Elon Musk announced on X that SpaceX has closed $40 billion in debt financing to buy GPUs for AI computing, with funds expected to arrive in early 2027. He said the financing is mostly callable debt and that SpaceX qualifies as investment grade due to revenue from Starlink and its rocket launch business. Bloomberg had earlier reported the company was negotiating with banks including Goldman Sachs and investors like Apollo Global Management to raise the funds for Nvidia chips.
cnbc.com
· 2026-10-26
Cerebras published a technical explanation of how it deploys very large AI models, such as the open-source ~3 trillion-parameter Kimi K3, across multiple WSE-3T wafer-scale chips. The company says it splits models to fit entirely in on-chip memory, since a single WSE-3T wafer holds only 44 GB while frontier models need terabytes for weights alone, enabling inference speeds of 1000-2000+ tokens per second.
cerebras.ai
· 2026-10-25
Commonwealth Fusion Systems said it will receive $85 million from the U.S. Department of Commerce under the CHIPS Act to develop advanced power electronics for fusion plants, with the government taking a stake in the company. The funds will support silicon carbide power electronics, radiation-hardened and radio-frequency components, and adapting AI chips like GPUs and TPUs for use in fusion reactors.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-10-23
Between October 8 and 18, Ukrainian drone strikes hit five Russian data centers, including three Yandex facilities housing its top supercomputers, plus sites serving Sberbank and VKontakte. The attacks disrupted cloud services, banking, e-commerce and ride-hailing across Russia, following earlier Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centers that knocked out internet and TV broadcasts.
tech.slashdot.org
· 2026-10-23
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told Yahoo Finance at GTC Berlin that the company's AI accelerators can stay productive for eight years or more, far outlasting the traditional four-year GPU lifecycle. He said lending against Nvidia hardware carries 'the lowest' risk of any asset because the chips hold strong resale and reuse value across different customers and workloads.
techspot.com
· 2026-10-23
The FCC used its new authority, granted October 13th, to block two unnamed gadgets for containing a HiVision Hi3516CV610 chip, which it labels a 'foreign surveillance chip.' HiVision is a subsidiary of Huawei, already on the FCC's Covered List of national security threats, and the chip is commonly paired with Sony camera sensors in security cameras and dashcams sold on sites like AliExpress.
theverge.com
· 2026-10-22
Industry analysis suggests that surging demand for memory chips, driven largely by AI companies, is raising component costs for Microsoft and Sony as they develop next-generation gaming consoles. Current Xbox and PlayStation hardware has already seen price increases tied to these chip shortages, and the report warns future console prices could rise far more sharply.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-10-22
According to SemiAnalysis, Nvidia has denied some neocloud providers access to its GTC Berlin conference after they added AMD GPUs or Google TPUs to their cloud offerings. The analysis firm says this follows earlier claims that Nvidia withheld early chip allocations and financial support from neoclouds that diversified their hardware, while larger hyperscalers have not faced the same treatment.
techspot.com
· 2026-10-21
Greenpeace activists disrupted Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's keynote at GTC Berlin, standing on chairs with a banner reading 'Nvidia, clean up your dirty business!' and shouting questions about Nvidia chips allegedly found in Russian drones and missiles, plus broader environmental concerns. Security removed the protesters as Huang told them 'It's okay, go easy' and 'I'll talk to you later.' The confrontation follows reports that Nvidia Jetson Orin chips have turned up in Russia's S-71 'Monochrome' weapon and other autonomous drones.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-10-21
Chip startup Tenstorrent has closed a $1.5 billion funding round that values the company at $6.2 billion, more than double its $2.6 billion valuation from late 2024. The round was led by new firm Trace Capital and Innovation X, with Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity, SanDisk, and T. Rowe Price also participating. CEO Jim Keller said the company chose to stay independent and raise capital after demonstrating its Galaxy servers could run DeepSeek models, with funds earmarked for chips tailored to open-weight AI and video generation workloads.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-10-19
Taiwan is adding AI servers and advanced chips to its controlled export list, aligning its policy with U.S. trade restrictions on China. Violators will now face criminal charges under the Foreign Trade Act, punishable by up to five years in prison and fines around $92,500, according to Bloomberg.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-10-17
SK Hynix's Solidigm unit is reportedly asking the U.S. government for permission to send American chipmaking equipment to its Dalian, China facility, linking that approval to its plan to build a NAND flash memory factory in upstate New York, according to Reuters sources. SK Hynix told TechCrunch it is not trying to expand capacity at Dalian and that the equipment move is being coordinated with and authorized by U.S. officials.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-10-15
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