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
SoftBank has taken over data-centre investment group DigitalBridge for $4bn, the Financial Times reports, with its chief executive describing the business as SoftBank’s future “third-party infrastructure arm”. The reported deal offers a concrete clue to how Masayoshi Son wants to build the infrastructure behind his AI ambitions: not…
Read the report & discussion ↗Watch Desk
Amazon is reportedly exploring an $8bn way to finance its AI chips: sell thousands of Nvidia processors to investors, then lease them back for its data centres. The proposal would shift some of the cost of expensive hardware away from Amazon’s balance sheet, if it goes ahead.
DeepSeek Watch
DeepSeek and Huawei have launched an open-source programming toolkit aimed at Huawei’s Ascend AI chips, offering developers an alternative software stack to Nvidia’s CUDA. The toolkit includes TileLang plus compute and communication libraries, according to Mobile World Live’s 30 September report.
vLLM Watch
vLLM 0.30.0 adds support for a wide range of models and expands tools for managing inference speed, GPU memory and deployment. The 22 September release also changes several defaults and removes older configuration paths, so operators should check compatibility before upgrading.
Watch Desk
Prime Intellect has launched Prime Inference, a platform for serving open AI models with serverless endpoints or reserved GPU capacity across multiple data centres. Its pitch is about the less glamorous, rather important business of keeping models available and agent tools working reliably.
Baseten Watch
Baseten says an AI-built inference engine for Qwen-3.6-35B-A3B ran up to 90% faster than vLLM on single-stream decoding in its tests on one NVIDIA B200. The company’s experiments also included a separate image-segmentation model, suggesting the approach may reach beyond one language model, though neither system is serving…
vLLM Watch
Engineers have integrated Helion into vLLM’s linear backend, reporting higher LLM inference performance with less kernel implementation complexity. On NVIDIA Hopper GPUs, the tuned backend outperformed the default CUTLASS and DeepGEMM options in the workloads described, with throughput gains above 10% in some cases.
GMI Cloud Watch
Open-weight AI models are becoming easier to download, but GMI Cloud argues that the harder business is serving them reliably at production scale. Its 2 October analysis points to a widening gap between what attracts attention and what developers actually use, with infrastructure and model runtimes increasingly central…
NVIDIA Watch
A California man has been arrested over an alleged scheme to send more than $300 million of export-controlled computer servers to China. Ars Technica says the indictment alleges the servers contained Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs, putting AI hardware export controls at the centre of the case.
Epoch AI Watch
AI chips shipped through 2027 could eventually support tens to hundreds of millions of concurrent agents running frontier models, according to a new Epoch AI analysis. Its bigger warning is about demand: the hardware build-out could outpace the market for AI services.
AWS AI Watch
AWS now supports Kubernetes 1.37 on Amazon EKS and EKS Distro, giving teams new options for GPU scheduling, autoscaling and workload monitoring. The update is available across EKS Regions, including AWS GovCloud, and is more than a routine version bump for teams running clusters.
Cloudflare Watch
Cloudflare has announced eight observability updates that bring logs, traces, analytics, alerts, dashboards and exports into a shared platform. The practical prize is less detective work just to find the right place to start investigating an application problem. The package also brings Logpush to self-serve plans and introduces…
Cerebras Watch
General Compute has signed a multi-year agreement to deploy Cerebras wafer-scale AI hardware and offer access through its cloud platform from the first quarter of 2027. The arrangement gives customers another route to Cerebras inference without buying the hardware themselves, though the deal’s size remains undisclosed.
Watch Desk
AI cloud provider Lambda has secured a loan worth more than $1bn to buy over 30,000 Nvidia GPUs, according to The Information. The fixed-rate facility carries a 6.78% interest rate, putting a concrete price on one route to financing the AI computing boom.
Watch Desk
An AI system called Ataraxos beat top-ranked Stratego player Pim Niemeijer 15 games to one, with four draws, in a 20-game series. The result, reported by Ars Technica, is notable not just for the win: the researchers say they trained the system for less than $8,000 using 16…
Watch Desk
High-yield bonds have financed at least 20 data-centre projects over the past year, and some projects serve companies building AI infrastructure. The Information says that debt is appearing not only in specialist AI funds but in broader investment portfolios too.
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft’s Agent Framework 1.20 adds native computer-use support, new vector-store connectors and changes to how Foundry hosts agent workflows. For developers, the headline is a broader set of building blocks, with some breaking changes to check before upgrading.
Cohere Watch
Cohere has released Embed 5, a pair of embedding models for finding information in enterprise documents, images and other data. Its practical twist is that teams can index with the higher-quality Pro tier and query with either Pro or Fast without rebuilding that index.
ASML Watch
ASML reportedly made no sales in Europe in the first half of 2026, despite being one of the continent’s most strategically important technology companies. The figure sharpens a debate about whether Europe can turn its chipmaking strengths into a wider industrial base for AI.
