Chip race: Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Nvidia battle it out for AI chip supremacy – The Verge

OpenAI reveals its first AI processor: Jalapeño

2026-06-24T10:36:47-04:00

OpenAI has just revealed a new "intelligence processor" chip for AI servers made in partnership with Broadcom. The chip, called Jalapeño, is designed to power current and future large language models, according to an announcement on Wednesday.

Jalapeño is an ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit), meaning it's designed for a specific purpose: AI inference. With AI inference, models process a user's request to run an agent like Codex or offer a response from ChatGPT, while AI training involves a model consuming vast amounts of data to inform its responses.

It comes just nine months after OpenAI revealed that it would team up with Br …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Nvidia says its AI data center design runs hotter to use a lot less water

2026-06-22T19:24:32-04:00

Public pushback against data centers has emphasized their water and energy consumption, and now Nvidia is highlighting its claim that the Rubin generation reference design for a fully liquid-cooled data center has "eliminated massive amounts of power usage and pretty much all water usage." Still, it doesn't address all of the concerns around AI data centers, including during their construction, and for the power generation requirements of the massive facilities. Also, as Gizmodo points out, Nvidia's blog post doesn't mention the cost of building this style of data center vs. one using less efficient air cooling, but claims that "every cloud …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Arm’s first CPU ever will plug into Meta’s AI data centers later this year

2026-05-08T15:05:21-04:00

After decades of only licensing its chip designs for others to use, UK-based Arm revealed the first chip it's producing on its own, and the first customer. Dubbed the Arm AGI CPU, it's another chip designed for inference, or running the cloud processing for AI tools like AI agents that can continue to spawn more and more tasks to run at once. The first company in line to use it is Meta, which has reportedly struggled to launch its own AI chips.

Meta says it's both the lead partner and co-developer, and plans to work on "multiple generations" of the data center CPUs, for use along with hardware from other vendors like Nvidia and AMD. Arm cus …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Nvidia’s spending $4 billion on photonics to stay ahead of the curve in AI

2026-03-02T11:56:49-05:00

Nvidia announced on Monday that it's investing $2 billion each into Lumentum and Coherent, which are both developing photonics technology for data centers, like optical transceivers, circuit switches, and lasers, which are used to move data at high speeds over long distances. Their tech could improve energy efficiency, data transfer speeds, and bandwidth in future AI data centers, after Nvidia already capitalized on its 2020 acquisition of the network hardware company Mellanox to beef up NVLink and increase the amount of data moving between its GPUs.

For Lumentum, the nonexclusive multiyear deal includes a "multibillion purchase commitment …

Read the full story at The Verge.

OpenAI snags $110 billion in investments from Amazon, Nvidia, and Softbank

2026-02-27T09:59:39-05:00

OpenAI has closed another round of funding, totalling $110 billion being newly committed to the maker of ChatGPT, which it says has more than 900 million weekly active users and over 50 million consumer subscribers. Amazon is investing $50 billion and striking a deal that includes plans for custom models and more. Nvidia and SoftBank are each contributing $30 billion, as well, even as the Wall Street Journal notes that Nvidia's previous $100 billion investment plan is "on ice." This marks another massive influx of cash for the company that's now valued at $730 billion, and previously closed a $40 billion round in 2025. At the time, it was th …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Chipwrecked

2026-01-30T11:00:00-05:00

The AI data center build-out, as it currently stands, is dependent on two things: Nvidia chips and borrowed money. Perhaps it was inevitable that people would begin using Nvidia chips to borrow money. As the craze has gone on, I have begun to worry about the weaknesses of the AI data center boom; looking deeper into the financial part of this world, I have not been reassured.

Nvidia has plowed plenty of money into the AI space, with more than 70 investments in AI companies just this year, according to PitchBook data. Among the billions it's splashed out, there's one important category: neoclouds, as exemplified by CoreWeave, the publicly tr …

Read the full story at The Verge.

AMD, Department of Energy announce $1 billion AI supercomputer partnership

2025-10-27T18:16:48-04:00

AMD has sealed a $1 billion deal with the US Department of Energy to develop two supercomputers, Lux and Discovery, in collaboration with Oracle and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Both supercomputers will live at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Lux is slated to come online fairly soon in early 2026, with Discovery following in 2029.

Both build on the work that went into the Frontier supercomputer, which is also housed at ORNL and was the fastest in the world until El Capitan came online last year at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. AMD also helped develop those supercomputers, so this isn't its first …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Qualcomm is turning parts from cellphone chips into AI chips to rival Nvidia

2025-10-27T15:10:34-04:00

Qualcomm is launching a pair of new AI chips in an attempt to challenge Nvidia's dominance in the market. On Monday, Qualcomm announced plans to release its new AI200 chip next year, followed by the AI250 in 2027 - both of which are built on the company's mobile neural processing technology.

The new chips are built for deploying AI models, rather than training them. The launch marks a notable change for Qualcomm, which has primarily made processors for mobile phones, laptops, tablets, and telecommunications equipment.

As reported by CNBC, Qualcomm's AI-focused processors are based on the company's Hexagon neural processing units that powe …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Intel’s tick-tock isn’t coming back, and everything else I just learned

2025-10-24T00:01:44-04:00

With Windows 10 on its last legs, Intel is looking forward to the PC industry growing more than it has in years - the most since 2021, when the covid-19 pandemic revived industry growth by creating a huge surge in demand. But it seems the struggling Intel, which just received lifelines from Nvidia, Softbank, and the US government, isn't fully ready to take advantage and is prioritizing AI instead.

Today on the company's Q3 2025 earnings call, where Intel saw its first profit in nearly two years due primarily to those lifelines, CEO Lip-Bu Tan and CFO David Zinsner explained how the company doesn't yet have enough chips. It's currently seein …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Nvidia is partnering up with OpenAI to offer compute and cash

2025-10-06T07:15:27-04:00

OpenAI is teaming up with Nvidia via a "strategic partnership" that will get the ChatGPT-maker more compute and more cash to develop new models on the road to superintelligence.

The partnership, announced Monday, will allow OpenAI to "build and deploy at least 10 gigawatts of AI datacenters with NVIDIA systems," which translates to millions of GPUs that can help power OpenAI's new models. One of the most important points here, besides more data centers and compute - which are always in high demand for companies like OpenAI - is that as part of the deal, NVIDIA "intends to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI progressively as each gigawatt is …

Read the full story at The Verge.