☕️ AMD's $1B Supercomputers, Qualcomm's Return to Data Centers & Mercor's Rise to $10B

The US Department of Energy joins up with AMD to power AI-driven research, Qualcomm announces its return to data centers, and Mercor quintuples its value with millions in funding.

Here are our main key takeaways:

Join us at AI Tangle as we untangle this week's happenings in AI!

AMD signs a $1 billion AI partnership with the US Department of Energy to construct two new supercomputers

The US Department of Energy has partnered with AMD as part of a $1 billion initiative to build two new AI-powered supercomputers, Lux and Discovery, to help accelerate breakthroughs in nuclear power, cancer research, fusion energy, and more. Lux, the first supercomputer, will launch within the next six months and be powered by AMD’s MI355X chips, while Discovery, built on AMD’s MI430 chips instead, aims for a 2029 launch. Confirmed by Energy Secretary Chris Wright and AMD CEO Lisa Su, the collaboration also involves HPE, Oracle Cloud, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Qualcomm enters the AI data center industry with its AI200 and AI250 chips

Semiconductor firm Qualcomm is making a surprise entry into the AI data center industry with the announcement of two new AI chips. The chips, dubbed the AI200 and AI250, are set to debut in 2026 and 2027, respectively, with the firm promising “ground-breaking new memory architecture” that “improves memory bandwidth by a factor of 10” to boot. Qualcomm also revealed its first chip customer, Saudi AI company Humain, which plans to deploy 200 megawatts of compute starting next year. The reveal of the two chips marks Qualcomm’s first time stepping into the field since a short-lived stint between 2017 and 2018 with its Centriq line of processors.

Mercor secures $350 million in funding as it surges to a $10 billion valuation

AI startup Mercor has raised another $350 million in funding as the company announced a successful Series C round on Monday, valuing the firm at $10 billion. Despite starting out in early 2023 as an AI-driven hiring platform, Mercor soon pivoted to a service that offered companies curated domain experts for AI model training, from doctors to lawyers.Now, Mercor intends to focus its freshly raised capital on expanding its talent network, providing faster delivery, and improving its matching system. The company saw an additional surge of success following reports of OpenAI and Google DeepMind cutting ties with one of its biggest competitors, Scale AI, around the summer of this year.

xAI launches Grokipedia, Elon Musk’s promised AI-driven rival to Wikipedia

Elon Musk’s promised AI-generated Wikipedia rival has recently gone online with a launch on Monday, developed by his AI startup xAI. Dubbed Grokipedia, Musk claims his encyclopedia will “purge out the (legacy media) propaganda” present in Wikipedia, containing close to 900,000 AI-written entries. However, in his mission to do so, many critics have pointed out Grokipedia’s tendency to reflect Musk’s own political views, including his skepticism of gender transition science and criticism of former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. While Grokipedia did suffer from a brief outage on debut, the v0.1 website is live again and available globally as it continues to expand its portfolio of articles.

Google and NextEra to revive a massive nuclear power plant in Iowa to feed AI’s energy needs

In order to meet AI’s ever-growing demand for energy, Google has partnered up with US electrical giant NextEra Energy to revive Iowa’s sole nuclear power plant, as announced in a joint press release. The Duane Arnold Energy Center closed its doors in 2020 due to high operating costs and public fears as it struggled to compete with natural gas and other renewable sources. However, with nuclear energy making a recent comeback, Google hopes to get the facility operational as early as 2029, with the Central Iowa Power Cooperative agreeing to buy any surplus electricity leftover by Google.

OpenAI could be developing its own generative music tool

A report from The Information alleges that OpenAI is developing a new generative music tool that takes in text and audio prompts. Though details are sparse, sources claim the tool could be used to add music to existing videos or add instruments to a vocal track. One source told The Information that OpenAI is working with students from the Juilliard School to annotate scores as a way to provide training data. It is unclear when OpenAI would launch such a tool or in what form it would debut, be it a standalone app or an integration for ChatGPT or Sora.

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