More Eggs.
A scale like we’ve never seen before.
News Items is as invaluable a way to start the day as a strong cup of coffee or a sip of mild gin" — Graydon Carter, editor and author of ‘When The Going Was Good’.
1. The Arctic is cooking. Across northern Russia — a region that is famously bitterly cold — temperatures this week have routinely surpassed 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32.2 degrees Celsius), adding to the mountain of broken heat records this summer has racked up so far. In recent days, the Selagoncy meteorological station, near the border of the Arctic Circle, recorded 93.0 degrees F (33.9 degrees C); another locality, Olenyok, logged 90.9 degrees F (32.7 degrees C), according to data collected by weather information service Ogimet and reported by climatologist Maximiliano Herrera. To put that in perspective, these temperatures are on par for Orlando, Fla., at this time of year. (Source: scientificamerican.com)
2. The U.S. economy keeps putting more eggs in the artificial-intelligence basket. Tech companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to meet AI computing needs and issuing billions of dollars of debt to help make those purchases. The rapid data-center build-out is powering construction spending, hiring and municipal revenues. Meanwhile, a stock-market rally fueled by the rise in shares of chip makers and other companies benefiting from the AI boom has led to a massive increase in household wealth. That is helping to bolster consumer spending. Combined, those factors are likely responsible for roughly one-third of the nation’s recent economic growth, according to Michael Pearce, an economist at Oxford Economics. But the strength that the economy is drawing from the AI boom is also a vulnerability: What would happen if the boom fizzled out? “It is very much an AI-driven economy right now,” said Barclays economist Jonathan Millar. “It’s hard to imagine that we would be anywhere near as resilient without that impetus.” (Source: wsj.com)
3. Google has assembled one of the largest infrastructure financing programs in history to supply more than $150 billion of artificial intelligence chips to Anthropic. Surging demand from Anthropic, in which Google is an investor, has led the Big Tech company to orchestrate a sprawling operation to supply its chips to the start-up, according to people involved in the project and corporate filings reviewed by the FT. The effort brings together Google, Broadcom, Apollo, Blackstone, Morgan Stanley and a slew of crypto miners in a web of transactions that stretches from chip manufacturing to data centre development. At the centre of the project are Google’s tensor processing units, or TPUs — AI chips it has co-developed with Broadcom since 2016. Once used largely inside Google’s own data centres, the chips have begun to be sold externally, challenging Nvidia’s dominance of the AI processor market. Google sells the systems in “pods” — server racks taller than a person that connect thousands of chips into a single computing system. “AI chips are some of the most valuable goods ever produced,” said a senior banker close to the deals. “It’s a scale like we’ve never seen before because it’s a product we’ve never seen before.” (Source: ft.com)
4. Bloomberg:
A flurry of model launches from China’s AI sector is rapidly narrowing the gap with Silicon Valley and creating what’s been described as a death zone for anyone without frontier-pushing technology or market-breaking pricing.
Alibaba Group became the latest in a parade of Chinese debuts hitting the top of global benchmarks with its Qwen3.8-Max this week, its most advanced model to date that appeared to match or exceed Anthropic PBC’s flagship Fable 5. Two weeks earlier, Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 showed performance comparable to the priciest US options built on a much humbler budget, sparking fresh questions over the effectiveness of US chip sanctions intended to slow China’s tech ascent.
