AI HW: China NVIDIA ban?

 AI Agents Spend Money, Online Betting Automates, ChatGPT Users Shift, Reinforcement Learning Accelerates

China barred its major tech companies from buying Nvidia chips. This move received only modest attention in the media, but has implications far beyond what’s widely appreciated. Specifically, it signals that China has progressed sufficiently in semiconductors to break away from dependence on advanced chips designed in the U.S., the vast majority of which are manufactured in Taiwan. It also highlights the U.S. vulnerability to possible disruptions in Taiwan at a moment when China is becoming less vulnerable.

Jensen Huang 'disappointed' by reported China Nvidia chip ban

China bans tech companies from buying Nvidia’s AI chips

AI SW: Modular startup: $250M => $1.6B

Start-up Modular raises $250mn to challenge Nvidia’s software dominance

A team of Silicon Valley veterans who previously worked at Apple and Google has raised $250mn to challenge Nvidia’s dominance of the software tools used to programme artificial intelligence chips. Palo Alto-based Modular, which is building an alternative to Nvidia’s Cuda software that has been vital to keeping customers locked to the chipmaker’s AI products, announced it has received the new investment at a $1.6bn valuation

Modular: Modular Raises $250M to scale AI's Unified Compute Layer

Modular: Modular’s bet to break out of the Matrix (Democratizing AI Compute, Part 10)

Modular: Modular 25.6: Unifying the latest GPUs from NVIDIA, AMD, and Apple

NVIDIA B200: Incredible Performance on NVIDIA’s Best

MAX delivers industry leading performance on NVIDIA Blackwell 200s, NVIDIA’s current flagship datacenter GPU. Following our partnership with Inworld, where we delivered 2.5x throughput wins and 3.3x latency wins (time to first audio) for their state-of-the-art text-to-speech model,