Dell Technologies stock fell 11% on Wednesday, pulling down Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Oracle, Super Micro and NetApp amid worries that enterprise AI spending won't match the scale of the ongoing data center buildout. Barclays analysts cut ratings on Dell, HPE and NetApp from buy to hold, saying they see no 'meaningful AI inflection' in enterprise demand and attributing recent revenue gains largely to a global memory shortage rather than AI adoption.
According to the Financial Times, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, SMBC and MUFG are exploring significant risk-transfer deals to shift portions of AI data center debt off their balance sheets, after racing to underwrite such loans for projects tied to Oracle and Meta. One case cited by Bloomberg involves $38 billion in construction debt for an Oracle-leased data center project in Texas and Wisconsin, which a bank group including JPMorgan and MUFG has spent over six months trying to distribute, with some lenders now selling pieces at a discount to non-bank buyers.
OpenAI's infrastructure lead Sachin Katti announced he is leaving the company after about a year, with his last day set for Nov. 15. He will remain as an advisor, while Uday Ruddarraju, currently OpenAI's CTO of compute, will take over leadership of the compute organization.
Meta has released two new AI models, Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, trained at its gigawatt-scale Prometheus data center. The company says the models build on earlier work shown with Muse Spark and post state-of-the-art results on benchmarks covering agents, memory, and coding, including domain-specific tests in law, finance and health such as Harvey's Legal Agent Benchmark.
Yandex confirmed that drone attacks damaged three of its data centers in Sasovo, Kaluga, and Vladimir between October 8-11, knocking two facilities offline entirely and degrading the third. Customers have reported being unable to access files stored on Yandex's cloud infrastructure, and the company says it cannot give a reliable timeline for restoring service. Yandex has urged customers to switch to alternative disaster-recovery infrastructure while its teams work to stabilize the remaining systems.
An economic essay by writer Derek Thompson, citing Harvard economist Jason Furman's data, shows data center construction spending surged 64.5 percent over the past year while nearly every other construction category declined. New energy infrastructure grew 4.1 percent to support AI-driven electricity demand, while manufacturing construction fell nearly 24 percent, education fell 12.6 percent, and healthcare and retail construction each dropped about 10.1 percent.
A report indicates that a third data center belonging to Yandex Cloud has been struck, though specific details about the nature of the incident were not disclosed in the available source material.
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.
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.
IDC Frontier, a SoftBank Group subsidiary, reported that its IDCF Cloud service suffered a ransomware attack beginning October 7 at 3:40 AM local time, disrupting its East Japan Region 1 data center cluster. The company said 495 businesses and local government bodies using the cloud platform were affected, and it has disabled management console access across all regions while checking security.
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