AI Infrastructure

There’s a new unicorn in AI — and it’s literally in orbit. Starcloud, a Redmond-based startup building solar-powered data centers in space, just announced a $170 million raise at a $1.1 billion valuation. Led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures, the round brings total funding to $200 million and launches what might be the most audacious infrastructure play in AI history. But Starcloud isn’t alone up there. SpaceX has filed FCC plans for up to one million orbital data center satellites. Blue Origin is circling the same idea. Nvidia is providing the chips. And here’s the kicker — Starcloud already has an H100 GPU running Google’s Gemma model in orbit right now. ...

A single research paper from Google just wiped billions off memory chip stocks across three continents. No earnings miss. No supply chain disruption. Just math. The algorithm is called TurboQuant. If it delivers on its promises, it rewrites the economics of running every major AI model on the planet. We’re talking 6x less memory, 8x faster inference, and zero accuracy loss. The Bottleneck Everyone Ignored Every AI conversation eats memory. When you chat with an AI, the model stores your context in a key-value (KV) cache — its working memory. Longer conversations mean bigger caches, which means more expensive GPU memory consumed. ...

Remember Pied Piper from HBO’s Silicon Valley? The fictional startup that built a compression algorithm so good it basically broke the internet? Google just built the real thing. Except instead of compressing video files, it’s compressing AI’s brain. On Tuesday, Google Research unveiled TurboQuant, a compression algorithm that reduces the memory footprint of large language models by at least 6x while delivering up to 8x faster performance on Nvidia H100 GPUs. The kicker: zero accuracy loss. ...

Jensen Huang just told the world Nvidia expects $1 trillion in revenue by 2027. That’s double last year’s forecast. But the real story from GTC 2026 isn’t the number — it’s the machine that’s supposed to earn it. Vera Rubin Isn’t a Chip. It’s an Ecosystem. Stop thinking about Nvidia as a GPU company. The star of this year’s GTC is the Vera Rubin platform — a five-rack-scale AI supercomputer built from seven different chips, each purpose-designed for a specific slice of the AI workload. ...

The lights shooting into the Austin sky on Saturday night weren’t aliens. They were Elon Musk doing what Elon Musk does best — staging an event so audacious that you can’t look away, even if you’re not sure you believe a word of it. Inside the defunct Seaholm Power Plant in downtown Austin on March 21, Musk officially launched Terafab — a joint venture between Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI to build what he calls “the most epic chip-building exercise in history by far.” The price tag: an estimated $20–25 billion. The goal: producing one terawatt of computing power per year, with 80% of it destined for space. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Wall Street doesn’t sound alarms. Banks prefer “cautiously optimistic” and “we see tailwinds.” So when Morgan Stanley publishes a report essentially saying a massive AI breakthrough is coming in months and the world isn’t ready, pay attention. Then Reuters dropped Thursday’s bombshell: Meta is planning layoffs affecting 20% or more of its workforce — roughly 15,000 people — to offset staggering AI infrastructure costs. These aren’t separate stories. One is the prediction. The other is the proof. ...

NVIDIA just wrote another $2 billion check. This time it’s going to Nebius Group, a Dutch-headquartered AI cloud company that crawled out of the wreckage of Russia’s Yandex. Nebius stock popped 16% on the news. And somewhere, a critic muttered something about circular investments. They’re not wrong. But the story is more interesting than that. What Is Nebius? Nebius isn’t your typical cloud startup. After Yandex split its international operations amid geopolitical fallout, Nebius rebranded, relocated to Amsterdam, and went all-in on AI-specific cloud infrastructure. No general-purpose computing. No email hosting. Every server optimized for one thing: running AI workloads. ...

When Mira Murati quietly left OpenAI in late 2024, the AI world held its breath. Now we know what she’s been building — and Nvidia just wrote a very large check to prove it matters. On Tuesday, Nvidia and Thinking Machines Lab announced a multiyear strategic partnership: a “significant investment” from Nvidia plus a commitment to deploy at least one gigawatt of next-gen Vera Rubin systems starting early 2027. Industry estimates peg the infrastructure cost at roughly $50 billion. ...