AI Chips

Google rolled out two more of its custom AI chips on Monday, and the company says it has now shipped four new TPU systems in a single year — a first in the decade-plus history of its in-house silicon. The new systems are TPU 8tx, built for confidential inference, and TPU 8i Max, built for AI agents that chew through massive context windows. The announcement came Monday morning from Amin Vahdat, Google’s senior vice president and chief technologist for AI and infrastructure. It fills out an eighth-generation TPU lineup that started in April with the 8t training chip and the 8i reasoning chip. “This is the first time we have introduced four TPU systems in a single year,” Vahdat wrote in the announcement. ...

Nvidia’s board opened an independent investigation into CEO Jensen Huang on Sunday, November 8, after reports that he was the target of a foreign intelligence effort tied to a Chinese businesswoman, Alice Huang, a former executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed. Huang told employees he had been unfaithful to his wife, while the board said it has no reason to believe national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised. Full story in slides above — Sources: The New York Times, The Verge, Associated Press, USA Today, November 8–9, 2026. ...

Nvidia’s board opened an independent investigation into CEO Jensen Huang on Sunday, November 8, hours after the chipmaker’s chief admitted to an affair with a woman accused of working for Chinese intelligence. The Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang investigation lands at the worst possible moment for the world’s most valuable company: its chips sit at the center of the AI boom, its sales to China are already under a microscope in Washington, and its stock just lost $450 billion in market value in a single trading day last week. ...

Micron’s stock crashed 11% on Thursday, November 5, after Bloomberg reported the memory chipmaker has largely stopped building a $4.5 billion plant in Taiwan. Shares traded at $708.64 in late morning, down from Wednesday’s close of $795.23. The drop capped a brutal week for the stock. Micron fell 7% on Wednesday, and Thursday’s slide pushed it roughly 42% below its record close of $1,213.56 on June 25. It also slipped below its 200-day moving average. ...

AMD just gave the AI spending debate its loudest answer yet. The chipmaker reported third-quarter results after the closing bell on Tuesday, November 3, and the numbers landed on the bullish side of nearly every line that mattered: record revenue, a data center business that nearly doubled, and a fourth-quarter forecast well above what Wall Street had penciled in. Shares rose about 8% in extended trading after the release, according to Reuters, a move that capped a regular session in which the stock had already gained 3.65%. It was the kind of reaction that says less about one quarter and more about the question hanging over the whole AI trade: is the infrastructure spending still accelerating, or starting to cool? ...

Samsung posted a record operating profit of 107.4 trillion won, about $80 billion, in the third quarter of 2026, as booming AI demand lifted its memory chip business to new highs. Full story in slides above. Sources: Yonhap News Agency, Reuters via SourceFirstNews, SamMobile, October 29, 2026.

OpenAI plans to buy Google TPU chips, The Information reported on Tuesday, in a move that would put ChatGPT’s maker on its rival’s silicon for the first time as an owner rather than a renter. The report, citing a person familiar with the matter, did not disclose financial terms or a timeline for any purchase. That’s a striking shift for a company that has built its empire on Nvidia hardware. OpenAI is already one of the largest buyers of Nvidia’s graphics processing units, the chips it uses to train AI models and run them for users. Amazon, Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet plan to spend as much as $600 billion combined this year on AI infrastructure, according to Reuters, and OpenAI’s reported purchase sits right in the middle of that spending race. ...

Oracle is doubling down on Nvidia and hedging at the same time. On Tuesday, the cloud company said it will expand to “multi-gigawatt scale” with Nvidia’s newest Vera Rubin AI servers, while also offering chips from Nvidia rivals for the first time. It’s a big order of confidence in Nvidia’s hardware, wrapped in a clear message: Oracle doesn’t want to be locked into one chipmaker. The companies did not disclose what the expanded deal is worth. But Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has previously said Vera Rubin systems can generate up to $40 billion in revenue per gigawatt for the chipmaker, which gives a sense of the scale involved when a cloud provider talks in gigawatts rather than server racks. ...

Elon Musk says SpaceX has closed $40 billion in debt financing to buy GPUs, with deliveries expected in the first and second quarters of 2027. Full story in slides above. Sources: Reuters, CoinDesk, BusinessToday, SiliconANGLE, October 25-26, 2026.

AI chip startup Tenstorrent closed a $1.5 billion Series E at a $6.2 billion post-money valuation, led by Trace Capital and Innovation X, to scale its Galaxy servers and open RISC-V chip designs. Full story in slides above. Sources: Tenstorrent announcement via ACN Newswire, Dealroom, TechCrunch via Crunchbase News, Bloomberg.

Tenstorrent, the chip startup trying to chip away at Nvidia’s grip on AI hardware, raised $1.5 billion on Monday at a $6.2 billion valuation. The round more than doubled the company’s value from the roughly $2.6 billion it fetched in late 2024. That makes the 10-year-old startup one of the best-funded Nvidia challengers on the planet. CEO Jim Keller told Bloomberg the company turned down acquisition interest from Intel and Qualcomm, reportedly at valuations of up to $5 billion, to stay independent and raise more capital instead. The deciding factor, Keller said, was Tenstorrent’s Galaxy servers: the company showed they could run DeepSeek’s open-weight models, and decided the business was worth building, not selling. ...

Microsoft wants to run its own AI on its own silicon. The company unveiled Maia 300 on Monday, its third-generation custom AI chip, and said it plans to put potentially more than one million of them to work across its infrastructure in 2027. That’s not a typo. One million chips, in multi-gigawatt installations, all bought from nobody. The announcement, covered by Reuters, CNBC, and Microsoft’s own news center, marks the most aggressive step yet by a hyperscaler to loosen Nvidia’s grip on the AI compute market. From 2027, Microsoft says Maia will become the primary inference system for its products and services, meaning the Copilots, the Azure AI workloads, and even some OpenAI models running on Microsoft’s cloud will increasingly run on chips Microsoft designed itself. ...

Satya Nadella announced Microsoft’s third-generation AI chip, the Maia 300, on October 12, 2026, saying multi-gigawatt deployments start in 2027. Microsoft says the chip delivers 40% more tokens per watt than leading GPU-based systems — the efficiency claims come from Microsoft, which hasn’t named the comparison systems. Sources: Digit.in, AIStockWire, Notebookcheck, October 12, 2026.

TSMC is about to make it six. The world’s biggest maker of advanced AI chips is expected to post a sixth consecutive quarter of record profit when it reports third-quarter earnings this Thursday, October 15 — and analysts say the AI chip boom has made the outcome close to a formality. The numbers are already most of the way there. TSMC told investors on October 8 that Q3 revenue reached NT$1.494 trillion (about $46.7 billion), a 50% jump from a year earlier that beat analyst forecasts and even topped the upper end of the company’s own guidance. September alone pulled in NT$511.86 billion, up 54.6% year over year, while sales across the first nine months of 2026 hit NT$3.90 trillion, up 41.1%. ...

Amazon is in advanced talks to acquire AI startup Decart in a deal valued at around $7 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday — a move aimed at loosening Nvidia’s grip on AI computing. The deal isn’t final and could still fall apart, per the report. Sources: Wall Street Journal via Reuters; The Jerusalem Post; Bloomberg via Business Standard, October 11-12, 2026.

Broadcom is arranging more than $50 billion in financing for the custom AI chips it’s developing with OpenAI, according to The Wall Street Journal — the latest mega-deal in a frantic week that’s turned the AI chip boom into Wall Street’s busiest credit market. The chip giant has spent recent weeks talking to private-credit firms about the raise, the Journal reported on October 7, citing people familiar with the discussions. Apollo Global Management and Blackstone are among the lenders approached. The financing could back several gigawatts of computing capacity and might close before the end of the year, though the talks are preliminary and the final amount could still change. ...

Samsung guided third-quarter operating profit of 107.4 trillion won (about $80.2 billion) — the first 100-trillion-won quarter by any tech company and nearly nine times the same quarter last year — on booming demand for AI memory chips. Full story in slides above — sources: Reuters; Aju Press; The Hindu BusinessLine, October 8, 2026.

SpaceX is in talks to raise $40 billion in loans and debt to buy Nvidia AI chips, in one of the biggest AI infrastructure financings ever reported. Full story in slides above — Sources: Financial Times via Reuters, Bloomberg (October 6–7, 2026).

Greg Lui, 38, owner of Earthmade Computer Inc. near Los Angeles, was arrested October 1 on a three-count federal indictment alleging he funneled more than $300 million in export-controlled AI servers to China via Malaysia and Singapore using false paperwork. If convicted, he faces up to 50 years in prison. Sources: U.S. Department of Justice via Digital Watch Observatory, Economic Times (AFP), Lokmat Times (IANS).

The chipmakers are bankrolling their own customers now. Broadcom’s Wall Street syndicate is in the process of assembling $60 billion in fresh financing for AI chips that would benefit Anthropic and other companies, Bloomberg reported on Friday, October 2. The package is split into a $42 billion Class A senior-secured tranche, syndicated among banks including Bank of America, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley, and an $18 billion Class B junior-debt tranche led by Blackstone, which is committing $9 billion from its own funds and syndicating the rest. ...