Robots, data centres and billions

TechCrunch reported on 26 August a $45 billion deal between Anthropic and Nscale. The capacity is drawn from two SpaceX data centres, and is reportedly worth $1.25 billion of capacity a month.

The headline calls it a streak: it is the latest in a run of compute contracts signed in a few months. What the piece does not say: how long the deal runs, or exactly what the headline figure covers.

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Amazon has tripled its order of Nvidia chips, citing surging demand. Two million GPUs are being added to AWS starting in the third quarter.

Nvidia also plans to ship an unspecified number of Vera CPUs, “some integrated with Rubin, others standalone”, according to CFO Colette Kress. The value of the order was not disclosed.

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A company founded by ex-Meta scientists launched Isaac 0.5 this week, a model designed to give machines the ability to “perceive, reason and act” in industrial settings.

In practice: helping vision-guided robots navigate complex environments — warehouses, factory floors — and letting companies extract visual intelligence from the video those robots record. The piece gives neither the company's name nor any measured result.

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The company, which TechCrunch calls viral, closed a $250 million Series B. Total funding now stands at $350 million and the valuation at $2.5 billion.

What the piece does not say: what exactly Instinct builds, or who led the round. The number does place it on the same floor as the week's other raises — past the billion mark without a product the general public would recognise.

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Robotics company Generalist is valued at $3 billion after raising nearly $200 million, according to sources cited by TechCrunch.

It is the second of the week's three robotics deals. The information is attributed to sources rather than to a company announcement: neither the round nor the investors are publicly confirmed.

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General Intuition is in talks to raise at a $6 billion pre-money valuation, with Valor Ventures and Point72 Ventures among the investors.

TechCrunch ties the round to the company's push into robotics. These are talks: neither the amount nor the closing of the round is settled.

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Released last month, ChatGPT Work is available on OpenAI's cheapest subscription tier, at $20 a month. It targets white-collar work — accountants, investors, doctors — where the day is spent in front of a screen.

It is a modified version of Codex, OpenAI's coding tool: the stated aim is to give non-engineers what software engineers already have, a tool that does not merely answer questions but completes multistep projects on its own. The question the piece asks: how much control over their digital life will people hand a model?

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Themis Sapsis and Kai Chang present Extreme Event Aware, an algorithm that produces plausible extreme-event scenarios without having seen a single extreme event in its training data, and maps their duration, intensity and area of impact. The open-access paper appeared on 20 August in Nature Communications.

The demonstration covers precipitation across the United States: 25 years of hourly maps pooled into daily ones, but training restricted to the record's first six months, which contain few or no extremes. The algorithm then produces plausible maps of a once-in-a-century event — 300 mm, say, where the observed record is 200. The authors name robotic navigation and financial crashes as other possible grounds.

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According to The Information, picked up by several US outlets, Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. Both companies decline to comment. In late 2025 the first talks started from a $7 billion valuation: Nvidia wanted to invest $500 million, and Hugging Face turned it down to stay neutral towards other chip makers.

Nvidia has been a shareholder since the August 2023 series D, which valued the French-American company at $4.5 billion — alongside Google, Amazon, Intel, IBM, Salesforce, AMD and Qualcomm. Founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, the platform now hosts hundreds of thousands of open models, datasets and demos.

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The Model Hardware Standard (MHS) enters research preview with a first group of research labs and advanced manufacturers. It is a shared specification that lets an agent operate microscopes, liquid handlers and robotic arms in parallel — from routine drug-discovery experiments to laser calibration on a quantum computer. Anthropic says it cuts integration work that today takes specialists weeks down to hours.

The standard grew out of a collaboration with the HHMI Janelia Research Campus, on a brain-imaging rig that combined lasers, motorised focusers and cameras from different vendors with no common interface. One cited example: at Carnegie Mellon, an agent orchestrates a liquid handler, a plate reader, a robotic arm and monitoring cameras spread across three computers with incompatible interfaces, running serial dilution dose-response experiments about three times faster. MHS works with any device that has a programmable interface, stays model-agnostic, and is reached through standard protocols including the Model Context Protocol.

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OpenAI has notified SpaceX that it intends to wind down the contract supplying its models to Cursor, with a proposed shutoff date of 12 November 2026 — the maximum notice the contract allows, to leave developers as much time as possible. The reason: the company says it cannot be confident SpaceX will use its technology within its terms of service.

OpenAI leans on two precedents it names itself: Twitter, now part of SpaceX, broke the terms of their contract after the acquisition; and Musk admitted under oath earlier this year that xAI, now also inside SpaceX, had violated OpenAI's terms of service. The custom agreement with Cursor left a limited cancellation window after a change of control. The two companies had worked together for nearly four years.

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