Before diving into today’s brief… check out this week’s episode of The Compute 100 with Shahin Farshchi, General Partner at Lux Capital!
Shahin has gone from chip designer to semis investor at Lux, backing some of the most consequential companies in compute over the last two decades. He’s backed Compute 100 companies like Cognichip, Unconventional AI and Majestic Labs from their earliest innings. This conversation covers the evolution of chip design, how founders in the semis market have evolved, and what it takes to build in compute. We love the convo, and hope you will too.
AMD will invest up to $5B in Anthropic and supply up to 2 gigawatts of Instinct MI450 accelerators, worth tens of billions of dollars, with shipments starting in the first half of 2027, according to the Wall Street Journal. Anthropic will buy some of the capacity outright and lease the rest, and the agreement marks AMD's first direct investment in an AI lab, a structure that turns a chip vendor into a financial backer of its own customer's growth. Shares dipped modestly in early Wednesday trading, a sign investors are discounting the revenue until MI450 shipments actually begin, but the deal gives AMD a credible frontier-lab customer to set against Nvidia's near-total hold on training compute.
Private Companies
OpenAILaunch
OpenAI will build a $20B-plus Stargate data center near Savannah, Georgia, delivering 3.2 gigawatts of power in phases from 2028 to 2032, per Bloomberg. OpenAI will fund the site's energy infrastructure directly and is committing $80M toward local schools, health care, and workforce training in exchange for a 50% property-tax abatement over 15 years. The site is OpenAI's latest bet that owning power and land, not chip supply, now determines how fast Stargate's roughly 7 gigawatts of planned capacity actually gets built.
SpaceXCustomer
SpaceX is in talks to sell AI computing power to the Pentagon for several billion dollars, the Wall Street Journal reported, an arrangement similar to the compute-rental deals it has already struck with Google ($920M a month) and Anthropic ($1.25B a month) out of its Colossus data centers. A Pentagon contract would put a national-security wrapper around what has so far been a commercial side business, positioning SpaceX as a neocloud competitor to Microsoft and Amazon for defense AI workloads, not just a rocket company monetizing spare GPU capacity.
Emerging
SK Hynix formally denied, in a July 22 regulatory filing, a Korea JoongAng Daily report that it was in talks to acquire Intel's Ohio semiconductor campus, stating it "has not pursued or decided to acquire Intel's Ohio site and fab as reported." SK Hynix shares fell about 1.4% on the denial; Intel separately reaffirmed its Ohio commitment, though production there remains pushed out to 2030–2031. A denied rumor still moved a $100B-plus company's stock, which shows how thin the market's patience has grown for foundry-capacity headlines.
Zhongji Innolight, the dominant Chinese maker of AI-datacenter optical transceivers, began book-building for an $8B Hong Kong listing on July 20, the largest HK IPO in roughly seven years, with BlackRock, Temasek, and CPPIB among cornerstone investors already committed. Western institutional capital lining up behind a transceiver maker signals the optical-interconnect bottleneck is now investable at index scale, not just through niche names like Coherent or Lumentum.
Watch This Week
Wednesday, July 22
Alphabet and Tesla report Q2 earnings after close, the first hyperscaler read this season on whether AI infrastructure spending is holding. AMD's Advancing AI event opens in San Francisco with the commercial launch of Zen 6 "Venice" EPYC CPUs and expected detail on the new Anthropic supply agreement.
Thursday, July 23
Intel reports Q2 earnings after close; options markets are pricing a 13–14% move, with 18A foundry progress the key line item.
Wednesday, July 29
Microsoft and Meta both report Q2 earnings the same day; combined capex guidance from two of the four hyperscalers is the week's largest datapoint for the infrastructure buildout narrative.