AI·
Days after opening Fable 5 to the public, a US government order forced Anthropic to pull it
A Commerce Department export directive forced Anthropic to disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all users, days after opening Fable 5 to the public.
Topic
AI infrastructure
Behind every model launch is a gigawatt of power and a multi-billion-dollar silicon contract. We track hyperscaler chip deals (Meta-Broadcom, Google-Broadcom, Microsoft-AMD), Nvidia’s shifting moat, and the regulatory side nobody was watching — EIA disclosure rules, grid interconnects, and the political fight over where this compute gets built.
58 articles in this topic
Hardware·
Renault ditched rare-earth magnets in its EVs in 2012. China's export squeeze made that look smart
A Renault explainer on rare-earth-free EV motors hit Hacker News. Here's how electric cars run without the magnets China controls, and who's shipping them.
Policy·
Taiwan weighs making AI chip exports to all of China a crime, not just to Huawei
Taiwan is considering US-aligned export controls that would treat unauthorized AI chip shipments to any Chinese customer as a crime. It's under discussion, not law yet.
Policy·
Anthropic is sending Mythos 5, the model it called too dangerous, to cyberdefenders and the US government
Mythos 5 is the same model as Fable 5 with cyber safeguards lifted, going to Project Glasswing defenders and, Anthropic says, ~150 orgs across 15+ countries.
Hardware·
GM is spending $900 million on a battery bet that could cut $6,000 off an EV truck
GM is pouring $900M into a new LMR battery plan, betting a cheaper chemistry gets its EVs to price parity with gas trucks by 2028. Here's the play.
Policy·
Sriram Krishnan is leaving the White House AI job to build an outside policy institution
Sriram Krishnan, the a16z partner who co-wrote the AI Action Plan, leaves his White House senior AI advisor role at the end of June 2026. Here's what changes.
Policy·
Trump dropped the mandatory AI model review after Silicon Valley pushed back
Trump's June 2 AI executive order asks for a voluntary 30-day model review, down from a mandatory 90-day one. Here's what got cut and who pushed.
Hardware·
Nvidia's RTX Spark laptops run 120-billion-parameter models locally, no cloud needed
Nvidia's RTX Spark laptops put a Grace Blackwell superchip and 128GB of unified memory in a notebook, aimed at running 120B-parameter models offline.
Apple·
$38 billion in fines was on the table. Apple just agreed to show India its revenue.
Apple agreed to hand the Competition Commission of India its local financials by June 25, removing its last shield against a fine reported at up to $38 billion.
Policy·
Adversaries are tracking US troops with the same phone-location data advertisers buy
A Wired investigation and a CENTCOM letter to Senator Wyden confirm enemies are tracking US troops through commercial phone location data. Here's how the broker pipeline works.
Apple·
Apple is opening AirPlay's slot in iOS 27. Google Cast can become the default on EU iPhones.
Mark Gurman's Sunday Power On says iOS 27 will let users pick Google Cast or another protocol over AirPlay for system-level streaming, to satisfy the EU DMA.
AI·
DeepSeek locked in the 75% V4-Pro cut. The API now undercuts every Western frontier model.
On May 23 DeepSeek told customers the V4-Pro discount becomes its standard price after May 31. Output drops from $3.48 to $0.87 per million tokens.
Policy·
Commerce will take equity in nine quantum companies. $2 billion is moving in exchange.
On May 21 NIST disclosed nine letters of intent worth $2.013B for IBM, GlobalFoundries, and seven quantum labs. Each comes with a minority federal stake.
Policy·
Sadiq Khan blocked a £50M Met Police deal with Palantir. Scotland Yard had only talked to one supplier.
London's mayor cited a 'clear and serious breach' of procurement rules and stopped the Metropolitan Police from awarding Palantir a £50M AI intelligence contract on May 21.
AI·
SpaceX's S-1 revealed who's paying for Colossus. Anthropic just locked in $45B through 2029.
Anthropic is paying SpaceX $1.25 billion a month for Colossus 1 and 2 capacity. The contract runs through May 2029 and books about 83% of SpaceX's revenue.
Hardware·
Alibaba's new Zhenwu M890 chip is 3x faster and aimed straight at agent workloads
Alibaba showed the Zhenwu M890 at its Cloud Summit on May 19. 144 GB of memory, 800 GB/s interchip bandwidth, and Qwen3.7-Max riding on top.
Web·
Atlassian laid off the engineer who built its edge. He published the blueprints.
Vasilios Syrakis spent eight years building Atlassian's Envoy control plane. After the March cuts, he posted a 40-minute walkthrough that hit 1.1M views.
Policy·
A federal jury took two hours to throw out Elon Musk's lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI.
On May 18 a nine-juror panel rejected every claim Musk filed against OpenAI in 2024. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers had told the courtroom she was ready to dismiss on the spot.
Hardware·
Cisco cut 4,000 jobs on its record revenue day. AI infrastructure orders jumped to $9 billion.
Cisco posted $15.8B in Q3 FY26 revenue on May 14, up 12% YoY, then sent layoff notices to 4,000 staff the same day. AI orders are now tracking to $9B for the fiscal year.
Hardware·
Cerebras priced its IPO at $185 and closed at $311. Andrew Feldman and Sean Lie became billionaires.
Cerebras raised $5.55 billion on May 14 and closed its first day at a $95 billion market cap. The wafer-scale AI chip maker shipped the year's biggest tech IPO.
Security·
Twin contractors deleted 96 federal databases in 56 minutes. One asked an AI how to clear the logs.
A federal jury convicted Sohaib Akhter on May 7 of wiping 96 government databases at Opexus. His twin Muneeb queried an AI: 'how do I clear system logs from SQL servers.'
Policy·
NV Energy is cutting off 49,000 Lake Tahoe homes by May 2027. The power is going to AI data centers.
Liberty Utilities serves 49,000 Tahoe customers. NV Energy supplies 75% of that power and is reclaiming it for Northern Nevada data center expansion.
Policy·
Residents can't sleep. 29 million gallons vanished. Oregon sent the bill. Data centers are losing the neighborhood.
Three data center stories trended in one week: infrasound, 29M gallons of missing water, and Oregon forcing grid cost pass-through.
Policy·
Palantir contractors are getting 'unlimited access' to NHS patient data before it's anonymized
NHS England created an admin role giving Palantir staff access to identifiable patient data. The £330M contract's break clause arrives in March 2027.
Policy·
Apple and Google are bringing hardware attestation to the web. GrapheneOS says it's a monopoly play.
Google's reCAPTCHA Mobile Verification will require a certified iOS or Android device to pass some captchas, even on desktop. GrapheneOS calls the pattern anti-competitive.
Gaming·
Nintendo hiked the Switch 2 by $50. AI data center demand for memory chips drove it.
Nintendo confirmed a $50 Switch 2 price increase effective September 1 in the US, citing market conditions. The DRAM shortage caused by AI buildouts is the trigger.
Policy·
A judge killed DOGE's grant purge. The 'review process' was asking ChatGPT 'Is this DEI?'
A federal judge restored $100M+ in grants after two DOGE staffers used ChatGPT to flag 97% of NEH grants as DEI, including an HVAC repair and Holocaust research.
Policy·
The EU called VPNs 'a loophole that needs closing.' Proton's UK signups rose 1,800%.
An EU Parliament briefing and Executive VP Henna Virkkunen both flagged VPN circumvention of age verification. The UK's attempt to solve it backfired into record VPN adoption.
Policy·
Meta pulled encryption from Instagram DMs today. WhatsApp and Messenger keep theirs.
End-to-end encryption is gone from Instagram DMs as of May 8. Meta cited low adoption for a feature it never turned on by default.
Web·
Cloudflare cut 1,100 jobs on its best earnings day. Revenue grew 34% and the stock dropped 18%.
Cloudflare laid off 20% of its workforce on May 7 while reporting record Q1 revenue of $639.8M. The stock dropped 18% after hours.
Policy·
A Michigan town voted against a $16B data center. The lawsuit was filed two days later.
Saline Township rejected rezoning for a 1.4 GW OpenAI-Oracle data center. Related Digital sued in 48 hours, and construction is underway.
AI·
Anthropic doubled Claude Code's limits by renting 220,000 GPUs from xAI
Anthropic doubled Claude Code's 5-hour limits, killed peak-hours throttling, and raised Opus API tiers. The capacity comes from xAI's Colossus 1, via a SpaceX deal.
Hardware·
SpaceX filed for a $55B Texas chip fab. Total Terafab spend could hit $119 billion.
SpaceX filed plans for a $55B Terafab semiconductor facility in Grimes County, Texas. Total spend could reach $119 billion across phases.
Hardware·
AMD's data center revenue jumped 57% to $5.8 billion in Q1. Its stock closed up 18%.
AMD reported Q1 revenue of $10.25B, up 38% YoY. Data center hit $5.8B (+57%) and Q2 guidance midpoint of $11.2B beat consensus by roughly $700M.
Policy·
Pennsylvania sued Character.AI after a chatbot named 'Emilie' invented a psychiatry license
Governor Josh Shapiro is asking Commonwealth Court to bar Character.AI from letting bots practice medicine. A state investigator got an offer to be assessed 'as a Doctor'.
Apple·
Apple dropped its 7-year 'net cash neutral' policy. Ternus is freeing up the balance sheet for AI.
Mark Gurman's May 3 Power On reads Apple's quiet capital-allocation shift as cover for John Ternus to spend more on AI infrastructure and acquisitions, less on buybacks.
Policy·
DHS used a customs summons to demand a Canadian's Google data over anti-ICE posts. ACLU sued May 4.
ACLU sued in N.D. Cal. to block a 1930s tariff-act subpoena targeting a Canadian who hasn't been to the US since 2015. Google has not said whether it complied.
Security·
Five Eyes intel agencies publish first joint agentic AI security guide. Their advice: slow down.
CISA, NSA, GCHQ, ASD, CSE and NCSC-NZ jointly tell organizations agentic AI isn't ready for fast rollout. The 23-page guide names five risk categories.
Policy·
FCC just voted to bar Chinese labs from certifying US electronics. 75% of devices are tested there now.
Brendan Carr's FCC advanced the 'Bad Labs' rule on April 30 in a 3-0 vote, kicking off a 60-90 day comment period. The rule covers 126 labs in China and Hong Kong.
Apple·
Apple booked $111.2B in Q2 with Ternus on the call. Cook warned about RAMageddon.
Apple posted record Q2 revenue of $111.2B (up 17%). John Ternus joined his first earnings call as named CEO. Cook warned AI memory costs will hit Apple's June quarter.
AI·
Alphabet hit $109.9B in Q1 and is starting to sell TPUs to outside data centers
Alphabet posted $109.9B Q1 2026 revenue with Cloud up 63% and a $460B backlog. Sundar Pichai said Google will sell TPUs to select customers running them in their own data centers.
AI·
Hyperscalers are on track to spend $700B on AI infrastructure in 2026
Big-tech AI capex is projected at $700B in 2026, up from $410B in 2025. Microsoft alone guided $190B. Wall Street is split: Meta got punished for the spend, Alphabet rallied.
Hardware·
Samsung Q1 profit hit 57.2 trillion won. Memory chips for Nvidia drove 93% of it.
Samsung Electronics posted record Q1 2026 results on April 30: 133.9 trillion won revenue and 57.2 trillion won operating profit. Semiconductors did 93% of the work.
AI·
OpenAI's models are on AWS Bedrock the day after Microsoft lost exclusivity
Amazon shipped Bedrock Managed Agents powered by OpenAI on April 28, plus Codex on Bedrock. Altman tells Stratechery the runtime matters as much as the model.
Policy·
Two gamers are suing Nintendo. They want the tariff money back, not the company.
After the Supreme Court killed Trump-era tariffs in February, Nintendo filed for refunds. A class action says those refunds belong to customers.
Hardware·
AMD Zen 7 'Florence' leak: 288 cores, a separate cache die, and a 25% IPC swing
Leaked slides describe Zen 7 EPYC scaling to 288 cores per socket, with all L3 moved off the CCD onto a stacked cache die. Tape-out is October 2026, launch late 2028.
AI·
Microsoft and OpenAI just rewrote their deal. Exclusivity is dead, and so is the AGI clause.
Microsoft loses exclusive rights to OpenAI's models. The revenue share now caps at 2030 and stops depending on AGI. Here's what actually changed and who it benefits.
Hardware·
Anker built its own AI chip. It runs neural nets inside flash memory cells.
Anker's Thus chip embeds compute inside NOR flash, claims 150x more on-device AI for noise cancellation, and ships in Soundcore earbuds on May 21. Here's why it matters.
Policy·
Trump fired the entire National Science Board. The body that signs off on $9B in NSF funding is gone.
All 24 NSB members got termination emails on April 24 from the presidential personnel office. The board approves NSF's largest grants and sets policy. It is now empty.
Hardware·
Cerebras files for an IPO again, this time with $510M in revenue and a $10B OpenAI deal in its pocket
Cerebras filed an S-1 on April 17 listing as 'CBRS,' targeting roughly $23B at the prior private mark. The OpenAI inference deal is the line item that changed the story.
AI·
Google is putting up to $40B into Anthropic. That's five days after Amazon's $5B.
Google committed $10B upfront and up to $40B total at a $350B valuation, plus five gigawatts of Google Cloud capacity. It's Anthropic's second nine-figure deal in a week.
Hardware·
Google splits its AI chip: the TPU 8t trains, the TPU 8i serves, and Axion handles the rest
At Cloud Next 2026, Google unveiled TPU 8t and TPU 8i, an 8th-generation split that matches Nvidia on agentic inference. Ironwood hit GA the same day.
Security·
GPUHammer grew up: three new Rowhammer attacks take full control of Nvidia machines
IEEE S&P 2026 papers extend GPUHammer with GeForge, GDDRHammer, and GPUBreach. They flip GDDR6 bits to break out of the GPU and own the host.
AI·
Amazon puts another $5B into Anthropic. Anthropic promises $100B back to AWS.
Amazon added $5B (up to $20B) to its Anthropic stake. Anthropic committed $100B+ to AWS over 10 years and 5 GW of Trainium capacity.
Hardware·
Why your next RAM kit costs double: the AI memory crunch, explained
DDR5 contract prices jumped 100% since 2025, HBM is eating 23% of DRAM wafers, and the fabs that could fix it don't come online until 2028. Here's the shape of the crunch.
Policy·
Virginia turned on data centers. Here's the chart the AI industry should be watching
Virginia voter support for new data centers crashed from 69% to 35% in three years. The Post/Schar School poll and the Digital Gateway cancellation show why it matters.
Policy·
The US government is about to make data centers show their power bills for the first time
The EIA confirmed it will develop a mandatory energy disclosure survey for data centers, two years behind Europe. Here's what it covers and why it matters.
Hardware·
Meta just committed 1 gigawatt of custom AI chips with Broadcom through 2029
Meta and Broadcom expanded their partnership to co-develop four generations of MTIA chips on a 2nm process. Here's what the deal includes and why Nvidia should care.