Meta Platforms shares fell by more than 7 percent despite record revenue of $51.2 billion in an adverse reaction to accelerated AI spending. Sales were up 26 percent year-over-year, but net income of $2.7 billion was far below analysts’ expectations. The company attributed the net income miss to accounting changes resulting from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act even as it advised analysts of “aggressive” capital expenditure increases to come. Meta’s 2025 capital expenditure forecast grew from the existing estimate of $66 billion to $72 billion. Most of that will be spent on data centers and researchers, Meta said, indicating 2026 capex would be “notably larger” and could reach as high as $100 billion. Continue reading Meta Reports Sales Increase, Record Revenue of $51.2 Billion

Qualcomm, which has established itself as a leading supplier of AI chips for edge devices with its Snapdragon line, is now making a major push into the data center space to challenge industry leaders such as Nvidia and AMD. The AI200 and AI250 accelerator chips are aimed at rack-scale inference systems as the debut entries in what Qualcomm describes as a multi-generation roadmap of AI inference equipment that will be updated annually. At Monday’s market close, Qualcomm stock was up by 11 percent on the news as investors saw promise of the San Diego-based firm’s expansion beyond its core mobile market. Continue reading Qualcomm Articulates Its Expansion into AI Data Center Chips

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) will be a launch partner for the first publicly available AI supercluster powered by AMD’s upcoming Instinct MI450 Series GPUs — with an initial order of 50,000 of the chips to be deployed starting in Q3 2026 and expanding in 2027. The resulting Oracle installations will feature Instinct MI450s configured with AMD-designed CPUs in AMD’s new Helios server rack systems, positioned to compete with Nvidia’s Vera Rubin NVL144 CPX racks when both platforms are mass-released next year. Oracle is challenged to rapidly scale its data center capacity due to massive compute commitments made this year to OpenAI. Continue reading Oracle Cloud Orders 50,000 New AMD Instinct MI450 AI GPUs

OpenAI has expanded its alliance with Broadcom, announcing a plan to create enough custom AI accelerator chips to consume 10 gigawatts of power. News of the custom chip collaboration leaked out last month. Now that it is ready to go public, OpenAI says designing its own chips and systems will allow the startup to leverage directly into the hardware what it has learned from developing frontier models. The racks, scaled entirely with Ethernet and other connectivity solutions from Broadcom, will be deployed across OpenAI’s facilities and partner data centers beginning in the second half of 2026. Continue reading OpenAI & Broadcom Developing Custom AI Accelerator Chips

More than 20 researchers have exited jobs at Meta Platforms, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other leading AI enterprises in recent weeks to join a Silicon Valley startup called Periodic Labs whose main goal is “to accelerate science,” focusing on areas including physics and chemistry. The venture has secured more than $300 million in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and started work at a makeshift facility in San Francisco as it lays groundwork for a dedicated Menlo Park facility where “physical robots” will run scientific experiments on a very large scale. Continue reading AI Startup Periodic Labs Raises $300M for Scientific Research

“There will soon be more machines in the workforce than humans,” predicts Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel. The good news is, “that’s how we are going to deliver on the promise of 8 billion people amplified to have the throughput capacity of 80 billion,” Patel told the crowd at the WebexOne conference in San Diego where the networking giant emphasized a message of “connected intelligence” with AI embedded “deeply and natively” across its flagship collaboration platform Webex. During the event, Patel promised smarter meetings, automated tasks and better security and reliability with Webex. Continue reading Cisco Shares Its Vision of Workplace AI at Webex Conference

California has become the first state in the nation to enact an AI safety law. The Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act requires major AI firms to regularly report safety information, keeping government apprised of the guardrails imposed when building models as well as ongoing risks presented. California is home to leading AI companies including OpenAI, Alphabet, Anthropic, Meta Platforms, Nvidia and xAI, which means the law will be something of a national standard, as the rules imposed on those companies will have follow-through effects in all states. The law also bolsters whistle-blower protections for employees of the affected firms. Continue reading California Enacts an AI Law Focused on Frontier Model Safety

Nvidia has made its Audio2Face open source, a potential boon for game developers and other 3D uses such as customer service. The generative AI facial animation system brings lifelike speech and expression to avatars on an accelerated basis using real-time facial animation and lip-sync. It works by analyzing acoustic features to create a stream of animation data that is then mapped onto a character’s facial poses. The data translates to “accurate lip-sync and emotional expressions,” says Nvidia, noting the imagery can be rendered offline for pre-scripted content or streamed in real time for dynamic characters with accurate lip-sync and emotional expressions. Continue reading Nvidia Audio2Face AI Avatar-Generator Is Now Open Source

OpenAI has laid out plans for five new U.S. data centers to bring its Stargate AI infrastructure project to a total of 7 gigawatts of capacity within three years. The company says that puts OpenAI on track to formalize its $500 billion, 10-gigawatt plans for Stargate by the end of 2025, ahead of schedule. The disclosure follows media coverage critical of OpenAI for moving too slowly toward its goals. There is also a SoftBank-imposed deadline of January 1 to corporately restructure in a way that allows investors to more fully participate in profits or risk losing $20 billion in funding. Continue reading OpenAI’s Five New AI Data Centers to Bring Capacity to 7 GW

Nvidia is investing up to $100 billion in a partnership with OpenAI that will result in what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicts will be “the biggest AI infrastructure deployment in history.” The project will use about 10 gigawatts worth of Nvidia systems — including the upcoming Vera Rubin platform — power equivalent to 4 million to 5 million GPUs. “This partnership is about building an AI infrastructure that enables AI to go from the labs into the world,” Huang said on CNBC’s “Halftime Report,” explaining the $100 billion will be invested in stages as each gigawatt is deployed. The investment will be all-cash with Nvidia receiving an undisclosed amount of OpenAI equity. Continue reading Nvidia Investing $100 Billion in OpenAI Data Center Build-Out

Alibaba Cloud’s newest AI model, Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B, has debuted with a splash. The Chinese company is touting it as “the first natively end-to-end omni-modal AI unifying text, image, audio & video in one model.” While Qwen3-Omni can accept prompts of text, image, audio and video, it only outputs text and audio. Alibaba Cloud has released the three versions of Qwen3-Omni so users can select based on their needs, choosing between general multimodal capabilities, deep reasoning or specialized audio understanding. Alibaba has also developed an AI chip called T-Head that performs comparably to Nvidia’s H20. Continue reading Alibaba’s Qwen3-Omni AI Ingests Text, Images, Audio, Video

Nvidia is investing $5 billion in Intel via a common stock purchase at $23.28 per share, which translates to about a 4 percent stake. The companies plan to collaborate across multiple projects, developing custom data center and PC products to accelerate applications and workloads across the hyperscale, enterprise and consumer markets. Nvidia’s NVLink will be used to connect the architectures, integrating Nvidia’s GPUs with Intel’s CPU technologies. For data centers, Intel will customize x86 CPUs that Nvidia can integrate into its AI platforms. Intel also plans to build x86 SOCs that integrate Nvidia RTX GPU chiplets for PCs. Continue reading Nvidia Invests $5 Billion in Intel with Plans for AI Infrastructure

Microsoft is in the final phases of building the $3.3 billion Wisconsin facility it says will be the most powerful AI data center in the world when it comes online in early 2026 to train the next decade of artificial intelligence models. The software giant has already begun staffing the operation and is already planning further expansion, with another $4 billion to be spent in the next three years to build a second data center of similar size and scale — bringing the total investment in Wisconsin to more than $7 billion. Located in Mount Pleasant, the nearly completed facility will be the first in what Microsoft is calling its Fairwater family of hyperscale data centers. Continue reading Microsoft Details $7 Billion Future of Wisconsin AI Data Center

In one of the largest cloud computing deals ever, OpenAI has contracted with Oracle for $300 billion in processing power over five years starting in 2027. Oracle has committed to 4.5 gigawatts of capacity. A typical nuclear plant caps at 1 gigawatt of output generated at any given instant. The deal involves risk for both companies. OpenAI’s annual revenue of about $10 billion is far short of the amount needed to cover this tab. Oracle’s exposure comes with depending on a small number of large customers for so much revenue and the expense of expanding infrastructure to fulfill the obligation. Continue reading OpenAI Signs $300 Billion Cloud Computing Deal with Oracle

AI infrastructure company Nebius Group NV has entered into a $17.4 billion deal to provide dedicated compute power to Microsoft from a new data center in Vineland, New Jersey. The five-year agreement could be worth up to $19.4 billion with additional capacity and services. The news sent Nebius shares surging by 49 percent on the Nasdaq composite, underscoring how the rapidly growing demand for AI support can influence the fate of companies. The deal added $1 billion to the value of Nebius founder Arkady Volozh’s stake. The Russian expatriate founded that country’s equivalent of Google. Continue reading Microsoft Contracts with Nebius for $17.4 Billion in AI Capacity