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Tag: SoftBank Corp

  • Microsoft partners with Anthropic and Nvidia in cloud infrastructure deal

    Microsoft said Tuesday it is partnering with artificial intelligence company Anthropic and chipmaker Nvidia as part of an AI infrastructure deal that moves the software giant further away from its longtime alliance with OpenAI.

    Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude that competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, said it is committed to buying $30 billion in computing capacity from Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform.

    As part of the partnership, Nvidia will also invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic, and Microsoft will invest up to $5 billion in the San Francisco-based startup.

    The joint announcements by CEOs Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, and Jensen Huang of Nvidia came just ahead of the opening of Microsoft’s annual Ignite developer conference.

    “This is all about deepening our commitment to bringing the best infrastructure, model choice and applications to our customers,” Nadella said on a video call with the other two executives, adding that it builds on the “critical” partnership Microsoft still has with OpenAI.

    Microsoft was, until earlier this year, the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI and made the technology behind ChatGPT the foundation for its own AI assistant, Copilot. But the two companies moved farther apart and their business agreements were amended as OpenAI increasingly sought to secure its own cloud capacity through big deals with Oracle, SoftBank and other data center developers and chipmakers.

    Asked in September if OpenAI could do more with those new computing partnerships than it could with Microsoft, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told The Associated Press his company was “severely limited for the value we can offer to people.”

    At the same time, Microsoft holds a roughly 27% stake in the new for-profit corporation that OpenAI, founded as a nonprofit, is forming to advance its commercial ambitions as the world’s most valuable startup.

    Anthropic, founded by ex-OpenAI leaders in 2021, said Claude will now be the “only frontier model” available to customers of the three biggest cloud computing providers: Amazon, which remains Anthropic’s primary cloud provider, and Google and Microsoft.

    AI products like Claude, ChatGPT, Copilotand Google’s Gemini are reshaping how many people work but take huge amounts of energy and computing power to build and operate. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic has yet reported turning a profit, amplifying concerns about an AI bubble if their products don’t meet investors’ high expectations and justify the expenditures. As part of the deal, Nvidia said Anthropic will have access to up to a gigawatt of capacity from its specialized AI chips.

    Huang said he’s “admired the work of Anthropic and Dario for a long time, and this is the first time we are going to deeply partner with Anthropic to accelerate Claude.”

    At Microsoft’s Ignite conference, a showcase of its latest AI technology which opened Tuesday in San Francisco, Anthropic’s chief product officer Mike Krieger highlighted the budding partnership during an on-stage appearance.

    “From the beginning, it has seemed there has been a lot of shared DNA between our companies,” said Krieger, who was also the co-founder of Instagram.

    ——

    AP Technology Writer Michael Liedtke in San Francisco contributed to this report.

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  • Anthropic, Microsoft announce new AI data center projects as industry’s construction push continues

    Artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced a $50 billion investment in computing infrastructure on Wednesday that will include new data centers in Texas and New York.

    Microsoft also on Wednesday announced a new data center under construction in Atlanta, Georgia, describing it as connected to another in Wisconsin to form a “massive supercomputer” running on hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips to power AI technology.

    The latest deals show that the tech industry is moving forward on huge spending to build energy-hungry AI infrastructure, despite lingering financial concerns about a bubble, environmental considerations and the political effects of fast-rising electricity bills in the communities where the massive buildings are constructed.

    Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, said it is working with London-based Fluidstack to build the new computing facilities to power its AI systems. It didn’t disclose their exact locations or what source of electricity they will need.

    Another company, cryptocurrency mining data center developer TeraWulf, has previously revealed it was working with Fluidstack on Google-backed data center projects in Texas and New York, on the shore of Lake Ontario. TeraWulf declined comment Wednesday.

    A report last month from TD Cowen said that the leading cloud computing providers leased a “staggering” amount of U.S. data center capacity in the third fiscal quarter of this year, amounting to more than 7.4 gigawatts of energy, more than all of last year combined.

    Oracle was securing the most capacity during that time, much of it supporting AI workloads for Anthropic’s chief rival OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT. Google was second and Fluidstack came in third, ahead of Meta, Amazon, CoreWeave and Microsoft.

    Anthropic said its projects will create about 800 permanent jobs and 2,400 construction jobs. It said in a statement that the “scale of this investment is necessary to meet the growing demand for Claude from hundreds of thousands of businesses while keeping our research at the frontier.”

    Microsoft has branded its two-story Atlanta data center as Fairwater 2 and said it will be connected across a “high-speed network” with the original Fairwater complex being built south of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The company said the facility’s densely packed Nvidia chips will help power Microsoft’s own AI technology, along with OpenAI’s and other AI developers.

    Microsoft was, until earlier this year, OpenAI’s exclusive cloud computing provider before the two companies amended their partnership. OpenAI has since announced more than $1 trillion in infrastructure obligations, much of it tied to its Stargate project with partners Oracle and SoftBank. Microsoft, in turn, spent nearly $35 billion in the July-September quarter on capital expenditures to support its AI and cloud demand, nearly half of that on computer chips.

    Anthropic has made its own computing partnerships with Amazon and, more recently, Google.

    The tech industry’s big spending on computing infrastructure for AI startups that aren’t yet profitable has fueled concerns about an AI investment bubble.

    Investors have closely watched a series of circular deals over recent months between AI developers and the companies building the costly chips and data centers needed to power their AI products. Anthropic said it will continue to “prioritize cost-effective, capital-efficient approaches” to scaling up its business.

    OpenAI had to backtrack last week after its chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, made comments at a tech conference suggesting the U.S. government could help in financing chips needed for data centers. The White House’s top AI official, David Sacks, responded on social media platform X that there “will be no federal bailout for AI” and if one of the leading companies fails, “others will take its place,” though he also added he didn’t think “anyone was actually asking for a bailout.”

    OpenAI CEO Sam Altman later confirmed in a lengthy statement that “we do not have or want government guarantees” for the company’s data centers and also sought to address concerns about whether it will be able to pay for all the infrastructure it has signed up for.

    “We are looking at commitments of about $1.4 trillion over the next 8 years,” Altman wrote. “Obviously this requires continued revenue growth, and each doubling is a lot of work! But we are feeling good about our prospects there.”

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  • OpenAI and Amazon sign $38 billion deal for AI computing power

    SEATTLE (AP) — OpenAI and Amazon have signed a $38 billion deal that enables the ChatGPT maker to run its artificial intelligence systems on Amazon’s data centers in the U.S.

    OpenAI will be able to power its AI tools using “hundreds of thousands” of Nvidia’s specialized AI chips through Amazon Web Services as part of the deal announced Monday.

    Amazon shares increased 4% after the announcement.

    The agreement comes less than a week after OpenAI altered its partnership with its longtime backer Microsoft, which until early this year was the startup’s exclusive cloud computing provider.

    California and Delaware regulators also last week allowed San Francisco-based OpenAI, which was founded as a nonprofit, to move forward on its plan to form a new business structure to more easily raise capital and make a profit.

    “The rapid advancement of AI technology has created unprecedented demand for computing power,” Amazon said in a statement Monday. It said OpenAI “will immediately start utilizing AWS compute as part of this partnership, with all capacity targeted to be deployed before the end of 2026, and the ability to expand further into 2027 and beyond.”

    AI requires huge amounts of energy and computing power and OpenAI has long signaled that it needs more capacity, both to develop new AI systems and keep existing products like ChatGPT answering the questions of its hundreds of millions of users. It’s recently made more than $1 trillion worth of financial obligations in spending for AI infrastructure, including data center projects with Oracle and SoftBank and semiconductor supply deals with chipmakers Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom.

    Some of the deals have raised investor concerns about their “circular” nature, since OpenAI doesn’t make a profit and can’t yet afford to pay for the infrastructure that its cloud backers are providing on the expectations of future returns on their investments. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman last week dismissed doubters he says have aired “breathless concern” about the deals.

    “Revenue is growing steeply. We are taking a forward bet that it’s going to continue to grow,” Altman said on a podcast where he appeared with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

    Amazon is already the primary cloud provider to AI startup Anthropic, an OpenAI rival that makes the Claude chatbot.

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  • OpenAI picks labor icon Dolores Huerta and other philanthropy advisers as it moves toward for-profit

    OpenAI has named labor leader Dolores Huerta and three others to a temporary advisory board that will help guide the artificial intelligence company’s philanthropy as it attempts to shift itself into a for-profit business.

    Huerta, who turned 95 last week, formed the first farmworkers union with Cesar Chavez in the early 1960s and will now voice her ideas on the direction of philanthropic initiatives that OpenAI says will consider “both the promise and risks of AI.”

    The group will have just 90 days to make their suggestions.

    “She recognizes the significance of AI in today’s world and anybody who’s been paying attention for the last 50 years knows she will be a force in this conversation,” said Daniel Zingale, the convener of OpenAI’s new nonprofit commission and a former adviser to three California governors.

    Huerta’s advice won’t be binding but the presence of a social activist icon could be influential as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attempts a costly restructuring of the San Francisco company’s corporate governance, which requires the approval of California’s attorney general and others.

    Another coalition of labor leaders and nonprofits recently petitioned state Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, to investigate OpenAI, halt the proposed conversion and “protect billions of dollars that are under threat as profit-driven hunger for power yields conflicts of interest.”

    OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, started out in 2015 as a nonprofit research laboratory dedicated to safely building better-than-human AI that benefits humanity.

    It later formed a for-profit arm and shifted most of its staff there, but is still controlled by a nonprofit board of directors. It is now trying to convert itself more fully into a for-profit corporation but faces a number of hurdles, including getting the approval of California and Delaware attorneys general, potentially buying out the nonprofit’s pricy assets and fighting a lawsuit from co-founder and early investor Elon Musk.

    Backed by Japanese tech giant SoftBank, OpenAI last month said it’s working to raise $40 billion in funding, putting its value at $300 billion.

    Huerta will be joined on the new advisory commission by former Spanish-language media executive Monica Lozano; Robert Ross, the recently retired president of The California Endowment; and Jack Oliver, an attorney and longtime Republican campaign fundraiser. Zingale, the group’s convener, is a former aide to California governors including Democrat Gavin Newsom and Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger.

    “We’re interested in how you put the power of AI in the hands of everyday people and the community organizations that serve them,” Zingale said in an interview Wednesday. “Because, if AI is going to bring a renaissance, or a dark age, these are the people you want to tip the scale in favor of humanity.”

    The group is now tasked with gathering community feedback for the problems OpenAI’s philanthropy could work to address. But for California nonprofit leaders pushing for legal action from the state attorney general, it doesn’t alter what they view as the state’s duty to pause the restructuring, assess the value of OpenAI’s charitable assets and make sure they are used in the public’s interest.

    “As impressive as the individual members of OpenAI’s advisory commission are, the commission itself appears to be a calculated distraction from the core problem: OpenAI misappropriating its nonprofit assets for private gain,” said Orson Aguilar, the CEO and founding president of LatinoProsperity, in a written statement.

    ——————————-

    The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI access to part of AP’s text archives.

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  • Massive earthquake slams Japan, residents flee some coastal areas

    Massive earthquake slams Japan, residents flee some coastal areas

    TOPSHOT – This image taken in Hong Kong on January 1, 2024 shows a warning message on a screen from a live feed on NHK World asking people to evacuate from the area after a series of major earthquakes hit central Japan. A powerful 7.5 earthquake hit central Japan on January 1, the USGS said, prompting tsunami warnings and authorities to urge people in the area to move to higher ground. (Photo by Mladen ANTONOV / AFP) (Photo by MLADEN ANTONOV/AFP via Getty Images)

    Mladen Antonov | Afp | Getty Images

    A powerful earthquake struck central Japan on Monday, triggering warnings for residents to evacuate some areas on its west coast, destroying buildings, knocking out power to thousands of homes and disrupting travel to the region.

    The quake with a preliminary magnitude of 7.6 triggered waves of around 1 metre along parts of the Sea of Japan coast, with authorities saying larger waves could follow.

    The Japan Meteorological Agency issued tsunami warnings for the coastal prefectures of Ishikawa, Niigata and Toyama. A major tsunami warning — the first since the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that struck northeastern Japan — was initially issued for Ishikawa but later downgraded.

    Russia also issued tsunami warnings in its far eastern cities of Vladivostok and Nakhodka.

    Several houses have been destroyed and army units have been dispatched to help with rescue operations, top government spokesperson Yoshimasa Hayashi told reporters, adding that authorities were still assessing the extent of the damage.

    More strong quakes in the area, where seismic activity has been simmering for more than three years, could occur over coming days, JMA official Toshihiro Shimoyama said.

    ANKARA, TURKIYE – JANUARY 01: An infographic titled ‘Series of powerful earthquakes strikes Japan, triggering tsunami alert’ created in Ankara, Turkiye on January 1, 2024. (Photo by Muhammed Ali Yigit/Anadolu via Getty Images)

    Anadolu | Anadolu | Getty Images

    In comments to the press shortly after the quake struck, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida also warned residents to prepare for more disasters.

    “Residents need to stay on alert for further possible quakes and I urge people in areas where tsunamis are expected to evacuate as soon as possible,” Kishida said.

    “Run!” a bright yellow warning flashed across television screens advising residents in specific areas of the coast to immediately evacuate their homes.

    Images carried by local media showed a building collapsing in a plume of dust in the coastal city of Suzu and a huge crack in a road in Wajima where panicked-looking parents clutched their children. There have been reports of at least 30 collapsed buildings in Wajima, NHK reported, citing the city’s fire department.

    The quake also jolted buildings in the capital Tokyo, some 500 km from Wajima on the opposite coast.

    More than 36,000 households had lost power in Ishikawa and Toyama prefectures, utilities provider Hokuriku Electric Power said.

    High speed rail services to Ishikawa have been suspended while telecomoperators Softbank and KDDI reported phone and internet service disruptions in Ishikawa and Niigata, according to their websites.

    Japanese airline ANA turned back planes headed to airports in Toyama and Ishikawa, while Japan Airlines cancelled most of its services to Niigata and Ishikawa regions and authorities said one of Ishikawa’s airports was closed.

    Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority said no irregularities have been confirmed at nuclear power plants along the Sea of Japan, including five active reactors at Kansai Electric Power’s Ohi and Takahama plants in Fukui Prefecture.

    Hokuriku’s Shika plant in Ishikawa, the closest nuclear power station to the quake’s epicentre, had already halted its two reactors before the quake for regular inspections and saw no impact from the quake, the agency said.

    The 2011 earthquake and tsunami killed nearly 20,000 people and devastated towns and triggered nuclear meltdowns in Fukushima.

    Another quake, known as the Great Hanshin Earthquake, hit western Japan in 1995, killing more than 6,000 people, mainly in the city of Kobe.

    Monday’s quake struck during the Jan. 1 public holiday when millions of Japanese traditionally visit temples to mark the new year.

    In Kanazawa, a popular tourist destination in Ishikawa, images showed the remnants of a collapsed gate strewn at the entrance of a shrine as anxious worshippers looked on.

    Kanazawa resident Ayako Daikai said she had evacuated to a nearby elementary school with her husband and two children soon after the earthquake hit. Classrooms, stairwells, hallways and the gymnasium were all packed with evacuees, she said.

    “I also experienced the Great Hanshin Earthquake, so I thought it would be safest to evacuate,” she told Reuters when contacted by telephone.

    “We haven’t decided when to return home yet.”

    The jolt was also felt by tourists who had flocked to Japan’s mountainous Nagano region for the start of the snow sports season.

    Johnny Wu, a 50-year-old Taiwanese snowboarder, was waiting for a shuttle bus back to his hotel in the resort town of Hakuba when the quake hit, rattling windows and shaking snow of roofs and overhead electric wires.

    “Everybody was panicked at that time. I’m a little bit better because, I come from Taiwan, so I’ve experienced a lot. But still, (I’m) still worried about (the quake) getting more serious,” he said.

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  • Arm files for Nasdaq listing, as SoftBank aims to sell shares in chip designer it bought for $32 billion

    Arm files for Nasdaq listing, as SoftBank aims to sell shares in chip designer it bought for $32 billion

    SoftBank plans to list Arm in the U.S.

    CFOTO | Future Publishing | Getty Images

    Arm, the chip designer owned by Japan’s SoftBank, filed for a Nasdaq listing on Monday, positioning itself to go public during a historically slow period for tech IPOs.

    The company wants to trade under the ticker symbol “ARM.”

    Arm reported $524 million in net income on $2.68 billion in revenue in its fiscal 2023, which ended in March, according to the filing. Arm’s 2023 revenue was slightly down from the company’s 2022 sales of $2.7 billion.

    The U.K.-based company filed confidentially for a listing in the U.S. earlier this year after previously announcing it would go public in the U.S. over the U.K., dealing a blow to the London Stock Exchange.

    Arm is one of the most important chip companies. It sells licenses to an instruction set at the heart of nearly every mobile chip, and increasingly, PC and server chips as well. In recent years, it has aimed to sell more complete chip designs, which is more lucrative.

    Arm chips are made by companies including Amazon, Alphabet, AMD, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Samsung, according to the filing. Its technology is also included in Apple’s chips for iPhones. Arm said that its technology was included in over 30 billion chips shipped in its fiscal 2023. Arm typically takes a fee on every chip that is shipped using its technology.

    SoftBank originally sought to sell Arm to chip giant Nvidia, but the deal faced major pushback from regulators, who raised concerns over competition and national security. SoftBank took Arm private in 2016 in a deal valued at $32 billion.

    Arm did not provide a projected share price, so it’s not yet possible to estimate its valuation.

    A critical component

    Arm, with just under 6000 employees, plays a pivotal role in the world of consumer electronics, designing the architecture of chips that are found in 99% of all smartphones, making it a key provider of technology to Apple, Google and Qualcomm.

    The company was founded in 1990 as a joint venture between several companies and Apple to create a low-power processor for battery-powered devices. It first went public in 1998, before being taken private in 2016 by SoftBank.

    But the company is also facing headwinds from a slowdown in demand for products like smartphones, which has hit chip firms across the board. Arm’s net sales fell 4.6% year-on-year in the second quarter, while the unit swung to a loss, according to SoftBank’s earnings release. SoftBanks’ beleaguered Vision Fund, meanwhile, has racked up billions of dollars in losses of late due to tech bets that soured in a high interest rate environment.

    In its filing, Arm made the case that its technology would be essential for AI applications, although it focuses on central processors, not the graphics processors that are required for creating big AI models. “The CPU is vital in all AI systems, whether it is handling the AI workload entirely or in combination with a co-processor, such as a GPU or an NPU,” Arm said in the filing.

    Arm identified x86, the instruction set used in Intel and AMD processors, as well as RISC-V, an open source instruction set backed by several big tech companies, as sources of competition.

    The company said that its three largest customers accounted for 44% of the company’s total revenue. The company’s largest customer, Arm China, a independent entity, accounted for 24% of sales. Arm also said that Qualcomm, which it is currently suing over a licensing violation, accounted for 11% of sales.

    Arm is poised to hit the market at a time when investors are flocking to next-generation semiconductors because of the demand spurred by artificial intelligence, most notably the soaring popularity of generative AI applications. Nvidia, the chipmaker most at the heart of the generative AI boom, has seen its stock price triple this year.

    However, the tech IPO market has been largely dormant for the past 20 months, with no notable venture-backed deals since Dec. 2021. Last October, Intel spun out self-driving car technology company Mobileye. That stock is up just 17% since its first day close.

    Some tech investors may be looking to Arm’s offering as an indication of demand for new offerings. Grocery delivery company Instacart is among late-stage startups that are reportedly preparing to submit IPO paperwork to the SEC.

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