TL;DR

U.S. lifts Nvidia China chip ban; OpenAI scales back Stargate; Alibaba’s Qwen3-235B tops benchmarks.

Highlights

• U.S. clears Nvidia and AMD to resume H20-class AI chip shipments to China; supply chain remains tight due to TSMC capacity 1.
• SoftBank and OpenAI scale back $500B “Stargate” U.S. data center ambitions to a single Ohio site; OpenAI secures separate $30B/year Oracle cloud deal 2.
• Alibaba launches Qwen3-235B-2507 open-weight LLM, surpassing leading closed models on benchmarks with a 262K-token context window 3.
• UK signs partnership with OpenAI for AI safety research and public sector deployments; aims to boost compute resources 20x in five years 4.
• OpenAI reports ChatGPT now handles 2.5B daily prompts and 500M weekly users, with U.S. accounting for 330M daily requests 5.
• Meta offers AI talent packages up to $1B, including $300M over four years, intensifying hiring competition 10.
• Anthropic seeks funding from UAE and Qatar, citing competitive pressures despite ethical concerns 6.
• Google DeepMind ’s Gemini AI achieves gold-medal score at 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad using new “Deep Think” mode 9.
• Human coder wins AtCoder World Tour Finals over OpenAI ’s model; AI shows strong performance in long-horizon coding tasks 12.
• Nvidia ’s market cap nears $4.2T, surpassing Japan’s MSCI weighting; CEO highlights robotics as next growth area 7.
• Moonshot details Kimi K2 model advances, including MuonClip optimizer and agentic data pipeline, with transformers.js deployment 15.
• Biogen invests $2B to expand North Carolina manufacturing with AI and automation for drug production 14.
• Trump shares AI-generated deepfake video of Obama’s arrest, highlighting ongoing risks of political misuse 13.

Commentary

The U.S. decision to allow Nvidia and AMD to resume AI chip shipments to China provides near-term relief for Chinese AI firms, though manufacturing constraints at TSMC will limit immediate supply 1. This move temporarily stabilizes a critical segment of the global AI hardware market while Chinese players continue to develop domestic alternatives. Nvidia ’s market cap, now larger than Japan’s entire MSCI weighting, underscores how central advanced hardware remains to the sector’s value chain 7.

On the infrastructure front, the downsizing of the SoftBank /OpenAI “Stargate” data center project—now reduced to a single Ohio facility—illustrates the challenges of scaling AI compute through massive capital deployments 2. OpenAI ’s separate $30B/year Oracle cloud deal and the UK’s £1B public investment in AI-ready compute reflect a shift toward diversified, incremental capacity expansion rather than megaprojects 24. The UK-OpenAI partnership also signals growing government involvement in AI safety and public sector adoption 4.

Model innovation remains active: Alibaba ’s Qwen3-235B-2507 sets new open-source LLM benchmarks 3, while DeepMind ’s Gemini demonstrates advanced mathematical reasoning 9. Moonshot’s Kimi K2 report shows progress in agentic data pipelines and deployment accessibility 15. Meanwhile, OpenAI ’s ChatGPT continues rapid user growth, with 2.5B daily prompts and 500M weekly users, intensifying competition with established search and productivity platforms 5.

The AI talent market is heating up, with Meta offering unprecedented compensation to attract top researchers 10, and Anthropic seeking capital from Gulf states to stay competitive, even as it acknowledges ethical tradeoffs 6. Biogen ’s $2B investment in AI-enabled manufacturing and the AtCoder coding contest highlight ongoing integration of AI into both enterprise and research domains 1412. Political misuse of generative AI, as seen in Trump ’s deepfake post, reinforces the urgent need for robust safeguards 13.