America's AI chip wall now has a gate
Washington spent years blocking Nvidia's best AI chips from China. It is now licensing selected Chinese buyers for the H200 — not the end of export controls, but a different idea of what they're for.
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Compute & Energy
Why geothermal power still begins with a very expensive hole
In Lanzarote, the residual heat of an eighteenth-century eruption cooks lunch for tourists. A few hundred kilometres west, an Icelandic-led consortium has begun drilling beneath Tenerife to find out whether the same kind of heat can carry an island's electricity system — with roughly half the exploration bill paid by the public.
Washington opens the chip taps for the Gulf
The US has formally approved the export of up to 35,000 advanced Nvidia chips to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, testing where the chip curtain actually ends.
What actually links data centres to the wildfires
As France carries out what its interior minister calls the country's largest peacetime evacuation, and Spain fights its biggest recorded fire, the AI buildout is being blamed for fires it did not start. There is a more serious question underneath, and it concerns the electricity grid rather than the water main.
A data centre promised no river water, then sued for some
An Imperial Valley AI data centre that pledged never to touch the Colorado River is now suing for 260 million gallons of it a year — and the county has since imposed a moratorium in response.
The internet's single points of failure keep introducing themselves
A routine database change at Cloudflare took down a chunk of the web for hours, exposing how few firms the internet now depends on.
Quantum computing's headline results keep failing to replicate
A new replication effort found several celebrated quantum computing results dissolve into simpler explanations once retested.
FERC lets AI data centers plug straight into power plants
A new US order clears data centers to bypass the grid queue and connect directly to power plants, starting in the country's largest market.
The Nexperia truce that leaves the company in two pieces
The Netherlands and China say the Nexperia dispute is behind them, but the chipmaker itself remains split into rival national halves.
Washington quietly becomes a shareholder in the chips it wants to save
By converting its CHIPS Act grants into an Intel stake, the US government has crossed from subsidizing the chip industry to owning a piece of it.
Washington redraws its chip controls around ownership, not borders
New US guidance extends licensing rules for advanced AI chips to any company with a Chinese parent, wherever it happens to sit.
The cloud has coordinates
For twenty years the cloud sold itself as placeless — an abstraction you rented by the hour. Then Iranian drones hit three Amazon datacenters in the Gulf, and the world's most important metaphor acquired a street address.
Compute as currency
Chips, models and cloud capacity are no longer ordinary exports but instruments of statecraft—granted to allies, withheld from rivals, traded for investment and alignment. Three developments in recent weeks suggest the transactional era has arrived; the harder question is how long such leverage survives being used.
AI's money is starting to move in circles
A handful of firms are financing each other's AI ambitions, and the same dollars increasingly appear to travel a short loop between supplier, customer and investor.
The next AI fight is over the wiring, not the chips
Broadcom's new networking silicon takes aim at the interconnects that quietly anchor Nvidia's grip on the AI data center.
The AI build-out is arriving on your power bill
Data centers are driving grid costs sharply higher, and the largest capacity market in the US is quietly passing the bill to households.