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🗞️ In this edition
🚪 Nvidia Cut China Off From The World's Data Centres
Sponsored: TigerData
Beijing Is Writing The Rules For Rogue AI
🔌 MCP CORNER Three servers worth wiring up this week.
📢 What else is happening
Nvidia has told the companies that rent out its chips who they are allowed to rent them to.
Beijing is drafting safety rules for AI that acts on its own.
And the biggest deal in chips this year is not about chips.
Keep reading.
Source: The Standard
WHAT HAPPENED
Nvidia has told the cloud companies that buy its chips that at least 51% of the services they sell have to go to customers outside China. The instruction was passed on verbally, through sales and regional teams, with nothing issued in writing. The Financial Times reported it first, citing people with knowledge of the matter, and Reuters said it could not immediately verify the account. Until now Nvidia set no conditions at all on who its cloud partners sold to.
WHY IT MATTERS
Export controls stop at a border, and renting computing power from a data centre in another country has been the way around them. A revenue condition inside a supply agreement reaches where a customs form cannot, because it follows the chip instead of the shipment. It also makes the company in the middle responsible for vetting its own customers, which is a job nobody in that business signed up for.
OUR TAKE
The obvious read is that Nvidia is getting out ahead of Washington. We think it is protecting its own order book, and the giveaway is that none of this was put in writing. A rule you can enforce by phone call is a rule you can quietly soften by phone call, and a written policy would have invited a regulator to hold the company to it.
Watch the hosts in Southeast Asia that built their business on Chinese demand. If one of them says publicly that it is reshaping its customer base before the year ends, the rule has teeth. If they all stay quiet and keep signing, this was a message meant for Washington rather than for them.
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Source: The Star
The agency doing it is the one that writes the five-year plans.
China's state economic planner says it will set safety standards covering the whole life of an AI system, from the data and computing power behind it to the way it is deployed, and will name the uses that get rules of their own. Developers will have to manage risk and disclose incidents and weaknesses they find, with a transition period and official sandboxes to try things in first. Bloomberg reported the Beijing briefing, where an official also called on other countries to work together on safety. The plan names some of the country's best-known model builders.
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Marvell Just Made The Biggest Bet In Chips: It agreed to buy an optical components maker in an all stock deal worth about $115 billion, and its own shares fell on the day it said so.
Somebody Else Is Running Up Your AI Bill: Google's threat researchers describe attackers who steal cloud keys, point them at a company's own models, and leave a bill that nobody notices for hours.
Gartner Says The Cheap Models Can Do The Work: Its analysts put a figure on how much of an agent's routine work open weight models handle at the same quality, and on what that does to the invoice.
SUSE Is Cutting One In Ten Jobs: The Linux company's chief executive told staff that automation has left some roles greatly diminished, and that the people affected would hear within days.
Palantir's Companies Outspent Its Governments: For the first time in the company's history its American business customers paid it more in a quarter than the American government did.
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Miros: Lets shoppers find the thing they can picture but cannot name.
Three stories about somebody else deciding what you are allowed to run. Nvidia is writing it into supply contracts, Beijing is writing it into standards, and Marvell is buying the part of the stack almost nobody was watching. None of today's news is a product announcement, and all of it changes what you can build on next year.
Read the contract, not the launch post.
When you do click a story in here, what makes you?
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