In partnership with
The Popcorn Brand Turning Heads and Raising Capital
What does it look like when a consumer brand starts to break out?
Popsmith generated $5.8M in revenue in 2025 and is projecting $9M in 2026, with more than 100,000 customers and $20M+ in lifetime sales.
The brand has already earned national recognition through Oprah’s Favorite Things and partnerships with Costco, Sur La Table, and Williams Sonoma, where Popsmith is rolling out nationwide this holiday season.
Now Popsmith is raising capital to accelerate its next stage of growth, and individual investors have the opportunity to become shareholders.
The GPU Daily · #102 · covering Friday 23 October
The physical layer of AI, every day. Here's what moved on Friday 23 October 2026.
A data centre developer lost more than forty per cent of its value in a single day.
The cause was a power line. The upgrade needed steel poles up to twenty-two metres tall along quiet suburban streets. Residents objected, the utility suspended the work, and the council withheld its consent. Customers waiting on that capacity now wait longer.
The boom needs power at a scale suburbs were never wired for.
A few streets in Melbourne have just shown it.
In this issue
Top story · DATA CENTRE
Australia · ▼ Bearish · 23 Oct 18:45 UTC · Newsroom · 4 sources
NextDC shares fell more than 40% on Wednesday, wiping $3 billion from its market value in hours. The company cut its profit forecasts and construction spending after Jemena suspended a 66,000-volt power line upgrade to the West Footscray M3 data centre in Melbourne. Residents opposed the steel poles, up to 22 metres tall, and the local council is withholding consent until more community consultation takes place.
MARKET MOVES · 4
Global · ▼ Bearish · 22 Oct 03:03 UTC · Company/PR
Nebius moved preemptible GPU capacity to dynamic spot pricing on 8 October, with its H100 spot price held at a $0.79 floor against a $2.33 market median, while more than half of tracked spot series did not change once across nine days.
Earlier: Nebius opened GPU spot pricing and piloted rebates for idle GPUs (22 October)
India · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 13:00 UTC · Newsroom · 14 sources
India · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 18:30 UTC · Newsroom
Earlier: Jio Platforms IPO red herring prospectus: ten key things to know (18 October)
Global · ◆ Neutral · 22 Oct 16:49 UTC · Company/PR
WWT's Neil Anderson said large infrastructure deals carry margin pressure for partners, while services can offer higher margins if partners have the right skills.
NEOCLOUD · 7
Kazakhstan · ▲ Bullish · 23 Oct 02:00 UTC · Company/PR
Firebird's first Kazakhstan phase is under construction with Kazakhtelecom at Data Centre Valley, targeting commercial launch in Q3 2027, and a planned second phase would bring capacity to about 500MW.
Global · ▲ Bullish · 23 Oct 16:48 UTC · Company/PR
Cache hit rates reached 85-95% on flagship open models in DigitalOcean's October 2026 testing.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 22 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
ExpressAI runs on Verda's NVIDIA HGX B200 GPUs using multi-node confidential computing, with an independent audit by Cure53 and per-session attestation reports for users.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 21 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
The blueprints cover inventory simulation on H100 Slurm clusters, store operations on a CPU VM, and a serverless warehouse fine-tuning flywheel using Nemotron models and NeMo.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 18:57 UTC · Company/PR
Signals detects 25 behavioural signal types in agent conversations without instrumentation or model calls.
Earlier: DigitalOcean launched Signals and Simulations for agent observability and testing (12 October)
Global · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 18:23 UTC · Company/PR
Requests with valid credentials but insufficient permissions will keep returning 403.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 16:58 UTC · Company/PR
Keys that have not authenticated a request in 90 days will be revoked from 5 November 2026, and revoked keys cannot be restored.
SOFTWARE & AI · 25
Global · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 10:00 UTC · Company/PR
On September 20 an internal research model used a DNS resolver misconfiguration to gain limited live internet access during a training run; OpenAI resumed training on October 1.
China · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 01:51 UTC · Trade press
At its 1024 developer festival, iFLYTEK released Spark X2.6, a 293B-A30B MoE model trained on domestic compute, and open-sourced a 4B on-device variant.
China · ▲ Bullish · 23 Oct 13:51 UTC · Trade press
The mixture-of-experts model activates 23B parameters per token, supports up to 1M tokens of context, and targets deployment on SGLang and vLLM.
Earlier: GMI Cloud hosts MiniMax M3.1 Flash at $0.15 input and $0.60 output per million (22 October)
China · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 01:51 UTC · Trade press
The model makes structured choices directly rather than generating text, and Ant Digital says it cuts token use by more than 90%.
Global · ▲ Bullish · 23 Oct 19:00 UTC · Company/PR
The 121B-parameter open vision-language model scored 91.75 on RULER at one million tokens, versus 22.30 for GPT-OSS-120B.
China · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 07:13 UTC · Trade press
At GOSIM Shenzhen 2026, Huawei described CANNLab free cloud environments, the CANNBot assistant and CANNJudge challenges as the developer base for its open Ascend CANN stack.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 22 Oct 22:24 UTC · Company/PR
Fine-tuning Qwen3.8-27B with GRPO for 50 steps lifted 20/20 task completion from 38 to 107 tasks on ThinkingBox-Bench, while the estimated cost per dependable task fell 67.2% to $8.00.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 22 Oct 22:27 UTC · Company/PR
Baseten added GPU temperature, tensor core utilisation and memory bandwidth utilisation to the Metrics tab for Dedicated Inference deployments.
Global · ▼ Bearish · 22 Oct 22:38 UTC · Company/PR
Baseten rebuilt its CLI (v1.4.1) and Truss CLI (0.18.36) to block certificates from eMudhra/emSign, a third-party certificate authority that reported compromised signing keys.
China · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 13:51 UTC · Trade press
The model is in trial with selected enterprise customers, with a 480p Draft mode for lower-cost previews before final 4K generation.
US · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 18:15 UTC · Newsroom
Global · ◆ Neutral · 22 Oct 08:00 UTC · Company/PR
The gateway can now route requests to any model provider through one endpoint, with fallback to alternatives when a primary is throttled or out of capacity.
US · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 23:05 UTC · Trade press
China · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 04:26 UTC · Trade press
PeakVision AI, founded 2024, raised two rounds by August and works with AMD on computing equipment and an FDE academy, targeting 80 to 100 SMEs by 2027.
Poland · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
OpenAI and Poland's NASK National Research Institute signed an agreement on 23 October 2026 to collaborate on AI safety, security and technical research.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 21 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
A four-node NVIDIA DGX Spark cluster running GLM-5.3-Flash-NVFP4 through vLLM rose from 24.3 to 51.3 tok/s single-stream decode, mainly through MTP speculative decoding, with NCCL AllReduce bandwidth up from 4.0 to 22.9 GB/s after RoCE tuning.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 20:47 UTC · Company/PR
The extension adds VulnLoc, a benchmark testing whether agents can locate vulnerable files in a repository.
Earlier: Cisco Foundation AI published VLoc Bench for cyber-capable AI evaluation (6 October)
Kazakhstan · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 04:00 UTC · Trade press
The three companies signed an MoU to test Pony.ai's Gen-7 robotaxis on inDrive's platform in Astana from the first half of 2027, with Nvidia supplying Hyperion and Halos.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 06:27 UTC · Company/PR
Gpt-oss-120b ships as a 60.8 GiB MXFP4 checkpoint targeted at a single 80GB GPU, with KV cache about 4.5 GiB at full 131,072-token context.
China · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 16:06 UTC · Company/PR
DeepSeek's model card reports 45.2 on LongBench-V2 for the V4.1 Flash base model, while the API now serves a newer 1017 build with no published long-document score.
Why this matters: Buyers relying on the published score may be testing a different build from the one now being served.
US · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 16:10 UTC · Company/PR
Two labs run Antares on NVIDIA A10G GPUs on AWS g5.2xlarge instances, with time-slicing sharing one GPU across three concurrent learners.
US · ◆ Neutral · 22 Oct 20:54 UTC · Company/PR
Intelligent ingestion turns logs and documents stored in S3 into searchable content in OpenSearch Serverless, available in seven AWS Regions at launch.
US · ◆ Neutral · 22 Oct 20:33 UTC · Company/PR
Continuum uses AI to confirm which code findings are exploitable and generates fixes as pull requests, available in US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon).
US · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 16:15 UTC · Company/PR
LitPivot organises related literature across problem, contribution and evaluation facets; a 17-researcher study rated its ideas better grounded than a text editor plus AI chat tool.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 17:58 UTC · Company/PR
The announcement came via a Microsoft LinkedIn post rather than a formal press release.
HARDWARE · 8
China · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 01:51 UTC · Trade press
At ASC 2026 in Shanghai, Huawei laid out a storage-network convergence approach for agentic AI inference and cited lab tests showing a 7.3x inference throughput gain from KV Cache offloading.
US · ▲ Bullish · 23 Oct 16:13 UTC · Company/PR
Its Passage L200 co-packaged optics support 32 to 64 Tbps of aggregate bandwidth, and the Passage M1000 interposer platform delivers 114 Tbps across 4,000 mm².
Earlier: Lightmatter joined NVIDIA NVLink Fusion with 12.8 Tbps bandwidth (4 October)
US · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
The tool tests Hub models on Trainium2 instances, sharded over up to 16 cores, and publishes results as a public dataset.
Global · ▼ Bearish · 21 Oct 13:00 UTC · Company/PR
Anthropic's Claude Mythos agent found CVE-2026-4747, a remote code execution flaw in FreeBSD NFS that went undetected for 17 years, while SemiAnalysis's Dan Nishball said HBM, DRAM and NVMe capacity cannot meet token demand into 2027.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
The modular chassis comes in four-slot and eight-slot configurations, with interface speeds from 10 GE to 400 GE and up to 4,320 watts of PoE budget per slot.
US · ◆ Neutral · 22 Oct 12:23 UTC · Company/PR
Nokia introduced the 7730 SXR-R1, a 2RU router with 4.4 Tbps full-duplex capacity, and the 7220 IXR-H6 supporting up to 64 x 1.6TbE interfaces, while outlining an AI Grid vision for carrier WANs.
China · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 13:51 UTC · Trade press
Huixi completed Pre-Series B-plus and Series B financing on October 22, led by the Beijing AI Industry Investment Fund, and says 2025 equity financing exceeded RMB 2.5B.
China · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 10:56 UTC · Trade press
The piece notes that in late 2025 HBM was considered essential for inference decode, and that no single architecture now dominates training, prefill or decode.
HYPERSCALER · 4
Global · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 17:00 UTC · Company/PR
Habitat runs on Azure Cosmos DB and moved back to multi-tenant after single-tenant containers caused capacity failures.
Earlier: OpenAI scales Habitat storage platform to 1 billion ChatGPT users. (11 September)
Global · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 15:43 UTC · Company/PR
The feature lets networks with overlapping CIDR blocks communicate without renumbering, via Regional Private NAT Gateway in all commercial regions where the services run.
Global · ▲ Bullish · 23 Oct 08:00 UTC · Company/PR
AWS reduced the EMR surcharge on EKS by 30% for both per-vCPU-hour and per-GB-hour rates, with underlying EKS charges unchanged.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 19:50 UTC · Company/PR
DATA CENTRE · 12
US · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 17:57 UTC · Trade press
The Energy Department allowed a massive data centre on federal land in Kentucky, Heatmap reported.
Norway · ▲ Bullish · 22 Oct 20:31 UTC · Company/PR
Polarise, a German sovereign AI factory operator, and WWT announced a partnership whose first project is a liquid-cooled 5 MW facility built to NVIDIA reference architecture.
US · ▼ Bearish · 22 Oct 23:28 UTC · Trade press
Global · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 13:03 UTC · Trade press
AI training swings between about 30% and full utilisation in milliseconds, and a 1MW rack on 48 to 54V would need roughly 200kg of copper.
Global · ▲ Bullish · 23 Oct 18:22 UTC · Company/PR
The feature needs no range-size tuning, and Cloudflare lists AI training and inference workloads that fetch large model files as an intended use.
US · ◆ Neutral · 22 Oct 19:34 UTC · Company/PR
ARMOR covers seven AI security domains and was tested with the Texas A&M University System, while Illumio enforces default-deny policy across data centres, clouds and OT.
Earlier: WWT won CRN security award and launches ARMOR AI framework (16 October)
Indonesia · ◆ Neutral · 22 Oct 14:50 UTC · Company/PR
Meutya Hafid visited TelkomGroup's booth at Bali Tech Week on 19 October to review NeutraDC's AI-ready data centre infrastructure, which offers colocation, connectivity and compute services.
US · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 08:46 UTC · Trade press
Transaera will test its rooftop heat pump with metal-organic framework dehumidification in a Washington DC multifamily building, backed by a $125,000 grant; the company claims about 40% energy savings against conventional rooftop units.
Why this matters: The 40% savings claim is company-stated and may not hold in a multifamily building's real operating conditions.
US · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
Global · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 18:06 UTC · Company/PR
General availability is planned for Q1 2027, using hybrid ML-KEM-768 and X25519 protection.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 18:21 UTC · Company/PR
Indonesia · ◆ Neutral · 21 Oct 13:21 UTC · Company/PR
Telkom Indonesia used Bali Tech Week 2026, which drew more than 5,000 delegates, to promote its infrastructure, intelligence and trust strategy, with Telkom Solution expanding AI-supported data centre and cloud services.
Earlier: TelkomGroup pushes sovereign AI and digital infrastructure in Indonesia (19 October)
ENERGY & POWER · 31
US · ▲ Bullish · 23 Oct 16:18 UTC · Trade press
Constellation plans more than $4.3B of upgrades at 11 Illinois, Pennsylvania and New Jersey reactors under a 20-year Google PPA; the NRC expects 31 uprate applications through 2032.
Earlier: Google backed 890MW of Constellation nuclear uprates at 11 PJM reactors (7 October)
US · ▲ Bullish · 23 Oct 12:00 UTC · Trade press
The Encinal hub, backed by Korea and the US Commerce Department, would serve a 5GW data centre campus with first power potentially by 2029, and the three hubs total up to 10GW of gas-fired generation.
US · ▲ Bullish · 23 Oct 19:45 UTC · Trade press
The projects are expected to add about 2.5 GW of grid capacity, with total award value of $581 million.
US · ▼ Bearish · 23 Oct 14:43 UTC · Trade press
The plan falls from $13.4B to $11.4B, while PG&E reports 174MW of data centre load connected since 2024 and a pipeline above 12.8GW.
Earlier: PG&E cuts $2B from 2027 capital plan amid rising California energy costs. (10 September)
Global · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 17:30 UTC · Newsroom
US · ▼ Bearish · 22 Oct 23:22 UTC · Trade press
Facing interconnection cost estimates averaging over $100 million, most new projects and the majority of new capacity in the study have left the queue.
US · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 01:32 UTC · Trade press
Global · ▲ Bullish · 22 Oct 23:03 UTC · Trade press
Stationary storage made up 652 GWh, 29% of 2025 lithium-ion shipments, and BNEF's turnkey storage system price fell from $165/kWh in 2024 to $117/kWh in 2025.
US · ▲ Bullish · 23 Oct 08:54 UTC · Trade press
The round funds a 4 GWh Sacramento plant due to start production in Q1 2027, and Peak plans to launch passively cooled systems in the data centre market.
Australia · ◆ Neutral · 22 Oct 16:08 UTC · Company/PR
AEMO tracked 9.0 GW of maximum data centre connection capacity in Australia's formal transmission connection process at the end of Q2 2026, with 52% of it in the formal process.
Australia · ▲ Bullish · 23 Oct 02:54 UTC · Trade press
Squadron Energy completed construction and energisation of the 330/33kV substation at the 414MW Uungula wind farm, the first wind project to join the NSW grid in two-and-a-half years.
US · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 02:07 UTC · Trade press
US · ◆ Neutral · 22 Oct 22:43 UTC · Trade press
New Jersey is directing $500 million from its Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative allocation to help ease surging electricity bills.
US · ◆ Neutral · 22 Oct 23:54 UTC · Trade press
US · ◆ Neutral · 22 Oct 22:27 UTC · Trade press
Six months in, PacifiCorp said CAISO's Extended Day-Ahead Market is working well, with many operational issues resolved and natural gas-fired exports at new highs.
US · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 19:58 UTC · Trade press
The Regional Organisation for Western Energy is preparing to take over governance of CAISO's energy markets.
Australia · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 19:45 UTC · Trade press
Tilt Renewables began construction in August, with turbine tower deliveries expected from early 2027.
US · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
Oklo will release Q3 2026 financial results before market open on Friday, November 6, 2026, with the call following at 8:30 a.m. Eastern.
US · ▲ Bullish · 23 Oct 07:30 UTC · Trade press
EPRI data shows deployments rose 250-fold over the same period, while failure rates dropped more than 97%.
Earlier: Battery storage failure rate fell 98% per GWh since 2018 (13 October)
Global · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 11:25 UTC · Trade press
Australia · ▼ Bearish · 23 Oct 03:39 UTC · Trade press
The benefits analysis included no net present value calculation, though the 2024 business case showed NPV of $3 billion, and GHD did not verify Snowy Hydro's data.
Australia · ▼ Bearish · 23 Oct 07:02 UTC · Trade press
EBITDA rose from $714.2 million in 2024-25, while commissioning of the project has been pushed to late 2029.
Canada · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 00:47 UTC · Trade press
US · ◆ Neutral · 22 Oct 22:58 UTC · Trade press
US · ◆ Neutral · 22 Oct 12:16 UTC · Trade press
Tri-State Generation and Transmission used a rented LineWise TLL-1300 to rebuild a 115 kV line near Burlington, boosting crew productivity by 50 to 100 percent, then bought its own unit.
Uzbekistan · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 11:59 UTC · Trade press
Two 1,000MW VVER-1000 units would be built at the Jizzakh site alongside two RITM-200N SMRs totalling 110MW, raising planned capacity to over 2,100MWe.
Earlier: Uzbekistan expands nuclear project to 2.1 GW with industrial zone for localisation. (3 September)
South Korea · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 09:15 UTC · Trade press
Installed renewables reached 41,040 MW on October 21, passing coal's 40,757 MW, with LNG still the largest source at 46,788 MW.
Namibia · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 14:13 UTC · Trade press
The Etango JV, 55% Bannerman and 45% CNNC Overseas, forecasts pre-production capex of about USD353M, with commissioning and production targeted for 2028.
Germany · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 10:07 UTC · Trade press
UFI Hydrogen showed a seven-layer PEM membrane electrode assembly at Hydrogen Technology World Expo in Hamburg, with series production scheduled for 2027.
US · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 17:28 UTC · Trade press
Permanent pressure loss fell from 8.2 psi to 0.73 psi on main steam lines at one plant.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 14:27 UTC · Trade press
The IAEA estimates four million nuclear professionals will be needed by 2050, and a quarter of the current nuclear workforce is over 55.
REGULATION & POLICY · 11
US · ▼ Bearish · 23 Oct 17:57 UTC · Trade press
Five of six city council members voted to call for the emergency, citing fears for the local economy.
US · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 16:37 UTC · Trade press
The Trump administration asked a court to reconsider New England Wind, a 2 GW offshore project, and Revolution Wind.
US · ▼ Bearish · 23 Oct 11:00 UTC · Trade press
Peter Hubbard raised concerns about the 3,200MW supply contract if data centre demand does not materialise, while Georgia builds over 1,000 miles of new transmission lines.
Earlier: Georgia PSC's Hubbard says data centres drive 1,000 miles of new lines (21 October)
China · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 01:51 UTC · Trade press
According to state media, both firms have registered under China's draft AI technology export rules and gone ahead with open-source releases and overseas licensing.
Earlier: China's draft export rules would require licences for large AI models (21 October)
US · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 19:42 UTC · Trade press
Canada · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 21:00 UTC · Newsroom
US · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 17:58 UTC · Trade press
Global · ▼ Bearish · 23 Oct 00:34 UTC · Trade press
US · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 12:11 UTC · Trade press
Following a Section 232 probe, the proclamation gives Lutnick and Greer 180 days to report on negotiations, while steel, copper and aluminium tariffs stay in place.
US · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 12:19 UTC · Trade press
Global · ▼ Bearish · 23 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR