AT&T will use D-Wave's quantum computing technology for network optimization use cases. According to D-Wave, AT&T used its quantum systems to reduce processing time for a network optimization workload from about an hour to less than 15 seconds. AT&T will now explore more use case for quantum.
Circle Internet Group said it has acquired IBM's blockchain portfolio, which has nearly 1,000 patents worldwide. The patents are focused on foundational blockchain technology, banking, financial services, enterprise infrastructure and cloud operations.
According to Circle, the blockchain patents will help it expand. Circle is best known for its USDC stablecoin, but has a much broader digital payment platform.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Nvidia is providing a $250 billion backstop for OpenAI so it can lease a 10-gigawatt data center being developed by Softbank's energy subsidiary. The project could cost more than $500 billion including the chips, which will obviously be Nvidia's. The power is controlled by the US government and funded by Japan.
Now if we're keeping score at home, I count three backstops in a circular deal that winds up with more GPUs. Nothing to see here and I'm sure it'll be great, but circular financing critics are going to have a field day with this deal.
You don’t think of General Motors as a company that takes a hit on memory costs, but reality bites. GM CEO Mary Barra, who noted that GM partnerships with Micron Technology and Samsung, said on the company’s second quarter earnings call: “We continue to expect commodity inflation, logistics and higher DRAM costs to be a headwind of $1.5 billion to $2 billion for the full year. We realized approximately $600 million in commodity costs in the first half and expect that headwind to increase in the second half, largely because it reflects 2 quarters of higher costs rather than just 1. In addition, spot rates continued to rise after our first quarter earnings call. And while they have eased somewhat recently, several commodities remain above those levels.”
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang released an open letter on how America needs to focus on open weight models. Huang isn't wrong that the world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models. Also note who signed on and who didn't.
I'm not a huge believer in open letters and think the problem in the US will largely take care of itself due to competition. Here's what I noted in my newsletter this week.
The breakneck pace of open LLM releases from Chinese AI players has US executives and a few policymakers freaked out. You can regulate China models all you want but all the signs are that US companies will also apply pressure on frontier AI companies. If you’re an enterprise trying to wrangle your AI budget you might as well cheer all of the open source LLM crowd on.
Anthropic said it has launched Claude Opus 5. The company said it comes close to Fable 5 performance at half the price and now is the default model on Claude Max. Here's all the benchmarks and details, but notice how everyone in the LLM race is talking costs.
Intel's second quarter was strong and illustrates how the company is recovering well. But I can't get too wound up. For starters, the foundry business is a big unknown. Yes, Intel can ride CPUs, which are the AI inference darling of the moment, but AMD has only become stronger. On GPUs, Intel is all roadmap.
The most notable thing on Intel's earnings call was an AMD question from an analyst asking about market share and losing server share. There's work to do. AMD's AI event upstaged Intel, which was also asked about Arm.
ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott has a knack for buzzwords. Here's one that you'll hear every AI agent orchestrator say soon: Kill switch.
Given OpenAI's Hugging Face fiasco, CIOs everywhere are going to worry about rogue AI agents (or just ones programmed to cheat benchmarks). Spotting an opportunity to put ServiceNow in the security conversation, McDermott said on the company's second quarter earnings call:
"For any company that's running ServiceNow and you get a rogue AI, there's a kill switch, it doesn't get through. And then you think about how you use the right model and you hire it for the right job. And we do that, too. And people are realizing you don't need to take a Ferrari to mail a letter. So using the right technology for the right job and then managing the budgets, including all the tokens and the security of this has become pretty important."
The upshot here is ServiceNow wants to be seen as the AI grownup in the room.
Tesla said its 2026 CapEx will top $25 billion and the company will pursue up to $30 billion in debt capacity.
Why?
Robots.
CEO Elon Musk said:
"This is a massive CapEx year, but I'm confident that all the things that we're investing in will yield incredible returns, really the best CapEx returns that we've ever seen. And the Tesla team has performed incredibly well. The Cybercab has started production. We will soon start production with Optimus."
He added:
"I think Optimus will be the biggest product ever, but it is a very complex problem to solve. It's one of the hardest things to solve to make an autonomous humanoid robot that can do tasks that if you simply ask it to do something or show a video, it can do the task without any programming.
It's a lot of work to scale. The production scaling challenge is very substantial. This is going to be the hardest product to scale manufacturing that we've ever made at Tesla because everything on the robot is new. And the difficulty of scaling the production ramp is proportionate to the newness of the parts in the robot."
And yes, Tesla makes cars, but whatever (see second quarter results).
Infosys said Ashiss Kumar Dash is the company's CEO designate. Kumar, who leads Infosys' energy vertical, will take over for Salil Parekh. Parekh's term ends in March 2027.
The company also reported first quarter earnings of 20 cents a share on revenue of $5.08 billion, up 2.8% from a year ago.
Monday said it will cut 20% of its workforce in a restructuring that'll incur about $45 million to $55 million in charges. Of that sum, $30 million to $35 million will be severance and related items.
Monday said the layoffs reflect "the Company's ongoing transformation of its product, marketing, and go-to-market strategy and is intended to support a leaner, more focused operating model as the Company continues to invest in its AI-driven growth strategy."
The company maintained its revenue growth outlook and adjusted cash flow.
Samsung's Unpacked event in London included the usual complement of smartphone upgrades complete with price increases due to memory costs for some models. Samsung also outlined its intelligent eyewear efforts with Gentle Monster and Warby Parker.
The most interesting thing the Fold8 has a passport-sized form factor. That's nice but the $1,900 price tag is a bit much (reviews).
Here's the recap:
