Just days after China accused Nvidia of breaking antitrust law, the Cybersecurity Administration of China (CAC) has told all domestic companies to stop any testing with and orders of Nvidia's RTX 6000D Pro chip. The order by the CAC, China's internet regulator, extends to Alibaba and ByteDance as well, which have previously shown interest in ordering tens of thousands of the chip. The decision likely comes after Beijing received favorable news following a report by many of its tech leaders on how their semiconductors compare against Nvidia's Chinese-specific chips.
Following their results at the IMO just months ago, OpenAI and Google DeepMind have yet again performed at the "gold-medal level," this time at the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). OpenAI claims its GPT-5 solved all 12 questions of the ICPC World Finals, with GPT-5 completing 11/12 on its first try, while DeepMind entered with Gemini 2.5 Deep Think and solved a problem that none of the 139 human teams could, Problem C. Had they been registered as competitors, OpenAI and DeepMind would have placed 1st and 2nd in the standings, respectively, marking another big step towards AGI.
Microsoft is nearing the end of construction of Fairwater, its $3.3 billion AI data center in Wisconsin that it touts will be the world's most advanced, as announced by Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith. Set to go live in early 2026, the 1.2-million-square-foot facility will host hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GB200 GPUs to train its own and OpenAI's models, with a second $4 billion site in Wisconsin announced on top. To minimize water consumption, Smith says that 90+% of the campus will use closed-loop cooling, while also being mindful not to drive up energy prices for locals by negotiating higher rates for itself.
A variety of US tech giants have recently pledged £31 billion ($39 billion) in investments in the UK's cloud and AI infrastructure sector amid US President Donald Trump's recent state visit. OpenAI led the slew of headlines with Stargate UK in collaboration with Nvidia and Nscale, which will house 31,000 Blackwell GPUs on top of establishing an "AI Growth Zone" in northeast England. Meanwhile, Microsoft committed $30 billion alone to data centers and a supercomputer in London, while others like Nvidia, CoreWeave, Google, and Salesforce added billions more to the total.
Nvidia has become a major shareholder in Intel with a $5 billion bet, roughly translating to a 4% stake in the chip manufacturer at a purchase price of $23.28 per share, pending regulatory approval. The news was announced in a joint press release on Thursday, which will work together to "seamlessly connect" architectures between the two by using Nvidia's NVLink technology - Intel's stock surged and closed 22.8% higher shortly after. The US government itself acquired nearly 10% of Intel in late August of this year in an effort to boost domestic production.
Amazon has debuted an upgraded version of its AI-powered Seller Assistant at its Accelerate conference, an agentic tool that third-party merchants can use to handle routine tasks for them. Built on Amazon Bedrock, the system can now coordinate inventory orders, fix account issues, and even map out proper, in-depth growth strategies. With Amazon boasting 1.3 million sellers already leveraging its AI tools, the company says that the assistant will only continue to help small businesses operate more efficiently at no extra cost.