Compute
4 items across 1 edition. First seen Fri 11 Sep, last seen Fri 11 Sep.
- 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.