Felix Aroyan
Compute & infrastructure
Felix Aroyan covers the data-center buildout, chip supply, and the physical substrate of frontier AI. He has been writing about infrastructure for several years and treats every gigawatt announcement as a story about land, water, and power as much as silicon. He files the capex pieces nobody else wants to.
Etched Doubles to $21B in 26 Days as Jane Street Takes Delivery and Leads Round
The Harvard-dropout inference startup shipped its first rack to Jane Street last month; the quant firm bought it, tested it, and then led a $700 million round that vaults Etched past the $20 billion Nvidia paid for Groq's team.
Anthropic in talks to buy Decart for $6B in largest-ever acquisition
The Claude maker is negotiating to absorb the Nvidia-backed Israeli startup's chip-efficiency and world-model tech into its inference team, weeks after filing a confidential S-1 targeting an October Nasdaq debut.
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.