AI Infrastructure

Google said on Nov. 9 it has added new systems, "TPU 8i Max" and "TPU 8tx," to the 8th generation of "TPU," its in-house semiconductors for AI. TPU 8i Max puts two TPU 8i chips in one package, doubling compute, SRAM and HBM bandwidth compared with TPU 8i. TPU 8tx pairs the same silicon as TPU 8t with AMD CPUs and is configured for heavily regulated companies and governments, protecting data and model weights in use with hardware. Together with the two products from April, the company said it is the first time it has released four TPU systems in a single year. Google did not disclose pricing, availability dates or regions.

Arthur Mensch, CEO of France's Mistral AI, on Nov. 8 opposed France's "Darcos bill," which would presume that copyrighted works were used to train AI, and urged lawmakers not to adopt it. He criticized the bill for reversing the burden of proof and instead proposed creating a European creative fund through contributions based on the revenue of all AI providers doing business in Europe (including foreign companies). He did not specify the rate, the collection method, distribution, the scope of revenue used in the calculation or whether it would be mandatory. The bill passed the Senate unanimously, the National Assembly is scheduled to debate it in a plenary session on Nov. 19, and it has not become law.

OpenAI on Nov. 5 (Nov. 6 Japan time) released the "National Community Compact," a set of commitments to communities that host its data centers, and a policy proposal, the "Compute Campus Policy Blueprint." For sites it owns and operates, the company pledged to pay for electricity and incremental infrastructure costs, disclose water and electricity use by site, not require public officials to sign nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) and report annually on jobs, among other things, and it called for the same measures to be written into law. The release came 2 days after 40 of 41 local ballot measures in the midterm elections went against development, and the company said it had been preparing for months. The specific sites covered, the start date, whether the commitments are binding and any third-party verification other than noise studies cannot be confirmed in the documents.

Chinese AI company Moonshot AI held talks to rent Nvidia's advanced "Blackwell" GPUs housed in European data centers, CNBC reported on Nov. 5 (Nov. 5 Japan time), citing four people. A proposal for more than 8,000 chips and a proposal to prepay 30% to 50% more than non-Chinese customers each came from a single source. Uses mentioned were mainly inference, with training also cited. No deal was reported, and Moonshot has made no announcement. The provider, the actual number of chips, when they would go into service and whether talks are continuing are unconfirmed. Current U.S. law cannot broadly regulate access through overseas clouds, and Britain's FT has reported that Nvidia asked cloud providers to limit sales to Chinese customers.

China's STAR Market Daily reported on Nov. 3, citing several industry sources, that DeepSeek plans to use Huawei's "Ascend" chips to train its next large model, "DeepSeek V5." Until now, Ascend has mainly been used for inference of DeepSeek's models. The Information also reported in October that pretraining on Ascend 950DT could begin as early as the end of the year. The scale and timing are unclear, and DeepSeek has made no announcement.

OpenAI on Nov. 2 unveiled on its engineering blog "Pando," a new Git backend built for its huge internal repository. It built the system because its AI coding tool Codex increased the number of tasks each person runs at once, causing pushes and fetches to surge beyond what the existing system could handle. Pando cut median push latency by about 80% and serves about 1 petabyte of Git data a day. It remains compatible with Git, and some improvements have been merged into Git itself. Pando itself is for internal use and has not been released.

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, on Oct. 28 reported results for the July-September quarter of 2026. Revenue rose 25% from a year earlier to $127.6 billion, and its cloud business, Google Cloud, more than doubled, rising 103% to $30.7 billion. The volume processed by the APIs for its in-house AI models reached about 32 billion tokens per minute, four times the level of a year earlier. Capital spending reached $51.4 billion in July-September, and the company said it expects it to exceed $300 billion in 2027.

Google said on Oct. 30 (Oct. 31 Japan time) that a prototype satellite for "Project Suncatcher," its research into placing AI computing infrastructure in space, had used its onboard AI chips, "TPUs," to return a response to a question sent from the ground. The open model "Gemma 4" replied with a haiku about space. The company said it was the first time a data center TPU had generated a response in orbit. However, the prototype carries only four TPUs, and reports say thermal constraints allow it to run for only about 15 minutes at a time. Startup Starcloud, whose satellite carries NVIDIA GPUs, achieved AI execution in orbit first in 2025, and the project's leader has also said it will be more than five years before space becomes cheaper than the ground.

Elon Musk, who leads SpaceXAI (formerly xAI), the AI company under SpaceX, posted on X on Oct. 31 (Nov. 1 Japan time) that the "Colossus 2" data center in Memphis will hold a total of about 1.2 million NVIDIA "Blackwell"-generation GPUs by the end of the year. Keeping to the plan he laid out in September, the roughly 200,000 GPUs to be brought online in December will be configured for inference, running already trained AI. Third-party estimates also rank Colossus 2 as the world's largest data center by computing power, and SpaceX's AI division had $7.56 billion in revenue in the July-September quarter from renting out computing resources. However, the figures are backed only by Musk's posts, and a lawsuit over the gas turbines that power the site is ongoing.