Asia's AI Data Center IPOs Hit a Market Reality Check
Stalled listings and shaky debuts are pressuring valuations across Asia's data center sector, Nikkei Asia reports, as investors demand proof of returns.
All reports
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EBU and NVIDIA Set Agentic Security Rules for Broadcasters
The EBU is widening its sovereignty framework to cloud vendors, open models and integrators, naming Microsoft, Nebius, Qvest and NVIDIA as first partners.
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Merz and NVIDIA Sign Industrial AI Letter of Intent
At Berlin's Kraftwerk venue, the chancellery, two federal ministries and NVIDIA signed a non-binding letter of intent on physical AI.
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RTX Spark Laptops Launch at $2,399 and Up
NVIDIA's RTX Spark superchip reaches slim Windows laptops from six vendors, pairing a Blackwell RTX GPU and Grace CPU with up to 128GB of unified memory.
MODELS
Muse Spark Open: Meta's 816B Open-Weight Release
Meta's open model activates 42 of 816 billion parameters per token, holds a million-token context – and, Meta says, runs on two Mac Studio desktops.
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German Government Agrees AI Cooperation With Nvidia
Nvidia is to supply engineers and Berlin the funding to push AI onto factory floors. The sum, the lead ministry and the timing stay open.
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Asian Stocks Slide on AI Debt and Inflation Fears
South Korea's Kospi fell 7.6 percent on October 15, 2026 and Japan's Nikkei nearly 5 percent after hot U.S. inflation data met AI funding doubts.
MODELS
Meta Releases Muse Spark Open With Open Weights
816 billion parameters, 42 billion active and a 1 million token context: Meta's new model runs on two Mac Studios instead of a data center.
MODELS
Nemotron 3.5 Super VL: Nvidia's Open Agent Model
Nvidia ships an open 120-billion-parameter multimodal model for round-the-clock agents, but the headline speed numbers assume Nvidia silicon underneath.
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Nvidia Takes Minority Stake in Doctolib
The chipmaker becomes a minority shareholder in the French booking platform and will help it train its own medical AI models inside Europe.
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NVIDIA Opens Vera Rubin Rack Design to OCP
At the OCP Global Summit, NVIDIA released its Vera Rubin rack and compute tray designs through MGX 1.2, including a 5,000A busbar and 250kW racks.
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NTT plans $6.3bn Anthropic data center in Osaka
About $6.3 billion, a site in Osaka and a partial opening in 2028: Nikkei reports NTT Data and Anthropic are in the final round of talks.
MODELS
Microsoft Maia 300 to hit gigawatt scale from 2027
Microsoft says Maia 300 will carry its inference workloads from 2027, claiming 40 percent more tokens per megawatt than leading GPU racks.
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SpaceX Plans $40 Billion Debt to Buy Nvidia Chips
The Financial Times reports talks over $10 billion in bank loans and $30 billion in bonds, with Apollo leading and Pimco among early lenders.
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RTX Spark: Microsoft Rebuilds Windows 11 for AI Agents
Nvidia and Microsoft unveiled the RTX Spark chip plus a Windows 11 that sandboxes agents in containers, with the Surface Laptop Ultra from $2,600.
MODELS
Mistral Large 4: open weights due in late October
Mistral's new flagship packs a trillion parameters, 49 billion of them active. For now it runs only through the API; the weights arrive in late October.
MODELS
Aleph Alpha releases open-weights model Kolibri
The mixture-of-experts system carries 78 billion parameters with about 3 billion active per token, and the weights ship under Apache 2.0.
MODELS
Reflection Beam: 501B-Parameter Open-Weight AI Model
Reflection's Beam packs 501 billion parameters with 23 billion active, and the startup claims it matches GLM-5.2 using three to four times less compute.
MODELS
Aleph Alpha releases Kolibri open-weight German model
The German-English mixture-of-experts model carries 78 billion parameters with about three billion active per token, released under Apache 2.0.
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Japan's Hard-Drive Suppliers Grow on AI Storage Demand
Resonac Holdings and TDK are expanding output of hard-disk drive parts because AI data centers keep absorbing ever more storage capacity.
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Toshiba to Double HDD Output for AI Data Centers
The group plans to double hard disk drive output for AI data centers by fiscal 2027, its first significant HDD expansion in about five years.
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NVIDIA AI Factory Cost Per Megawatt: $60 Million
A one-megawatt AI factory runs about $60 million. NVIDIA argues the payback rests on throughput per megawatt, hardware lifespan and reuse across workloads.
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GPT-6 Astra Ultrafast: Up to 8x Faster on Blackwell
NVIDIA says the Blackwell-tuned Ultrafast mode generates tokens up to 8x faster than Astra Standard, and it is already in the OpenAI API.
MODELS
Deepseek ships open-source tools for Huawei Ascend chips
The TileLang language and new compute libraries aim to drive Ascend silicon without CUDA, tuned on a supernode of 128 Ascend 950 chips.
MODELS
AMD Buys World Labs in $8.2 Billion Stock Deal
The chipmaker pays in its own shares for Fei-Fei Li's world-model startup and makes her its chief scientist, reporting to Lisa Su.
MODELS
Nvidia Open Agent Safety Platform quarantines AI agents
The chipmaker pairs OpenShell, a separate watchdog called Sentry and BlueField-4 DPUs to wall off agents that stray outside their sandbox.
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AMD World Labs Acquisition: $8.2 Billion in Stock
The chipmaker pays in stock and makes Fei-Fei Li its chief scientist, seven months after joining a funding round that valued the startup at $5 billion.
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Microsoft is retiring the Copilot+ PC brand
The badge is quietly vanishing from laptops with no formal announcement, and Microsoft is trimming AI features inside Windows 11 as well.
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Project Suncatcher: Google to Test AI Chips in Orbit
A prototype satellite is due to launch next week, giving Project Suncatcher its first real check on whether AI compute belongs in Earth orbit.
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Anthropic Signs $11.6 Billion Akamai Cloud Deal
The seven-year contract can grow to about $20 billion, and it hands Anthropic a warrant for as much as five percent of Akamai's shares.
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Nscale Locks In $3.36B Before Its $35B NYSE IPO
Third Point, Apollo and Citadel take the first tranche; Nvidia adds $1 billion in mid-November, with the notes converting once shares start trading.
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Suncatcher: Google Launches AI Chips Into Orbit
A refrigerator-sized prototype carrying four TPUs is set to ride a Falcon 9 on October 1 and operate in orbit for five years.
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Google Suncatcher Satellite Launch Set for October 1
A Falcon 9 is set to carry Google's first Suncatcher satellite on October 1 — four Trillium TPUs, roughly one kilowatt of solar power, 15-minute compute bursts.
MODELS
Alibaba Unveils Zhenwu V900 AI Chip in Hangzhou
At the Apsara Conference in Hangzhou, Alibaba showed a chip it rates at three times the previous generation and pledged over 20 gigawatts by 2032.
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Huawei unveils 11 AI chips, aiming at Nvidia
At Huawei Connect on September 17 the company showed more than ten chips for AI data centers, with exports limited by its own capacity crunch.
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Crusoe Raises $3.9B, Valued at $30.9B for AI Compute
The Series F values the data center operator at $30.9 billion, with Nvidia among the backers — as a $40 million startup pitches a solar-farm alternative.
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Apple Plans AI Server Built on Its Own M8 Ultra Chips
The Information reports two server variants, with two or four M8 Ultra chips, aimed at inference for developers, companies and governments.
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Perplexity's local agent comes to Windows RTX PCs
The agent now plans and runs multistep tasks on RTX cards with 24 GB of VRAM or more, and work finished locally costs no Perplexity credits.
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Fujitsu to Export Fugaku-Based AI Inference Chips
Nikkei reports the Japanese group will ship inference CPUs derived from its Fugaku supercomputer line to US and Asian buyers from 2027 at the earliest.
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d-Matrix Plugs Raptor XPUs Into NVIDIA NVLink Fusion
The inference chipmaker wants Raptor accelerators inside NVIDIA's MGX racks. The announcement names no launch date, no specs and no customers.
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Nikkei op-ed: Seoul's AI diplomacy should include Japan
A Nikkei Asia opinion piece urges Seoul to bring Tokyo into its AI diplomacy. The full argument sits behind a paywall we could not read.
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NVIDIA Puts Real-Time AI Into Live Sports Production
At IBC in Amsterdam, NVIDIA is showing a deepfake detector rated 99.3 percent accurate, frame interpolation for slow motion and live dubbing.
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Intel Says It Is Already Making Chips on High-NA EUV
TSMC will not use ASML's most advanced lithography tool before 2030, Samsung targets 2028 - the same machine, three very different bets.
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Samsung Opens AI Chip Packaging Center in Yokohama
The memory maker wants closer ties to Japan's adhesive, substrate and packaging-tool suppliers. Size, staffing and cost stay undisclosed.
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Philippines bets $34.4bn on becoming an AI hub
Manila's seven-year masterplan pledges $34.4 billion for AI infrastructure and aims to pull in $21 billion of private money by 2033.
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US to raise AI safety with China at Trump-Xi summit
Sources familiar with the preparations describe a narrow opening for dialogue, one that sits awkwardly beside the two countries' technology rivalry.
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South Korea to merge five state power utilities in 2027
The plan targets October 2027 and is meant to speed up investment in generation and grids as AI and chip plants pull more electricity.
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ARM's Mali G2 Ultra NX puts AI cores in the GPU
Better graphics, higher frame rates and lower power draw at the same time – ARM's pitch for its next Mali generation rests on dedicated AI cores.
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South Korea limits unions' claim on chip profits
Nikkei Asia reports new South Korean guidelines that free employers from bargaining over AI and chip windfalls; the full text stays paywalled.
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NVIDIA Pools Home PCs to Run AI Agents Locally
A free router tool spreads inference across idle machines on a home network, and Windows PCs with up to 128 GB of unified memory land in October 2026.
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NBA 2K27 Brings DLSS 5 to GeForce NOW's Cloud RTX 5080s
The September lineup runs to 28 titles, but the real news is a rendering feature tied to the Ultimate tier's cloud hardware, not to your own GPU.
MODELS
Nvidia to buy Hugging Face for $12.93 billion
The chipmaker is buying the hub that hosts three million models, promising other accelerators stay welcome. Closing is planned for the first half of 2027.
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Kioxia pitches NAND flash as a partial DRAM substitute
The company says a CXL module is already with customers for evaluation, but Nikkei's paywalled report leaves the specifications unstated.
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Anthropic Signs $35 Billion Cloud Deal With Lambda
Reuters reports a $35 billion compute agreement between Anthropic and Nvidia-backed Lambda, with none of the companies confirming the deal.
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Microsoft: More memory chips won't fix the AI bottleneck
Azure hardware chief Rani Borkar told a chip industry audience in Taipei that new memory capacity alone will not clear AI supply bottlenecks.
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Google to unveil two custom AI chips a year, not one
The AI infrastructure chief says the two-year generation cycle is over; Google also wants 60 percent more space in Taiwan.
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CrowdStrike SafeMind Pairs NVIDIA Nemotron With Falcon
At Fal.Con 2026 the two companies showed a defense stack where red-team and blue-team agents keep sharpening each other inside Falcon.
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China Life revenue jumps as insurer bets on AI and chips
First-half revenue reached 434.3 billion yuan as the world's largest life insurer by market value pledges more money for AI, chips and biotech.
MODELS
Ox Alpha Revealed as GLM-5.3-Flash: Zhipu Stock Up 12%
The mystery Ox Alpha model is GLM-5.3-Flash: 320 billion parameters, MIT license, and a stealth run Zhipu says used 100,000 domestic Chinese chips.
MODELS
Nvidia Nears $12.9 Billion Deal for Hugging Face
The Information reports talks over the open-model hub. Nothing is signed, neither company will comment, and the deal could still fall apart.
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Nvidia's NVHBM Moves the Memory Controller Into HBM
Nvidia moves its memory controller into the HBM base die, claiming up to 30 percent more bandwidth and 15 percent less memory power. Annapurna Labs signs on first.
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OpenAI's Jalapeño Chip Beats Nvidia in Inference Tests
OpenAI's first in-house accelerator posts more tokens per watt than Blackwell and Rubin on InferenceX — but only an early A0 sample was measured.
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Apple Puts M6 in Mac mini, M5 Ultra in Mac Studio
Preorders are open and shipping starts September 22. The M6 moves to a 2-nanometer process, while the M5 Ultra scales to 512 GB of memory.
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Groq 3 LPX Ships: Nvidia Targets Agent Decode Latency
The accelerator posts 3,400 output tokens per second on Gemma 4 31B, and Nebius becomes the first AI cloud to run it. Vendor figures, no ship dates.
Companies
Thomson Reuters builds its own AI model for $40 million
The information giant launches "Thomson", its own Qwen-based language model — instead of continuing to rent from OpenAI or Anthropic.
Regulation
Taiwan indicts nine over AI servers shipped to China
130 Nvidia B300 servers were ordered, 74 reached Chinese customers, 56 were stopped by customs. The accused include Nvidia and Supermicro employees.
Infrastructure
250 million dollars for data centres in orbit — Nvidia backs Starcloud
A 2.3 billion dollar valuation, with 25 million from Nvidia. The promise: unlimited solar power and cooling in vacuum. The bottleneck right now is launch capacity.
Business
Nvidia discusses Perplexity stake at $30 billion-plus valuation
According to The Information, Nvidia is in talks to back the AI search engine at a valuation above $30 billion. A year ago the figure was $20 billion.
Hardware
Nvidia raises AI server prices by more than 15 percent — memory is the reason
It is not the processors driving the increase but DRAM and HBM. Microsoft, Google and Oracle are already being passed the surcharge on systems shipping in early 2027.
Business
Hugging Face explores sale at a $13 billion-plus valuation
The "GitHub of AI" is reportedly gauging interest in a sale at $13 billion or more, per Business Insider. Its 2023 valuation was $4.5 billion.
Business
Amazon hikes device prices up to 60 percent — an AI side effect
The Echo Dot jumps from $50 to $80, the Fire TV Cube climbs 43 percent: Amazon is passing on soaring memory prices — fallout from the AI boom.
Markets
Alibaba raises 10.2 billion dollars — the largest placement in Hong Kong's market history
The entire net proceeds are earmarked for chips, data centres and models. In the most recent quarter, those very outlays cut profit by 75 percent.
BUSINESS
Nvidia pays Poolside $6 billion — plus $1 billion in equity
Not an acquisition: Nvidia licenses Poolside's Model Factory, extends job offers to 109 staff and invests at a $12 billion pre-money valuation.
AGENTS
Nvidia agent AVO solves ARC-AGI-3 outright — 100 percent
Nvidia's agent system AVO cleared all 183 levels of the ARC-AGI-3 reasoning benchmark — with about 12 percent fewer actions than the prior best system.
INFRASTRUCTURE
Broadcom seeks over $60 billion for Anthropic chips
Broadcom is negotiating one of the AI era's largest debt raises: up to $100 billion for chips to be leased primarily to Anthropic.
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Anthropic hires Google's TPU architect for its own chips
Amir Salek, who delivered seven generations of Google's TPU chips, joins Anthropic — laying the groundwork for the lab's own silicon.
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Nvidia in talks with Korean chip startup Rebellions
Jensen Huang met Rebellions' CEO in Santa Clara: a partnership, investment or acquisition of the $2.3 billion inference-chip maker is on the table.
Law
Google AI secrets case: judge tosses espionage counts
Ex-Google engineer Linwei Ding remains convicted of stealing AI trade secrets — but the seven economic espionage convictions have been thrown out.
Infrastructure
Brazil launches $444 million AI infrastructure push
About 2.3 billion reais go into supercomputers and language models — split between China's Huawei and iFlytek and a tender aimed at US chipmakers.
Research
Veeda AI Raises $90M Seed to Build World Models for Robots
Former Nvidia researcher Sanja Fidler has raised over $90 million for world-model startup Veeda AI — one of Canada's largest seed rounds ever.
Markets
Nvidia pays Poolside $6 billion in unusual licensing deal
Nvidia licenses Poolside's "Model Factory" for $6 billion, invests $1 billion at a $12 billion valuation and hires 109 staff — without an acquisition.
Infrastructure
Broadcom seeks over $60 billion in debt for AI chip push
Per Bloomberg, the chipmaker is negotiating one of the largest AI debt deals yet — financing aimed largely at Anthropic compute capacity.
Safety
OpenAI halts its largest planned training run: Astra may cross the critical cyber threshold
Since August seventh the company can no longer rule out that its upcoming model reaches the highest risk tier of its own safety framework. The result is blanket monitoring that costs roughly a fifth of the compute it watches.
China
First Nvidia H200 shipments reach China: ByteDance and Tencent get about 10,000 each
Washington has issued export licences to roughly ten Chinese companies while Beijing approves imports case by case. A large share of the licensed chips is stuck in Hong Kong for now.
INDUSTRY
Google secures $12.2 billion warrant in Marvell AI chip deal
Marvell grants Google the right to buy up to 58.97 million shares as part of a custom-chip partnership. Marvell stock jumped double digits.
INDUSTRY
Fractile eyes $6.5 billion valuation after Anthropic chip deal
The British chip startup is negotiating a $600 million round — valued more than six times higher than in May. The trigger: a chip deal with Anthropic.
SECURITY
After Hugging Face incident, OpenAI overhauls its security
Stricter network isolation, 30-minute alerts, paused RL training runs: OpenAI draws consequences from July’s model breakout.
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Nvidia H200: first shipments reach ByteDance and Tencent
Beijing loosens its import block — but most chips must stay in Hong Kong, which simply lacks the power to run them.
INFRASTRUCTURE
Just 2.2 million chips: Microsoft’s AI fleet below expectations
A Guardian investigation finds Microsoft operates far fewer AI chips than the industry assumes — despite $280 billion in spending.
HARDWARE
Cerebras CS-4: three wafers, one rack — up to 30x faster
The freshly listed chipmaker's first multi-wafer system targets the inference market: over 1,000 tokens per second on trillion-parameter models.
INFRASTRUCTURE
OpenAI plans giant Ohio data center – Nvidia backs $105 billion
8 gigawatts in Ohio: OpenAI leases a mega campus from SoftBank's SB Energy, with Nvidia guaranteeing up to $105 billion in payments.
BUSINESS
Groq raises $350 million to fuel its neocloud pivot
From chip developer to cloud provider on Nvidia hardware: Groq is now valued at $3.5 billion – roughly half its 2025 mark.
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Etched raises $700 million at a $21 billion valuation
The inference-chip specialist more than doubles its worth in weeks, ships first to Jane Street and recruits Nvidia talent.
BUSINESS
Baidu's GPU cloud grows 283% - yet the stock falls
AI now makes up half of Baidu's core business, but weaker overall results push the stock down more than 5 percent.
Companies
SpaceX closes its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor
The all-stock deal is official: AI coding company Cursor now belongs to SpaceX — and gains access to what it calls the world's largest GPU fleet.
Infrastructure
Nvidia in talks over $3 billion SB Energy deal for OpenAI
Nvidia is discussing a $3 billion investment in SoftBank's SB Energy, The Information reports — to power OpenAI's data-center campus in Ohio.
Business
Nvidia Halves Its Backstop for OpenAI's Ohio Data Center
Nvidia is cutting its funding guarantee for OpenAI's 10-gigawatt Ohio data center from up to $250 billion to under $120 billion, the WSJ reports.
Business
Nvidia 13F: $21 billion in SpaceX, $30 billion in Intel
Nvidia's latest SEC filing reveals an equity portfolio of more than $60 billion — dominated by a new SpaceX stake and a halved Intel position.
Economy
AI boom powers Malaysia's economy: GDP grows 6 percent
Chip exports and data centers drive the strongest quarterly growth in years — Malaysia emerges as an infrastructure winner of the AI buildout.
Finance
Shadow credit: $70 billion quietly props up the AI buildout
Bond traders are warning about roughly $70 billion in off-balance-sheet credit backstops that AI companies use to secure their data-center buildout.
Open Source
Meta returns to open source with Muse Glimmer
A 30-billion-parameter model under Apache 2.0 that runs on a single consumer GPU – built for local AI agents.
Infrastructure
Anthropic leases 191 MW from Bitcoin miner Riot
$9.1 billion over 20 years: Anthropic locks in Texas data center capacity as Riot pivots from mining to AI landlord.
Business
Anthropic in Talks to Buy Decart for $6 Billion
Bloomberg reports Anthropic wants to acquire Israeli world-model startup Decart – its largest acquisition ever, ahead of an expected IPO.