In partnership with
Blu Dot surpasses 2,000% ROAS with self-serve CTV ads
Home furniture brand Blu Dot blew up on CTV with help from Roku Ads Manager. Here’s how:
After a test campaign reached 211,000 households and achieved 1,010% ROAS, the brand went all in to promote its annual sales event. It removed age and income constraints to expand reach and shifted budget to custom audiences and retargeting, where intent was strongest.
The results speak for themselves. As Blu Dot increased their investment by 10x, ROAS jumped to 2,308% and more page-view conversions surpassed 50,000.
“For CTV campaigns, Roku has been a top performer,” said Claire Folkestad, Paid Media Strategist, Blu Dot. “Comping to our other platforms, we have seen really strong ROAS… and highly efficient CPMs, lower than any other CTV partner we've worked with.”
Using Roku Ads Manager, the campaign moved from a pilot to a permanent performance engine for the brand.
The GPU Daily · #096 · covering Saturday 17 October
The physical layer of AI, every day. Here's what moved on Saturday 17 October 2026.
In this issue
Top story · DATA CENTRE
Canada · ▲ Bullish · 17 Oct 00:00 UTC · Newsroom
Anthropic signed a long-term lease at EverWind's Point Tupper campus in Nova Scotia, a project the developer puts at $10 billion: $8B for the data centre and $2B for wind generation. EverWind announced the deal as a "leading frontier AI developer" and did not name the tenant. Anthropic confirmed later the same day. Phase one is 95MW from late 2027, with a 325MW second phase in 2028, subject to commercial, technical and regulatory conditions.
Earlier: Nova Scotia to host massive data centre to power artificial intelligence (16 October)
MARKET MOVES · 4
Global · ▼ Bearish · 17 Oct 06:00 UTC · Newsroom
US · ◆ Neutral · 17 Oct 21:30 UTC · Newsroom
US · ▼ Bearish · 17 Oct 16:15 UTC · Newsroom
Japan · ◆ Neutral · 16 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
Foxconn's subsidiary Lin Yin International Investment will take the stake, which values the unit at JPY 320bn enterprise value, with completion expected 1 October 2027.
NEOCLOUD · 1
Israel · ▲ Bullish · 17 Oct 01:00 UTC · Trade press
SOFTWARE & AI · 12
US · ◆ Neutral · 17 Oct 17:00 UTC · Newsroom
China · ◆ Neutral · 17 Oct 07:36 UTC · Trade press
The agent model, built on a 744B MoE GLM-5.2 base, has full weights still marked 'Coming soon'.
Earlier: Shanghai AI Lab releases Atria Dawn, 744B MoE agentic model. (16 September)
Global · ◆ Neutral · 15 Oct 18:15 UTC · Company/PR
Meta's Muse Spark Open and NVIDIA's Nemotron 3.5 Super VL are now available through Baseten Model APIs, with Nemotron offering a context window of up to 1,048,576 tokens.
Earlier: Nebius added three open-weight models to its inference platform (16 October)
China · ◆ Neutral · 17 Oct 07:45 UTC · Trade press
China · ◆ Neutral · 17 Oct 02:09 UTC · Trade press
The endpoints cost 5 yuan per 1,000 successful requests and are capped at 5 queries per second per account.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 17 Oct 22:45 UTC · Trade press
China · ◆ Neutral · 17 Oct 02:10 UTC · Trade press
The release spans an SDK, a 30B-A3B memory model and the MemHub app, with Tencent reporting 72.6% on LoCoMo.
China · ◆ Neutral · 17 Oct 07:45 UTC · Trade press
AXP is designed to register a million AI agents and run 100,000 concurrently, with cross-region addressing over 4,000 km on the CENI testbed.
US · ◆ Neutral · 17 Oct 14:30 UTC · Newsroom
Global · ▲ Bullish · 16 Oct 14:20 UTC · Company/PR
Argon accepts text, image, video, audio and PDF inputs but returns text only, sharing a 1,048,576-token window across input and output.
Brazil · ◆ Neutral · 16 Oct 19:00 UTC · Company/PR
Itaú is targeting its full customer base by end-2026, with the IARA governance platform controlling access to several AI models, including OpenAI's.
US · ◆ Neutral · 16 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
The rebuilt tool now produces a first-pass analysis of a 300-page credit agreement in about 20 minutes, followed by an hour or more of human review.
HARDWARE · 4
South Korea · ▲ Bullish · 17 Oct 17:00 UTC · Newsroom
Japan · ◆ Neutral · 17 Oct 02:00 UTC · Trade press
Global · ◆ Neutral · 17 Oct 21:00 UTC · Company/PR
The laptops start at $2,399 and carry Blackwell RTX graphics and up to 128GB of unified memory, per NVIDIA's own announcement.
Earlier: NVIDIA RTX Spark laptops ship 16 October with up to 128GB memory (13 October)
US · ◆ Neutral · 16 Oct 20:59 UTC · Company/PR
HYPERSCALER · 1
US · ◆ Neutral · 16 Oct 08:00 UTC · Company/PR
Braket's AWS-run components sit inside the FedRAMP boundary in US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California) and US West (Oregon), while quantum hardware providers run outside it.
DATA CENTRE · 5
India · ▼ Bearish · 17 Oct 14:15 UTC · Newsroom
Earlier: Google data centre project in Andhra Pradesh faces local criticism, CM defends potential. (22 August)
Ireland · ▼ Bearish · 17 Oct 06:45 UTC · Newsroom
Southeast Asia · ▼ Bearish · 17 Oct 02:45 UTC · Newsroom
Global · ▼ Bearish · 17 Oct 11:15 UTC · Newsroom
Global · ◆ Neutral · 17 Oct 18:30 UTC · Trade press
ENERGY & POWER · 7
Australia · ▲ Bullish · 17 Oct 06:00 UTC · Trade press
Large-scale solar FIDs hit 3.5 GW in 2026, roughly 30% above the previous annual high, with total renewable FIDs at 5 GW by October.
Taiwan · ▲ Bullish · 17 Oct 02:00 UTC · Trade press
Brazil · ▼ Bearish · 17 Oct 09:30 UTC · Trade press
Developers surrendered authorisations for 923 Brazilian solar projects in 2026, representing 40.6 GW and BRL 134B in lost investment, per ABsolar.
Australia · ◆ Neutral · 17 Oct 01:29 UTC · Trade press
Atmos acquired operating solar farms Yatpool (106 MW) and Hughenden (20 MW), plus the Bullawah wind and battery project, taking its capacity past 2 GW.
France · ▲ Bullish · 17 Oct 08:30 UTC · Trade press
France will let solar-plus-storage projects up to 25 MW connect to the grid by end-2026, up from 17 MW, provided grid injection stays at 17 MW.
US · ◆ Neutral · 17 Oct 09:50 UTC · Trade press
Aluko plans to invest over $107M in a Tennessee frame plant creating 285 jobs, with Qcells panels carrying the frames by end-2026.
US · ◆ Neutral · 13 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
The DOE's Nuclear Energy Launch Pad selected 12 developers across 13 projects, and Oklo's isotope pilot will first produce lutetium-177 for cancer treatments.
Earlier: Oklo details Groves-2 Forge, a follow-on isotope reactor project in Texas (15 October)
REGULATION & POLICY · 4
US · ◆ Neutral · 17 Oct 00:15 UTC · Newsroom
Netherlands · ◆ Neutral · 17 Oct 07:00 UTC · Trade press
The Dutch inspectorate warns a cyberattack or faulty update on aggregator platforms could switch enough home devices at once to destabilise the grid, citing a 3 GW imbalance threshold.
US · ◆ Neutral · 17 Oct 15:30 UTC · Newsroom
US · ◆ Neutral · 17 Oct 21:31 UTC · Trade press
A Meta spokesperson said the updated terms do not show a change in how Meta crawls the web.