AI Infrastructure

OpenAI plans to buy Google's artificial intelligence chips, according to a report by The Information on Tuesday, cited by Reuters. The report, which relies on a person familiar with the matter, says the ChatGPT maker intends to purchase Google's Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, as technology companies keep ramping up spending on data centers and semiconductors to meet surging demand for AI computing.

Microsoft is offering voluntary buyouts to about 60,000 employees, more than a quarter of its global workforce, as the company tries to contain staff costs while spending heavily on artificial intelligence data centres and chips. The programme, announced in a staff memo on Monday, is one of the clearest signs yet of how the AI buildout is reshaping even the largest technology employers from the inside.

Anthropic made its initial public offering filing public on Monday, giving investors the clearest look yet at the finances, spending commitments and risks behind the maker of Claude. The company plans to list its Class A common stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol ANT, with both Anthropic and existing shareholders selling shares. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are named first among 24 underwriters. The filing does not yet set a share count or price range, and CNN reports trading could begin as soon as November 16.

A consortium led by Mubbadrah Investment has unveiled plans to build a 3 billion dollar artificial intelligence data centre in Oman, with planned capacity of up to 400 megawatts. The project was announced at a signing ceremony in London during the state visit to the United Kingdom of Sultan Haitham bin Tarik, and it is intended for hyperscale operators running large-scale AI training and inference workloads, with room to expand beyond the initial build.

Artificial intelligence has delivered "zero financial payoff" to corporate America outside the technology sector, according to Torsten Slok, partner and chief economist at Apollo Global Management. In a Daily Spark note published on October 24, titled "No Signs of AI Payoff Outside the Tech Sector," Slok argued that despite massive investments and widespread hype, there is still no evidence that revenue growth or profit margins are improving for most large companies.

Google is putting far more weight behind an unusual answer to the AI power crunch: paying households and businesses to use less electricity at the moments the grid needs relief most. On Thursday, Google and distributed energy platform Voltus announced a tenfold expansion of their "Bring Your Own Capacity" agreement in the PJM region, adding 1,070 megawatts of flexible capacity to the 100 megawatts the two companies first committed in June.

Meta delivered a record quarter on Wednesday, and investors spent Thursday worrying about what it will cost to keep going. Shares in the Facebook and Instagram owner fell sharply, shedding more than 100 billion dollars in market value and dragging the Nasdaq down 2.6 percent, its biggest one-day fall since June. Nvidia slid 4.4 percent as the sell-off spread. The trigger was not weak business. It was the scale of Meta's artificial intelligence spending, and a new plan to help pay for it.

Anthropic could make its initial public offering paperwork public as early as Friday, October 23, moving the maker of Claude one step closer to what could become the largest stock market debut ever. Yahoo Finance reported the timing on Wednesday, citing three people familiar with the plans. Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.

OpenAI is racing to secure investor commitments for a funding round of about 30 billion dollars before rival Anthropic reaches the stock market, in a contest that could value the ChatGPT maker at more than 1.4 trillion dollars, Reuters reported on Monday, citing two people familiar with the matter. The timetable is unusually fast for a raise of this size, and it is aimed squarely at the calendar: Anthropic is expected to make its public market debut in mid-November.

Tenstorrent, the AI chip company led by veteran processor designer Jim Keller, said on Monday that it has closed a 1.5 billion dollar Series E funding round at a 6.2 billion dollar post-money valuation. The figure more than doubles the valuation the company reached in December 2024, and it ranks among the largest single raises by an independent AI chip startup this year.