AI Infrastructure
All briefings covering ai infrastructure.
Nscale Acquires Anyscale for $1.65B to Build a Full-Stack AI Hyperscaler
British AI infrastructure company Nscale announced on July 30 that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Anyscale, the commercial steward of the Ray distributed computing framework, for approximately $1.65 billion. The deal vertically integrates compute infrastructure with the software layer that enterprise AI teams use to train and serve large models, creating what Nscale calls a full-stack AI cloud. Anyscale will maintain independent branding and continue serving existing customers without disruption.
Nvidia Backs OpenAI's $500 Billion Ohio AI Campus
Nvidia is in talks to provide a $250 billion financial guarantee so OpenAI can lease a 10-gigawatt AI campus being built by SoftBank in Piketon, Ohio, on the site of a former uranium enrichment plant. A separate deal for Nvidia to finance $350 billion in chip purchases is also under discussion, bringing the potential total commitment to $600 billion. If completed, the deal would be the largest financial guarantee between two private companies in history and would give OpenAI full independence from Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle for AI compute.
AMD Zen 6 Venice: The Chip That Will Reshape Your AI Costs
AMD launched EPYC Venice today, the world's first server processor built on TSMC's 2nm process, at its Advancing AI 2026 conference in San Francisco. The chip delivers up to 256 cores and claims a 70% performance improvement over its predecessor, with 1.7 times faster AI inference throughput. Operators who understand this infrastructure shift can plan smarter AI investments over the next 12 to 24 months.
EU Forces Google to Open Android to Rival AI Assistants
The European Commission has issued binding orders under the Digital Markets Act requiring Google to give rival AI assistants, including Claude and ChatGPT, equal system-level access to Android devices previously reserved for Gemini. Google must also begin sharing its search data with competing AI services by early 2027.
MCP Goes Stateless: What the July 28 Spec Means for Your AI Agents
The Model Context Protocol's largest revision since launch ships on July 28, 2026, replacing stateful sessions with a clean stateless architecture and introducing MCP Apps, a formal Tasks extension, and six OAuth/OIDC security hardening changes. Beta SDKs are live now in Python, TypeScript, Go, and C#. Organisations running AI agents on HTTP infrastructure will benefit from simpler deployments, while security teams gain formal alignment with enterprise authentication standards.
Together AI Raises $800M to Make Open-Source AI Production-Ready
Together AI closed an $800 million Series C on 1 July 2026, pushing its valuation to $8.3 billion and cementing its position as the leading platform for running open-source AI models at scale. The round was led by Aramco Ventures with participation from Nvidia, Vista Equity, General Catalyst, and SentinelOne. The raise arrives as open-source AI adoption triples on Together's platform, driven by costs that run 60 to 90 percent below closed models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
Databricks Launches Unity AI Gateway to Govern Every AI Agent You Run
At the Data + AI Summit 2026 in San Francisco, Databricks announced Unity AI Gateway, a unified governance layer that covers every AI asset an enterprise runs whether hosted on Databricks or externally. The platform introduces hard spend caps, real-time content filtering, unified agent tracing across models and MCP servers, and smart routing, giving operators a single place to see and control their entire AI estate. Simultaneously, Databricks unveiled Agent Bricks, its fully featured developer platform for building and operating agents in production.
NVIDIA Releases Open Multimodal AI Agent That Sees, Hears and Reads
NVIDIA launched Nemotron 3 Nano Omni on June 16, 2026, an open-weight multimodal model that combines vision, audio, and language understanding in a single AI agent deployable on local hardware or cloud infrastructure. The model activates just 3 billion of its 30 billion parameters per inference, delivering nine times the throughput efficiency of comparable open multimodal models. Businesses can now deploy a single AI agent that reads documents, transcribes audio, and analyses video without routing data through external cloud providers.
China Plans $295B AI Data Centre Buildout on Domestic Chips
China's National Development and Reform Commission is drafting a blueprint to spend approximately $295 billion over five years on a nationwide network of AI data centres. State-owned carriers China Mobile and China Telecom will operate the infrastructure, with a target of sourcing at least 80 per cent of AI chips and technology from domestic suppliers including Huawei, effectively excluding Nvidia and AMD. The plan signals the formal bifurcation of the global AI computing stack into two separate ecosystems.
MCP Hits 97 Million Installs and Becomes the AI Standard
The Model Context Protocol reached 97 million installs in March 2026, with every major AI provider now shipping MCP-compatible tooling. MCP has become the foundational standard for connecting AI agents to external tools, databases, and APIs. Operators building AI workflows on proprietary integration approaches are creating technical debt that will be expensive to unwind.
Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite Makes Powerful AI 8x Cheaper to Run
Google launched Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite on 3 March 2026, pricing it at $0.25 per million input tokens, one-eighth the cost of Gemini 3.1 Pro. The model is 2.5 times faster than its predecessor and outperforms rival efficiency models from OpenAI and Anthropic across most benchmarks. For operators building or buying AI-powered tools, the cost of running capable AI at scale has dropped significantly.
Cisco and NVIDIA Bring Secure AI to the Enterprise Edge
Cisco announced a major expansion of its Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA at GTC 2026 on 17 March, extending AI deployment capabilities from central data centres to edge locations including warehouses, hospitals, and vehicles. The platform compresses enterprise AI deployment timelines from months to weeks, with zero-trust security and agent-level guardrails built in from the start. AT&T is the first service provider to bring these capabilities to market.
NVIDIA GTC 2026: NemoClaw Brings Enterprise AI Agents to Every Business
NVIDIA launched NemoClaw at GTC 2026 today, an open-source platform that lets businesses deploy AI agents without proprietary lock-in. Paired with the Vera Rubin chip platform, which delivers up to 10 times cheaper AI inference than its predecessor, NVIDIA has made a clear push to become the foundational layer for the agentic AI era. For operators, this means the infrastructure for autonomous AI workflows is becoming faster, cheaper, and more accessible.