Future Technology[Weekly Roundup] The chip that isn't Nvidia's
This week the AI chip race stopped being a two-horse story, a ransomware strain showed it can think for itself, and astronomers quietly broke their own record again. Five stories, no filler.
This Week's Top Stories
OpenAI just ran a model at 750 tokens a second, and Nvidia wasn't involved
OpenAI previewed GPT-5.6 Sol running on Cerebras wafer-scale chips this week, hitting speeds most Nvidia-served models don't get close to. Access is limited to select customers for now while capacity scales up.
Why it matters: this is a serving decision, not a training one, and it's the clearest sign yet that Nvidia's grip on inference specifically is starting to loosen.
Qualcomm is closing in on an $8-10 billion Nvidia challenger
Qualcomm is reportedly in talks to buy Tenstorrent, the RISC-V AI chip startup run by veteran chip designer Jim Keller, for somewhere between $8bn and $10bn. It's a serious bid for a real seat at the AI hardware table.
Why it matters: Nvidia holds over 80% of the AI training hardware market. A deal like this, backed by Keller's track record at Apple, Tesla and AMD, is the most credible dent in that lead anyone has attempted.
Ransomware that adapts mid-attack just showed up
Researchers documented JadePuffer, described as the first known agentic ransomware. It runs an AI agent that retries failed steps and changes tack when blocked, carrying out an entire extortion job without a human steering each move.
Why it matters: most security tooling assumes an attacker follows a fixed script. The Five Eyes nations (US, UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand) put out joint guidance on agentic AI risk the same week, and the timing wasn't a coincidence.
DeepSeek is building its own chip to cut Nvidia loose
Three sources confirmed DeepSeek is designing its own inference chip, backed by a reported $7.5bn war chest. It's built specifically for inference, the stage where a trained model actually answers you, not for training.
Why it matters: US export controls keep Chinese labs off Nvidia's best silicon, so Beijing's AI champions are building their own way around it. Nvidia shares dipped on the news. Not a knockout, but a signal.
We just passed 390 confirmed black hole collisions
The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration released its biggest gravitational wave catalog yet, adding 161 newly confirmed black hole mergers. A decade ago the running total was zero.
Why it matters: each entry sharpens the models physicists use to understand how the universe's biggest objects form and collide. The pace of discovery is the actual story here.
One to Watch Next Week
Data centres in space are gaining real momentum, orbital solar power with no cooling-water problem to solve on the ground. It sounds like science fiction until you remember every cloud provider on Earth is currently fighting local governments over water and power draw. Worth watching if this moves from concept to contract.
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That's the week. Hit reply if one of these stories deserves a longer look, I read every reply.
Nath, Future Technology
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