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Jul 28, 12:25
Google TPU surge and Meta capacity push fuel CSP capex wave
AI demand and whether the boom is heading into a bubble are back in focus, and capital expenditure by cloud service providers (CSPs) and their supply chains is emerging as a key gauge. Google has already said it will raise capex again in 2027, and industry watchers expect AWS and Microsoft to follow, keeping AI infrastructure momentum strong with more capital injections.
Nvidia has made a strategic investment in Safe Superintelligence Inc. and announced a long-term partnership with the secretive AI lab founded by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, giving SSI access to Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin systems and expanding its computing capacity by an order of magnitude.
LG Electronics said on July 27 that its 600kW coolant distribution unit has received Nvidia certification after passing more than 100 standardized AI factory technology validations. The company also said it recently secured cooling projects for a North America hyperscale cloud service provider and the Sinar Mas data center in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Smart glasses are emerging as a major next-generation consumer device as breakthroughs in generative AI and large language models (LLMs) reshape the wearable market. Once constrained by bulky designs and limited use cases, smart glasses are now drawing investment from global tech giants and hardware startups alike, while also redrawing the supply chain.

Anthropic has asked SK Hynix to help supply chips for its own in-house AI chip production, SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won said. He made the remarks at a recent AI summit in San Francisco, where he also disclosed that South Korea's three new investment plans in semiconductor expansion, AI data centers and physical AI would total more than US$3 trillion.

More than 40 technology companies launched the Open Secure AI Alliance on Sunday, a new initiative to develop open-source tools and techniques for AI-powered cybersecurity defense, while pushing back against calls to restrict access to open AI models.

Apple and Micron are fighting over whether the smartphone maker can buy memory chips from Chinese manufacturer ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) for non-US devices, a move opposed by Micron. Both companies are lobbying the administration of US President Donald Trump, which could force him to make an uncomfortable choice between his goals of cheaper prices or domestic chip production.

Moonshot AI officially released the model weights for its Kimi K3 large language model on July 27, allowing developers to download, fine-tune, and deploy it.

Nvidia is pushing into the server CPU market with its Vera chip as AI infrastructure competition enters a new phase, seeking to evolve from a chip supplier into a full AI computing systems provider. But the company still needs cloud service providers (CSPs) to embrace the platform at scale if it wants to challenge Intel and AMD in servers.
The push toward deeper sovereign control over the critical hardware stack underpinning AI models is gaining traction following news of Anthropic's outreach to SK hynix for supplies related to producing its own chips, spanning early design planning and key component procurement.
Inner Mongolia HyperStrong Technology is a major production subsidiary established by Beijing HyperStrong Technology in Baotou, Inner Mongolia. Its development offers a useful case study as competition intensifies among China's battery energy storage system integrators.
Young Optics said second-quarter revenue rose sequentially, but gross margin narrowed as newer products stayed in early production and the product mix shifted. The company expects shipments to remain broadly stable in the third quarter, even as it deepens its presence in optical communications, automotive optics, and AR glasses components.