Infrastructure & Chips · AI News Briefing

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2026-10-14 TechCrunch AI

SpaceX and Google both said no. Now his software is riding a SpaceX rocket next to Google’s

Satlyt, which builds software to run AI models on satellites, raised an $8 million seed round. Co-founder Rama Afullo says he pitched the idea internally at both Google Cloud and SpaceX's Starlink and was turned down. The software was slated to fly on a SpaceX rocket alongside the first prototype of Google's Project Suncatcher space data center. Earlier, Satlyt ran Google DeepMind's Gemma model on a spacecraft and cut the size of a downlink transmission about onboard software errors by more than 60%.

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2026-10-13 The Verge AI

Microsoft’s new AI chip makes it less reliant on Nvidia’s GPUs

Microsoft has announced Maia 300, its third-generation in-house AI chip, which will start running production workloads in 2027. Microsoft says it delivers 40 percent more tokens per megawatt than leading GPU-based systems, and a 96-chip configuration delivers up to 7 times the token throughput of a Maia 200 rack. It is designed to be Microsoft's primary system for inference, the work of generating answers from trained models. According to The Decoder, each chip carries 288 GB of HBM4 memory and is rated at 950 watts.

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2026-10-13 AI Times

Why Anthropic, ahead of its IPO, is betting everything on data centers

According to The Information, a data center Anthropic is building in Louisiana would add more than $1.3 billion in revenue if it opens a month earlier than scheduled. The site draws 330 MW of power for 245 MW of usable AI computing capacity, assuming all of it goes to inference rather than training. Consultancy Occam Edge estimates that capacity could bring $1.3 billion a month and, if Anthropic pays $200 million a month in chip rent, a gross margin of about 85 percent, before training costs and staff.

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2026-10-12 TechCrunch AI

Can the AI industry persuade data center opponents by getting rid of NDAs?

Amazon said it will no longer use nondisclosure agreements when negotiating data center projects with local governments, following Microsoft's lead. The announcement was buried in a long blog post arguing that data centers are good for communities. Hosts on TechCrunch's Equity podcast doubted that the recent wave of data center moratoriums will last, since they typically run one or two years and the centers will not come online for two to five years.

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2026-10-11 AI Times

Nvidia reportedly plans to invest in AI inference chip startup d-Matrix

Nvidia plans to invest in AI inference chip startup d-Matrix, The Information reported on the 8th, citing three people familiar with the deal. The size and terms were not disclosed. In July the two companies announced a plan to split inference work, with d-Matrix chips handling the small model's predictions and a large model on Nvidia GPUs verifying the results, a technique called speculative decoding.

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2026-10-10 Ars Technica AI

Ukraine’s drones knock out AI data center belonging to “Russia’s Google”

Ukrainian drones struck two of Russian tech giant Yandex's five data centers on October 8 and 9, knocking them out. The Sasovo site houses two of the company's three supercomputers used to train the YandexGPT AI model, and Kaluga is its largest facility. Reuters reported that Ukrainian company Firepoint's FP-1 one-way attack drones were used. Yandex's AI chatbot and apps for streaming, banking and rail suffered disruptions.

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2026-10-07 TechCrunch AI

AI computing startup Lambda to raise $4B ahead of planned IPO

AI computing firm Lambda is raising up to $4 billion at a $14.5 billion valuation before the new money, according to a report on a letter to investors. It could be Lambda's last private round before an IPO planned for 2027. Its backlog grew from $15 billion in June to $50 billion in September, and much of the increase appears to come from a single deal Anthropic signed in late August.

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2026-10-05 Wired AI

Rural Data Centers Are in for a Big Federal Tax Break

Starting January 1, 2027, rural data center projects can qualify for tax benefits under the opportunity zone program expanded by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Research by the Searchlight Institute, reviewed by WIRED, found more than 100 rural data centers that could be eligible, counted from a conservative list of fewer than 700 projects planned or under construction. Microsoft, Amazon and Meta said they do not use the program, and Google did not respond. Senator Josh Hawley introduced a bill last month to remove data centers from opportunity zone funding.

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2026-10-04 Wired AI

The Nvidia Shield TV Is 7 Years Old. It Just Got a $100 Price Hike

Nvidia is raising the price of the Shield TV Pro by $100 to $299, effective October 2. A spokesperson said the cost of components, including memory, has increased substantially across the industry. The streaming box is a 2019 design, stock has been slim for months, and it is still out of stock at Nvidia's store while Best Buy sells it at the new price.

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2026-10-04 TechCrunch AI

Amazon responds to data center backlash, says it no longer uses NDAs

Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said the company has stopped using nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) with the government agencies it works with as it seeks approval for new data centers. The line is one sentence in a long blog post arguing that data centers are good for communities. He said more than 100 data center moratoriums are being considered across the US, and New York has announced a one-year moratorium on permits for large data centers. Garman claimed direct data center water use is 0.5% of US industrial water use and that backup generators run roughly 10 hours a year.

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