Tech

The AI race has a new front, and it’s not about who builds the smartest model. It’s about who controls the pipes. Meta just signed a $27 billion, five-year infrastructure deal with Nebius Group — a company that, two years ago, was busy shedding its identity as Yandex’s international arm. The deal gives Meta priority access to purpose-built GPU clusters running Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin chips. And it tells us something crucial about where the AI industry is actually heading. ...

Jensen Huang walked into a packed San Jose hockey arena, leather jacket and all, and casually doubled NVIDIA’s AI revenue forecast to $1 trillion through 2027. Then he announced chips purpose-built for AI agents, a partnership with a former competitor, Disney robots, self-driving car deals, and — because apparently Earth isn’t big enough — data centers in space. GTC 2026 wasn’t a product launch. It was a declaration of what comes next. ...

There’s a moment in every tech rivalry when the incumbent realizes it’s no longer the insurgent. For OpenAI, that moment arrived this week — loudly. The Wall Street Journal reports that OpenAI’s top executives are finalizing what amounts to a corporate identity crisis: a major strategic pivot away from experimental moonshots and toward coding tools and enterprise customers. The company that once ran itself like a portfolio of startups is in full consolidation mode. ...

Everyone’s talking about Nvidia’s new chips. But there’s a quieter, arguably more important war happening underneath all the GTC 2026 keynote spectacle — and it’s being fought by two Korean companies most people can’t tell apart. Samsung Electronics and SK hynix are locked in an increasingly fierce battle to supply the memory chips that make AI possible. Without high-bandwidth memory (HBM), Nvidia’s fancy GPUs are just expensive paperweights. And at GTC 2026 this week, both companies showed up swinging. ...

The AI revolution has a landlord problem. It needs staggering amounts of power, water, and real estate — and the communities being asked to supply it are increasingly slamming the door. 300 Bills and Counting State lawmakers have proposed more than 300 bills in 2026 alone targeting data center construction and energy consumption. That’s not a slow regulatory awakening. That’s a stampede. The proposals span the political spectrum: construction moratoriums in New York, Maine, Vermont, Oklahoma, and Georgia. Virginia is weighing whether to scrap $1.6 billion in annual tax breaks. Democratic legislators in blue states and Republican legislators in red ones are pushing essentially the same restrictions — a genuinely rare phenomenon in 2026 American politics. ...

The most impressive AI video generator on the planet just got grounded — not by a technical failure, but by a wall of lawyers. ByteDance has officially suspended the global launch of Seedance 2.0, the AI video model that went viral earlier this year for producing disturbingly realistic clips. The reason? A coordinated legal blitz from Disney, Netflix, and Paramount that makes it crystal clear: Hollywood isn’t going to let its intellectual property become free training data. ...

Here’s a number that should stop you cold: Meta is planning to fire roughly 16,000 people — 20% of its entire workforce — while simultaneously doubling its AI spending to $135 billion in 2026. Fire the people. Fund the machines. It’s the most honest statement Big Tech has made about where things are going. The Layoffs Aren’t About Survival This isn’t 2022’s post-pandemic correction. Meta’s advertising business is still a cash machine. These cuts are proactive. The company isn’t trimming because it’s hurting — it’s reallocating capital from human labor to compute infrastructure. ...

Thirty thousand people just descended on San Jose for what might be the most important tech keynote of 2026. NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference kicks off today, and Jensen Huang has promised to “surprise the world.” He’s not bluffing. The Training Era Is Over. Welcome to Inference. For three years, the AI hardware playbook was brain-dead simple: buy GPUs, train bigger models, repeat. NVIDIA rode that formula to a $4.4 trillion market cap — the most valuable public company on Earth. ...

In a week dominated by headlines about Meta axing 16,000 workers and Tesla building AI chip factories, a story broke at SXSW 2026 that actually made you feel something. ElevenLabs — the $11 billion AI voice startup — announced “1 Million Voices,” a $1 billion in-kind commitment to give free, lifetime voice restoration to one million people who’ve permanently lost the ability to speak. And it arrived wrapped in the kind of story no press release could manufacture. ...

Silicon Valley has a new business model: fire humans, hire GPUs. Meta is planning to cut roughly 20% of its workforce — about 16,000 people — to offset the staggering cost of its AI infrastructure ambitions. Reuters broke the story on March 14, citing sources who say top executives have already told senior leaders to start identifying where the axe falls. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone called it “speculative reporting about theoretical approaches.” Translation: we’re not announcing it yet. ...