COMPUTE
Data centers, chip supply, power, and the physical substrate of frontier AI.
Nvidia weighs $250 billion
backstop for OpenAI's Ohio
megacampus
The chipmaker is in early talks to guarantee a quarter-trillion dollars in lease and debt financing for a 10-gigawatt SoftBank-built data center in southern Ohio — a deal that would make Nvidia both supplier and de facto lender to its biggest customer, and one that has already rattled the credit market.
Nvidia weighs $250B guarantee to
put OpenAI on SoftBank's Ohio
campus
The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that Nvidia is negotiating a backstop of roughly $250 billion so OpenAI can lease a 10-gigawatt data-center hub in Piketon, Ohio, with a separate chip-financing deal of up to $350 billion under discussion — a structure that sent Nvidia shares down more than 4% and reignited circular-financing fears.
TSMC clears $39.6B in Q2,
rockets past seasonal patterns on
AI chip demand
The world's largest contract chipmaker posted record April–June revenue of NT$1.27 trillion, up 36% year-on-year, with June sales alone jumping 67.9% — breaking a four-year summer decline and setting up a July 16 earnings print analysts expect will show a fifth straight quarter of record profit.
Anthropic taps Samsung for its
first custom AI chip, targeting
2nm
The Claude maker has opened early-stage talks with Samsung's foundry to manufacture a bespoke accelerator on the SF2 node, one month after Samsung joined Anthropic's $65B Series H — and weeks after a rival Samsung project with OpenAI collapsed.
Copilot's first metered month ends
with five-figure invoices and a
Gartner warning
GitHub's June 1 switch to token billing closes its first cycle today, with agentic developers reporting 10x–50x cost jumps, a Slash employee burning $81,267 in a week, and Gartner forecasting AI coding will out-cost developer salaries by 2028.
OpenAI and Broadcom unveil Jalapeño,
the lab's first custom inference
chip
The ASIC, co-designed with Broadcom and built with Celestica, taped out in nine months and is showing roughly 50% cost savings versus AI GPUs, per Broadcom CEO Hock Tan. Initial deployment is targeted for late 2026.
OpenAI's first custom chip, Jalapeño,
lands at 50% the cost
of GPUs
OpenAI and Broadcom on June 24 unveiled Jalapeño, an inference ASIC taped out in nine months with help from OpenAI's own models, with initial gigawatt-scale deployment planned by year-end alongside Microsoft.
Claude goes dark again as
Anthropic logs third major June
outage
A widespread elevated-error-rate incident on June 23 took down Claude.ai, the API, Claude Code and Claude Cowork for over an hour — the third significant stumble in three weeks, with Anthropic's $965B IPO filing now drawing Wall Street scrutiny to a 99.12% uptime number that falls well short of enterprise norms.
SpaceX prices at $135, closes
at $161, drags AI infrastructure
onto the Nasdaq board
SPCX raised $75 billion in the largest IPO in history and finished its first session up 19%, valuing the xAI-and-Colossus-owning rocket company above $2 trillion — and, in the words of one former Nasdaq chief, opening the window for OpenAI and Anthropic.
Supermicro to raise $7B for
AI servers, sending SMCI down
more than 17%
The server maker disclosed a $5 billion underwritten offering and a $2 billion ATM program on June 9 to fund components for roughly $39 billion of AI server orders from more than 20 customers — and the market punished the dilution.
Meta lifts 2026 AI capex
to $125–$145 billion and cuts
8,000 jobs
The compute spend is the largest single-year capital plan in Meta's history. The headcount reduction, announced the same week, lands at the layers of the org that the new capex will not save.