Nvidia agreed to backstop as much as $105B in credit support for OpenAI's data center campus in Pike County, Ohio — down from the $250B guarantee the two sides were discussing in July — where SoftBank's SB Energy will build, own, and lease an initial 4.25 gigawatts, with an option for 3.75 more, to OpenAI under a 20-year deal, with the first phase online in 2028. The smaller number doesn't quiet the circular-financing question it was designed to answer: Nvidia is still underwriting the site risk behind the customer that buys its chips, even as CEO Jensen Huang calls the concern "preposterous" because Nvidia's capital is "only a portion" of what OpenAI ultimately has to raise. It's the same anchor-tenant logic reshaping compute financing all month, just written at Ohio zoning-map scale. (Bloomberg)
Private Companies
Lightmatterpartnership
Lightmatter expanded its push to standardize the physical interface between GPUs and the rest of an AI cluster, growing the Open Silicon Photonics for AI Systems workstream inside the Open Compute Project from 10 founding members to 19 and publishing a 300-page architecture vision for co-packaged optics that scales cluster designs from 72 nodes past 1,024. The goal is a shared blueprint so hyperscalers can swap copper for light without locking into one vendor's interconnect, with the first formal specifications due in the fourth quarter. (DatacenterDynamics)
Groqfundraise
Groq raised $350M at a $3.5B valuation — roughly half its $6.9B mark from a year ago — in a round led by Disruptive that also includes Nvidia, the same company whose licensing deal in June hired away founder and CEO Jonathan Ross along with other key staff. The startup is remaking itself as a data-center operator focused on inference capacity rather than chip sales — its second raise since June's $650M round. (Bloomberg)
Public Markets
AMD closed its largest-ever debt raise — $4.75B across four tranches, pricing below guidance — the same day Bank of America named it top pick and lifted its 2030 server-CPU forecast above $210B. Data-center revenue doubled to $6.7B, now 58% of sales. (TipRanks)
Applied Materials beat Q3 estimates with record $9.12B revenue and guided Q4 revenue up 51% to $10.25B on "unabated" AI-chip equipment demand — yet shares fell nearly 6% as investors judged a beat insufficient after the stock's outsized 2026 run. (Benzinga)
Emerging
Faster robots, sparser math: Deltoris is an algorithm-hardware co-design for the vision-language-action models now running on-device in robots, exploiting how little changes between consecutive camera frames to skip up to 92.9% of redundant bit-level operations. Paired with a speculative-inference scheme and a custom systolic accelerator, it hits 34.2x the speed of mobile GPUs at the 50–200Hz control rates real-time robotics demands — evidence that the physical-AI wave will lean on specialized silicon, not repurposed datacenter chips. (arXiv)
Power at sea: Naver invested in Panthalassa, the Oregon startup building floating, wave-powered AI data centers, following the company's $140M round in May led by Peter Thiel. Panthalassa has already tested prototype platforms at sea and plans a third pilot this year ahead of commercial deployment in 2027 — one more entrant in the search for power sources that don't compete with the grid as onshore interconnection queues stretch years long. (DatacenterDynamics)