From the archive
AI hardware provides the computing power, memory and networks used to train and run artificial intelligence models. Follow news on GPUs, AI accelerators, data centres, chip design and energy demand. Read how changes in infrastructure affect performance, availability and cost, and distinguish measured results from vendor claims about what the next generation of computing will deliver.
Lead story
An early Groq investor says her new $52 million fund expects about half its investments to fail, while betting on AI companies that deliver outcomes in industries such as construction, industrials and insurance. Sandhya Venkatachalam’s account offers a useful look at how one investor is applying lessons from…
Read the report & discussion ↗Watch Desk
AI companies, private-equity firms and trade unions have formed a multimillion-dollar coalition to promote data-centre construction under agreed standards, Axios reports. The American Infrastructure Alliance plans campaigns in seven US states, hoping to head off construction moratoriums while arguing for what it calls responsible growth.
TSMC Watch
TSMC is reportedly considering five additional advanced-packaging plants in Chiayi, Taiwan, which could eventually bring its planned cluster there to ten facilities. The proposal points to a long-term expansion of capacity for CoWoS, a key packaging technology used in AI accelerators, but it is still at an early…
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman says AI agents have reached a “watershed moment”, citing their ability to coordinate, break rules and conceal activity. His interview also sets out specific proposals for safer systems and argues that the UK needs greater control over its AI infrastructure.
AWS AI Watch
Amazon’s custom-chip business has reached a reported $25 billion annual revenue run rate, giving AWS a growing role in the market it also serves with Nvidia hardware. The twist is that Amazon can sell both: Nvidia chips for customers who want them, and its own Graviton CPUs and…
NVIDIA Watch
MeetKai says it will build sovereign AI systems in six countries using NVIDIA infrastructure, with a national-scale data centre planned for Ukraine from 2027. The plan puts locally hosted models and computing capacity on the table, although it remains a company announcement rather than evidence that the facilities…
Hugging Face Watch
A team writing on Hugging Face says it has made LTX-2.5, a 22-billion-parameter audio-and-video model, generate five-second clips faster than they play on a GPU with 32 GB of memory. The practical win is not just speed: the authors describe techniques for fitting real-time talking-character generation onto more…
NVIDIA Watch
Researchers can now explore AI-predicted protein-complex structures for more than 2,800 viruses, alongside an open NVIDIA pipeline for making further predictions. It is a useful head start for outbreak research, not a shortcut around the laboratory bench.
Watch Desk
Australia’s Greens-led Senate inquiry has invited OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei to appear, as scrutiny grows over AI agents’ reported access to government websites. The hearings resume in Canberra on 1 October, giving lawmakers a public forum to question the companies about…
Geoffrey Hinton Watch
Geoffrey Hinton says Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has a financial interest in resisting calls to slow frontier AI development, arguing that selling more chips benefits from continued expansion. The accusation, made in an interview with NDTV, puts the conflict between AI safety arguments and the chip industry’s…
OpenAI Watch
OpenAI has used historical texts digitised from Oxford University’s Bodleian Library to help populate its AI training set, according to The Guardian. The important wrinkle is that Oxford’s original partnership announcement did not clearly say the material would be used for model training, prompting staff concerns about transparency,…
TSMC Watch
Taiwan has approved US$44 billion of TSMC investment in the United States since 2020, as the chipmaker expands its Arizona ambitions while Taiwan insists that its most advanced capabilities remain on the island. The money is not just a corporate expansion story. It is a map of how…
Unsloth Watch
Unsloth’s latest beta release adds local Qwen-Image-2.1 image generation and editing, custom agent skills, and a long list of improvements for desktop, training and Linux users. The practical shift is simple: more AI work can happen locally, with less wrestling over model files, hardware setup and repetitive workflows.
NVIDIA Watch
MeetKai says it will roll out sovereign AI infrastructure across Brazil, Ukraine, Pakistan, Kazakhstan and Bangladesh, with NVIDIA hardware and software at every layer. The most consequential plan is in Ukraine, where a national-scale AI data centre is intended to begin coming online in 2027, starting at 15MW…
TSMC Watch
TSMC held an estimated 72.5% of global foundry revenue in the second quarter of 2026, leaving Samsung Foundry on 5.9%. The figure matters because the AI boom is not only a contest between model makers and chip designers. It is also concentrating the manufacturing capacity beneath them in…
AWS AI Watch
Amazon is raising its 2026 infrastructure spending to about $220bn, yet AWS expects AI capacity constraints to continue through 2026 and into 2027. The useful point is not the giant budget alone: building the physical machinery for AI takes so long that even extraordinary spending cannot produce instant…
AWS AI Watch
AWS has published an architecture for training mixture-of-experts models with reinforcement learning on Amazon EKS, claiming 40% more rollout-generation throughput by combining EFA networking with DeepEP. The practical point is that scaling AI training is increasingly a traffic-management problem, not simply a hunt for more GPUs.
AWS AI Watch
AWS has published a SageMaker deployment guide for Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-1.7B-Base, allowing developers to clone a speaker’s voice from a short recording and generate new speech in ten languages. The practical shift is from model demo to managed endpoint, with the usual small print that voice identity deserves rather more…
Watch Desk
Robert O’Callahan, a Google DeepMind engineer in New Zealand, has resigned after concluding that his team’s work on chip-design tools would help accelerate AI development he believes is already moving too quickly. His departure matters because it shifts the AI-safety argument away from model researchers and towards the…
