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A growing group of companies, including Google, SpaceX and Nvidia alongside several startups, are exploring placing AI data centers in space. The idea relies on continuous solar power and the vacuum of space for cooling, potentially easing the energy demands of AI computing on Earth.
Nvidia has increased the price of its Shield TV Pro streaming box by $100 to $299.99, effective October 2. The device, which first launched in 2019, still uses the same aging Tegra X1+ processor, but Nvidia says rising component and memory costs industry-wide are responsible for the price jump.
Nvidia has raised the price of its Shield TV Pro streaming device from $199.99 to $299.99, a $100 increase despite no hardware changes. An Nvidia spokesperson told Ars Technica the hike, effective October 2, stems from rising component costs, particularly memory, across the industry. The company has also discontinued the standard Shield TV, leaving the Pro as its only Shield-branded device.
U.S. stocks closed higher Friday after September nonfarm payrolls showed just 29,000 jobs added, far below the 84,000 expected, pushing unemployment to 4.2%. The soft data raised odds the Federal Reserve will hold rates steady in October to 78%, up from 36% a week earlier. Nvidia, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks and AMD all touched all-time highs, lifting the Nasdaq for the week even as the Dow and S&P 500 finished lower.
Cerebras Systems' stock closed Friday at $166.43, down nearly 20% for the week and its lowest price since its May IPO. The decline followed a SemiAnalysis report that OpenAI will use Nvidia GPUs, not Cerebras chips, to power the 'Ultrafast' mode of GPT-6.1 Sol, and coincided with the expiration of lockup restrictions freeing up to 19.4 million insider shares, about 8% of shares outstanding.
The Department of Justice announced the arrest of Greg Lui, 38, CEO of Earthmade Computer, accusing him of using falsified paperwork to reroute servers containing restricted Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China via Malaysia and Singapore. The DOJ says the scheme ran from October 2023 to August 2026 and involved shipments worth more than $300 million, including fraudulent buyer documents and false claims to a Malaysian official that goods had reached China.
The Department of Justice has arrested Greg Lui, also known as Yiu Kong Lui, owner of Earthmade Computer Inc., alleging he and unnamed co-conspirators smuggled more than $300 million in export-restricted Nvidia chips to China between 2023 and 2024. Prosecutors say the chips were routed through Malaysia and Singapore using falsified paperwork before reaching Chinese buyers, including the Chinese government. Lui faces charges of conspiracy to violate export control laws, outbound smuggling, and money laundering conspiracy, carrying a potential 20-year sentence.
Nvidia has increased the price of its Shield TV Pro streaming box by $100, from $199.99 to $299.99, effective October 2. The company told Ars Technica the hike reflects industry-wide increases in component costs, particularly memory, driven by demand from AI hardware production. The non-Pro Shield TV variant has already been discontinued, leaving only the Pro model in production.
US prosecutors arrested Greg Lui for allegedly smuggling servers containing $300 million worth of NVIDIA AI chips to China, violating export controls, according to Bloomberg. The report also details an earlier case involving a red hair dryer used to strip serial numbers off NVIDIA server boxes, and describes new data centers in western China believed capable of housing 115,000 restricted NVIDIA processors.
Microsoft is expected to reveal pricing and a release date for its Surface Laptop Ultra at an upcoming event, according to the report. The laptop, first shown in June, is among the first devices to use NVIDIA's new RTX Spark chip, an Arm-based processor built for running large AI models locally, and features a 15-inch mini-LED display with up to 2,000 nits of brightness.
Nvidia and partners including Acer, Asus, Dell, Gigabyte, HP and MSI will release a 64GB version of the GB10-based DGX Spark system on October 23, priced from $4,999. The new tier sits alongside the existing 128GB configuration, which currently sells for roughly $7,000 to $9,000 due to memory shortages.
OpenAI is deploying its new Jalapeño AI chip in racks alongside AMD's EPYC Turin CPUs, each configured with 1.5TB of memory, rather than Nvidia's newer Vera processor. Richard Ho, OpenAI's VP and Head of Hardware, told Tom's Hardware that Turin was chosen for pragmatic reasons, calling Vera 'a little bit behind' in maturity and noting partners already had experience with AMD's chip.