Chips

Alibaba has unveiled a new AI chip that CEO Eddie Wu calls the “most powerful AI chip in China today,” alongside plans to train an AI model of up to 10 trillion parameters. The announcements, made at the company’s annual Apsara conference in Hangzhou, land just days before Chinese leader Xi Jinping meets President Trump in Washington, where the race to lead in AI is expected to be a major theme.

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Last Thursday, the U.S. Department of Energy handed the operator of America’s largest power grid emergency authority to “direct backup generation resources to operate as a last resort” before rolling blackouts across 13 states and Washington, D.C. It was the latest in a string of such orders this year. In Europe, meanwhile, a new data centre in Frankfurt or Amsterdam can wait the better part of a decade just to be plugged in. This is what the AI boom looks like from the grid’s side, and it’s not pretty.

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For years, Ulanqab in Inner Mongolia was best known as China’s official “potato capital.” Now its fields have a new crop: enormous data centres to power China’s AI ambitions, going up so fast that one construction worker laughingly described his country to the BBC as “an infrastructure maniac.”

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AMD crossed a $1 trillion market value for the first time on Monday, joining a tiny club of chipmakers as investors pile into bets on its growing role in AI, Reuters reports. Shares jumped 9.6% to $613.31, a record high, making AMD only the fourth U.S. chipmaker ever to reach the milestone, after Nvidia, Broadcom and Micron.

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has a message for the AI researchers warning that the technology could wipe out humanity within a few years: calm down. In an interview with CBS News, the head of the world’s most valuable company dismissed those warnings as “doomsday narratives” that are “not grounded in science.”

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