Chips

The US Commerce Department cleared Chinese companies to handle Nvidia’s H200 AI chips even though some of them appear to exist mainly on paper, The New York Times reported on Saturday. Its reporters found empty offices at two of the licensed firms and links to blacklisted Chinese companies and to suppliers of the Chinese military.

Ricursive Intelligence, the chip-design start-up founded by the two researchers behind Google’s AlphaChip, has released Ripple-65B Preview, a free AI model it says is now the best American open-weight model at agentic coding. It says the whole thing cost $32 million to build, about a tenth of what the previous leader spent.

American voters used Tuesday’s midterm elections to turn against the data centres that power artificial intelligence. By Wednesday, 33 local ballot measures restricting data centres had passed or were leading in counts still under way, Stateline reported, citing the tracker Data Centers on the Ballot. Only one measure, in North Dakota, went the way of the industry’s supporters.

US intelligence agencies believe a Chinese informant built a close relationship with Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, The New York Times reported on Thursday, citing unnamed officials briefed on the classified findings. The woman, Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, is an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore data centre company already under US scrutiny over Nvidia’s AI chips.

Hackers who get into the hardware beneath an AI model can quietly rewrite how it answers in under a minute, without changing the model file anyone checks, security firm Eclypsium says in a 15-page research report published on Thursday.

Elon Musk’s AI company is buying up the houses around its noisy power plant in Southaven, Mississippi, as long as the owners agree not to sue. Estate agents working for it have been going door to door in the Colonial Hills neighbourhood, residents told the Guardian, and in a recording the paper heard, one realtor told a homeowner the target is 418 homes.

DeepSeek has raised about 100 billion yuan, roughly $15 billion, in one of China’s largest ever private funding rounds, Bloomberg reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. Tencent and CATL, the world’s biggest maker of electric car batteries, founded and chaired by Robin Zeng, are among the largest investors. DeepSeek hasn’t confirmed the figure and hasn’t commented.

President Donald Trump says America’s biggest new data centres now have to make their own electricity, and should pay the towns that host them to win them over. In a Truth Social post at 1:37am Eastern time on Wednesday, he wrote that new and large data centres, “in some cases gigantic”, are “mandated by me to make their own electricity, and give or sell any excess back to the local community, or grid”.

Most Americans think artificial intelligence is bad for society, and about two-thirds don’t want any more data centres built to power it, according to a new ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday. It found 57% say AI is bad for society and 42% say it is good, and the pessimists feel it more strongly: 17% call AI “extremely” bad for society, against 2% who say it is extremely good.

Robots are about to have their big breakthrough, according to Nvidia’s Jensen Huang. “The ChatGPT moment for robotics is fast approaching,” Huang said on Wednesday as Nvidia unveiled a reference humanoid that robot makers and university labs can build on. It led a batch of announcements around his GTC Berlin keynote, alongside AI data centres that ship in containers, a robotaxi deal and new tools for company AI agents.

Google wants developers who write AI code for Nvidia chips to be able to run it on Google’s own chips by changing a single word. Google and Meta introduced TorchTPU on Tuesday at the PyTorch Conference in San Jose: an open-source backend that lets PyTorch, the most widely used framework for building AI models, run natively on Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs).

OpenAI has gone quiet on keeping America’s best AI chips out of China, just as Congress gets ready for its last big fight over the issue this year. Capitol Hill aides and lobbyists told Politico that the ChatGPT maker, which publicly backed tough chip export controls for much of last year, has stepped back from pushing for new restrictions, leaving the field to Nvidia, the chipmaker that wants to sell more of its chips in China.

DeepSeek has released the software that runs its own AI service, 18 months after saying it wouldn’t. The Chinese lab published DeepInfer on GitHub on Tuesday, describing it as “the high-performance inference framework that powers DeepSeek’s large-scale production services”, and it runs on Nvidia’s Blackwell chips and Huawei’s Ascend 950 alike.

Germany has signed up Nvidia to help build AI models for its factories. On Monday the federal economy and research ministries signed a Joint Declaration of Intent with the chipmaker at the Invest in Germany Summit in Berlin, with Chancellor Friedrich Merz then sitting down on stage with Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang, to sell the plan to the country’s manufacturers.

Meta is wiring close to a million GPUs together in Ohio so they can train AI as one machine. In a detailed engineering post on Monday, the company opened up Prometheus, the gigawatt-scale supercluster in New Albany, Ohio, that trained its Muse models, and set out how it keeps hundreds of thousands of chips from tripping each other up.

The machine Microsoft billed as Britain’s largest supercomputer has lost its main customer before a single chip was switched on. Microsoft has pulled out of its deal to be the anchor tenant at Nscale’s planned AI data centre in Loughton, Essex, the Telegraph reported on Sunday. Microsoft hasn’t commented, and the paper didn’t say why it walked away.

As of October 29, 2026, the AI bubble has not popped, but it is wobbling: AI chip and data centre stocks have had two sharp sell-offs this year, Alphabet's shares fell 10% after its free cash flow stayed negative for a second quarter, Amazon's slid after hours as its cash outflow deepened, and the International Monetary Fund now names an AI market correction as one of the biggest risks to the global financial system in its October Global Financial Stability Report. What hasn't happened yet is the thing that ends a bubble: the money pouring in has not stopped.

Anthropic has signed its first data centre deal in Canada. The Claude maker will lease the first phase of a new campus at Point Tupper, on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, which developer EverWind announced on Friday as part of a plan worth more than C$10 billion, the largest private investment in the province’s history.

Reflection AI, the Nvidia-backed start-up founded by former Google DeepMind researchers, has released the weights of Beam, a 501 billion-parameter model built for coding and long-running AI agents, free for anyone to download, run and change under an Apache 2.0 licence.

China wants a say over which of its most powerful AI models leave the country. Its commerce and science ministries on Friday proposed adding 23 AI technologies to the national list of technologies banned or restricted from export, covering large language models, AI agents, computing clusters and AI chip design, and ordered companies to register any such exports from today.

Nvidia’s first Windows laptops built around its own chip went on sale around the world on Friday, and the company is pitching them as PCs that run AI agents and large AI models without the cloud. Nvidia said RTX Spark laptops from ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft and MSI are available today, starting at $2,599.

The tech giants say they pay their fair share for the power their AI data centres use. A new bill in Congress would turn that promise into law. Representative Eugene Vindman, a Virginia Democrat, introduced the Make Data Centers Pay Act on October 13, which would bar utilities from passing any of the extra cost of powering a big data centre on to other customers’ bills.

Nvidia is putting $250 million into British research on keeping AI agents safe, but none of it arrives as cash. The chipmaker announced on October 13 a five-year donation of computing power, valued at $50 million a year, for UK research into “agentic safety and security”: making AI systems that act on their own harder to misuse, hijack or lose control of.

When a fault hits the power grid, a giant AI data centre can vanish from it in an instant, and that sudden loss of demand can push the whole grid off balance. Google, Meta, Microsoft and Nvidia now say their AI computers will stay on the line. The four companies published a grid specification through the Open Compute Project (OCP), the industry group for open data centre designs, as Nvidia opened up its next-generation Vera Rubin rack designs at the OCP Global Summit in San Jose on October 12.

Microsoft wants its own chips, not someone else’s GPUs, to run most of its AI. The company unveiled Maia 300 on Monday, the third generation of its in-house AI accelerator, and said it will scale the Maia family to “multi-gigawatt deployments” from 2027, making it “the primary inference system for Microsoft products and services”.

Amazon is in talks to buy Decart, the AI startup Anthropic walked away from last month, for around $7 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter. No deal has been announced, and the talks could still fall apart.

Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft say they pay their “fair share” for the power their AI data centres use. A nearly yearlong Senate investigation has found that promise covers far less than it sounds. In a 27-page report, Senators Elizabeth Warren, Chris Van Hollen and Richard Blumenthal say the biggest data centre operators refuse to pay the full cost of the grid upgrades they trigger, keep asking for secrecy deals and will go on seeking tax breaks.

Microsoft says Copilot will soon be able to read the files on your Windows PC and take actions for you across the operating system. The company announced the change at a Windows and Surface event in San Francisco on Wednesday, alongside a new sandbox that keeps AI agents fenced in and the first laptops built on Nvidia’s new RTX Spark chip.

Tencent has signed a deal to rent about 100,000 advanced AI chips from Oracle for roughly $7 billion, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday, using a gap in US export rules that lets Chinese companies rent the chips they aren’t allowed to buy.

OpenAI wants its AI to help design computer chips, including the kind that power AI itself. The company and chip design software maker Synopsys announced on Wednesday a multi-year partnership to build GPT-Synopsys, a specialised model trained to use Synopsys’s design tools the way an expert engineer would.

DeepSeek has open-sourced Huawei Ascend versions of the low-level software it uses to train and run its AI models, matching almost every tool it had previously built for Nvidia’s chips. The Chinese lab announced the release on Wednesday on its official WeChat account, saying it had worked with Huawei on the project.

Pope Leo XIV has singled out Nvidia’s boss Jensen Huang for playing down the risks of AI. Speaking to reporters on his flight home from France on Monday evening, the Pope said experts’ warnings about AI “should be taken seriously” and are not “fake news”, according to the Vatican’s transcript of the press conference.

AMD has agreed to buy World Labs, the AI lab founded by Stanford’s Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal worth about $8.2 billion. The chipmaker announced the agreement on Monday, and Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting directly to chief executive Lisa Su.

Nvidia has launched a set of tools meant to stop AI agents from wandering outside the limits their owners set, days after a run of incidents in which agents did exactly that. The company announced the Open Agent Safety Platform on Monday, as CNBC reported, with more than 100 companies signed up, including Anthropic, Microsoft and Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI.

China’s government has signalled it could let some of its biggest tech companies, including TikTok owner ByteDance and Alibaba, buy Nvidia’s new RTX PRO 5500 chip, Reuters reports, citing The Information and two people familiar with the matter. Reuters said it could not immediately verify the report.

The fight over AI data centres has reached Donald Trump’s own doorstep. Palm Beach County, home to Mar-a-Lago, has voted unanimously to ban new hyperscale AI data centres for a year, WPTV reports, one of a growing number of places saying no to the buildings that power the AI boom.

NVIDIA lets you use several of China’s best AI models for free, and most people don’t know it. Its API catalog at build.nvidia.com gives you one key for DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, GLM 5.3, GLM 5.3 Flash and Kimi K3, through an OpenAI-compatible API, as a viral post on X pointed out in late September 2026. We checked what’s actually on offer, how to set it up, and what NVIDIA’s small print says, because there’s an important catch: it’s for testing, not for running a real product. For that, NVIDIA points you to paid options, including NVIDIA Brev, its service for renting ready-made GPU machines, which we cover in full below.

One of Britain’s biggest AI bets is heading for Wall Street with a lot of cash in its pocket. Nscale, the London-based company that builds data centres for AI, has raised $3.36 billion ahead of a planned US stock market listing, including $1 billion from Nvidia, the company announced on Friday. TechCrunch reports it’s aiming for a valuation of about $35 billion.

Elon Musk is going all in on Nvidia. SpaceXAI’s Colossus 2 data centre already runs about 550,000 of Nvidia’s top AI chips, and Musk says he wants to add up to 660,000 more by the end of December, more than doubling it, as Bloomberg reported. He laid out the timeline in a reply on X early on Friday:

Orbital data centres are satellites that run AI in space, powered by near-constant sunlight instead of the electricity grid. The idea has gone from science fiction to a real race in less than a year. Google will launch its first test satellite carrying AI chips on October 1, SpaceX wants permission for up to a million AI satellites, and Elon Musk is predicting that, one day, almost all computing will happen off Earth. Here’s how orbital data centres work, who’s building them, what could go wrong and when, if ever, they’ll matter.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”