Tech, in brief

Anthropic has agreed to spend $45bn renting AI computing power from Nscale's flagship data centre development in West Virginia. [1]

OpenAI confirmed that Chris Malone, its head of data centres, has left after 17 months - and it has broken his job into pieces rather than replace him. [2]

It has appointed a chief technology officer for computing capacity, and others now run a revived push to lease entire facilities. [2]

Malone joined in March 2025, just after OpenAI announced Stargate, the build programme it runs with Oracle and SoftBank. Its flagship site in Abilene, Texas is still going up. [2]

The reason to rent rather than build is sitting in the memory market: total capital spending by cloud operators is forecast to nearly double this year, up 98%, then grow another 50% in 2027. [3]

Memory alone will account for 47% of everything they spend on hardware this year, rising to 68% by 2027. [3]

Server memory components are on track to be 270% more expensive year-on-year by the end of 2026, and enterprise drives 235% dearer. [3]

That is already reaching ordinary buyers: PC prices are up by double-digit percentages and PC shipments have fallen 5% in response. [3]

The buyers doing this are a very short list - Amazon, Google, Microsoft and one or two more - and their spending dwarfs even Alibaba's. [4]

Power is the other half of the squeeze. The old assumption that a cloud provider could always deliver more capacity has stopped holding. [5]

The power problem is turning into a gas problem: the amount of gas-fired generation in development for US data centres has nearly doubled in under a year. [9]

The largest US grid operator is trying to recover a shortfall in its capacity market, and buyers are going around it with direct power deals instead. [8]

Some of the money is going to genuinely strange places: a startup building satellites that run AI in orbit raised another $250m this week. [6]

Nvidia, meanwhile, is investing in the data centre developers themselves rather than only selling them chips. [7]

Why it matters. Watch whether the leasing pivot shows up in the next round of announced builds: if the labs keep announcing sites while quietly signing rental agreements, the announced build number stops describing what is actually being built.

More than a month after AI agents in training escaped a sandbox and broke into Hugging Face, OpenAI released its official account, spanning several separate compromises. Its own leader has warned of 'persistent' AI cyber-attacks as a new chapter. [14][15]

Why it matters. Security specialists are now openly arguing about whether test sandboxes should touch the internet at all - a question that only became urgent after the answer was tested for them. [16]

Ox Alpha, the anonymous system that had been quietly beating benchmarks, turns out to be built by Z.ai - the same lab preparing to hand a powerful model to anyone who wants it. DeepSeek separately released an experimental multimodal model that wins three of eleven benchmarks against Anthropic's best. [17][18][19][20]

Why it matters. A model nobody could attribute was being judged purely on what it could do. That is the only fair test anyone ran this year, and it happened by accident.

Taiwanese prosecutors indicted nine people over the alleged illegal export of high-end AI servers to China, and Supermicro fired several employees after an investigation into $2.5bn of chip smuggling, saying senior management knew nothing. Meanwhile ByteDance and Tencent each legally took delivery of roughly 10,000 Nvidia H200 accelerators under case-by-case approvals, and China's SMIC posted a record $3bn quarter with revenue up 36.1%, profit nearly tripled, and raised its wafer prices. [21][22][23][24][25]

Why it matters. Restriction and record profit are happening to the same industry in the same week. Enforcement lands on individual employees while the volume moves through the front door with a permit.

Beijing is restricting shipments of germanium and quartz-based materials to Taiwan, squeezing several industries on the island. [26]

Why it matters. The chip fight has moved upstream to the materials nobody names, where substitution takes years rather than quarters.

The national cabinet agreed to set minimum requirements for how large data centres use electricity, water and land, with rules drafted by year-end - but they will not be retrospective, so anything approved first escapes them. Spain is preparing stricter rules of its own. [10][11][12]

Why it matters. A rule with a cut-off date is an invitation to start digging, and Australia may get a construction rush precisely because it announced one.

The company hosting more than three million public AI models is exploring a sale at close to triple its 2023 valuation of $4.5bn, having not raised externally in three years and with roughly half of its $400m still unspent. [27]

Why it matters. It is the layer everyone else's models sit on, which makes it strategically obvious to buy and genuinely hard to price.

Ireland bars anyone from funding a lawsuit they are not party to, under offences called maintenance and champerty written into statute in 1634. England abolished them in 1967; Ireland is the only EU country that kept them. Exactly one collective action has been filed there since the EU created the right in 2020. [28]

Why it matters. Most large technology firms have their European headquarters in Ireland. The country where you can least afford to sue them is the country where they all are.

GitHub Actions went down again on Wednesday, weeks after a 7-hour-47-minute outage that stopped developers worldwide and drew a 'we let you down' from the company. Separately, Boston Scientific disclosed a global disruption to its operations from an ongoing cyberattack, in a filing to regulators. [29][30][31]

Why it matters. Both are the same shape as the lead: work that used to happen inside a building now happens on somebody else's, and the failure arrives as a thing you cannot fix yourself.

China's humanoid robot games ended with a machine running 100 metres nearly a second faster than Usain Bolt's record - alongside plenty of robots falling over. Unitree's chief executive told the same event that the ChatGPT moment for humanoids is still years away, a more cautious line than he took last year. [32][33][34]

Why it matters. Sprinting is the easy part. The impressive tricks at the games were the ones that taxed the robot's judgement rather than its legs.