The Wire · Infrastructure
Live coverage of the compute layer — GPUs, data centers, power deals, interconnects, and the economics that decide what every builder pays to run a model.
OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna API prices by 80% to $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output, while Terra fell 20% to $2 and $12. Fast mode gives Sol up to 2.5 times Standard speed at twice the price. OpenAI says Sol-assisted kernel work lowered serving cost by 20% and improved token-generation efficiency by more than 15%, while Luna delivers year-old frontier performance at roughly six cents per task-dollar and nearly nine times the speed. The edition connects cheaper models to Amazon's reported $1.8m, 860%-over-budget coding task, Gemini Robotics 2 whole-body control, Nscale's Anyscale acquisition and Okta's roughly $200m Permiso deal.
AMD has posted strong second quarter results and forecast even better future financials once its Helios rack systems and Instinct MI400-series GPUs reach buyers. “In data center AI, the growing number and scale of Helios and MI450-series deployments position the [datacenter] business for significant growth in the second half of the year, with growth accelerating in 2027,” CEO Lisa Su told investors on Tuesday during the chip design company's Q2 earnings call. “We now expect data center segment revenue to more than double year over year in 2027,” she added. Yet, despite reporting Q2 profits surging 163 percent year-over-year on revenues of $11.5 billion, and several multi-gigawatts worth of Helios commitments from the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta in the bag, Wall Street isn’t buying it. The company's share plunged 10.5 percent after its results announcement, before settling 8.7 percent below opening price at the time of publication. The apparent cause for concern: AMD's growing exposure to the AI bubble. Much of the company's growth potential across both CPUs and GPUs is tied to AI adoption by a handful of companies that are yet to prove they can operate profitably. On Tuesday's earnings call, Su attempted to assuage investor fears, but in the same breath she said the quiet part out loud. “When we talked about the large frontier-model companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, they will be consuming through a number of CSPs,” Su said. “There are additional customers or lots of customers who are interested in Helios at, let's call it, a more regular scale than gigawatt scale.” In other words, while AMD can sell plenty of GPUs, most are sold to a handful of customers. And while other entities have AMD on their shopping lists, they don't buy in bulk. Microsoft, another flagship customer for AMD's latest generation of AI picks and shoves, serves both OpenAI and Anthropic, while Meta is reportedly looking to enter the GPU cloud biz itself. Despite this, AMD remains optim
Read full story →AMD’s Q2 2026 financial results show record revenue across the business, but gaming is contributing less and less to that overall pie. Overall, AMD’s Q2 revenue was $11.5 billion, up 50% year-over-year and up 13% quarter-over-quarter. In AMD’s gaming segment, however, it saw $779 million in revenue, down 31% YoY due to “lower semi-custom revenue,” according to AMD’s press release. Go deeper with TH Premium: CPU (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) CPU scaling with DLSS Ryzen to the top: How AMD innovated in the gaming CPU market How ARM is working its way into PCs AMD CES 2026 gaming trends press Q&A roundtable transcript That’s not a new story, as AMD has continually pointed to the late stage of the console lifecycle as the driving force behind declining gaming revenue. CEO Lisa Su, however, also says revenue is declining due to rising component costs. “Gaming graphics revenue also declined year-over-year as higher industry-wide component costs contributed to higher graphics card prices and weighed on overall demand,” Su said. Earlier this year, AMD said that it expected a 20% decline in gaming revenue in the second half of the year, which is reaffirmed in its Q2 2026 earnings call. “[We expect] a modest decline in our client gaming segment, with slight growth in client offset by strong double-digit decline in gaming,” said AMD's Jean Hu, executive vice president and Chief Financial Officer. Despite these declines, Su says she's 'optimistic' about the future of AMD's client CPU business, particularly when it comes to AI PCs. "I think AI PCs will become more important as it relates to our client business in 2026. I think our first half performance has been very strong, and although we are expecting that the market will decline in the second half, the market's actually held up, you know, better than you know most people would have thought," said Su. (Image credit: AMD) Despite a large decline in gaming revenue, AMD’s overall client business (including gaming) brought in $3
Read full story →Driven by demand for AI capacity, AMD's data center revenue more than doubled year-over-year in its latest earnings report, reaching $6.7 billion. That's up from $5.8 billion in Q1, and jumping 107 percent from the $3.2 billion it reported for the same period a year ago. During Tuesday's earnings call, AMD CEO Lisa Su said […]
Read full story →Nowhere is the US data center boom bigger than in Texas. But less than a year after declaring Texas the “epicenter of AI development,” Governor Greg Abbott has declared a moratorium on all new power grid connections for data centers—at least until developers provide more information about their projects’ potential impacts on the grid and communities. The Republican governor directed regulators in an August 3 announcement at the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the grid operators at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to perform a “comprehensive verification and audit of all data centers advancing through ERCOT’s interconnection process.” As an independent system operator, ERCOT oversees a power grid that operates separately from the rest of the United States and provides services to most of Texas. Texas has aggressively courted data center development with its availability of cheap land and relatively abundant energy resources, along with offering state incentives, like tax breaks and fewer regulations. That puts the state on track to surpass Virginia in becoming the largest US data center market . Read full article Comments
Anthropic has been on a cloud partnership spree in recent months, and its latest move is reportedly a $10 billion deal with AI cloud startup Volta.
The week-old Open Secure AI Alliance, spearheaded by Nvidia and grown to over 120 companies, already has proposals out for defending against AI agents.
On Wednesday morning, Ted Cruz’s Senate Commerce Committee will convene on five bills aimed at age verification and “child safety.” The bills each have their own issues when it comes to privacy, data collection, parental rights, and free speech. But one bill, the partisan Republican SCREEN Act, is a Christian nationalist nightmare. Utah Senator Mike Lee introduced the Shielding Children's Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net (SCREEN) Act in February 2025, alongside exclusively Republican cosponsors and supporters Senators John Curtis, Jim Banks, and Representative Mary Miller. The SCREEN Act would require every website that includes even one piece of what the legislation describes as “harmful to minors” to verify visitors’ ages. It defines “harmful to minors” as content that “depicts, describes, or represents, in a patently offensive way with respect to what is suitable for minors, an actual or simulated sexual act or sexual contact, actual or simulated normal or perverted sexual acts, or lewd exhibition of the genitals;” is “obscene” or “child pornography;” or “appeals to the prurient interest in nudity, sex, or excretion.” Unlike the many laws now in place around the U.S. that apply to sites made up of at least one third adult content, like porn sites and some social media platforms, SCREEN would place the burden and risk of verifying users’ ages to every website on the internet that falls under the law, which would be most sites with user-generated content and also mainstream entertainment platforms like Netflix. It also attacks virtual private networks (VPNs) by requiring sites to verify based on IP addresses; many people in states that have age verification laws in place use VPNs to get around submitting sensitive personal data like ID and biometrics to a smattering of third-party websites in use today. Critics say the SCREEN Act would be a privacy and free speech disaster. And the agenda of its sponsors is clear: “Internet pornography has infected our cu
As if the graphics card market was not already in a bad state, things are about to get even worse for consumers. The prices for the best graphics cards seems likely to continue to rise, as news of a 20% to 40% increase is now coming out of Japan. CFD Sales Inc., a well-known Japanese technology supplier and distributor, has confirmed these price adjustments for Gigabyte graphics cards. However, given the current times that we live in, the price hikes will likely expand to other brands and make their way to the U.S. market sooner or later. Go deeper with TH Premium: GPUs (Image credit: Noctua) Desktop Roadmap Enterprise Roadmap Rubin in-depth The Stout Owl: The ultimate Noctua G2 PC The revision notice about the Gigabyte graphics card price increases from CFD Sales Inc. reads: "Thank you for your continued support. This is Ogaki from CFD. Thank you for your continued use of CFD-BIZ.com. Due to a price revision by the manufacturer, we will be implementing a price revision (increase) for GIGABYTE VGA products, effective for orders placed from August 1, 2026. The affected products will vary, but we anticipate price revisions of approximately 120% to 140% [editor's note: likely 1.2x or 1.4x] compared to current prices. We sincerely apologize for this sudden announcement, and we appreciate your understanding." There were already early signs that another significant price hike was looming on the horizon. Over the past several weeks, graphics card prices have climbed sharply across Asia in countries like China and South Korea . AI is still gobbling up all the supply for memory chips, and chipmakers are struggling to keep up with that demand. The unprecedented demand for and shift toward AI hardware has substantially impacted the production cost of mainstream graphics cards, and as always, the repercussions pass down to the consumer. One U.S. retailer confirmed to Tom's Hardwar e that it has not received any notice about price adjustments for graphics cards. However, it has
If you want to bypass AI guardrails designed to stop models from assisting with cyberattacks, you often just have to ask the right way, according to researchers from Cisco Talos. Simply claiming you own the servers you're targeting or that you're taking part in a capture-the-flag or bug bounty exercise was often enough to persuade models to cooperate. Talos researchers have been poring over prompt logs and artifacts recovered from threat-actor endpoints running tools such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and Gemini to learn how suspected threat actors are abusing LLMs. The big takeaway from that "significant corpus," the researchers said in their report, is that existing guardrails offer little resistance to operators willing to reframe their requests. “We did not encounter any sophisticated encoding or techniques designed to trick the models,” Talos explained. “Most of the time it was a simple ‘I'm allowed to do this,’ and the model complied.” When guardrails did manage to get between criminals and their prizes, the researchers added, “they accomplished little.” The bulk of the report consists of examples of threat actors trying, and often succeeding, to coax AI models into assisting with malicious activity. On the "guardrails doing little" side, Talos documented numerous examples, few of which relied on particularly sophisticated techniques. Most common in the list of easy-to-accomplish guardrail hops was simply claiming ownership of equipment or infrastructure that an attacker wanted to exploit. In many cases, simply telling the AI that a target belonged to the attacker was enough, with no need to provide actual evidence of the claim. Telling an AI model that what it was being asked to do was part of a capture-the-flag or bug bounty exercise also seemed to be a common tactic. That, the researchers explained, commonly freed chatbots from their ethical constraints, allowing them to hunt for vulnerabilities and then exploit them in target systems, again without any ne
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is working on a ruling that will ban the import of Chinese-made optical transceivers, which are widely used in data centers to convert electrical impulse data into light and vice versa. Sources told Reuters that the agency wants to publish the ruling so that it would take effect before the end of the year. Go deeper with TH Premium: AI and data centers (Image credit: Microsoft) Photonics and high-speed data movement is the next big AI bottleneck The data center cooling state of play Massive AI data center buildouts are squeezing energy supplies Ultra Ethernet: The data center interconnection of tomorrow "Transceivers definitely pose a risk," AI policy expert Divyansh Kaushik of advisory firm Beacon Global Strategies told the publication. "As the data center buildout scales up, you want to make sure the data center supply chain is secure from the get-go.” The administration fears that these components could be used to steal data, install malware, or disrupt data center operations in the U.S. These optical transceivers are crucial for data centers as they require less electrical energy than traditional copper-based wiring and are also much faster. There are several U.S.-based manufacturers of these components, like Lumentum, Coherent, and Apple Optoelectronics, but Reuters said that they do not have the scale and capacity of leading company Innolight, which has cornered 27% of the global market. This isn’t the first industry-wide ban that the FCC has imposed in recent months. While the U.S. has banned Huawei products from the country since 2019, it recently enforced several other bans that have primarily affected major Chinese or China-connected companies. This includes the ban on foreign-made drones , applied in December 2025, foreign-manufactured routers , enacted last April, and advanced robotic devices that weigh over 4.4 pounds and have a 200-kbps connection, which was announced just last month. The first ban pri
<p data-block-key="hoi0o">All charged with grand larceny</p>
<p data-block-key="telw2">Makes up a significant proportion of Moonshot's overall compute capacity for Kimi models</p>
Tech companies and developers have been scouring the U.S. for places to build data centers, and they’ve been drawn to Texas’ loose regulations and seemingly abundant power supply. But even Texas can be pushed to the brink.
<p data-block-key="aqje9">Data center expected to have a total eventual capacity of 15MW</p>
Texas announced new a audit on data centers that could slow approval for new facilities seeking to connect to the state energy grid. Governor Greg Abbott (R) on Monday directed the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to verify and audit new data center proposals, writing that […]
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