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Elon Musk confirmed that SpaceX is constructing a foundry in Bastrop, Texas, dedicated to casting turbine blades and vanes, a notoriously difficult manufacturing bottleneck in gas turbine production. Musk said the in-house casting operation could cut up to 18 months off the timeline for bringing new natural gas turbines online, supplementing solar power as SpaceX and Tesla scale up 100GW/year of solar capacity.
A leaked pre-release version of Nvidia's DLSS 5 DLL, discovered inside NBA 2K27's early access build, has been patched by modders in the RenoDX Discord to run on older RTX 30-series Ampere GPUs after earlier being enabled on RTX 40 and 50-series cards. Results are inconsistent: some titles hit 20-40 FPS with noticeably sharper, more photorealistic visuals, while others drop to single digits, and nearly all suffer from heavy input latency and visual noise.
A roundup covers Meta's reckoning moment alongside separate stories: the real-world impact of school phone bans, the rise and fall of a self-styled 'Nostradamus of AI' figure, and Nvidia's push to power robotics infrastructure globally.
After years of volatile pricing and shortages, GPU prices have largely normalized, with standouts like Intel's Arc B580 at $250, AMD's 16GB Radeon RX 9060 XT at $350, and the RX 9070 XT at $600. The 9070 XT now undercuts Nvidia's RTX 4070 Ti Super by a small margin despite offering similar 16GB VRAM specs, marking roughly a 25% price drop from that card's 2024 launch price.
Nvidia's latest SEC 13F disclosure reveals it holds $63.44 billion across just eight public equity positions, with Intel and SpaceX making up roughly 80% of the total value. Notably, seven of the eight holdings saw no new activity last quarter, yet the portfolio's value more than tripled, rising from about $18.4 billion to over $63 billion largely due to price appreciation.
Chinese robotics firms are building humanoid and industrial robots using Nvidia's chips and simulation software, an area of AI hardware trade that remains largely permitted under current U.S. export rules. Nvidia has positioned itself as a key infrastructure provider for this 'physical AI' sector, supplying both computing power and development platforms to Chinese customers despite broader U.S.-China tech tensions.
Nvidia posted stronger-than-expected fiscal second-quarter results and issued a bullish forward outlook, reinforcing confidence that AI infrastructure spending remains robust. On the earnings call, Nvidia disclosed that Amazon will buy an additional 2 million of its GPUs in 2027 and 2028 even as it builds its own AI chips, and the strong report helped push the Nasdaq, S&P 500 and Dow to their best trading day since early August.
A leaked DLL file from DLSS 5, discovered inside NBA 2K27's installation files, has been packaged into the RenoDX modding tool and applied to numerous games including Remedy's Control. The unfinished build initially worked only on RTX 50-series cards, but modders quickly adapted it for RTX 40-series GPUs as well, letting a much wider audience test the unreleased technology months ahead of Nvidia's planned fall launch.
Following its latest earnings report, Nvidia is showing investors that its competitive moat isn't limited to GPU chips, where rivals like Amazon and Google are building in-house alternatives. The company's Vera Rubin architecture bundles GPUs with CPUs, inference accelerators, storage and networking racks, positioning Nvidia as the orchestrator of entire gigawatt-scale AI data centers rather than just a chip supplier.
Residents and advocacy group Stand.earth allege that the DataOne data center in Vineland, New Jersey — tied to a $19.4 billion Nebius-Microsoft GPU deal — has been running dozens of unpermitted gas turbines and building an unpermitted 1.5-million-gallon LNG storage tank near two schools. Locals say they only learned the site was a data center after the Microsoft deal became public, and complaints about nighttime noise and air pollution led to a delayed town hall in January 2026, months after construction began.
South Korea's government will roll out a free generative AI program called 'AI for All' starting with beta testing in September, expanding to the whole population later this year. Three consortia, including groups led by the nation's top telecom carriers and Kakao's operator, will build apps that connect to government systems for tasks like booking medical appointments, apartment hunting, and tax filing, with no token limits on usage.
President Trump called Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's cellphone in the middle of a company-wide staff meeting on Thursday, with Trump's voice audible through Huang's onstage microphone before Huang briefly stepped away and returned within a minute. The call came the same day Nvidia launched an employee-funded political action committee and a day after the company posted quarterly revenue of $96 billion, up 106 percent year over year.