Nvidia and OpenAI have announced a new strategic AI partnership, with Nvidia planning up to $100 billion in unspecified investments in the AI unicorn, outlined in a Monday press release. The pair has signed a letter of intent to deploy 10 gigawatts worth of Nvidia systems to power the next generation of OpenAI models, with the first gigawatt slated for the second half of 2026. As was the case with OpenAI's $300 billion deal with Oracle, the move is likely to lessen its reliance on Microsoft as its primary investor and cloud partner throughout the years.
According to a recent article by the Financial Times, China has begun construction of a $37 billion project to build the "Stargate of China" in the Wuhu municipality, The plan looks to convert farmland on a 760-acre island into a data center for Huawei, China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom, consolidating dispersed infrastructure into a unified network with the help of Huawei's UB-Mesh for faster AI inference in nearby major cities. With China lessening its reliance on foreign hardware and chips as of late, a Stargate of its own, even if not as grand in scale as OpenAI's, could help it catch up with the US.
Meta's Facebook Dating is receiving a small set of new AI features as it looks to address "swipe fatigue" in the online dating scene, as outlined in a recent blog post. The update includes an AI dating assistant that gives user-specific feedback on a person's dating journey and also allows them to find matches with prompts like "find me a Brooklyn girl in tech." Meanwhile, Meta's opt-out "Meet Cute" feature lets users skip the swipe process entirely by automatically matching them with someone using a "personalized" algorithm once a week, for starters at least.
Huawei has announced that it has co-developed a new variant of DeepSeek's R1 model, one designed to block politically sensitive content, boasting a near-100% success rate in its mission. The model, DeepSeek-R1-Safe, was trained on 1,000 Ascend AI chips with Zhejiang University, the alma mater of DeepSeek's founder, even though the startup itself was not involved. Despite the numbers, however, Huawei did mention that the model's success rate dropped to as low as 40% under disguised prompts, yet still achieved an 83% overall defense rate, with little to no loss in actual performance.
On Monday, Nvidia and Abu Dhabi's Technology Innovation Institute (TII) revealed that they are opening a joint research lab in the UAE that will focus on next-generation AI models and robotics. The hub is the first Nvidia AI Technology Center in the Middle East, and will integrate the chip leader's computing power and AI models with TII's research in robotics. TII will also be using the newly released Jetson Thor chip, Nvidia's prime offering for robotics work, as the UAE races to become a major player in the AI space.
In an effort to catch up with Qualcomm, Taiwanese semiconductor firm MediaTek has launched its latest processor, the Dimensity 9500, just days ahead of Xiaomi's next handset release powered by Snapdragon. The processor, built using TSMC's 3nm process, comes with a new ninth-gen neural processing unit (NPU) for even better handling of AI tasks as well as running small, on-device AI models, along with other hardware upgrades. The Dimensity 9500 is expected to feature in upcoming premium phones as early as Q4 2025.
