Compute
16 items across 4 editions · appeared in the last 2 editions in a row. First seen Fri 11 Sep, last seen Tue 15 Sep.
- MediaTek announced the Dimensity 9600 Pro on 15 September, built on a 2nm process node with a 2+3+3 all-big-core CPU: two C2-Ultra cores at 4.55GHz and six C2-Pro cores at 4.35GHz and 3.1GHz. MediaTek says it delivers "up to 17% higher single-core performance and up to 15% higher multi-core performance" versus the previous generation, with a "61% reduction in multi-core power consumption".
- On AI, MediaTek says a second-generation Super Efficient NPU cuts power consumption by 40% for always-on AI, and that the NPU 1090 delivers "51% higher LLM prefill performance, 55% higher Token generation per watt", with support for models up to 30B parameters running on the handset.
- MediaTek says the G2-Ultra NX GPU gives "up to 27% higher peak performance, 24% lower power consumption at peak performance, and 18% faster raytracing", and that first devices are expected to launch in Q3 2026.
- Every figure here is MediaTek's own and comes from its release; there are no independent benchmarks yet, and the company did not name the first handset makers to ship the chip.
- Euclyd announced on 15 September that it raised over €200 million in a Series A co-led by Samsung, Somerset Capital Partners, the EQT-managed Scaleup Europe Fund and Innovation Industries, with EIFO, imec.xpand, the Brabant Development Agency and Quadri also participating. Peter Wennink, former president and chief executive of ASML, joins as chairman.
- CNBC reports the same round as "$231 million" and says chief executive Bernardo Kastrup told it the Eindhoven company is designing an inference system with an architecture different from GPUs, covering both processor and memory. CNBC notes: "Euclyd's systems have yet to be proven at scale in commercial deployments."
- Kastrup told CNBC the company aims to begin rolling out physical chip systems in 2028, with thousands of enterprise customers served by 2030, and said of Samsung: "They are one of the biggest memory manufacturers in the world… they know the supply chain, they have a huge network."
- Euclyd's release names its products as "craftwerk" agentic AI silicon and a "craftwerk station CWS" low-power exascale AI factory, but discloses no performance figures, no benchmark comparison against Nvidia parts and no deployment dates.
- SemiAnalysis, publishing on 14 September, writes: "At GTC 2026, Jensen presented this graph that VR NVL72 achieved 3x performance per MW compared to Blackwell on O(1-3 Trillion) parameter model around 200 TPS. But when compared to the real world performance of Rubin already on prelease software, we are already seeing up to 7x better token throughput per megawatt."
- It reports that in the realistic 60–100 tokens-per-second operating range, "Vera Rubin achieves between 1.4x and 3x the throughput per TCO compared to the latest and greatest GB300 TRTLLM configuration", and that "Vera Rubin achieves approximately 61% higher maximum P90 interactivity than GB300 Dynamo TRTLLM, reaching 276.24 versus 171.53 P90 TPS". It adds that with the open-source SGLang stack, "GB300 can achieve similar interactivity as Vera Rubin".
- SemiAnalysis models "$159.5 billion in annual revenue and $149.9 billion in modeled profit per all-in utility GW" at 75 TPS and 60% utilisation, about "39% more revenue and 42% more modeled profit" than GB300 Dynamo SGLang, and says the rack tested is "the production SKU of 2300W TDP & 1.5TB of CPU LPDDR5X per compute tray".
- The measurements are on pre-release software, and SemiAnalysis thanks "Jensen Huang, Ian Buck, Nick Comly, Kedar Potdar, Rohit Nagraj, and the Mainland China TensorRTLLM Team" for help with the software bring-up and for verifying the benchmark results, so this is not an arm's-length test.
- Asked on CNBC's "Mad Money" on Monday whether the AI slowdown debate had caused him to reconsider Broadcom's fiscal 2027 and 2028 AI semiconductor forecasts, chief executive Hock Tan said: "No, not in the least." On the 2 September earnings call he had forecast AI semiconductor revenue of $115 billion in fiscal 2027, doubling to $230 billion in fiscal 2028.
- CNBC reports Broadcom shares fell 4.8% on Monday and the iShares Semiconductor ETF fell 5.6%, as investors reconsidered compute demand after Amodei's essay. Tan said Anthropic is on track to become Broadcom's largest custom chip customer in 2027 and to hold that position in 2028, displacing Google.
- Tan said he agrees with Amodei about the need for some restrictions — "Like any tool, it's important to put governances, safeguards on how we use the tool" — but added of AI that "It's not a live animal that will run wild by itself."
- The $115 billion and $230 billion figures are company guidance, not booked revenue, and Broadcom has not disclosed the contracted volumes behind them.
- The Register, publishing on 14 September at 21:46 UTC, reports that employees discovered the latest round of Oracle layoffs on Monday when they lost access to corporate systems such as email and Slack, because notifications were not consistently sent to personal addresses. Those who reached their accounts saw: "After careful consideration of Oracle's current business needs, we have made the decision to eliminate your role as part of a broader organizational change."
- The Register reports severance of four weeks of pay plus one additional week per year of employment, and says some of those cut had more than 20 years' tenure. Oracle declined to comment on the layoffs.
- The cuts follow a filing in which Oracle added roughly $700 million to its 2026 restructuring plan, taking total estimated restructuring costs to about $2.8 billion. The Register reports first-quarter fiscal 2027 revenue of $19.3 billion and net income of $4.76 billion, with about 30% year-over-year growth.
- Oracle has not said how many people were cut in this round, or which teams and regions were affected, so the scale is not established.
- The Associated Press reports that on Monday 14 September SoftBank Group fell 10.7% in Tokyo, SK Hynix and Kioxia Holdings each fell 6.4%, Samsung Electronics fell 4.1%, TSMC fell 1.2% and Tokyo Electron fell 1%. South Korea's Kospi lost 3.3% to 6,684.37 and Japan's Nikkei 225 slid 0.8% to 63,492.99, while Hong Kong's Hang Seng rose 0.4% to 24,904.46.
- Reuters reports that in US premarket trade at 04:46 a.m. ET, Nasdaq 100 e-minis were down 505.5 points or 1.72%, S&P 500 e-minis down 53.25 points or 0.70% and Dow e-minis down 97 points or 0.18%. Nvidia fell more than 2%, Intel nearly 6%, Marvell Technology around 6% and AMD around 5%, while Meta and Amazon each fell more than 1%. ServiceNow rose 3%, and Adobe and Workday 2.5% each.
- The AP quotes Dan Baker of Morningstar saying the decline "probably reflects the possibility that AI development may be slowed by regulators to try to avoid the worst case outcomes".
- These are intraday and premarket moves, not closing prices, and the pacing debate was not the only thing moving markets: the AP reports Brent crude rose 2.8% to US$107.55 a barrel in the same session.
- The Korea Herald, publishing at 09:51 on 14 September and citing industry sources, reports that state-run Korea Electric Power Corp. proposed Samsung Electronics prepay 20 trillion won ($14.8 billion) and SK hynix prepay 5 trillion won — roughly five years of electricity bills based on last year's payments — and that both companies rejected it after internal reviews.
- The prepayment would have helped expand power infrastructure for the semiconductor clusters under construction in Yongin, just south of Seoul, and in the southwestern Honam region.
- The paper reports KEPCO's total debt stood at 210.7 trillion won as of the end of June, with daily interest expenses of 11.5 billion won, and says the decision reflects concern about committing that much money upfront when it is uncertain whether the AI-driven semiconductor boom will continue.
- The report rests on unnamed industry sources relayed by Yonhap; neither company nor KEPCO is quoted, and the article does not say how the power infrastructure will be funded instead.
- Bloomberg reports that SoftBank Group secured an $11.87 billion loan to support its investment in OpenAI, up from an earlier target of $10 billion. The two-year facility was sealed last week and attracted commitments from around 20 banks, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified.
- The report says SoftBank stated last week that it would repay the balance of a $40 billion loan taken earlier this year to finance the OpenAI investment, paying down the $25.9 billion it owes on 15 September; that uncollateralised borrowing was due to mature in March next year.
- Bloomberg says SoftBank is slated to invest close to $65 billion in OpenAI by October and has already raised about $37 billion this year from offshore and domestic bond sales and loans, including this facility, alongside a $10 billion margin loan backed by its OpenAI stake and a potential bond sale of as much as $20 billion.
- The sources are unnamed and SoftBank has not published the facility's terms. Bloomberg notes the financing comes as executives voice the need to slow AI development, and flags concerns about growing credit risk in the sector.
- TechNode Global, reporting a filing made to the Hong Kong stock exchange on 13 September, says Z.ai plans a share placement of HK$15.68 billion (about $1.98 billion) at HK$714 per share — a 9.96% discount to the 11 September close of HK$793 — representing about 4.5% of enlarged share capital and expected to close on 16 September.
- Alongside it the company plans convertible bonds with gross proceeds of $3.016 billion and principal of RMB20.14 billion, zero coupon, maturing in 2027, with an initial conversion price of HK$892.50 per share.
- Of the proceeds, 60% is earmarked for next-generation GLM models and training, inference and computing infrastructure, 15% for business expansion, strategic investments and potential acquisitions, and 25% for capital structure, working capital and general corporate purposes, with deployment expected by 30 June 2028.
- Both transactions remain conditional and had not closed; TechNode notes the placement may not proceed if its conditions are not met. Only this outlet's account of the filing was read for this item.
- The paper, posted to arXiv on 10 September 2026, reports that "MoEs degrade more rapidly under data repetition", with the effect growing as sparsity increases: dense 80M-parameter models tolerate "8x" repetition with minimal decline while MoEs "begin to suffer at 4x" and underperform dense alternatives at "32x".
- The study spans models from "80M to 1B active (8.5B total) parameters". The authors are Atindra Jha, Margaret Li, Jure Leskovec, Percy Liang and Luke Zettlemoyer.
- With strong masking-based regularisation, MoEs keep their advantage over dense models "even when data is repeated more than 64 times", though the paper says no method fully recovers all-unique-data performance — a direct constraint on sparse architectures as high-quality text runs short.
- Preprint, not peer reviewed. The largest configuration is 8.5B total parameters, well below frontier scale, and the paper does not claim the thresholds transfer.
- Reuters reported on 11 September at 8:46 pm that Nvidia is in talks to invest up to $10 billion as an anchor investor in Anthropic's IPO, which is seeking to raise up to $100 billion at a valuation of around $2 trillion, with completion expected before the US midterm elections in November.
- For comparison, Reuters cites Anthropic's May round of $65 billion raised at a $965 billion post-money valuation, and an annualised revenue run rate that surpassed $65 billion by the end of July, up from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025.
- The report notes Nvidia said in November 2025 it would invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic under a broader partnership including a $30 billion Azure computing commitment, and that Anthropic committed more than $100 billion over a decade to AWS in April.
- Reuters says "The plans remain under negotiation and could change". Both companies declined to comment or did not respond, and no filing has been made. This is a Reuters exclusive; other outlets are aggregating it.
- TechCrunch reported on 11 September at 9:46 am PDT that the UK-based AI data centre company Nscale has appointed Fidji Simo to its board, and that per Bloomberg it is pursuing up to $3.5 billion in pre-IPO financing ahead of a planned autumn listing.
- Simo left OpenAI in July 2026 as CEO of AGI deployment — described by TechCrunch as "essentially the No. 2 executive at the AI lab" — citing health reasons, and continues to advise part-time. She was previously chair and CEO of Instacart through its 2023 IPO and spent over a decade at Meta.
- She joins a board that includes Sheryl Sandberg, Susan Decker and Nick Clegg; the CEO is Josh Payne. The company was founded two years ago.
- The $3.5 billion figure is attributed to Bloomberg rather than to Nscale, and no IPO filing or date has been confirmed.
- The Wall Street Journal reported on 11 September, followed by Reuters, that the Department of Defense is in talks to lend $5 billion to AI cloud startup Fluidstack through its Office of Strategic Capital, which lends to companies in areas deemed critical to national security. It would be by far the office's largest loan.
- The reported purpose is not a new AI data centre but strengthening US manufacturing capacity and supply chains for the components data centres depend on — an industrial-policy move aimed at reducing foreign supplier dependence in AI infrastructure.
- This is talks, not a signed agreement. Neither the Pentagon nor Fluidstack commented, and the WSJ sourced the story to people familiar with the matter. The underlying WSJ and Reuters reports are paywalled or blocked to automated retrieval; the figures here are as relayed by Tech Startups.
- Watch for an OSC announcement confirming terms, and for which components are named — that would reveal where the government judges the AI supply chain to be most fragile.
- Oracle reported first-quarter fiscal 2027 results on 10 September: total revenue $19.3 billion, up 30%; total cloud revenue $11.6 billion, up 62%; cloud infrastructure revenue up 121% to $7.4 billion. GAAP EPS was $1.56 (up 55%) and non-GAAP EPS $1.92 (up 30%). Capital expenditure for the quarter was $28.5 billion.
- Remaining performance obligations — contracted revenue not yet recognised — reached $664 billion, up $209 billion year over year. That backlog is the clearest single number for how much AI compute demand has been contracted rather than merely forecast.
- Quarterly capex of $28.5 billion against quarterly revenue of $19.3 billion is the figure to watch: Oracle is spending more each quarter than it takes in, on the expectation that RPO converts. Conversion timing, not demand, is the risk.
- The press release does not attribute quotes to named executives on AI or GPU supply, and does not break out GPU delivery volumes.
- Reported 10 September, sourced to the New York Times: the Department of Justice is examining whether Nvidia's roughly $20 billion arrangement with Groq, disclosed in late December 2025 and billed as a nonexclusive licensing agreement rather than an acquisition, was structured to sidestep merger review. Groq founder and then-CEO Jonathan Ross moved to Nvidia along with several key team members.
- The deal produced the Groq 3 language processing unit, now in full production as part of Nvidia's LPX rack-scale platform, integrating Groq's low-latency inference silicon into Nvidia's AI factory architecture.
- The inquiry sits alongside an FTC examination of acqui-hires across big tech. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said in February that regulators want to ensure such deals "are not an attempt to get around" merger review. A finding against Nvidia would put a widely copied AI-industry deal template at risk.
- This is an investigation, not a complaint. No charges have been filed, and the underlying NYT report is behind a paywall; details here are as relayed by SDxCentral.
- Announced 10 September at the International Space Summit in Paris: a $1 billion programme called Altair-Next Gen, led by UAE-based Marlan Space and Loft Orbital, to field a 50-satellite constellation running AI hardware in orbit, scaling from a ten-satellite demonstration. Ten satellites are in production in Abu Dhabi, with first launches in October 2026.
- Mistral supplies the onboard models providing reasoning and natural-language tasking, and powers services in an AI application store; BlackSky is the programme's highest-resolution optical provider. The constellation carries both radar and optical sensors for government and commercial customers.
- The claimed advantage is latency: analysing imagery on orbit and transmitting results in seconds, rather than downlinking raw imagery for ground processing hours later. Stated initial applications are maritime domain awareness, wildfire detection, disaster response, and port and critical infrastructure protection.
- No power, compute capacity or per-satellite cost figures were published, and the $1 billion is a programme value across a consortium rather than committed spend. Maritime domain awareness and infrastructure monitoring are dual-use by nature.