TechPulse USA

By Daniel Rao South Korea has spent the past year talking about a sovereign AI factory as if saying the words loudly enough would build it. On 27 October, Naver finally gave the talk a signature. The country's dominant internet company has signed a $9 billion computing-infrastructure contract with Brookfield, turning a July handshake over AI infrastructure into a documented business structure — and, crucially, into the key that may unlock Nvidia's roughly $1 billion equity investment. That distinction matters, and it is the whole story. This is not $9 billion in cash landing in Naver's bank account. It is not a finished data centre, and it is certainly not proof that anyone will pay to use the thing once it is built. What Naver announced, through a corrected disclosure on its "Future Business and Management Plans", is that the infrastructure for its AI factory will be held in a company tentatively called Asset Co., formed by an investment vehicle of the Brookfi...

Jensen Huang walked out of a Scottish castle this week carrying two messages for anyone invested in the AI trade. First: the demand wave behind Nvidia's chips is far from over — he expects the company to sell roughly twice as many chips next year as it is selling today. Second, and pointedly: "If something is dangerous, hold it back." The twin pronouncements came as Huang was received by King Charles at Dumfries House in Scotland, where Britain's monarch convened two days of talks with the leaders of Nvidia, OpenAI, Microsoft and Google. And they arrived alongside a blockbuster new revenue forecast: Nvidia now expects to book between $3 trillion and $4 trillion in AI infrastructure revenue through 2030, with $500 billion of chips set to ship this year alone. Jensen Huang at Nvidia's CES 2025 keynote, with the Blackwell GPU architecture — the chips at the center of his doubling forecast — on screen behind him. Photo: Pronoia, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons. ...

Canada's Cohere and Germany's Aleph Alpha signed a definitive merger agreement on Wednesday, the two artificial intelligence companies announced, completing a transatlantic combination first disclosed in April that aims to create a sovereign-AI challenger to the American frontier labs. The merged business will operate as Cohere, with dual headquarters in Toronto and Berlin, and the deal positions Germany's Schwarz Group — owner of the Lidl supermarket empire — as a central financier of Europe's enterprise AI push. Reuters reported the signing from Berlin on Wednesday morning, making this one of the day's freshest developments in the AI industry. The companies did not disclose updated financial terms, and the transaction remains subject to regulatory approvals. Cohere co-founder and CEO Aidan Gomez on stage at Collision 2023 in Toronto. (Photo: Piaras Ó Mídheach / Collision via Sportsfile via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0) What the agreement settles Wednesday...