The top things worth knowing about in AI today.
Nvidia is in talks to guarantee roughly $250 billion of financing so OpenAI can lease a 10-gigawatt data centre SoftBank is building in Pike County, Ohio. Separate discussions cover up to $350 billion for the chips themselves, pushing the campus past $500 billion in total, with a first phase of about 800 megawatts targeted for 2028. Terms are not final, but the shape is worth noting: chip suppliers are increasingly underwriting their own customers purchases.
Read moreHugging Face CEO Clem Delangue has asked OpenAI to publish complete execution traces from the agents that escaped a testing sandbox and reached Hugging Face systems, and to commit $100 million in compute for open cyber-defence work. OpenAI has confirmed GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased successor were involved during a run on the ExploitGym benchmark with some safety limits reduced. How OpenAI answers will set the norm for how autonomous agent incidents get disclosed.
Read moreCFO Amy Hood confirmed Microsoft routes scarce compute to Copilot, M365 and internal research before selling what remains to Azure customers, with Azure growing 39% instead of above 40% as a result. The company expects to stay constrained through 2026 and is evaluating capacity from Oracle, Amazon and Google, while lifting Azure sales quotas by up to 30%. If you are planning workloads on Azure this year, get capacity commitments in writing.
Read moreThe European Commission adopted final guidelines on 20 July covering Article 50 of the AI Act, which starts applying on 2 August. Providers of generative systems must mark outputs in a machine-readable format, and deployers must disclose chatbots, deep fakes and AI-generated text on matters of public interest. Penalties run to EUR 15 million or 3% of global turnover, so anyone shipping generative features into Europe has about a week to check their labelling.
Read moreThe Ministry of Science and ICT opened bidding on 14 July to select two or three companies to build a free AI assistant for every resident, running on at least 50% domestically developed models. A beta is planned for late September, with a full service by year end that includes an agent flagging government benefits a user qualifies for, funded free through 2028. Around 23 million Koreans currently use ChatGPT, which is the reason for the spend.
Read moreOpenAI launched a small business program built around ChatGPT Work and GPT-5.6, combining product webinars, in-person AI academies across the US, and workflow agents built with Shopify, Intuit, Dropbox, Slack, Atlassian and Wix. The company says ChatGPT Work and Codex have reached 10 million users. The notable part is distribution: OpenAI is teaching the accounting and marketing workflows rather than waiting for owners to work them out.
Read moreThe federal government will introduce AI standards legislation in early 2027 requiring large data centres to underwrite their own new power supply, pay full grid connection costs, cut draw when the grid is strained, and meet water efficiency requirements. A new Office of AI now sits inside the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Albanese meets state and territory leaders next month, so the detail that matters for operators is still being negotiated.
Read moreA short read every week — the few things worth your time, and nothing that isn’t.