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.
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.
Big Tech's FDE Land Grab Targets The Fortune 500, Not Main Street
Microsoft's $2.5B Frontier Company and AWS's $1B forward-deployed engineering unit are the latest hyperscaler bets on embedding engineers inside enterprise customers — a model that leaves the deployment problem at 33 million U.S. small businesses conspicuously unsolved.
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.