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 · #098 · covering Monday 19 October
The physical layer of AI, every day. Here's what moved on Monday 19 October 2026.
In this issue
Top story · NEOCLOUD
US · ▲ Bullish · 19 Oct 23:39 UTC · Trade press
Anthropic and Nscale are reportedly close to another $45bn compute deal, a little over a month after announcing one of the same size in August. Bloomberg's sources say talks are still under way and the details could change. Nscale is also pursuing an IPO, and Bloomberg reports investor pushback over its proposed $30bn valuation.
Earlier: Anthropic Signs $45B Compute Deal With Nscale. (26 August)
MARKET MOVES · 6
US · ▲ Bullish · 14 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
The round was led by Accel and valued the GPU platform at $15.75bn post-money, after its annualised run rate passed $1bn with usage up more than 15x year on year.
Earlier: Modal Labs closing on $750M funding round at $15.75B valuation (28 September)
US · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 13:00 UTC · Trade press
US · ▼ Bearish · 19 Oct 21:30 UTC · Newsroom
Earlier: CoreWeave stock sinks as bond yields surge near 15% (14 October)
Canada · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 21:45 UTC · Newsroom
US · ▲ Bullish · 19 Oct 19:15 UTC · Newsroom
India · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 13:15 UTC · Newsroom
Earlier: Jio Platforms IPO red herring prospectus: ten key things to know (18 October)
NEOCLOUD · 3
India · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 15:45 UTC · Newsroom · 2 sources
EU · ▲ Bullish · 19 Oct 15:00 UTC · Company/PR
Microsoft will contribute Azure Local and Foundry Local, and Nebius will provide a European training and inference platform for EBU members.
US · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
A survey of 500 US AI Natives found 60% say over a quarter of engineering time goes to infrastructure work, rising to 73% among firms using five or more providers.
Why this matters: The findings come from a neocloud vendor, so they may favour its single-platform pitch.
SOFTWARE & AI · 16
Global · ▲ Bullish · 19 Oct 15:37 UTC · Trade press
Super VL is a 120bn-parameter open-weight model for enterprise agents, while the Bolt models are designed to run on RTX Spark PCs and DGX Spark workstations.
Earlier: NVIDIA released Nemotron 3.5 Super VL and edge models for local agents (15 October)
Global · ▲ Bullish · 19 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
The service offers SFT and RL on dedicated GPU allocations, priced at $9 per B200 GPU-hour for the first eight weeks after launch.
China · ▲ Bullish · 19 Oct 06:59 UTC · Trade press
At the CSDI Summit, SenseCore described domestic Prefill and high-bandwidth Decode clusters linked by KV Cache, with about 5x token throughput in one test and a target of 6 to 10 trillion tokens a day by Q4 2026.
Global · ▲ Bullish · 15 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
Meta released weights for Muse Spark Open, a 1M-token-context agentic coding model, and Modal is serving it with per-token billing.
Earlier: Meta released Muse Spark Open, an 816B-parameter open-weight model (15 October)
US · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 20:00 UTC · Newsroom
Global · ◆ Neutral · 13 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
Modal trained Qwen3.6-35B-A3B with samplers across six GPU types, matching B200-only scores while cutting sampler cost per update by about 15%.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 17:48 UTC · Company/PR
Cloudflare's Clairic returns typed extractions in a single forward pass, typically under one second, charging only for input tokens.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 12:00 UTC · Company/PR
GPT-6 Astra scored 87.4% on MultiLangBench across 20 languages, up from 26.8% for GPT-5.6 Sol.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 19:12 UTC · Company/PR
Cloudflare cut its code reviewer's inference cost from $2.43 to $0.77 per review and median latency from 4m 09s to 1m 32s.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 16:00 UTC · Company/PR
Paired with the Generative Ads Model and Adaptive Ranking Model, the tokenisation delivered a +0.35% lift in conversions, measured February 2026.
China · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 01:47 UTC · Trade press
VAST says its 5B-parameter EdenLive model runs above 24 FPS at 720p on a single RTX 5090, with weights and code released.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 16:10 UTC · Company/PR
The reference architecture runs a three-agent customer-support pipeline on Amazon Bedrock and OpenSearch 2.19, with each agent hop recorded as a span.
US · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 13:00 UTC · Company/PR
Grok 4.7 builds on Grok 4.6 with better mixed-document handling and repo-scale coding with planning and error recovery.
Earlier: Grok 4.7 now available on Amazon Bedrock (29 September)
Global · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 15:30 UTC · Company/PR
The 1,300-line router sends work to 14 specialised agents, cutting column configuration from three to four days to under an hour.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 16:00 UTC · Company/PR
MCP Apps (SEP-1865) pair a tool with a live UI rendered in a sandboxed iframe, hosted on Cloud Run.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 07:00 UTC · Company/PR
Google was named a Leader in the inaugural IDC MarketScape Worldwide Agentic AI Platforms 2026 assessment, citing Gemini's Model Garden of over 200 models.
HARDWARE · 13
US · ▲ Bullish · 19 Oct 12:45 UTC · Trade press
US · ▲ Bullish · 19 Oct 20:09 UTC · Trade press
TorchNeuron is a development tool that lets developers run PyTorch apps on alternative chips such as Amazon's own, rather than Nvidia GPUs.
UK · ▲ Bullish · 19 Oct 22:00 UTC · Newsroom
US · ▲ Bullish · 19 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
TorchNeuron entered public beta on 20 October 2026, and 89% of the top 100 text-generation architectures now run on Trainium, up from 46%.
Germany, EU · ▲ Bullish · 19 Oct 19:27 UTC · Company/PR
NVIDIA invested in four German startups, Agile Robots, Avelios Medical, Mirelo and Reflex Aerospace, as part of a nearly $10 billion European commitment.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 19:30 UTC · Company/PR
Cisco launched Nexus One, a data centre networking architecture spanning Cisco Silicon One and Nvidia Spectrum-X Ethernet switch silicon.
Earlier: WWT and Cisco discuss the Nexus One platform for AI-ready data centres (17 October)
Turkey · ▲ Bullish · 19 Oct 08:50 UTC · Trade press
Beta Enerji is building a manufacturing campus in Adana for transformers and switchgear, expected to employ 1,200 people at peak operation.
Germany · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 18:00 UTC · Company/PR
NVIDIA said it ran a 104-qubit fault-tolerant quantum simulation on Europe's JUPITER supercomputer.
US · ▼ Bearish · 19 Oct 05:26 UTC · Trade press
Swift Current filed suit in New York state court alleging First Solar knowingly supplied over 2.4 million defective Series 6 Plus and Series 7 modules, paid for at over $360 million.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 20:30 UTC · Company/PR
Global · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
US · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
Global · ◆ Neutral · 20 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
HYPERSCALER · 2
US · ▲ Bullish · 19 Oct 13:00 UTC · Company/PR
Phase one is complete, with GB200 and GB300 NVL72 racks deployed and scaling toward roughly 1 million GPUs.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 16:00 UTC · Company/PR
The platform runs full E/E architectures on C4A bare-metal Arm instances built on Google's Axion processors.
DATA CENTRE · 4
US · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 17:39 UTC · Trade press
The permit, filed on 6 October, covers phase four of the MEM01 facility, where 5C plans to expand power from 20 MW to 84 MW using fuel cells.
Canada · ▼ Bearish · 19 Oct 21:15 UTC · Newsroom
Earlier: Anthropic signs onto $10b Nova Scotia data centre project (17 October)
Australia · ▼ Bearish · 19 Oct 20:15 UTC · Newsroom
Indonesia · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 14:28 UTC · Company/PR
TelkomGroup operates 30 data centres and plans two new internet gateways in Jakarta and Surabaya.
ENERGY & POWER · 28
US · ▼ Bearish · 19 Oct 09:00 UTC · Trade press
FERC's June 2026 show-cause orders require every grid operator to show its interconnection framework can handle 62 GW of new US data centre capacity by 2030. PJM's pipeline is about 11.8 GW.
Earlier: US grid operators miss FERC deadline for large-load interconnection processes (8 October)
US · ▲ Bullish · 19 Oct 13:59 UTC · Trade press
The project would use 12 Xe-100 reactors of 80 MW each at the retired Breed Generating Station in Sullivan County, with Amazon providing development funding.
Canada · ▲ Bullish · 19 Oct 21:23 UTC · Trade press
The factory in London, Ontario will cover 226,000 square feet and is due for completion by 2028.
US · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 16:16 UTC · Trade press
Voltus will operate the 100 MW plant under a three-year contract that makes it responsible for Google's capacity obligation.
Earlier: Sunrun partners with Voltus to supply distributed solar-plus-storage capacity to AI hyperscalers. (24 August)
US · ▲ Bullish · 19 Oct 14:41 UTC · Trade press
The project combines 86 MW of solar with 280 MWh of lithium-ion and 100 MWh of Eos zinc batteries under a 15-year Google offtake, expected online by 2030.
Earlier: Google signs PPAs with MN8 Energy and Eos for West Virginia and Utah projects. (3 September)
US · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 21:59 UTC · Trade press
US · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 21:56 UTC · Trade press
The administration is using a decades-old law to give Williams Companies $42 million toward the Constitution Pipeline from Pennsylvania to New York.
Australia · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 03:22 UTC · Trade press
Queensland's LNP government shortlisted four companies to build 400 MW of new gas-fired capacity in central Queensland by 2032, from ten bidders offering 4 GW.
US · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 20:08 UTC · Trade press
Traditional transmission takes seven to 10 years from planning to energisation, while data centres can reach GPU energisation in under a year.
India · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 12:37 UTC · Trade press
The deal is priced at INR 6 ($0.063) per kWh and requires four hours of daily non-solar supply at 90% monthly availability.
Australia · ▲ Bullish · 19 Oct 05:19 UTC · Trade press
South Australia selected four projects totalling 12.66 GW for the Whyalla West release area, led by Windlab's proposed 6 GW solar and wind.
South Korea · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 03:15 UTC · Trade press
The K-GX strategy runs to 2035 with 1,000 trillion won (about $A1.1 trillion) and targets 100 GW of renewables by 2030.
US · ▼ Bearish · 19 Oct 07:30 UTC · Trade press
The Illinois Power Agency's August procurement secured 600 MW of storage against the 3 GW-by-2030 requirement, with installed storage at just 102 MW.
US · ◆ Neutral · 18 Oct 23:44 UTC · Trade press
An investigation found no public input among the five states that signed a complaint against MISO's $22 billion long-range transmission portfolio.
US · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 09:00 UTC · Trade press
PG&E has energised over 1,200 miles of underground lines since 2021, with per-mile costs falling from above $4 million to about $3.1 million.
US · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 19:56 UTC · Trade press
Captona closed the preferred equity investment on October 13, financing 55 MW of solar and 5 MWh of battery storage across 10 projects in four US states.
US · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 11:50 UTC · Trade press
Australia · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 05:45 UTC · Trade press
The expansion adds 150 MW and 300 MWh to the existing Victorian battery, with completion expected in 2028 and up to 370 construction jobs.
US · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 20:43 UTC · Trade press
India · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 20:41 UTC · Trade press
NTPC signed the power purchase agreement on October 15 for a roughly 1MW hybrid CSP and PV project at Bhadla Solar Park in Rajasthan.
US · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 16:00 UTC · Trade press
Its prototype generated about 2 kilowatts of net power for 8.7 seconds.
US · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 16:00 UTC · Trade press
The Adélie unit generated roughly 60 watt-hours at Axial Seamount on 27 September, 300 miles off Oregon.
Indonesia · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 11:40 UTC · Trade press
Two FPU-100 floating units would supply 200 MW, with Rosatom expecting consumer supply within five years.
Norway · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 11:15 UTC · Trade press
The MDG wants plug-in solar and batteries meeting safety rules connectable by end-2027, with a VAT exemption study due 1 October 2027.
Why this matters: Residential storage and solar could become easier to deploy in Norway, though the proposal is political, not yet law.
US · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 09:00 UTC · Trade press
About 60% of those AI deployments are in active use without their benefits being effectively quantified, according to ScottMadden.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 20:07 UTC · Trade press
South Africa · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 13:59 UTC · Trade press
Quantum Leap Energy will hold around 80% of the venture at Pelindaba, with TerraPower already holding offtake agreements for its expected output.
Sri Lanka · ▼ Bearish · 19 Oct 07:44 UTC · Trade press
Sri Lanka's National System Operator told all PV owners to disconnect after a 17 October blackout caused by transmission network instability, following a February 2025 outage linked to high solar penetration.
REGULATION & POLICY · 8
US, China · ▼ Bearish · 19 Oct 18:45 UTC · Newsroom · 2 sources
US, Saudi Arabia · ▼ Bearish · 19 Oct 19:45 UTC · Newsroom
Earlier: Employee arrested after listening device found in OpenAI conference room, FBI says (13 October)
US, Saudi Arabia · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 17:43 UTC · Trade press
Senators Merkley and Markey introduced a Joint Resolution of Disapproval on October 15 to block the US-Saudi 123 agreement signed July 22.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 15:30 UTC · Newsroom
Australia · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 02:23 UTC · Trade press
The NSW government will introduce a bill allowing the mine to lift production to 16.5 million tonnes a year until 2032, after a High Court ruling on downstream emissions.
Indonesia · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 09:07 UTC · Trade press
Indonesia's president ordered PT PLN to improve efficiency and speed delivery of the 100 GW solar programme launched in August, with Suroso Isnandar taking over as president director.
Germany · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 19:27 UTC · Company/PR
Earlier: NVIDIA showcased its European work at GTC Berlin (13 October)
US · ◆ Neutral · 19 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
The USGS identified 60 critical mineral commodities in 2025, and NSF is funding recovery from mature shale reservoirs in Oklahoma and a new cobalt mine in Idaho.