Hardware

OpenAI partnered with Amazon to build infrastructure for agents on the world’s largest cloud platform, a further sign that its close relationship with Microsoft is weakening.

Nvidia, the dominant supplier of AI chips, released a competitive open-source large language model whose speed tops its size class — the first open-weights leader to come from the United States since last year, when Meta delivered Llama 4.

DeepSeek, the Chinese developer of outstanding open-weights models, has withheld an upcoming update of its flagship model from U.S. chip makers, a move that intensifies the AI rivalry between the U.S. and China.

Iran hit at least three Amazon data centers in the Middle East, an indicator of AI’s critical role in the United States’ war against Iran and possibly the first time such facilities have been targeted during warfare.

Meta and OpenAI are among the tech companies that are building private power plants that will operate independently of regional grids to supply electricity for their massive buildout of AI data centers.

Projected demand for output from large language models is spurring a massive buildout of data centers. Researchers asked whether smaller models running on local devices could meaningfully lighten that load.

Reasoning models in the 1 to 2 billion-parameter range typically require more than 1 gigabyte of RAM to run. Liquid AI released one that runs in less than 900 megabytes, and does it with exceptional speed and efficiency.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX acquired xAI, opening the door to richer financing of the merged entity’s AI research, a tighter focus on space applications of AI, and — if Musk’s dreams are realized — solar-powered data centers in space.

The United States government’s effort to deprive China of AI computing power backfired as China turned the tables and banned U.S.-designed chips.

Top AI companies announced plans to build data centers that are projected to burn through trillions of dollars and gigawatts of electricity in the next few years.

In factories, where teams of robotic arms work in tight spaces, their motions are programmed by hand to keep them from interfering with one another. Researchers automated this programming using graph neural networks trained via reinforcement learning.

OpenAI completed its transition from nonprofit to for-profit in a feat of legal engineering that took an army of lawyers, investment bankers, and two state attorneys general 18 months to negotiate.

Drones are becoming the deadliest weapons in today’s war zones, and they’re not just following orders. Should AI decide who lives or dies?

Robot control systems that accept only text input struggle to translate words into motions in space. Researchers developed a system that enables robots to plan spatial paths before they execute text instructions.

OpenAI, strapped for processing power to drive a worldwide constellation of planned data centers, turned to Nvidia’s archrival AMD.