China Telecom just ordered 40,000 servers worth $1.7bn. Huawei did not even bid, yet its ecosystem walked away with the bulk of the deal. That is not an accident. It is the template. A state-owned Chinese carrier has handed Huawei a major win without Huawei lifting a finger. China Telecom named the winners of a […]
Qualcomm, the king of the smartphone modem, is in talks to design custom chips for ByteDance. The move would help it escape a shrinking phone market. It also shows US chipmakers will not give up on China. Qualcomm wants to be a chip designer for the AI age. Its first big customer could be Chinese. […]
A supercomputer in Shenzhen just topped the world rankings for the first time since 2017. The headline is the speed. The real story is the silicon: it runs without a single chip from Nvidia, AMD or Intel. China has taken back the supercomputing crown. On Tuesday, organisers declared a machine called LineShine the world’s fastest […]
Cerebras nearly doubled its revenue and guided 2026 sales above Wall Street’s estimates. Its stock still fell about 10%. The reason was a margin squeeze, caused not by a shortage of chips but by a shortage of buildings. Cerebras just learned the price of going public into a mania. On Tuesday the AI chipmaker posted […]
OpenAI just showed off Jalapeño, its first home-grown AI chip, built with Broadcom. It is designed for inference, not training. And it is the clearest sign yet that the company most dependent on Nvidia wants a way out. OpenAI has a chip now. On Wednesday it unveiled Jalapeño, the first piece of silicon it has […]
For the past several years, the artificial intelligence industry has been moving toward an uncomfortable reality: the most powerful models, infrastructure, and capabilities are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small number of well-funded companies. While billions of dollars continue to pour into proprietary AI platforms, the open-source ecosystem that helped drive much of […]
Superhuman, the company that used to be Grammarly, just bought GPTZero, the startup that catches AI writing. The contradiction is the point. As the internet fills with machine-made text, proving something is human is becoming a product. There is a neat irony at the centre of this deal. Superhuman’s biggest product helps people write with […]
Bloomberg says defense-factory startup Hadrian is in talks to raise as much as $1bn at a $7.5bn valuation. Hadrian calls that “inaccurate”. Either way, the rumour shows how hot physical AI and US reindustrialisation have become. Here is a number, and a denial, in the same breath. Hadrian Automation has discussed a new funding round […]
While public markets panic that AI will gut enterprise software, a quiet Dutch firm just raised €5.25bn on the opposite bet. Main Capital’s pitch: boring, essential software is exactly where the next decade of value sits. Charly Zwemstra has spent 23 years buying software that almost nobody finds exciting. Think hospital appointment systems, municipal tax […]
Menlo Ventures has raised $3bn, the biggest haul in its 50-year history. It is funded, in effect, by a single bet on Anthropic that is now worth about $14bn. Most venture funds are sold on a promise. Menlo Ventures’ new $3bn is sold on a receipt. The firm announced the raise on Tuesday, its largest […]
