According to this week's Tom's Hardware Premium roundup, Tencent has signed a five-year, $7 billion deal to lease high-performance AI chips from Oracle, with the per-hour rate roughly 43% cheaper than leasing an Nvidia H100 on a one-year contract. No specific chip model was confirmed, though the deal's scale and pricing suggest Hopper-class GPUs. Separately, Synopsys and OpenAI unveiled 'GPT-Synopsys,' an AI model combining Synopsys' chip design IP and EDA tools with OpenAI's LLM capabilities.
A year-long Senate investigation found that AI data center developers have often exaggerated the community benefits of their projects while obscuring key figures. Companies reportedly tout construction job counts but withhold permanent staffing numbers, with some disclosing ratios as low as one permanent job per megawatt of capacity. The probe also examined sales-tax exemptions on computer equipment, which investigators say are more lucrative to companies than the property-tax breaks that typically draw public scrutiny.
A grove of about 200 blight-resistant American chestnut trees in West Virginia is at risk of being cleared for Nscale's planned 'Monarch Compute Campus,' a data center project developed with Nvidia and Caterpillar. The facility is slated to eventually cover more than 2,250 acres and deliver 8 gigawatts of computing capacity for AI firms including Anthropic, backed by over $20 billion in investment.
According to leaked factory notices cited by hardware leakers @hongxing2020 and @Zed__Wang, Nvidia has stopped producing GB202 chips for consumer RTX 5090 graphics cards, including Chinese 'D' variants. The notice claims the RTX 5080 24GB will become the new top consumer GeForce model, with the RTX 5080 16GB being discontinued. Nvidia has not confirmed the claim and typically does not comment on rumors.
A Ukrainian drone attack hit Yandex's Kaluga data center, Russia's largest, with Russian state media outlet TASS confirming several modules were completely taken out of service. The facility, covering 1.4 million square feet with over 3,800 server racks and 63 megawatts of power capacity, had only opened in late 2023 and hosted Yandex's internal services and cloud operations.
A shortage of computer RAM, informally dubbed 'RAMageddon,' is being driven in part by AI data centers consuming large quantities of memory chips. The shortage is pushing up prices for consumers and businesses that rely on RAM for computers and other devices.
Ukraine struck Yandex data centers in Sasovo and Kaluga on October 8 and 9, knocking out two of the company's five facilities, according to Reuters. Firepoint's FP-1 drones hit the Kaluga site, Yandex's largest, while the Sasovo facility housed supercomputers used to train its YandexGPT AI model. Yandex reported no injuries but confirmed service disruptions, with Russian users unable to access apps including Ivi, T-Bank and Russian Railways.
A new Wood Mackenzie report finds that four-hour battery storage systems cost less than open-cycle natural gas turbines in all 43 markets surveyed across every continent. The firm projects battery costs will keep falling while gas turbine electricity costs rise, partly due to AI data center developers buying up available turbines and driving procurement waits to two-to-four years, with closed-cycle models backlogged into the early 2030s. Separately, solar was found to be the cheapest new power source in every surveyed market, though tariffs and import restrictions are pressuring prices in North America.
Amazon announced it will stop requiring non-disclosure agreements when negotiating data center deals with local governments, following Microsoft's similar policy change earlier this year. The move comes amid growing community opposition to AI infrastructure projects, which has produced hundreds of proposed or enacted moratoriums in places ranging from New York to San Francisco.
Russian state media TASS reported on October 9 that a drone attack hit Yandex's data center in Kaluga's Grabtsevo industrial park, completely disabling several of its modules. The facility, Yandex's largest in Russia, spans about 130,000 square meters with a planned 63-megawatt capacity and over 3,800 server racks. This comes just two days after satellite imagery showed damage from a separate drone strike on another Yandex data center in Sasovo, Ryazan region.
Wall Street firms, led by Blackstone, are marketing AI data centers as a real estate investment category, including a new publicly traded REIT called Blackstone Digital Infrastructure Trust launched this year. Blackstone CEO Nick Pell said the fund focuses on 'stabilized' data centers in established markets like Northern Virginia and Dallas, aiming to tap what the company estimates is a $300 billion market, even as community opposition and state-level moratoriums on new data center projects grow.
Kioxia has introduced its LD4-series SSDs in the E1.L form factor, built on BiCS8 3D QLC NAND and targeted at read-heavy hyperscale workloads such as AI storage and object storage. The drives currently ship at up to 30.72TB, but Kioxia says the underlying architecture has been validated to support capacities as high as 122.88TB, without giving a launch timeline for those larger models.
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