The compute buildout

Chinese companies have bought more than 1 million Nvidia gaming and workstation chips this year to make up for a shortage of AI computing power, the Financial Times reported, citing industry insiders. The chips, mostly the RTX Pro 6000D, RTX Pro 5000 and RTX 5090, are weaker than Huawei's Ascend 910C but can handle simpler AI workloads like parts of inference. China's domestic AI chip supply could reach about 3.5 million units this year, while demand may exceed 5 million. Nvidia has said its share of China's AI accelerator market is effectively zero because of US export controls.

Financial Times Tech ↗ · October 13 briefing

Microsoft unveiled Maia 300, its third-generation in-house AI accelerator, designed mainly for inference and slated to become the main platform for serving Copilot, GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Foundry and OpenAI models. The company claims about 40% more tokens per megawatt than leading GPU systems, with each rack holding 96 chips and drawing roughly 167 kilowatts. Microsoft plans multi-gigawatt deployments starting in 2027, and Reuters reported it could deploy more than a million chips next year. Nvidia still handles most of Microsoft's AI workloads today, and the efficiency claims have not been independently verified.

CNBC Technology ↗ · October 12 briefing

Nvidia contributed its Vera Rubin rack and compute tray designs to the Open Compute Project at the OCP Global Summit, letting hardware makers build compatible AI data center systems from shared blueprints. The updated MGX 1.2 specification supports racks drawing up to 250 kilowatts with liquid cooling, and Nvidia also open-sourced four software tools for managing switches, racks and clusters. Nvidia announced new partnerships with Cisco, Google, Meta and Microsoft, with Meta adopting its Spectrum-6 Ethernet switches for larger Vera Rubin AI factories. Each Vera Rubin NVL72 rack combines 72 Rubin GPUs and 36 Vera CPUs.

NVIDIA AI Blog ↗ · October 12 briefing

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan warned at the DBS Asia Future Forward conference in Singapore that access to financing may become a bigger constraint on the AI boom than shortages of chips, memory or power. Hock Tan said wafer shortages could ease by 2028 or 2029, while demand for computing may outstrip supply through 2029 or 2030. Lip-Bu Tan pointed to rising borrowing costs and doubts about returns, though he said a major slowdown looks unlikely over the next two to three years. Higher bond yields are making it more expensive to fund data center construction and chip purchases.

CNBC Technology ↗ · October 12 briefing

Ukrainian drones struck a Yandex data center in Sasovo on October 8, starting a fire at a facility housing supercomputers used to train the company's AI models, and hit a second site in the Kaluga region a day later. Ukraine says follow-up strikes have left all three of Yandex's supercomputers unavailable, and Yandex shares fell more than 3%. President Zelenskyy described the attacks as a response to Russian strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure.

Ars Technica ↗ · October 11 briefing

Samsung forecast third-quarter operating profit of 107.4 trillion won, about $80 billion, the first time any tech company has topped 100 trillion won in a single quarter. Profit jumped roughly 780% from a year earlier on revenue of about 195 trillion won, driven by demand for AI memory chips such as HBM4 sold to Nvidia. It is Samsung's fourth straight record quarter, as buyers lock in multiyear memory supply deals.

BBC Technology ↗ · October 8 briefing

China is building data centres at breakneck speed across its energy-rich hinterland, turning cheap power and land into an edge in the AI race. Ulanqab in Inner Mongolia has 89 data centres built or planned and about 15GW of committed capacity, with data service electricity use up 85% in the first half of 2026. China has 24GW of operating capacity, under half the US's 56GW, with a further 50GW under construction or announced.

Financial Times Tech ↗ · October 8 briefing

SpaceX is in talks with banks and investors to raise $40 billion to buy Nvidia chips, in what would be one of the largest debt financings of the AI buildout. The early-stage plan combines about $10 billion of bank loans with $30 billion of investment-grade debt, with Apollo expected to lead and Pimco among the lenders in talks. The deal could close in 2027, though yields on SpaceX bonds have risen since its June IPO.

CNBC Technology ↗ · October 7 briefing

San Francisco's Board of Supervisors voted unanimously for a 45-day urgency ordinance halting permits for new or expanded data centers, effective immediately. Supervisor Shamann Walton proposed the pause over energy and water use, noise and pollution concerns, noting the city's data center rules date to 2001. The moratorium can be extended for up to two years while planners draft long-term rules, and Oakland approved a similar pause.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · October 7 briefing

Banks are syndicating a record $60 billion debt package to fund Broadcom-designed AI chips for Anthropic, testing lenders' appetite amid growing worries about AI debt. It includes a $42 billion senior secured tranche and an $18 billion junior tranche led by Blackstone, which is committing $9 billion. Anthropic is expected to become Broadcom's largest chip design customer as its new compute comes online in 2027.

Financial Times Tech ↗ · October 6 briefing

Nvidia is nearing a $6 trillion market value as investors return to the AI chipmaker after a disappointing start to the year. Reaching it would make Nvidia the first company ever worth $6 trillion. The chip rally helped push the S&P 500 to an all-time high on AI bets.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · October 6 briefing

Elon Musk confirmed that TSMC and his companies are discussing a possible chipmaking partnership tied to Terafab, the giant semiconductor fab project Tesla and SpaceX are building in Texas. A deal could make TSMC a direct supplier to Tesla, SpaceX and xAI, which Musk says need far more chips than his existing partners Samsung, TSMC and Micron can expand to supply. The Terafab project carries an initial planned spend of around $55 billion, and no formal agreement has been announced.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · October 5 briefing

Tencent agreed this year to a five-year lease across Oracle data centers in Southeast Asia, its largest overseas cloud deal, for access to about 100,000 advanced AI chips that US export rules keep out of China. People familiar with the matter put the contract at about $7 billion, with roughly 30 percent paid upfront. The Financial Times reported that the spending helped push Tencent to a negative free cash flow of 13.8 billion yuan, about $2 billion, in the second quarter, its first negative quarter in more than a decade.

Financial Times Tech ↗ · October 1 briefing

Japan's largest power company, JERA, signed a memorandum with Dell and UK developer RHAELM to build AI data centers, a national push the Financial Times said could reach $140 billion. The first site, beside JERA's gas plant in Chiba near Tokyo, is a 400-megawatt campus expected to cost more than $15 billion, with Apollo backing RHAELM and Dell supplying rack-scale servers. Phased operation is expected from around 2028, full capacity in 2029, and several gigawatts nationwide in the 2030s.

Financial Times Tech ↗ · October 1 briefing

SpaceX carried Alphabet's tensor processing units into orbit on Thursday on a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg, aboard Planet Labs satellites that include a solar-powered prototype with Google's chips. The flight is the first in-orbit test of Project Suncatcher, the effort Google described in November 2025 to see whether solar-powered machine learning can run continuously in space. SpaceX has pitched orbital computing as a way around the power and land fights facing data centers on the ground.

CNBC Technology ↗ · October 1 briefing

Thieves broke into trailers bearing Nvidia branding at an autonomous trucking company's warehouse in Fremont, California, expecting to find valuable AI computing hardware inside. Instead they made off with roughly 40,000 pounds of sand used as ballast to simulate fully loaded trucks during testing, while the actual computing hardware remained secured inside the truck cabs. The heist was discovered after someone recognized the stolen vehicles, and it reflects a broader rise in thefts targeting real and perceived AI hardware as GPU prices have soared.

Business Insider Tech ↗ · September 28 briefing

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has asked domestic companies including Alibaba Group and ByteDance to report how many of Nvidia's new RTX Pro 5500 chips they want to buy and what they would use them for, signaling Beijing may allow the purchases, The Information reported. The RTX Pro 5500 is a Blackwell generation workstation GPU with 84 GB of memory that sits outside the data center accelerator category targeted by past rounds of US export controls. ByteDance alone is reportedly considering an order of roughly one million units, an amount that could absorb about two quarters of Nvidia's planned production for China. Approval would mark a notable loosening in China's approach to US AI hardware even as broader export restrictions remain in place.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · September 27 briefing

Crusoe had committed to buying 29 of Boom Supersonic's 42 megawatt Superpower turbines for $1.25 billion, with deliveries set to begin in 2027 to power its AI data centers. Boom CEO Blake Scholl said turbines are no longer part of Crusoe's near term power plans, though a Crusoe spokesperson clarified the company still intends to use turbines, just not Boom's. Crusoe says it builds its AI facilities from the power up and will keep mixing turbines, wind, solar, batteries, and grid power depending on each site, while Boom's newly commercialized power business loses its marquee launch customer.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · September 27 briefing

The Palo Alto based startup, which is backed by former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, raised a $27.5 million Series A led by Socratic Partners with participation from Hudson River Trading, adding to a $12 million seed round and bringing its total funding to $39.5 million. The company builds vertical cavity surface emitting lasers, or VCSELs, that move data between components inside AI systems, with products spanning from 100G to 200G today and a roadmap toward 800G, 1.6T, and beyond. It plans to use the new funding to expand its US and Taiwan teams and scale manufacturing for hyperscale data center customers.

TechMeme ↗ · September 27 briefing · Follow the money

Alibaba unveiled its Zhenwu V900 AI chip, which it says delivers three times the performance of its predecessor and supports training clusters of up to 500,000 chips, with mass production targeted for early 2027. The company committed to spending more than $53 billion over three years on cloud and AI infrastructure, aiming to expand data center capacity past 20 gigawatts by 2032. Alibaba said its next flagship model, Qwen 4, is already in training.

CNBC Technology ↗ · September 22 briefing

London based data center developer Nscale filed to list on the New York Stock Exchange at a valuation of up to $35 billion, following a landmark deal with Anthropic. Nscale signed a contract worth up to $44.6 billion over six years to supply roughly 460 megawatts of computing capacity at its West Virginia campus. The company reported a $1 billion net loss on just $141 million in revenue for the first half of the year.

SiliconANGLE ↗ · September 20 briefing

Huawei moved up the launch of its next generation Ascend 960DT AI chip to the first quarter of 2027, from an original target of Q3 2027, saying the chip is arriving ahead of schedule with roughly double the performance of its predecessor. The acceleration is part of Huawei's broader push to challenge Nvidia and close China's AI computing gap with the US. The company faces pressure to achieve chip self-sufficiency amid ongoing American semiconductor export restrictions.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · September 17 briefing

Bitcoin miner turned data center operator Clean Spark Inc. is seeking to borrow roughly $2.23 billion through a junk bond offering to finance a 175 megawatt AI data center in Sandersville, Georgia, backed by a 20 year lease with a Meta subsidiary. It is the first time US junk bonds have been used to finance a data center project tied to Meta, whose lease is expected to generate about $6.6 billion in payments over its term. The five year notes, arranged by Morgan Stanley, carry an initial yield around 8.5 percent.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · September 17 briefing

Arm CEO Rene Haas said he is more confident than he was in July that the company's new AGI CPU, its first in-house data center chip, can meet a $2 billion revenue target. Arm first disclosed the $2 billion demand figure back in May but kept its official outlook at $1 billion while it worked to secure enough manufacturing supply. Haas made the comments in a CNBC interview, and Arm shares rose following the remarks.

CNBC Technology ↗ · September 17 briefing

A group of 10 banks is providing a $22 billion loan to support Blackstone and Alphabet's new cloud venture Crux AI, one of the largest debt deals yet to finance AI chip infrastructure. The financing underscores how AI compute buildouts are increasingly funded through debt rather than equity as costs climb. It adds to a wave of multibillion dollar loans banks have arranged this year to bankroll the processors underpinning the AI boom.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · September 16 briefing

US data centers could consume nearly 18 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day by 2035, more than Germany and Japan combined, according to a new report from Bloomberg's NEF research unit. The forecast is nearly double the estimate issued just nine months earlier, reflecting how fast the AI boom is reshaping power demand. Grid-connected data centers alone are expected to drive roughly 15 billion cubic feet per day of additional power-sector gas demand through 2035.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · September 15 briefing

Zankore, an Indonesian AI infrastructure platform backed by Nvidia, signed a $3.1 billion loan deal to purchase advanced chips. The deal underscores surging demand for computing capacity across Asia and demonstrates how emerging markets are betting heavily on AI infrastructure buildout. Indonesia's investment in AI-capable data centers reflects the region's strategy to participate in the global AI economy.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · September 9 briefing

OpenAI announced it is collaborating with Samsung on developing next-generation chips, with Samsung representing one of the largest-scale deployments of ChatGPT globally. The partnership reflects OpenAI's strategy to work with device makers on custom silicon to reduce dependency on Nvidia. Samsung's involvement signals major consumer electronics companies are integrating OpenAI models into their ecosystem.

TechMeme ↗ · September 9 briefing

Qualcomm issued stock warrants to Amazon as part of a data center infrastructure deal, giving Amazon the right to acquire $4 billion worth of Qualcomm shares. The partnership represents Qualcomm's push into the lucrative data center chip business where Nvidia has dominated during the AI boom. The deal signals increasing competition in AI infrastructure with new players challenging Nvidia's market leadership.

CNBC Technology ↗ · September 9 briefing · Follow the money

Japanese AI chip startup Preferred Networks is pursuing an IPO to mass-produce its chips and compete globally in the increasingly expensive AI hardware race. The company's move to public markets reflects the massive capital requirements for developing and manufacturing competitive AI chips in competition with Nvidia, Google, and other tech giants. The IPO signals Japan's commitment to maintaining domestic AI chip capabilities amid intense global competition.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · September 8 briefing · Follow the money

Broadcom issued a strong forecast for AI chip demand over the next two years, predicting a significant surge in sales and margin expansion as enterprises accelerate AI infrastructure buildout. Despite missing short-term guidance, Broadcom's bullish AI outlook signals confidence in sustained demand for AI acceleration hardware and suggests the company can challenge Nvidia's market dominance. The forecast reflects enterprise confidence in the medium-term AI infrastructure market despite near-term softness.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · September 2 briefing

Nvidia has announced a strategic partnership with MediaTek to integrate Nvidia's AI acceleration technology into MediaTek's custom silicon designs, marking a major shift in the competitive chipmaking landscape. The collaboration will extend beyond AI accelerators to include consumer devices like PCs, automotive systems, and edge computing platforms, giving MediaTek access to Nvidia's cutting-edge AI infrastructure. MediaTek shares surged 10% on the announcement, reflecting investor confidence in the partnership's ability to challenge Qualcomm's dominance in the mobile and automotive chip markets.

CNBC Technology ↗ · September 1 briefing

There is another huge increase in AI usage from productive agents like Grok bot. This is continuing the need for more energy and more construction of AI data centers. AI Revenues continue to grow. Breaking this down this dynamic situation is needed to know investment and business decisions. SemiAnalysis says Anthropic and OpenAI each ended ... Read more

Next Big Future AI ↗ · September 1 briefing

Nvidia invests $3.5 billion into Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek. The deal shows how Nvidia plans to stay essential to AI infrastructure as Big Tech begins to build its own AI chips.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · August 31 briefing

Nvidia's $3.5 billion investment in MediaTek is a strategic positioning move that allows Nvidia to monetize the infrastructure layer as Big Tech companies build proprietary AI chips. Rather than compete with custom silicon, Nvidia is creating a toll model where it profits from the chipmaking ecosystem regardless of who designs the end chips. This infrastructure-first approach has historically proven lucrative for Nvidia across CUDA, AI accelerators, and networking.

Forbes Tech ↗ · August 31 briefing

Lambda, an AI cloud company that buys computing chips and leases them to businesses, has raised $1 billion in private short-dated debt to purchase Nvidia GPUs it will deploy for Microsoft. The deal, arranged by JPMorgan Chase, is the latest in a string of large loans Lambda has used to fund GPU infrastructure, including a $1 billion credit facility in May and a $926 million loan for Nvidia GB300 chips this week. The financing shows how debt markets are fueling the AI buildout even as questions persist about whether demand will keep pace with the flood of new capacity.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · August 30 briefing

An OpenAI executive helping to oversee the AI developer's data center buildout, Chris Malone, has left the company.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · August 25 briefing

IBM is announcing today at the annual Hot Chips conference what may be the most consequential change to mainframe architecture in decades: a processor whose cores can natively execute both IBM's own instruction set and Arm's — switching between the two in nanoseconds. The chip, which will power the next generation of IBM Z and LinuxONE systems, is the first dual-architecture mainframe processor ever built. It is designed to let enterprises run the vast and fast-growing ecosystem of Arm-native Linux software — including the AI frameworks that increasingly define modern infrastructure — directly alongside the z/OS transaction-processing workloads that anchor the world's banks, insurers, and governments."As technology enthusiasts on both sides, we're really excited about being what I would consider one of the most powerful commercially available processors that'll be dual architecture," Tina Tarquinio, chief product officer for IBM Z and LinuxONE, told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview ahead of the announcement. The announcement marks the first hardware milestone from the strategic collaboration IBM and Arm unveiled in April, and it offers an unusually direct answer to a question that has shadowed the mainframe for years: can the machine that processes most of the world's regulated financial transactions remain a first-class citizen in an AI era built largely on other people's silicon? How IBM engineered a processor core that speaks ...

VentureBeat ↗ · August 24 briefing

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said the sharp criticism of AI data centers is well-earned and introduced new standards for projects in Texas, including an audit requirement and a suggested ban on rural developments, after his administration halted some 1,800 data center projects.

Business Insider Tech ↗ · August 23 briefing

The Tennessee Valley Authority approved a new wholesale rate class for data centers on August 20, 2026, alongside a fiscal 2027 budget carrying more than $13 billion in planned generation and transmission spending through FY29.

Unite. AI ↗ · August 20 briefing

British inference chip startup Fractile is in advanced talks to raise about $600 million at a $6.5 billion pre-money valuation, more than six times the roughly $1 billion it was worth after a $220 million round led by Accel, Founders Fund and Factorial Funds in May. The jump follows an initial deal to sell Anthropic around $250 million of chips, a contract both sides intend to expand. Founded in 2022 by Oxford roboticist Walter Goodwin, Fractile builds hardware aimed at cutting the time models take to produce answers, though its chips are not expected to be in use until 2027.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · August 19 briefing

Chinese AI firms have been renting time on Nvidia's most advanced chips, including GB300s, through data centers in Southeast Asia, sidestepping export rules that bar them from importing the hardware. White House official Michael Kratsios accused Moonshot AI of tapping GB300s via a facility in Thailand in July. The House passed the Remote Access Security Act 369 to 22 to extend export-control logic to cloud GPU rentals, and lawmakers are now weighing customer vetting and location checks for hyperscalers without kneecapping US cloud providers abroad.

CNBC Technology ↗ · August 19 briefing · Rules and the courts

Marvell issued Google a warrant to buy nearly 59 million of its shares at $206.58 each, an aggregate exercise price of roughly $12.2 billion, as part of an expanded custom silicon partnership. Marvell will build AI inference accelerators, networking chips, storage controllers and memory interface parts tied to Google's TPU ecosystem, with warrant tranches vesting against every $500 million of chips Google buys. Marvell shares jumped more than 11 percent in premarket trading while rival Broadcom fell over 3 percent, and full exercise would make Google the company's fifth-largest investor.

Financial Times Tech ↗ · August 19 briefing

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed an executive order on August 18 imposing what he called the nation's strictest guardrails on AI data centers, a sharp reversal from his earlier push to attract the projects. The order bars the Department of Environmental Protection from reviewing permit applications unless developers make a legally binding commitment to new state standards covering energy affordability, environmental protection, workforce development, transparency and community engagement, and unless the local community has already approved the project. Developers must also bring their own power and pay for it, with a significant share from clean sources such as solar, advanced nuclear and battery storage, and all data center projects are pulled out of the state's fast track permitting program.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · August 18 briefing

Groq raised a $350 million Series A at a $3.5 billion valuation led by Disruptive, with Nvidia expected to participate. That is far below the $6.9 billion Groq commanded in September 2025, a drop that followed Nvidia's $20 billion licensing deal that took founder Jonathan Ross and other key staff, though the company frames the round as a new baseline rather than a down round. Having stepped back from its proprietary inference chips, Groq now runs 13 data centers on Nvidia GPUs serving more than 6 million developers and enterprises, and plans to grow from 54 megawatts to over 200 megawatts by 2027. CEO Alex Davis said the goal is to build Groq into the world's leading AI inference cloud.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · August 17 briefing · Follow the money

Researchers at Israeli cyberdefense firm Dream found a hacking tool assembled from two open-source AI agent frameworks running largely on its own inside Taiwanese government systems over four days in early July. Up to eight agents worked simultaneously, mapping 21 government systems, probing for weaknesses, and switching tactics when blocked. The operation compromised at least 85 government accounts, took more than 2,500 personnel records, and spread into Taiwan's nuclear safety agency and at least seven energy companies. Internal communications used Simplified Chinese, and Dream's chief strategy officer called it an unprecedented end to end autonomous attack on a government target.

Financial Times Tech ↗ · August 12 briefing

Mistral AI announced a three part expansion of its infrastructure business aimed at turning European AI sovereignty into a purchasable product. It is adding regional inference endpoints that let customers choose whether workloads run in Europe or the United States, a Priority Tier backed by an uptime guarantee for mission critical deployments, and a coalition of European enterprises signing multi year compute commitments. Mistral says those commitments will underwrite 200 megawatts of European infrastructure by the end of 2027 and a full gigawatt by the end of 2030. In a move likely to unsettle sovereignty purists, the company will also start hosting third party open models, beginning with GLM-5.2 from the Chinese lab Z.ai.

VentureBeat ↗ · August 11 briefing · Open models

TSMC reported July revenue of NT$467.58 billion, about $14.5 billion, up roughly 45 percent year over year and a record monthly high. High performance computing, the segment where TSMC books its AI chip sales, accounted for 66 percent of revenue in the second quarter, and the company now expects 2026 revenue to grow slightly above 40 percent in US dollar terms. TSMC also raised its 2026 capital expenditure projection to between $60 billion and $64 billion. Because TSMC manufactures for Nvidia, Apple and Google, its monthly figures are watched as a leading indicator of AI semiconductor demand, and European chip stocks including ASML rose on the report.

CNBC Technology ↗ · August 10 briefing

Microsoft plans to unveil its next generation in house AI accelerator, the Maia 300, potentially as soon as September, according to The Information. The company is in talks with TSMC to secure manufacturing capacity for more than 300,000 units for delivery in 2027, and ultimately wants capacity for more than 1 million chips, though component supply and the ongoing TSMC negotiations could constrain those plans. Microsoft introduced the original Maia in November 2023 and unveiled the second generation Maia 200 in January on TSMC 3 nanometer technology, but it has lagged Alphabet and Amazon in scaling custom silicon to reduce its dependence on costly Nvidia processors. It is also trying to persuade major cloud customers such as Anthropic to adopt the chip.

TechMeme ↗ · August 10 briefing

SK Hynix's board approved 54 trillion won, about $38 billion, to build two new chip fabrication plants in South Korea, one for DRAM in Yongin and one for NAND flash in Cheongju. The Yongin Y2 plant breaks ground in July 2027 with its first cleanroom due in June 2029, while the Cheongju M17 fab starts construction in February 2027. The company also pulled its target to finish all four Yongin fabs forward to 2033, twelve years ahead of the original 2045 plan, citing surging AI memory demand and a shortage that has driven memory prices sharply higher.

CNBC Technology ↗ · August 9 briefing

Amazon is backing a 7.65 gigawatt natural gas plant in Pecos County, Texas, built by Pacifico Energy to power a new off grid data center at the same site. Its 35 turbines are permitted to emit 33 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, which would make it the single largest emitting power plant in the country, roughly double the dirtiest coal plant now operating in the United States. The project, first reported by the New York Times, will not connect to the Texas grid, at least initially. Amazon said it remains committed to reaching net zero emissions by 2040.

The Verge ↗ · August 9 briefing

Chinese AI chip designer Moore Threads said it plans to list in Hong Kong at an appropriate time, after its shares rose more than 420% since debuting in Shanghai last year. The Beijing based company, founded in 2020 by former Nvidia executive Zhang Jianzhong, raised about 8 billion yuan, roughly $1.1 billion, in that offering. First half revenue jumped 147% to 1.74 billion yuan while its net loss narrowed to 11.6 million yuan from 270.9 million a year earlier. Moore Threads says a Hong Kong listing would support its international expansion and help it recruit research and management talent.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · August 9 briefing

Advanced Micro Devices agreed to acquire Toronto-based startup Taalas, a move that will let AMD offer another type of artificial intelligence chip to the burgeoning data center industry.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · August 6 briefing

SpaceX is using Tesla's large Megapack backup batteries to help power its Colossus AI data centers in Greater Memphis.

CNBC Technology ↗ · August 6 briefing

Liquid AI debuted LFM2.5-2.6B, an open-weight language model designed for agentic workloads that can run entirely on local hardware from smartphones and laptops down to a Raspberry Pi, without cloud inference or GPUs.

VentureBeat ↗ · August 6 briefing · Open models

Nvidia open sourced the storage stack and programming interfaces that let GPUs pull data straight from drives without routing every request through the CPU, under a framework it calls SCADA, short for Scaled Accelerated Data Access. Google, Intel, and Meta signed on as founding maintainers of a new Accelerated IO group on GitHub, an unusual alignment given that all three design AI chips competing with Nvidia. The wider Storage Next effort now spans more than 40 participants including DDN, Kioxia, and Micron, and Nvidia demonstrated a single server hitting 230 million random reads per second using three H100 GPUs and 44 Micron drives.

Forbes Tech ↗ · August 5 briefing

AMD's data center revenue more than doubled year over year to $6.7 billion in the second quarter, up 107% from $3.2 billion a year earlier and up from $5.8 billion in Q1, driven by demand for AI capacity. Total revenue rose 50% to $11.5 billion against estimates of $11.3 billion, but the company's third quarter forecast landed below some analyst expectations and the stock dropped more than 7% after hours. Gaming revenue fell 31% over the same period as the business tilts further toward AI accelerators.

The Verge ↗ · August 4 briefing

Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered state regulators to freeze all new data center connections to the power grid until a full audit of their energy and water use is complete. In a letter to the Public Utility Commission of Texas and grid operator ERCOT, Abbott directed the agencies to collect disclosures covering tax incentives, power consumption projections, on-site generation, cooling technology and community protections. ERCOT is currently reviewing 474 gigawatts of connection requests, roughly five times the state's peak demand, with data centers accounting for about 90% of the incoming load. Neither agency has said when approvals will resume.

Ars Technica ↗ · August 4 briefing

Olix, the British AI chip start up founded two years ago by 25 year old James Dacombe, raised $312 million at a $3.3 billion valuation, triple where it stood six months ago. The round was led by New York investor Fundomo, with participation from Arm, quant trading firm Hudson River Trading, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings and the UK government's Sovereign AI fund. Olix is building inference systems around a novel photonic interconnect that splits each stage of inference onto specialized chips, a bet Dacombe frames as the end of Nvidia handling every AI workload.

Financial Times Tech ↗ · August 3 briefing · Follow the money

Amazon Web Services grew revenue nearly 37 percent to $42.23 billion in the second quarter, its fastest expansion since 2021 and ahead of analyst expectations, sending Amazon shares up sharply after hours. The company said its AI business and its custom chips each surpassed an annualized revenue run rate of more than $25 billion, roughly doubling from a year earlier. Total Amazon net sales rose 20 percent to $200.6 billion, with AWS citing surging demand for AI and cloud infrastructure.

CNBC Technology ↗ · July 30 briefing

Chinese startup Moonshot AI is seeking access to more of Nvidia's advanced Blackwell chips to train the next version of its model, Kimi K4, according to a report from The Information. The push underscores how leading Chinese AI labs continue to rely on Nvidia hardware despite US export controls. Bloomberg noted the report cited unnamed sources.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · July 28 briefing

The surge in AI data center construction is reviving the US nuclear industry after four decades of stagnation, as tech giants sign deals for round the clock, carbon free power. Microsoft has committed to a $16 billion, 20 year contract to restart a unit at Three Mile Island by late 2027, while Amazon is investing $700 million in small modular reactor developer X-energy. Meta has contracted for up to 6.6 gigawatts of nuclear capacity and Google has signed multiple deals of its own. Together the major AI players have committed to nearly 10 gigawatts of nuclear power, enough to supply roughly 7 million homes.

Forbes Tech ↗ · July 26 briefing

Britain's first cabinet level AI minister, Kanishka Narayan, told the Financial Times that domestic chip manufacturing and drone technology will sit at the heart of Prime Minister Andy Burnham's plan to reindustrialise the country. The strategy ties economic growth to national security, wagering that building AI chips at home, rather than relying on software alone, will determine the UK's place in the global AI race. Narayan framed domestic chipmaking as the best way to partner with private capital and capture what he called the economic opportunity of a lifetime. The push marks a significant elevation of AI policy under the new Burnham government.

Financial Times Tech ↗ · July 26 briefing

Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said Chinese AI company Moonshot AI obtained Nvidia's advanced GB300 chips to train its latest model, in violation of US export controls. Kratsios said Moonshot secured GB300 equipped servers through infrastructure based in Thailand, letting its engineers train on the hardware without importing the physical chips into China. The accusation came days after Moonshot released Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion parameter model that closes the performance gap with frontier systems from Anthropic and OpenAI, and Kratsios separately alleged that Moonshot distilled Anthropic's Fable model to help build K3. Moonshot has not publicly responded to the allegations.

CNBC Technology ↗ · July 23 briefing · Rules and the courts

Etched, founded by three Harvard dropouts, raised a $300 million Series C led by Sequoia Capital that doubled its valuation to $10.3 billion from $5 billion in December. The startup has built a custom prefill chip along with new memory and interconnect technology designed to speed up inference for any type of AI model, including transformers, mixture of experts designs, and state space models, without requiring GPUs. Etched says it already has $1 billion in pre booked orders, runs a 2 megawatt data center, and recently opened a 10 megawatt facility in Milpitas, California, with backing from investors including Peter Thiel, Andrej Karpathy, and Geoffrey Hinton.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · July 23 briefing · Follow the money

Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, accused Chinese startup Moonshot of improperly using US AI models and restricted Nvidia chips to build its Kimi K3 system, which stunned the industry last week with capabilities rivaling Anthropic and OpenAI on coding benchmarks. Kratsios said Moonshot acquired servers with Nvidia GB300 Blackwell chips, which are barred from export to Chinese companies, and routed workloads through GB300 equipped infrastructure in Thailand to train its models. He also said Moonshot built an internal platform to conduct large scale distillation against US models and could switch between multiple access methods to avoid detection. Kimi K3 launched on July 17 with 2.8 trillion parameters.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · July 22 briefing · Rules and the courts

Pressure from President Trump to shift chip manufacturing onshore is squeezing margins at TSMC, whose gross margin faces structural erosion of roughly 2 to 4 percentage points over the coming years as it builds fabs in the US. Manufacturing a single chip in America costs 20% to 50% more than in Taiwan, even after TSMC has pledged 200 billion dollars in US manufacturing investment since Trump returned to office in 2025. TSMC plans to offset the higher costs by raising foundry prices by up to 10% in 2027, passing the burden on to clients including Apple and Nvidia. Analysts note that with TSMC's gross margin still around 67.7%, the erosion looks manageable for now, but the geopolitically driven push for domestic chip production is expected to persist beyond Trump's term.

CNBC Technology ↗ · July 22 briefing

Alphabet raised its 2026 capital expenditure guidance to 195 billion to 205 billion dollars, up from the 180 billion to 190 billion dollar range it forecast last quarter, as it races to build the computing power needed to meet AI demand. The increase came alongside second quarter results in which Google Cloud revenue grew sharply and the unit's backlog of contracted but unrecognized work climbed toward 514 billion dollars. Adjusted earnings per share of 2.85 dollars came in just under the 2.89 dollars analysts expected, and Alphabet shares fell after the spending hike overshadowed otherwise strong revenue of 119.8 billion dollars. The guidance increase underscores how aggressively the largest cloud providers are now committing capital to AI infrastructure.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · July 22 briefing

Nvidia confirmed its Vera Rubin platform has reached full production, with NVL72 rack systems, which pair 72 Rubin GPUs with Vera CPUs using liquid cooling, now shipping to customers including OpenAI, CoreWeave, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Meta, and Dell. OpenAI plans to adopt Vera Rubin at scale in the third quarter, and CoreWeave says its racks are already delivering ten times the token output of the prior generation. The rollout marks a key milestone for Nvidia after months of speculation about possible delays to the new chip design.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · July 21 briefing

Z. AI, formerly known as Zhipu, has completed a 1 gigawatt data center built entirely on Chinese made chips, a major step in Beijing's push to replace restricted Nvidia silicon for AI development. The facility, enough to power roughly 750,000 homes at any given moment, is now partially operating and is meant to help the company train its GLM models. Z. AI was barred from using US sourced Nvidia chips after being added to the Commerce Department's export blacklist in January 2025, forcing the shift to domestic hardware. Chinese chips still lag Nvidia's in efficiency, meaning the site's gigawatt power draw may translate into less effective training capacity than a similarly sized Nvidia powered facility.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · July 20 briefing

The Information reported that Google is developing a new server chip, internally known as Frozen v2, designed to run Gemini models far more efficiently. Anonymous sources cited in the report say the chip could be six to ten times more efficient than Google's existing AI chips, measured by tokens generated per unit of power, with release expected around 2028. Google did not confirm or deny the report, saying only that its teams are constantly experimenting with new innovations for performance and efficiency. The news reflects a broader push among major AI labs to design proprietary silicon and reduce reliance on Nvidia hardware, and it helped lift Alphabet shares roughly 3 percent.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · July 20 briefing

A new industry consortium has launched an AI Materials Foundry aimed at accelerating the discovery of advanced materials used in chip manufacturing, with founding members including Nvidia, Meta and Samsung. The effort, backed by Jeff Bezos, raised a $450 million Series B round led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA to fund the initiative. The group aims to reduce the chip industry's dependence on rare and hard to source materials such as ruthenium and iridium by combining computing power with materials science research. Nvidia will supply compute infrastructure while Meta's Fundamental AI Research team contributes its Universal Model for Atoms, a frontier chemistry model built for materials discovery.

AI Business ↗ · July 20 briefing

Anthropic has proposed buying up to $10 billion of computing capacity from Meta over two years, a deal that would see the social media giant become an infrastructure supplier to its AI rival. Meta is also considering launching a cloud business as it spends $145 billion on infrastructure.

Financial Times Tech ↗ · July 19 briefing

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stressed that the company's next-generation Vera Rubin AI accelerator systems are in production and on track for customer delivery, dismissing reports that manufacturing snags could delay the rollout. Research firm SemiAnalysis had said this month that the rack-scale successor to Blackwell was delayed by difficulties manufacturing a specialized circuit board that connects electronic modules. Speaking in Tokyo about Japan's sovereign and physical AI ambitions, Huang countered that Vera Rubin is already in production with giant volumes incoming, though he acknowledged shipments have not really started yet, with deployments expected to begin in the first quarter of 2027.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · July 15 briefing

Under Secretary of Commerce Jeffery Kessler told a House hearing that shipments of Nvidia's H200 AI chips to China have begun but remain a very small quantity against the export licenses issued so far. The licenses stem from President Trump's December decision to approve H200 sales to China, and roughly 10 Chinese firms were reportedly cleared to buy the chips earlier this year. Confirmation that deliveries have restarted points to a potential new revenue stream for Nvidia as volumes scale up.

CNBC Technology ↗ · July 14 briefing

A new FT Film investigation by reporter Eleanor Olcott goes inside the black market that is moving advanced AI semiconductors into China as Washington tightens export controls. The documentary examines how smugglers and intermediaries keep restricted chips flowing to Chinese buyers despite US efforts to slow China's AI development.

Financial Times Tech ↗ · July 14 briefing

Intel is spending 5 billion euros, about 5.7 billion dollars, to expand its Leixlip campus in Ireland, upgrading existing fabrication lines rather than building new plants. The investment will add capacity for Intel Xeon 6 and next generation Xeon chips built on the Intel 3 process node to meet surging AI and high performance computing demand. Intel says the expansion will create several hundred permanent jobs plus thousands of construction jobs and should finish by the end of next year, bringing the company's total investment in Ireland since 1989 to more than 30 billion euros.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · July 13 briefing

Meta's Hyperion data center supercluster in Richland Parish, Louisiana, will be a 5 gigawatt facility now expected to cost more than 50 billion dollars, up sharply from the 27 billion dollar figure disclosed last October when Meta and Blue Owl Capital formed a joint venture to fund and manage the build out. A 2024 Louisiana law exempts data centers built before 2029 from state and local sales tax on equipment for 20 years, and local officials say the resulting tax revenue is funding community improvements including higher teacher bonuses. Meta has also pledged 1 billion dollars for local infrastructure like roads and water systems, with the full 5 gigawatt buildout targeted for completion around 2032.

CNBC Technology ↗ · July 13 briefing

In a Verge Decoder interview, Nvidia automotive chief Xinzhou Wu said Level 4 autonomy could reach consumer cars in under five years, backed by the company's roadmap of a 2025 Mercedes Benz production project, a 2027 Level 4 pilot with Google, and driverless service plans with Uber for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. Wu argued that cameras, radar, ultrasonic sensors, and lidar together provide the redundancy needed to handle safety critical edge cases, calling lidar indispensable for Level 3 and Level 4 systems. Asked about Tesla's camera only approach, Wu acknowledged Tesla is ahead on basic driver assistance but stopped short of saying vision alone can reach full Level 4 autonomy.

TechMeme ↗ · July 13 briefing

Apple's canceled self-driving car effort, known as Project Titan, consumed more than a decade of work and over 10 billion dollars before being scrapped, but the neural processing work it produced became the foundation for Apple's AI chips. According to Mark Gurman, Apple is now preparing an M7 Ultra chip capable of supporting 1,536 gigabytes of unified memory for its first dedicated server hardware, expected around 2028. Apple is also pulling forward its M7 lineup and skipping higher end M6 chips to bring major AI processing gains to customers sooner.

The Verge ↗ · July 12 briefing · Robots and physical AI

Meta is developing four new AI chips under its MTIA program, covering model training, ranking and recommendation, general AI workloads, and inference, with production beginning in September. The modular chiplet design, built with Broadcom, manufactured by TSMC, and paired with Samsung memory, is meant to cut Meta's GPU costs and reduce reliance on Nvidia and AMD even as the company keeps spending heavily with both. Meta plans to deploy 7 gigawatts of compute in 2026, doubling that in 2027, with capital expenditures projected at 125 to 145 billion dollars for the year.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · July 9 briefing

ZML, a French AI infrastructure startup backed by Turing Award winner Yann LeCun and Docker founder Solomon Hykes, has released ZML slash LLMD, a free inference server that lets large language models run across multiple chip architectures, including Nvidia, AMD, Google TPU, Apple Metal, and Intel Arc. Founder Steeve Morin said the tool breaks down the silos that have locked developers into specific hardware, helping companies cut both cost and energy use when deploying AI models at scale. The company, which has raised 20 million dollars to date, is offering the software free for now to gather usage data before eventually monetizing it.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · July 8 briefing

AI chip maker SambaNova has raised 1 billion dollars in the first close of its Series F round at an 11 billion dollar valuation, led by General Atlantic with backing from T. Rowe Price, Capital Group, and the Qatar Investment Authority, among other investors. The new valuation is a sharp jump from just seven months earlier, when Intel had reportedly been in talks to acquire the company for around 1.6 billion dollars before that deal fell through. SambaNova, founded in 2017 and based in Palo Alto, builds AI inference chips including its SN40L processor and an upcoming SN50 chip, with customers such as JPMorgan Chase and Saudi Aramco.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · July 8 briefing · Follow the money

China's DeepSeek is developing its own AI chip designed for inference, the stage where a trained model generates responses for users, rather than for training new models, according to three sources cited by Reuters. The effort is at an early stage, with DeepSeek reaching out to external partners and holding talks with chip design, foundry, and memory companies. The push is driven by U. S. export controls that bar Chinese firms from buying Nvidia's most advanced chips, as well as Beijing's pressure on its tech champions to build domestic alternatives. DeepSeek has historically relied on both Nvidia and Huawei chips, and a U. S. ban on Huawei chip exports has helped that company capture roughly half of China's $50 billion domestic AI chip market.

Ars Technica ↗ · July 7 briefing

Chip stocks sold off globally on Tuesday after Samsung's preliminary second quarter operating profit of about $58 billion, a 19-fold jump from a year earlier, failed to impress investors following the stock's 145% run up this year. U. S. memory makers Sandisk and Micron fell about 7% and 5% respectively, the SOXX semiconductor ETF slid roughly 5%, and Intel dropped 9% while Marvell, Lam Research, Applied Materials, and AMD each declined 6% or more. Investors were unsettled by high expectations for the AI trade and concerns about the sustainability of data center spending. The selloff was compounded by a separate report that China's DeepSeek is developing its own AI chip to reduce its dependence on Nvidia.

CNBC Technology ↗ · July 7 briefing

Semiconductor stocks came under pressure as investors question whether the rapid pace of AI infrastructure spending can be sustained beyond 2026, despite continued commitments from major technology companies. Bloomberg also reports that SK Hynix's planned US ADR debut will give American investors easier access to one of the world's leading AI memory-chip suppliers while helping fund its continued expansion.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · July 5 briefing

A source tells The Guardian that the 20 billion pounds of 'potential' AI investment touted by UK ministers in 2025 for Stargate's Cobalt site appears to have been hypothetical. OpenAI and Nscale reportedly never visited Cobalt or lodged any planning forms for the project.

TechMeme ↗ · July 5 briefing

Valar Atomics, a California-based nuclear startup, generated power from an advanced reactor to run an Nvidia AI chip. While just a trickle of electricity was produced, it’s the first time a next-gen reactor has done so in the US. On the heels of a demonstration of Valar’s Ward 250 reactor connecting to the Nvidia Blackwell chip at the company’s site in Utah, Valar Atomics CEO Isaiah Taylor joins Ed Ludlow on "Bloomberg Tech." (Source: Bloomberg)

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · July 2 briefing

Amazon hardware chief Panos Panay says the company is designing custom chips for key devices as it experiments with AI gadgets.

CNBC Technology ↗ · July 2 briefing

Nvidia AI chip competitor Etched says it has already booked $1 billion under contract for the inference systems powered by its chip.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · June 30 briefing · Follow the money

Super Micro Computer Inc.’s offices in Taiwan were raided by government authorities on Monday, widening an investigation into the alleged smuggling of Nvidia Corp. chips into China using the company’s servers, according to a person familiar with the situation. Super Micro’s shares fell as much as 9.2%.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · June 29 briefing

Baidu's Hong Kong-listed shares rose over 6% amid reports that its AI chip unit Kunlunxin is targeting a $50 billion initial public offering in the city.

CNBC Technology ↗ · June 29 briefing · Follow the money

Firmus Technologies Pty Ltd. will build its first data center project in Indonesia as part of a partnership with US chip giant Nvidia Corp., which the Australian artificial intelligence infrastructure firm said is expected to win it as much as $30 billion in committed offtake agreements in its first six years.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · June 28 briefing

The pivot into physical AI grows On Semi's addressable market by an additional $30 billion, the company said.

CNBC Technology ↗ · June 28 briefing

On Semiconductor said the deal bumps up its total addressable market by $30 billion to $243 billion by 2030.

CNBC Technology ↗ · June 25 briefing · Robots and physical AI

Qualcomm's data center entry analyzed: how the Modular acquisition, HBC memory architecture, and Arm-based C1000 CPU challenge NVIDIA in AI inference.

Forbes Tech ↗ · June 25 briefing

Qualcomm Inc., trying to expand its dominance from mobile phone chips, forecast sales of more than $15 billion a year by fiscal 2029 in the booming market for AI components in data centers.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · June 24 briefing

SK Hynix Inc. is seeking 45.45 trillion won ($29.4 billion) in a US listing, tapping investor demand for high-flying memory-chip stocks even after a major selloff shook the group this week.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · June 24 briefing

SummaryRFIC design is a complex “dark art” that limits progress in wireless technologies like 5G, autonomous vehicles, and satellite communications. Princeton researchers use reinforcement learning and inverse design to rapidly create RFICs from scratch. Diffusion models rapidly generate novel or human-interpretable RF layouts, achieving record performance and drastically reducing design time. Future progress needs large, shared chip design datasets and open ecosystems so AI can learn universal ele...

IEEE Spectrum AI ↗ · June 24 briefing

Axios / Bloomberg / MarketWatch ↗ · June 23 briefing

TechCrunch AI ↗ · June 22 briefing · Follow the money

Bloomberg / TechMeme ↗ · June 22 briefing

Three Amazon engineers who testified at Seattle city council hearings against the company's AI data center expansion plans are now being investigated by Amazon, with the employees alleging retaliation for their public testimony. The engineers cited environmental and infrastructure concerns in their testimony, which directly contradicted Amazon's stated positions on data center growth. The case has drawn attention from labor advocates and raises questions about whether companies can discipline employees for protected speech made in official government proceedings.

Engadget ↗ · June 21 briefing · AI and work

AWS is in talks to sell its custom Trainium AI chips to outside data centers; Andy Jassy has framed third-party chip sales as a $50 billion opportunity.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · June 18 briefing

FERC ordered grid operators to prioritize large-load interconnections for data centers, creating a regulatory fast lane even as electricity supply shortages remain unresolved.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · June 18 briefing · Rules and the courts

Nvidia's self-improvement program for robots uses teams of AI coding agents to autonomously direct robot training for datacenter tasks like GPU installation.

Ars Technica ↗ · June 17 briefing · Robots and physical AI · AI that writes code

Industry debate is shifting from model quality to who can deploy the most reliable gigawatts of compute, with estimates that a full 1 GW AI data center now costs around $100 billion to build.

Next Big Future AI ↗ · June 16 briefing

Qualcomm has been in talks to acquire Tenstorrent, a startup designing AI chips, for roughly $8 billion to $10 billion, according to The Information. Tenstorrent had discussed raising about $800 million at a roughly $3.2 billion valuation last year.

TechMeme ↗ · June 15 briefing

Artificial Analysis published AgentPerf, its first agentic AI infrastructure benchmark, with NVIDIA saying Blackwell Ultra NVL72 led the initial results and ran 20x more agents per megawatt than prior NVIDIA systems.

NVIDIA AI Blog ↗ · June 12 briefing

Members of Congress are scrambling to jump on the growing anti-data center fervor sweeping through local communities across the country. Why it matters: Where there is this kind of intense grassroots uproar, there is also political opportunity — and lawmakers know it. The latest example is legislation from Rep. Rob Bresnahan (R-Pa.) to restrict companies' ability to sue municipalities for rejecting applications to build data centers. The bill — called "the Local Control Protection Act" — would als

Axios ↗ · June 11 briefing · Rules and the courts

Just after Seattle enacted a one-year data center moratorium that some of Amazon's own employees pushed for, Amazon shared how much water its data centers use, reportedly for the first time. With concerns about water consumption and energy use a focus of new AI data center construction debates, Amazon says its global data center operations […]

The Verge ↗ · June 11 briefing

OpenAI said ChatGPT accounts with ties to China tried to stir local opposition to US data center projects, a potential bid to slow American AI infrastructure buildout.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · June 10 briefing

Meta signed its first India AI data center partnership with Reliance on a 168-megawatt facility that will feed Meta's global AI compute needs and can scale over time.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · June 10 briefing

The British government thinks a state-backed infrastructure initiative will help supercharge homegrown chip startups.

Wired ↗ · June 8 briefing

The owners of Xnrgy Climate Systems, a closely held manufacturer of heating an cooling parts for AI data centers, are considering a sale that could value the company at as much as $10 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · June 3 briefing

The company best known for powering the AI boom is coming for the PC: Nvidia is expected next week to debut the first Windows computers that use its chips as the main processor, sources confirm to Axios. Why it matters: Microsoft's first AI PC push stumbled, but Nvidia's arrival gives it a second chance, this time with the world's hottest chipmaker attached. Driving the news: Nvidia and Microsoft will unveil their joint work and the first computers running the chips at two key industry conferences...

Axios ↗ · May 31 briefing

The dangers of AI eclipsed those of nuclear weapons at a defense forum discussion on strategic stability in Singapore, as panelists warned it could reduce reaction times to the point where people make rash decisions.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · May 31 briefing

South Korean chip startup XCENA is betting that AI's real bottleneck is not compute, but memory.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · May 29 briefing · Follow the money

SK Hynix crossed a $1 trillion valuation as AI data center demand drives memory chip prices higher and reshapes the semiconductor market. The post SK Hynix Tops $1 Trillion Valuation as AI Memory Boom Reshapes Chip Market appeared first on TechRepublic.

TechRepublic ↗ · May 27 briefing · Follow the money

Mainland China-based chip giants such as Cambricon saw their shares tumble on Wednesday.

CNBC Technology ↗ · May 27 briefing

XAI AI data center economics are even better when you can start a project and finish it in 12 months and get it rented and paid off while competitors are still building. An active AI Gigawatt of data center in the hand is worth $20 billion per year while an under construction Gigawatt data center ... Read more

Next Big Future AI ↗ · May 24 briefing

Blackstone is partnering with Google to launch a U. S.-based AI infrastructure company powered by Google’s TPU chips.

CNBC Technology ↗ · May 19 briefing

The AI infrastructure boom is coming for Americans’ utility bills, and public patience is already running out.

Fortune AI ↗ · May 19 briefing

Meta is building one of the largest artificial intelligence data centers in the world, and it's going up in a remote corner of Louisiana. Financed by one of the biggest private capital deals ever assembled, the project in rural Richland Parish will require up to 7.5 gigawatts of power, 5 gigawatts for computing alone, from 10 brand new natural gas plants. In a region desperate for economic revival, the data center has become more than just infrastructure: it’s a bet on the future. (Source: Bloom...

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · May 18 briefing

Bloomberg: Sources: AI chip designer Tenstorrent has drawn takeover interest from Intel and Qualcomm; Tenstorrent could be valued at more than $5B in a potential deal — Artificial intelligence chip startup Tenstorrent Inc. is drawing early takeover interest from prospective buyers at a moment ...

TechMeme ↗ · May 18 briefing · Follow the money

TSMC now expects the global semiconductor market to reach about $1.5 trillion by 2030, with AI infrastructure demand pulling forward spending on advanced nodes and packaging. The outlook underscores how AI workloads are reshaping capex plans across foundries and cloud hyperscalers.

Reuters Technology ↗ · May 15 briefing

@mingchikuo: Sources: Intel has begun testing production of “low-end/legacy iPhone, iPad, and Mac processors”; Apple thinks TSMC's resources will continue tilting toward AI — ... Apple has kicked off low-end/legacy iPhone, iPad, and Mac processors at Intel on the 18A-P series (using Foveros packaging).

TechMeme ↗ · May 14 briefing

U. K.-based Graphcore is developing AI chips and systems and was acquired by the Japanese giant in 2024.

CNBC Technology ↗ · May 12 briefing

Cerebras Systems Inc. increased the size of its initial public offering, now seeking to raise as much as $4.8 billion, as demand for the artificial intelligence chipmaker and data center operator's shares continues to build.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · May 11 briefing · Follow the money

The partnership is among a startling wave of multi-billion-dollar AI compute arrangements between tech giants and neocloud vendors.

AI Business ↗ · May 11 briefing

The apparently insatiable demand for AI compute has data center entrepreneurs looking to the stars. There's a key problem: There aren't enough rockets to put data centers in orbit around Earth, and they're too expensive.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · May 11 briefing · Follow the money

A key company behind Thailand’s national AI effort is suspected of helping to smuggle billions of dollars worth of Super Micro Computer Inc. servers containing advanced Nvidia Corp. chips to China, with Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. one of multiple end customers, according to people familiar with the matter.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · May 10 briefing

OpenAI Introduces MRC (Multipath Reliable Connection): A New Open Networking Protocol for Large-Scale AI Supercomputer Training Clusters

AI Research News ↗ · May 7 briefing

Nvidia to Invest Up to $2.1 Billion in Data Center Firm IREN

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · May 7 briefing

This five-year deal is one of many circular agreements keeping the AI sector afloat.

Engadget ↗ · May 5 briefing

Abhishek Vishnoi /Bloomberg:Analysis: Asian suppliers account for ~90% of Nvidia's production costs, up from 65% in 2025, as latest wave of collaborations shifts from chips to physical AI— The list of Asian stocks that benefit from business partnership with Nvidia Corp. is getting longer, as the region further integrates …

TechMeme ↗ · May 3 briefing · Robots and physical AI

Google is packing ample amounts of static random access memory into a dedicated chip for running artificial intelligence models, following Nvidia's plans.

CNBC Technology ↗ · April 22 briefing

Google Cloud is highlighting its latest tensor processing unit generation and how Alphabet is tying custom AI accelerators to cloud bundles, ecosystem bets, and partnership lines that steer who gets priority capacity for training and inference. (Source: Bloomberg)

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · April 22 briefing

Marvell saw a $2 billion investment from Nvidia in March, as AI demand continues to surge.

CNBC Technology ↗ · April 21 briefing

Alphabet aims to build on momentum with new chips dedicated to inference, further challenging Nvidia in a fast-growing segment.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · April 20 briefing

Cerebras moves toward the public markets; the company has announced AWS and OpenAI-related infrastructure angles in recent months.

Planet AI (Aggregator) ↗ · April 20 briefing · Follow the money

Almost 40% of such builds in US risk hold-ups, including projects tied to Microsoft and OpenAI

Financial Times Tech ↗ · April 19 briefing

The latest deal is one of many compute arrangements that major AI developers have made with chipmakers in recent months to reduce reliance on Nvidia.

AI Business ↗ · April 15 briefing

Europe’s most valuable company says customers are accelerating expansion plans

Financial Times Tech ↗ · April 15 briefing · Follow the money

Elon Musk, who is the world's richest person, has been counting on the greater Memphis area to serve as the backbone for xAI's buildout.

CNBC Technology ↗ · April 15 briefing · Rules and the courts

Microsoft Corp. has agreed to rent data center capacity at a site in Norway that was initially intended for OpenAI and marketed as part of the artificial intelligence company's Stargate initiative.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · April 14 briefing

In February, the company said it would make London its largest research hub outside of the U. S.

CNBC Technology ↗ · April 13 briefing

TSMC is benefiting from sustained demand for advanced semiconductors from its key customers like Apple and Nvidia.

CNBC Technology ↗ · April 12 briefing

Daniel Tudor /Financial Times:Analysts and researchers say Google's TurboQuant compression algorithm to make LLMs more efficient is more likely to expand memory chip demand than reduce it— More efficient artificial intelligence could mean even greater need for semiconductors, say experts

TechMeme ↗ · April 12 briefing

Intel Corp., trying to promote the use of its technology in data centers, said Alphabet Inc.'s Google has committed to using future generations of its Xeon processors and other chips.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · April 9 briefing

The AI chip race is heating up, with Andy Jassy taking a shot at Nvidia in his annual letter to shareholders.

Business Insider Tech ↗ · April 9 briefing

The project was part of a package of tech investment promising the UK could become an AI superpower.

BBC Technology ↗ · April 9 briefing · Rules and the courts

Nvidia has reserved the majority of TSMC’s most advanced packaging capacity. The lesser-known chipmaking step may become the next bottleneck for AI.

CNBC Technology ↗ · April 8 briefing

Broadcom said it agreed to produce future versions of Google artificial intelligence chips, and announced an expanded deal with Anthropic.

CNBC Technology ↗ · April 8 briefing

A group of banks including Natixis SA, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA have started selling $3 billion of loans for a data center in Ohio backed by Meta Platforms Inc., the latest deal supporting the buildout of artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · April 8 briefing

Broadcom is developing chips using Google's tensor processing units, or TPUs, offering an alternative to technology from Nvidia. Mandeep Singh has more on "Bloomberg Open Interest." (Source: Bloomberg)

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · April 7 briefing

Uber is expanding its AWS contract to run more of its ride-sharing features on Amazon's chips. This is a thumb-of-the nose at Oracle and Google.

TechCrunch ↗ · April 7 briefing

Writing fast GPU code is one of the most grueling specializations in machine learning engineering. RightNow AI released AutoKernel, an open-source framework that runs an autonomous LLM agent loop to optimize GPU kernels for arbitrary PyTorch models. The goal is to automate the kind of performance tuning engineers usually do by hand.

AI Research News ↗ · April 6 briefing

Rapid technological advancements and the huge sums of money flowing into the data center are posing both risks and rewards for insurers.

CNBC Technology ↗ · April 6 briefing

Chinese chip companies have benefited from strong domestic demand for AI as U. S. tech curbs have bolstered local firms.

CNBC Technology ↗ · April 5 briefing

The startup, which is planning to go public later this year, designs chips specifically for AI inference, another challenger to Nvidia's dominance.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · April 1 briefing · Follow the money

Company part of growing cohort of UK groups developing faster AI processors

Financial Times Tech ↗ · April 1 briefing · Follow the money

Chipmaker sold stake two years ago to help shore up its precarious finances

Financial Times Tech ↗ · April 1 briefing

Mistral AI, a French startup trying to build a European alternative to OpenAI, has secured its first debt financing of $830 million for a data center project outside of Paris, becoming the latest technology company tapping credit markets for an unprecedented buildout of artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · March 30 briefing · Follow the money

Rebellions' chips are focused on AI inferencing, putting it in competition with Nvidia as well as other startups from Groq to Cerebras.

CNBC Technology ↗ · March 30 briefing · Follow the money

Texas site for Nexus Data Centers aims to avoid grid connection delays with direct gas supplies

Financial Times Tech ↗ · March 29 briefing

Meta is increasing investment at a data center in El Paso, Texas, to $10 billion from $1.5 billion, as the company ramps up spending on AI infrastructure.

CNBC Technology ↗ · March 26 briefing

SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron shares fell as investors fear fewer memory chips may be required in the future.

CNBC Technology ↗ · March 26 briefing

Aligned Data Centers has raised $2.58 billion through a revolving credit facility to help the company finance its data center expansion in the US.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · March 26 briefing

The bill would halt the construction of new AI data centers around the US until "strong national safeguards" are put in place.

Business Insider Tech ↗ · March 25 briefing

The Information:Source: as part of its Google deal, Apple has full access to the Gemini model in its own data centers and can use distillation to produce smaller models— Before we get to today's column, we wanted to flag OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's major reorg, the company's new “Spud” model and its decision …

TechMeme ↗ · March 25 briefing

Lawmakers call for commerce department to suspend licences that let company send advanced semiconductors to south-east Asia

Financial Times Tech ↗ · March 24 briefing

While much of the attention has focused on GPUs, an area Nvidia dominates, CPUs are seen as key for AI inferencing and agents.

CNBC Technology ↗ · March 24 briefing

NYT: Trump officials tied the plan to reducing supply-chain vulnerability after the war in Iran, with a voluntary consortium targeting chips, energy, and minerals.

TechMeme ↗ · March 23 briefing

Shortly after Amazon announced its $50 billion investment in OpenAI, AWS invited me on a private tour of the chip lab at the heart of the deal.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · March 22 briefing

As OpenAI gears up for a potential IPO, it's outlined a more tempered infrastructure strategy and has moved away from an ambitious agreement with Nvidia.

CNBC Technology ↗ · March 22 briefing · Follow the money

Bloomberg:Elon Musk announces Terafab, an Austin-based project run by Tesla and SpaceX to manufacture robotics, AI, and space data center chips for Tesla, xAI, and SpaceX— Elon Musk said his Terafab project — a grand plan to eventually manufacture his own chips for robotics, artificial intelligence …

TechMeme ↗ · March 22 briefing · Robots and physical AI

The investment, the vendor's largest annual spending to date, comes as the vendor repositions itself in the AI hardware ecosystem.

AI Business ↗ · March 19 briefing

Nvidia Corp., the company at the center of an explosive build-out of AI computing, expects to generate at least $1 trillion from its Blackwell and Rubin chips through the end of 2027.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · March 16 briefing

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said space computing "has arrived" at the GTC 2026 conference.

CNBC Technology ↗ · March 16 briefing

Nvidia and AMD are seeing huge demand for CPUs and Jensen Huang is poised to unveil details for processors specialized for agentic AI at the GTC conference.

CNBC Technology ↗ · March 15 briefing

The US Commerce Department has pulled a draft regulation that would have restricted exports of artificial intelligence chips to anywhere in the world without US approval, according to an electronic notification posted on a government website.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · March 15 briefing

Meta's latest generations of its MTIA series of in-house chips for artificial intelligence will help support the company's massive data center expansion plans.

CNBC Technology ↗ · March 12 briefing

Nvidia Corp. will invest $2 billion in Nebius Group NV as part of a strategic partnership to develop and build AI data centers, as the chip giant continues to pour money into companies that buy its chips.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · March 11 briefing

The MTIA processors are Meta's latest attempt to build its own AI hardware, even as it continues spending billions on gear from industry leaders like Nvidia. Four new chip generations will deploy by end of 2027.

Wired ↗ · March 11 briefing

Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab struck a multiyear strategic partnership with NVIDIA to deploy at least one gigawatt of Vera Rubin systems. The deal includes a significant strategic investment from Nvidia into the one-year-old AI startup.

Financial Times ↗ · March 10 briefing

Mississippi regulators authorized xAI to build a power plant with 41 natural gas-burning turbines in Southaven to power its nearby data centers, despite environmental concerns.

CNBC Technology ↗ · March 10 briefing

Oracle and OpenAI have scrapped plans to expand a flagship AI data center in Texas after negotiations stalled over financing and OpenAI's changing needs. Meta is reportedly in talks to lease the planned expansion site in Abilene, with Nvidia facilitating discussions.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · March 8 briefing

The first known military strike on a US hyperscaler has rattled regional ambitions to build multibillion-dollar cloud facilities in the Gulf. Amazon facilities in Bahrain and the UAE were struck by drones, raising questions about the resilience of AI infrastructure in conflict zones.

Financial Times ↗ · March 8 briefing

Oracle is planning to cut thousands of jobs as it navigates a cash crunch caused by its massive multi-billion dollar investment in AI data center expansion. The move highlights the extreme capital requirements of the current AI infrastructure race.

Bloomberg ↗ · March 5 briefing · AI and work

The US Commerce Department is considering a draft rule that would require foreign countries to invest in American AI infrastructure in exchange for receiving advanced semiconductors from Nvidia and AMD, effectively using chip exports as geopolitical leverage.

Financial Times ↗ · March 5 briefing

Broadcom's AI revenue has jumped 106% year-over-year, driven by massive demand for custom AI chips. CEO Hock Tan made a strong case for why AI growth will last, surpassing bullish Wall Street expectations for infrastructure spending.

CNBC ↗ · March 5 briefing

At MWC 2026, SK Telecom announced it is rewriting its entire network core for AI, expanding data center capacity to the gigawatt scale and upgrading its own LLMs to power customer service and network operations.

AI News ↗ · March 4 briefing

Amazon cloud services have been disrupted after a physical object hit a data center in the UAE, raising fresh concerns about the vulnerability of critical digital infrastructure as tensions with Iran ramp up.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · March 2 briefing

Apple has surprised the market with an M4-powered iPad Air refresh. The headline feature is a 12GB RAM floor, specifically designed to handle the advanced on-device AI features of 'iPadOS 26'.

Apple Newsroom ↗ · March 2 briefing

Nvidia's market dominance is facing new pressure as Meta moves toward AMD chips and OpenAI turns to Amazon's custom silicon for its massive compute needs.

CNBC Technology ↗ · March 1 briefing

Nvidia's latest earnings report showed a 75% increase in data center revenue, quelling some fears of an AI infrastructure bubble. CEO Jensen Huang dismissed concerns about a spending slowdown, citing continued demand for next-gen Blackwell chips.

CNBC Technology ↗ · February 27 briefing

Elon Musk's xAI is facing intense backlash from neighbors of its Memphis supercomputer site. Despite spending $7 million on a sound wall, residents describe the persistent noise from the facility's power plant as 'torture,' leading to new legal challenges.

Ars Technica ↗ · February 27 briefing

Meta AI has released GCM, an open-source tool for monitoring massive GPU clusters. As AI models scale to trillions of parameters, the physical infrastructure has become increasingly fragile; GCM aims to ensure high performance and hardware reliability during months-long training runs.

AI Research News ↗ · February 26 briefing

Meta has announced a massive multi-year partnership with AMD to purchase up to 6 gigawatts of custom Instinct MI450 AI chips. The deal, which could see Meta owning 10% of AMD, signals a major shift to diversify compute infrastructure away from Nvidia dominance.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · February 25 briefing

AI chip startup MatX, founded by former Google TPU engineers, has secured $500 million in funding. The company aims to compete with Nvidia by building hardwired AI chips that trade general-purpose flexibility for extreme performance in LLM inference.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · February 25 briefing · Follow the money

SambaNova Systems raised $350 million in Series E funding led by Vista Equity. The company claims its new SN50 chip runs AI models 5x faster than rivals and has secured a major deployment deal with SoftBank for its next-generation AI infrastructure.

TechMeme ↗ · February 25 briefing

Amazon has committed $12 billion to build massive AI data centers in Louisiana, part of its broader $200B infrastructure-first strategy to dominate the generative AI cloud market.

CNBC Technology ↗ · February 24 briefing

NVIDIA has sold its entire stake in Arm, signaling a strategic shift as the company focuses its resources on dominating the AI data center and specialized CPU market.

CNBC Technology ↗ · February 20 briefing

India’s Adani Group has committed $100 billion over the next decade to build 5 gigawatts of AI data center capacity, partnering with Google and Microsoft to establish India as a global AI infrastructure hub.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · February 18 briefing

A team of former SpaceX engineers raised $50M for Mesh, a startup mass-producing optical transceivers to solve the critical networking and cabling bottlenecks in large-scale AI clusters.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · February 18 briefing · Follow the money

New data shows NVIDIA’s Blackwell Ultra chips deliver up to 50x better performance and 35x lower costs for agentic AI workloads, solidifying NVIDIA's lead in the specialized hardware race for autonomous agents.

NVIDIA Blog ↗ · February 17 briefing

AMD is partnering with Tata Consultancy Services to deploy its latest AI data center technology in India, aiming to break NVIDIA's near-monopoly in one of the world's fastest-growing AI markets.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · February 17 briefing

Blackstone is leading a $1.2 billion financing round for Indian AI cloud startup Neysa. The capital will fund the deployment of over 20,000 GPUs to build domestic AI sovereign infrastructure.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · February 17 briefing

OpenAI is releasing its first artificial intelligence model that runs on chips from semiconductor startup Cerebras Systems Inc., part of a push by the ChatGPT maker to broaden the pool of chipmakers it works with beyond Nvidia Corp.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · February 13 briefing · The frontier model race

The cash commitment is a move toward sovereign AI in Europe.

AI Business ↗ · February 13 briefing

OpenAI is releasing its first artificial intelligence model that runs on chips from semiconductor startup Cerebras Systems Inc., part of a push by the ChatGPT maker to broaden the pool of chipmakers it works with beyond Nvidia Corp.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · February 12 briefing · The frontier model race

The cash commitment is a move toward sovereign AI in Europe.

AI Business ↗ · February 12 briefing

Meta announced a record $10B+ investment to build a 1GW data center campus in Lebanon, Indiana, one of its largest AI infrastructure projects.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · February 11 briefing

Apollo Global Management is nearing a $3.4B loan deal to help xAI acquire Nvidia chips, as the lab's burn rate reportedly hit $1B/month.

The Information / TechMeme ↗ · February 9 briefing

The investment comes from backers including the Qatar Investment Authority as demand for chips beyond Nvidia soars and as Qatar aims to build out its AI infrastructure.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · February 5 briefing · Follow the money

In merging SpaceX with xAI, Elon Musk may be providing his artificial intelligence startup with a much-needed cash infusion.

CNBC Technology ↗ · February 4 briefing

The Maia 200 deployment demonstrates that custom silicon has matured from experimental capability to production infrastructure at hyperscale.

Forbes Tech ↗ · February 2 briefing

Coco Feng /South China Morning Post:Filing: Chinese AI chip designer Cambricon reports a $316M net profit in 2025, its first profitable year; rivals Moore Threads and MetaX narrowed their losses— Domestic A-share companies in the sector are forecast to achieve substantial growth in their 2025 results, according to Donghai Securities

TechMeme ↗ · February 2 briefing

ASML is experiencing several tailwinds including an expectation of increased chipmaking capacity and continued demand for AI semiconductors.

CNBC Technology ↗ · January 28 briefing

Over 400,000 H200 chips coming to tech giants as China tries to balance tech needs with self-reliance.

Ars Technica ↗ · January 28 briefing

Microsoft Corp. is rolling out its second-generation artificial intelligence chip, the centerpiece of the company’s push to power its services more efficiently and provide an alternative to Nvidia Corp. hardware.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · January 26 briefing

Nvidia Corp., the dominant maker of artificial intelligence chips, invested an additional $2 billion in the cloud computing firm and key customer CoreWeave Inc., marking the latest example of the circular financing deals that have lifted valuations of AI companies and fueled concerns about a bubble. Bloomberg's Anurag Rana joins to discuss on Bloomberg intelligence. (Source: Bloomberg)

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · January 26 briefing

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will produce unprecedented volumes of heterogeneous astronomical data (images, catalogs, and alerts) that challenge traditional analysis pipelines. The LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC) aims to derive robust constraints on dark energy and dark matter from these data, requiring methods that are statistically powerful, scalable, and operationally reliable. Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) are alr...

arXiv ↗ · January 20 briefing

An updated rule from the EPA closed a loophole that allowed xAI to build its Memphis data center quickly using air-polluting turbines as a power source.

CNBC Technology ↗ · January 19 briefing

Local vs giant data centers, Gmail gets Gemini, Trump tariffs AI chips, OpenAI backs Altman’s Merge, Murati’s loses staff to Altman, and Open Responses launched.

Forward Future ↗ · January 18 briefing

Parts makers concerned about whether Beijing will allow imports of AI processors

Financial Times Tech ↗ · January 18 briefing

Tesla Inc. is almost finished with the design of the AI5 chip for its full self-driving system, and is in the early stages of developing the next version, AI6, Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said in a post on X.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · January 18 briefing

Taiwanese chipmaker beats own guidance on revenue and gross profit margin

Financial Times Tech ↗ · January 15 briefing

The U. S. struck a trade deal with Taiwan as the country looks to help boost domestic semiconductor manufacturing.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · January 15 briefing

AI chip startup Etched raised about $500 million in a new funding round, according to people familiar with the matter, part of an effort to compete with Nvidia Corp. in the booming market for artificial intelligence processors.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · January 13 briefing · Follow the money

The tech giant has pledged to be a "good neighbor" as it continues to invest in AI infrastructure throughout the country.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · January 13 briefing

Gemini hits Hyundai, AI finds climber, Meta goes nuclear, DeepSeek coding, xAI builds plant, Anthropic joins Allianz, Dell pivot, DRAM up, MiniMax IPO, a16z funds.

Forward Future ↗ · January 12 briefing · Robots and physical AI

Nvidia is now requiring its customers in China to pay upfront in full for its H200 AI chips even as approval stateside and from Beijing remains uncertain.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · January 8 briefing

Yoolim Lee /Bloomberg:Samsung expects Q4 operating profit up 208% YoY to ~$13.8B, vs. ~$12.3B est., and revenue up 23% to ~$64.2B, as demand for AI servers lifted memory chip prices— Samsung Electronics Co.'s quarterly profit more than tripled to a record high after global demand for AI servers sharply lifted memory chip prices.

TechMeme ↗ · January 7 briefing

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang officially launched the company’s new Rubin computing architecture, which he described as the state of the art in AI computing.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · January 5 briefing

Data centers tied to the biggest US grid just tacked on another $6.5 billion to the cost of procuring power supplies, adding to concerns the artificial intelligence boom is worsening energy inflation.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · January 5 briefing

Jiyoung Sohn /Wall Street Journal: A profile of June Paik, CEO of Seoul-based chip startup FuriosaAI, valued at ~$700M, whose AI chip dubbed "RNGD" is slated to enter mass production this month — June Paik spurned a takeover offer from Meta Platforms last year. Now his South Korean company, FuriosaAI, has an AI chip entering mass production.

TechMeme ↗ · January 4 briefing · Follow the money

Nvidia's $20 billion strategic licensing deal with Groq represents one of the first clear moves in a four-front fight over the future AI stack. 2026 is when that fight becomes obvious to enterprise builders. For the technical decision-makers we talk to every day — the people building the AI applications and the data pipelines that drive them — this deal is a signal that the era of the one-size-fits-all GPU as the default AI inference answer is ending. We are entering the age of the disaggregated inference stack.

VentureBeat ↗ · January 4 briefing

Kieran Smith /Financial Times:How Nokia has reinvented itself for the AI revolution by expanding into cloud services, data centers, and optical networks, and by partnering with Nvidia— Finnish company that brought the world the 3310 has reinvented itself for the AI revolution — Few digital sounds have burrowed into the human brain like the Nokia ringtone.

TechMeme ↗ · January 2 briefing

Baidu has announced plans to spin off its artificial intelligence chip subsidiary, Kunlunxin, and list the new firm on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

CNBC Technology ↗ · January 2 briefing

Elon Musk’s xAI is planning an expansion of its massive data center complex in Memphis, and has purchased a third building in the area that will bring the company’s artificial intelligence computing capacity to almost 2 gigawatts, the billionaire wrote Tuesday in a post on X.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · December 30 briefing

Welcome to Tech In Depth, our daily newsletter about the business of tech from Bloomberg’s journalists around the world. Today, in the second installment of our reports looking ahead to tech trends in 2026, Ian King writes that watching the less-publicized chipmakers may be a better way of assessing the future of artificial intelligence than keeping an eye on market leader Nvidia.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · December 30 briefing

The battle for AI dominance has left a large footprint—and it's only getting bigger and more expensive.

Wired ↗ · December 28 briefing

Supply chain shortages drive developers to use smaller and less efficient power sources to fuel AI power demand

Financial Times Tech ↗ · December 28 briefing

In data-center terms, scaling out involves linking computers, while scaling up packs more GPUs into a computer, challenging copper's physical limits. Copper cables face a phenomenon at high data rates that necessitate wider wires and more power, complicating a data center's dense connections. Point2 and AttoTude propose radio-based cables, offering longer reach, lower power consumption, and narrower cables than copper, without the cost and complexity of optics.

IEEE Spectrum AI ↗ · December 28 briefing

Nvidia is making its largest purchase ever, acquiring assets from 9-year-old chip startup Groq for about $20 billion.

CNBC Technology ↗ · December 26 briefing

The US accused China of engaging in unfair trade practices in the semiconductor sector, but is declining to impose additional tariffs on chip imports until at least mid-2027.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · December 23 briefing

Welcome to Tech In Depth, our daily newsletter about the business of tech from Bloomberg's journalists around the world. Today, Ian King reports on the changing fortunes of the memory chip industry.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · December 23 briefing

Reuters:Sources: Nvidia plans to begin shipping its H200 chips to China before mid-February 2026 and expects initial shipments to be ~40,000 to 80,000 H200 units— Nvidia (NVDA. O) has told Chinese clients it aims to start shipping its second-most powerful AI chips to China before the Lunar …

TechMeme ↗ · December 22 briefing

Alphabet Inc. has agreed to buy clean energy developer Intersect Power LLC for $4.75 billion in cash, plus existing debt, marking one of the largest deals by the tech giant to dramatically expand its data center footprint for AI.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · December 22 briefing

Sherry Qin /Wall Street Journal:Chinese AI chipmaker Biren Technology plans to raise up to ~$623M in a Hong Kong IPO, pricing shares at ~$2.19 to ~$2.52, and expects trading to start January 2— The company expects its shares to start trading in Hong Kong on Jan. 2 — Chinese AI chip maker Shanghai Biren Technology seeks …

TechMeme ↗ · December 22 briefing · Follow the money

Moore Threads Technology Co. introduced a new generation of chips aimed at reducing artificial-intelligence developers’ dependence on Nvidia Corp.’s hardware, just weeks after pulling off one of the most successful Chinese IPOs in years.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · December 21 briefing · Follow the money

Restricted chipmaking tools are being retrofitted to make advanced AI chips, exposing cracks in US-led export controls

Financial Times Tech ↗ · December 21 briefing

Michigan regulators approved a request from utility DTE Energy Co. to power a massive data center development planned by Oracle and OpenAI, marking a significant infrastructure expansion for AI compute capacity.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · December 18 briefing

Chip startup Mythic Inc. has raised $125 million in a new funding round, money that will help support its attempt to challenge Nvidia Corp. in the lucrative market for artificial intelligence processors.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · December 17 briefing · Follow the money

Shares of Chinese chipmaker MetaX Integrated Circuits Shanghai soared nearly 700% after raising nearly $600 million in its initial public offering.

CNBC Technology ↗ · December 17 briefing

Last Energy Inc., a nuclear startup, raised $100 million from investors led by Astera Institute to commercialize a small reactor it’s developing as soaring demand for power to run artificial intelligence stokes interest in the industry.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · December 16 briefing · Follow the money

"Give me a few weeks to actually ship what I have access to," Google cofounder Sergey Brin said, describing a coming Gemini Live model.

Business Insider Tech ↗ · December 16 briefing

Elon Musk warns of an AI hardware 'all-out war' as Nvidia's Blackwell rollout accelerates, pushing rivals to race on speed, cost, and scale.

TechRepublic ↗ · December 15 briefing

Company raises its capital expenditure forecast as it doubles down on AI infrastructure bet.

Ars Technica ↗ · December 11 briefing

The company has also developed AI models to power its Autonomy+ subscription, which it intends to roll out early next year for $2,500 upfront or $49.99 a month.

CNBC Technology ↗ · December 11 briefing · Robots and physical AI

Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek has relied on Nvidia Corp. chips that are banned in the country to develop an upcoming AI model, according to a new report in The Information.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · December 10 briefing · Rules and the courts

The company's Starcloud-1 satellite is running Gemma, an open model from Google, marking the first time in history that an LLM has been trained in outer space.

CNBC Technology ↗ · December 10 briefing · Open models

President Donald Trump granted Nvidia Corp. permission to ship its H200 artificial intelligence chip to China in exchange for a 25% surcharge, a move that lets the world’s most valuable company potentially regain billions of dollars in lost business from a key global market. Bloomberg's Caroline Hyde reports. (Source: Bloomberg)

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · December 9 briefing

AI advances made through group's custom processor hits Nvidia's stock and prompts ChatGPT maker to declare 'code red'

Financial Times Tech ↗ · December 8 briefing

Alphabet Inc. investors are growing increasingly confident that the company's semiconductors could represent a significant driver of future revenue for Google's parent, potentially worth $900 billion.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · December 4 briefing

ByteDance Ltd.'s TikTok will invest more than 200 billion reais ($37.7 billion) to build a data center in Brazil, marking its first project in Latin America.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · December 3 briefing

Nvidia Corp. is on the verge of securing a massive lobbying win after US lawmakers kept a measure out of must-pass defense legislation that would have limited the company's ability to sell their advanced artificial intelligence chips to China and other adversary nations.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · December 3 briefing · Rules and the courts

Amazon.com Inc.'s cloud unit raced to get the latest version of its artificial intelligence chip to market, renewing efforts to sell hardware capable of rivaling products from Nvidia Corp. and Google.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · December 2 briefing

Nvidia Corp. invested $2 billion in chip-design software maker Synopsys Inc. as part of a broader engineering and design tie-up, aiming to infuse its AI-computing technology into more industries.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · December 1 briefing

Power demand from US data centers is set to surge to 106 gigawatts by 2035, according to BloombergNEF, a 36% increase from the research provider's previous outlook in April.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · December 1 briefing

China's focus on pushing domestic chips could make Baidu's chip unit, Kunlunxin, a fast-growing business for the company.

CNBC Technology ↗ · November 30 briefing

Digital Connexion, a joint venture between Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries Ltd., Brookfield Asset Management Ltd. and Digital Realty Trust Inc. has signed a pact to invest $11 billion by 2030 for developing a data center in southern India.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · November 27 briefing

Alibaba and ByteDance shift development to south-east Asia to sidestep US curbs

Financial Times Tech ↗ · November 27 briefing

The artificial intelligence company said it was working with a developer to build a solar farm on 88 acres next to its Memphis site. Given the proposed size, the solar farm would likely produce around 30 megawatts of electricity, only about 10% of the data center's estimated power use.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · November 26 briefing

Meta Platforms Inc. is in talks to spend billions on Google's AI chips, the Information reported, adding to a monthslong share rally as the search giant has made the case it can rival Nvidia Corp. as a leader in artificial intelligence technology.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · November 25 briefing

A rally in Alphabet Inc. shares is poised to shake up the ranking of the world’s most valuable companies, amid signs the search giant is making headway in efforts to rival Nvidia Corp.’s bestselling AI accelerator.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · November 25 briefing

Tech giants are increasingly facing community backlash as they select places to build mammoth AI data centers.

CNBC Technology ↗ · November 25 briefing

Tesla is nearing the final step of the design process for its AI5 chip and starting work on a new AI6 chip to be deployed in its cars and data centers, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Sunday in an X post.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · November 23 briefing

The AI startup Firebird Inc. has received US government approval to export Nvidia Corp. chips to Armenia for a supercomputer project in the country, part of a global push to expand artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · November 19 briefing

Elon Musk said his xAI artificial intelligence startup plans to develop a 500 megawatt data center in Saudi Arabia with the kingdom’s state-backed AI venture Humain that will rely on chips from Nvidia Corp.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · November 19 briefing

China unveils a 1,000× quantum chip, eBay expands AI tools, NVIDIA moves to full servers, OpenAI fixes em-dashes, Maryland power costs rise, DBS sees AI gains, ChatGPT tests group chats, and Tesla, Mercedes win China AI approval.

Forward Future ↗ · November 18 briefing

Anthropic rival OpenAI has secured more than $1.4 trillion worth of deals with Nvidia, Broadcom, Oracle and the major cloud providers.

CNBC Technology ↗ · November 17 briefing

Taiwanese electronics manufacturer expects revenue from AI server production to almost double from this quarter to the next

Financial Times Tech ↗ · November 17 briefing

Alphabet Inc.’s Google plans to invest $40 billion in three new Texas data centers, part of an effort to add artificial intelligence computing power in a state that’s also drawn multibillion investments from competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic PBC.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · November 16 briefing

Microsoft EVP of Cloud + AI Scott Guthrie says the goal is to be able to 10X the AI training every 18-24 months. This likely includes maintaining the 2-4X pace of chip improvement. Satya Nadella gave Dylan Patel (founder of SemiAnalysis) and Dwarkesh an exclusive first-look at their brand-new Fairwater 2 datacenter. Microsoft is building ... Read more

Next Big Future AI ↗ · November 16 briefing

Welcome to Tech In Depth, our daily newsletter about the business of tech from Bloomberg’s journalists around the world. Today, Kurt Wagner looks at Mark Zuckerberg’s musings about what his company might do if it builds too many data centers for its AI needs.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · November 13 briefing

Anthropic PBC will spend $50 billion to build custom data centers in the US. They'll start coming online in 2026 according to the company. OpenAI, Meta Platforms Inc., Google, Microsoft Corp., Nvidia Corp. and other leading tech companies plan to collectively spend hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers to support AI. Bloomberg's Ed Ludlow reports. (Source: Bloomberg)

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · November 12 briefing

D-Matrix Corp., a Microsoft Corp.-backed AI chip startup, raised $275 million from new investors including Qatar Investment Authority and Singapore’s EDBI, valuing the company at $2 billion.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · November 12 briefing · Follow the money

NTT Data Group is considering building data centers in Saudi Arabia as the Japanese firm looks to capitalize on fresh momentum around artificial intelligence in the kingdom.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · November 11 briefing

A recent letter from OpenAI reveals more details about how the company is hoping the federal government can support its ambitious plans for data center construction.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · November 10 briefing

Anduril Industries Inc. founder Palmer Luckey, a Lockheed Martin Corp. board member, Palantir Technology Inc.’s Shyam Sankar and other investors are putting $130 million into Valar Atomics, a nuclear startup that’s aiming to build thousands of advanced nuclear fission reactors within a decade.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · November 10 briefing · Follow the money

One mayor is trying to bring some of the AI data center frenzy back to Silicon Valley's backyard. But first…

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · November 10 briefing

Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang said he had asked Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. for more chip supplies as artificial intelligence demand remains strong.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · November 9 briefing

Tesla CEO Elon Musk he needs a "gigantic" semiconductor fabrication plant to meet the company's chip needs as it expands its AI and robotics ventures.

CNBC Technology ↗ · November 9 briefing · Robots and physical AI

OpenAI has asked the Trump administration to revamp a Chips Act tax credit to help lower the cost of artificial intelligence infrastructure, as the startup explores additional ways the US government can support an industrywide data center build-out for AI.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · November 9 briefing

Google says Ironwood, the seventh generation of its Tensor Processing Unit, is more than four times faster than its predecessor chip.

CNBC Technology ↗ · November 6 briefing

Since generative artificial intelligence began to make headlines in 2022, investors have poured money into Nvidia Corp., convinced that its leading position in AI hardware will deliver riches.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · November 5 briefing

Chinese electric car company Xpeng is following in Tesla's footsteps by moving into robotaxis and humanoid robots.

CNBC Technology ↗ · November 5 briefing · Robots and physical AI

Executives discussing options including shorting basket of artificial intelligence stocks or using derivatives to transfer risk

Financial Times Tech ↗ · November 5 briefing

Nvidia Corp. and Deutsche Telekom AG are building a €1 billion ($1.2 billion) data center in Germany to bolster infrastructure in Europe that can power complex artificial intelligence systems.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · November 4 briefing

Without a fully reusable Starship there will not be large scale AI Data Centers in space. SpaceX has to bring the cost of flying a SpaceX Starship below $80 million per flight. SpaceX will likely be able to do this for their own costs in 2026 but they may not sell Starship flights at less ... Read more

Next Big Future AI ↗ · November 4 briefing

"It's in the best interest of America to serve that China market. It's in the best interest of China to have the American technology," the Nvidia CEO said.

CNBC Technology ↗ · November 3 briefing

Commerce department approval paves way for huge new investment in AI and cloud infrastructure in Middle East

Financial Times Tech ↗ · November 3 briefing

Qualcomm Inc. shares rose to their highest price in 15 months after unveiling chips and computers for the lucrative AI data center market, aiming to challenge Nvidia Corp. in the fastest-growing part of the industry.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · October 28 briefing

Qualcomm announces new chips, cards and rack-scale solutions for the AI data center, but omits key details.

Forbes Tech ↗ · October 28 briefing

Nvidia Corp. and Deutsche Telekom AG are preparing to announce plans for a €1 billion data center in Germany as part of a broader push to develop more infrastructure across Europe to power AI systems.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · October 28 briefing

Nvidia's massive investment in OpenAI will come in tranches over time, and most of the money will go back to Nvidia.

CNBC Technology ↗ · September 25 briefing

XAI Colossus 2’s is targeting ~1 Gigwatt as soon as possible. They have natural gas turbines for primary generation, batteries for stability, and grid for long-term scalability. XAI Colossus 2 has power from seven installed SMT-360/Titan-350 Natural Gas Turbines. The seven turbines in question are deployed at the Southaven, Mississippi site 6 miles from Colossus ... Read more

Next Big Future AI ↗ · September 23 briefing

In an interview with CNBC, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said his company's project with OpenAI is equivalent to between 4 million and 5 million GPUs.

CNBC Technology ↗ · September 23 briefing

BYD executive Stella Li said BYD has not been told to stop using any Nvidia products.

CNBC Technology ↗ · September 23 briefing

Two Chinese nationals in California have been charged with the illegal shipment of tens of millions of dollars' worth of AI chips, including those from Nvidia.

CNBC Technology ↗ · August 6 briefing

US President Donald Trump met Wednesday with Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang at the White House, as he readies sweeping new tariffs on semiconductor imports.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · August 6 briefing

Nvidia warns that government-mandated kill switches or backdoors in AI chips would fracture trust in US technology and undermine the semiconductor industry, while denying Chinese accusations that its chips already contain such mechanisms.

Ars Technica ↗ · August 6 briefing