The big guns are all out for OpenAI’s latest funding round. (Picture: generated)In what looks like one of the strongest funding rounds in history, OpenAI is getting investments from SoftBank and half of the Magnificent Seven.
SoftBank and Nvidia will be the largest investors, clocking in at $30 billion each, while Amazon will pitch in «potentially» $20 billion and Microsoft will contribute «less than» $10 billion, according to Reuters and The Information.
Apparently, Amazon’s investment could come with a caveat that OpenAI expands its cloud server rental with the company, which will likely not be a large hitch.
This will also be SoftBank’s second investment in OpenAI, after recently completing a $41 billion investment, and selling out Nvidia.
That would bring their holdings to $71 billion, which is still short of Microsoft’s reported stake of $135 billion.
The H200 was getting popular in China, being miles ahead on performance. (Picture: generated)Several sources are telling Reuters that the H200 chips are not permitted to enter, and authorities have told technology execs explicitly to not purchase the chips.
The H200 was cleared by Commerce for export to China in December and got finally approved this week.
Nvidia’s new system will drastically reduce training time. (Picture: Nvidia)The Rubin platform is that much faster on training, and also five times quicker on inference tasks. It wasn’t expected until later this year, writes The Verge.
The system actually consists of six chips, including a CPU, a GPU, an NVlink chip, a NIC, and a DPU and an optics chip.
It can train a «mixture of experts» model with 10x less inference token cost, and a 4x reduction in GPUs compared to the Blackwell platform, Nvidia says.
The platform is now rolling out to nearly every cloud provider, including to Nvidia partners Anthropic, OpenAI and Amazon, according to TechCrunch.
Jensen Huang estimates that AI companies will be spending between $3 and $4 trillion on infrastructure over the next five years.
The H200 chip is a huge leap forward for Chinese infrastructure firms, compared to local capacity. (Picture: Generated)Citing five sources familiar with the matter, Reuters reports a boom in Chinese chip orders from Nvidia, which far outstrips supply.
Nvidia currently sits on some 600K high performance H200 chips, recently cleared for China, but Chinese companies have placed orders for a whopping 2 million of them for 2026.
This has led Nvidia to re-approach TSMC for another production run, Reuters reports.
This is notwithstanding regulatory pressure from the Chinese government, who have not said if they will allow the chips in the country.
They are instead considering bundling H200 purchases with domestically produced chips, Reuters says, in order to boost their internal industry.
Nvidia’s more powerful H200 chips can now be sold in China. (Picture: Nvidia)The powerful chip can be sold to vetted partners with a tax of 25% to the U.S. government, Trump said in a statement.
Nvidia’s H200 is a much more advanced chip than the custom H20 that the company was allowed to export to China earlier, with the newer Blackwell chips being only about 1.5 times faster, Reuters notes.
The H20 chips were recently banned in China, where the authorities instead opted for Huawei chips for data center supplies.
The massive stock sale fueled a lot of rumors and worries. (Picture: generated)Known for its massive stakes in emerging technologies, SoftBank’s disclosure of the sale caused a 2% dip in Nvidia’s share price and inflated talk of an AI bubble.
Now CEO Masayoshi Son has revealed that it certainly wasn’t because they were taking profit before any downturn. On the contrary:
— I was crying to sell Nvidia shares, he told the FII Priority Asia forum in Tokyo, and says he «didn’t want to sell a single share,» adding that «I respect Jensen, I respect Nvidia so much,» according to Business Insider.
Talks between Meta and Google on custom chips has Nvidia slightly worried, but not much. (Picture: generated)News on the talks was posted by The Information on tuesday, and caused Nvidia to drop 3% and Google to tease a $4 billion valuation in the markets.
Under the deal being discussed, Meta would start renting compute on Google’s Tensor Processing Units as early as next year, Reuters reports.
Nvidia and Anthropic will optimize for each other, and use Microsoft’s cloud. (Picture: generated)The companies will invest some $15 billion in Anthropic, while the AI lab commits to $30B in spending on Azure, Microsoft’s cloud offering.
— We’re increasingly going to be customers of each other. We will use Anthropic models, they will use our infrastructure and we’ll go to market together, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, according to Reuters.
The agreement means Anthropic will optimize their software stack to better run on Nvidia’s hardware, while Nvidia will «optimize for Anthropic workloads.»
No more invite codes for select countries in Sora 2, and bevy of new features. (Picture: generated)
Sora 2 expands, is now available without invite codes
Following the massive success of the Sora 2 video generator, OpenAI is opening up the service for those without invite codes in the USA, Canada, Japan and Korea «for a limited time.» Simultaneously, they are announcing reusable characters that can feature in more than one video and an easier way to stitch videos together. If that wasn’t enough, OpenAI is adding more video generations for power users hitting the 30-per-day generation limits and letting them pay for more gens. They are also musing about letting rightsholders get compensation for the reuse of their characters, as a means of getting paid for your work on the platform. They do warn that 30 gens needs too many GPUs and will be throttled at some stage. More at: MacRumors and a Twitter announcement, list of available countries.
OpenAI reveals security research agent in beta
The new agent, Aardvark, will look through code repositories at scale almost like a human would, and find errors and exploits before the bad guys do. It will continually analyze your source code and find vulnerabilities. The agent has already been used to find «numerous» vulnerabilities in open source software, and OpenAI will provide pro bono scanning to «select, non-commercial» OSS systems. Aardvark is not being widely released, existing instead as a private beta inside OpenAI’s offices, kind of like Google’s CodeMender. More at OpenAI’s announcement and ZDNet.
Alibaba won’t say if they’ll use any Nvidia chips, but says they can help out with robotics. (Picture: Adobe)Nvidia chips are as good as banned in China, but that doesn’t stop the internet giant Alibaba from partnering with the chip supplier — and see its stocks surge 10%.
Alibaba recently decided to «double down» on AI, according to this Reuters report, and promised $53 billion in AI infrastructure investments during the next three years – with even more coming.
Nvidia is slated to help develop physical AI functions like data synthesis, model training, environmental simulation and validation testing, Reuters says.
The deal will see Nvidia become OpenAI’s «preferred» partner for chips. (Picture: Adobe)Nvidia has made a deal to invest the money in ten gigawatts of compute capacity for OpenAI, and the first gigawatt data center should be coming online in the second half of 2026.
The money will be disbursed in stages and then be «returned» from OpenAI in the form of 4-5 million next-gen gpu purchases by the AI lab.
Jensen Huang and Sam Altman are on the brink of some serious UK investments. (Picture: Adobe)There is a UK/US summit coming up next Tuesday, where Donald Trump is expected to get a royal, red carpet welcome — but take a look at the guest list, and some real investments might be behind it, CNBC reports
Traveling with Trump is both OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Nvidia chief Jensen Huang, and speculation is rife that they are carrying some serious investment news.
«Sizable deal»
According to CNBC, both OpenAI and Nvidia are in discussions about a «major investment,» and a «sizable deal» for data center development in the UK that «could be worth billions of dollars.»
Jensen Huang’s deep pocketed buyers seem happy to purchase even more. (Picture: ETC-USC, CC BY 2.0)In a filing with the SEC, the company reveals that 53% of its revenue came from just three sources.
They are anonymized in the filing, but Nvidia clearly states that they account for 23%, 16% and 14% of sales.
Last quarter, two top customers accounted for 14% and 11% of revenue, writes CNBC.
OEM manufacturers?
These customers are not end users of the product, but rather systems manufacturers who buy chips directly from Nvidia and put them on circuit boards and servers — which they call «Direct customers.»
Google has launched a freakishly accurate Hurricane forecast, currently being tested with the U.S. National Hurricane Center. (Picture: Screenshot)Nvidia is building in Europe!
The AI chip maker announced at the GTC Paris conference that they are working with partners in European countries to build both infrastructure and factories, marking probably the largest AI investment so far on the continent. More at Investor’s Business Daily, and Nvidia’s press release.
A novel approach to the AI embargo in China
Chinese AI companies have found a route around the embargo of advanced AI chip sales to the country. Much like the early days of desktop publishing, they have taken to flying suitcases full of high density hard drives to neighboring Malaysia, to hook them up to a nicely unrestricted supercomputer and process the data. More at The Wall Street Journal. See also: Sneakernet.
Massive Google Cloud outage affects just about everyone
Google’s cloud service went down from 11:46 until 14:23 PST yesterday, affecting a lot of internet services, like Spotify, Cloudflare, Discord and Snapchat. It also affected certain login features at OpenAI, impacted most services at Anthropic and, of course Google’s own Gemini, listing the entire time span as «full outage.» More at: TechCrunch, and r/singularity.
Google AI with high precision hurricane forecasts
Google DeepMind & Google Research have launched a model that simulates 50 storm scenarios up to 15 days out, now being trialed with the U.S. National Hurricane Center. Early results show forecasts are ~87 miles more accurate than Europe’s ECMWF model. It’s a smarter, data-rich companion to traditional physics systems—and a potentially big step forward in saving lives. More at The Verge and check it out at Google’s weather lab.
