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The GPU Daily · #108 · covering Thursday 29 October
The physical layer of AI, every day. Here's what moved on Thursday 29 October 2026.
A utility in Ohio has raised its five-year spending plan by thirty percent.
Contracted demand is now growing faster than its existing plants can produce. The biggest driver is one data centre campus in its home state. The developer's parent has agreed to pay for the new power lines, with a guaranteed return on top.
The utility is building for a tenant.
The tenant is covering the bill.
In this issue
Top story · ENERGY & POWER
US · ▲ Bullish · 29 Oct 15:05 UTC · Trade press
AEP raised its five-year capex plan 30% to $100B. Gas generation spend climbs to $20B from $13B, and transmission reaches $37B from $33B. SoftBank and its affiliates will pay for the Piketon transmission line serving SB Energy's 10.4 GW Ohio data centre, at an 11.35% base return on equity.
Earlier: PJM files study of SoftBank's 10 GW Ohio AI campus (14 October)
MARKET MOVES · 8
US · ▲ Bullish · 29 Oct 20:01 UTC · Company/PR
Intel's DCAI revenue reached $7.3bn, up 78% year over year, and it completed a $23bn public equity offering during the quarter.
US · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 21:56 UTC · Trade press
Anthropic holds about $132 billion in cash and investments against roughly $500 billion of non-cancellable compute commitments through 2033, per the author's estimates.
Global · ▲ Bullish · 29 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
ST posted a 37.3% gross margin and $291M net income, and guided Q4 2026 revenue to $4.15B at the midpoint.
China · ▼ Bearish · 29 Oct 09:01 UTC · Trade press
The STAR 50 index, which tracks Chinese tech including AI companies, has collapsed, according to a podcast discussion this week.
China · ▲ Bullish · 29 Oct 05:16 UTC · Trade press
Q3 revenue reached RMB 665m, while nine-month R&D spending rose 191.48% to RMB 263m.
US · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 19:56 UTC · Trade press
The OpenAI-backed firm is paying $10 per share, about $7.6bn in equity, with total enterprise value of $15.3bn.
China · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 05:16 UTC · Trade press
Jingshuo builds data infrastructure for physical AI, with investors including Vision Knight Capital and Sirius Capital.
US · ◆ Neutral · 28 Oct 20:49 UTC · Company/PR
NEOCLOUD · 5
South Korea · ▲ Bullish · 29 Oct 09:15 UTC · Newsroom
Global · ▼ Bearish · 29 Oct 11:00 UTC · Newsroom
Finland · ▲ Bullish · 28 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
The S3-compatible all-NVMe storage sits in the FIN-03 region alongside Verda's GPU instances, with no egress, ingress or API request fees.
UK · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 15:14 UTC · Company/PR
Only 15% have moved to a domestic alternative, according to the survey of 1,000 UK IT leaders by Civo, a UK cloud vendor.
Why this matters: Vendor-commissioned survey data, so the gap between stated intent and actual migration may be overstated.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 26 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
On one HGX B200 node, eight single-GPU replicas produced 42.5% more valid video per node-hour than one replica spanning all eight GPUs, though mean latency rose 5.5 times.
SOFTWARE & AI · 25
France · ▲ Bullish · 29 Oct 17:00 UTC · Trade press
Mistral says ML4 matches GLM-5.3 on performance while using 47% fewer tokens per task, and is available on Hugging Face and via API.
Earlier: Microsoft and Hugging Face release ThinkingBox-Training, cutting cost per task to $8 (23 October)
Global · ▲ Bullish · 29 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
The model has 49B active parameters and a 1M token context window, and Hugging Face serves it on 8 x NVIDIA H200 GPUs with FP8 weights.
Earlier: Mistral released Large 4 model trained on 4,000 NVIDIA GPUs (6 October)
China · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 05:16 UTC · Trade press
The Hy4 preview released in August has 770 billion total parameters, 49 billion active at inference, and a one million token window.
China · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 07:07 UTC · Trade press
The 35B-parameter MoE diffusion model scored 73.6 on SWE-bench Verified, the team says, and ran at 515 tokens/s on a single H200 in agent tasks.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 13:00 UTC · Trade press
Deepgram, which raised a $130m Series C earlier this year, agreed to keep Pipecat open source and vendor-neutral as a condition of the deal.
US · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 09:00 UTC · Company/PR
A replay of the Hugging Face breach showed the new monitors would have alerted OpenAI's security team about 30 minutes after a sandbox escape.
Earlier: OpenAI resumes frontier AI training after security overhaul, discloses software flaw (26 October)
Southeast Asia · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 07:30 UTC · Trade press
Tencent is pitching WorkBuddy to existing regional cloud customers as competition at home intensifies.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 14:19 UTC · Company/PR
The real-time interactive model entered research preview on October 28, with native audio and planned access for Google AI Ultra subscribers.
China · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 05:16 UTC · Trade press
The identifiers deepseek-v5, deepseek-v5-open and deepseek-v5-next appeared in account-integration tests, with no specifications or release date.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 26 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
The Turbo API costs $0.016 per image in Singapore and $0.014133 in Global regions, with a 120 requests-per-minute rate limit.
India · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 18:16 UTC · Company/PR
The feature has served millions of smartwatch users in India for over six months, on-demand inference via AWS Lambda, with plans to move to batch inference.
China · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 02:01 UTC · Trade press
V4.1-Flash-1017 led open-weight models on FrontierCode 2.0, and no V5 has been announced.
China · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 07:08 UTC · Trade press
US · ◆ Neutral · 28 Oct 20:00 UTC · Company/PR
The CLI lets developers create, deploy and operate AI agents from the terminal, and version 1.0 supports direct work with runtimes, memory and gateways.
US · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 20:08 UTC · Trade press
China · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 07:07 UTC · Trade press
Global · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 08:00 UTC · Company/PR
Global · ◆ Neutral · 28 Oct 08:00 UTC · Company/PR
The regional expansion brings AWS Agent Registry to nine regions in total, delivered through Amazon Bedrock AgentCore.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 28 Oct 18:00 UTC · Company/PR
US · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
The initiative covers federally funded datasets, models and code, with Hugging Face hosting over 17,000 public science datasets.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 16:00 UTC · Company/PR
Knowledge Catalog now ingests definitions from six semantic layers and is claimed to make agents nearly 4x more accurate, based on internal benchmarks.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 12:52 UTC · Company/PR
Simulations runs full multi-turn conversations between a simulated user and a coding agent in an isolated sandbox, supporting Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode.
Earlier: DigitalOcean launched shows and Simulations for agent observability and testing (12 October)
Global · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
The Swift packages support Parakeet and Qwen3-ASR models, and Parakeet transcribes an hour of audio in 20 to 40 seconds on an M4 Max.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 30 Oct 17:00 UTC · Company/PR
Global · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 17:00 UTC · Company/PR
The update centres on faithfulness, harm minimisation, honesty, human agency and care, and retires most detailed style guidance.
HARDWARE · 10
South Korea · ▲ Bullish · 29 Oct 08:15 UTC · Newsroom
China · ▲ Bullish · 29 Oct 07:06 UTC · Trade press
The 1,024-NPU liquid-cooled cluster offers 1 EFLOPS of FP8 compute and 256TB of unified memory, and took one month from start to power-on.
Korea · ▲ Bullish · 28 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
Earlier: Can Britain chip away at Nvidia? Start-ups raise $1.6bn in AI race (19 October)
China · ▲ Bullish · 29 Oct 01:59 UTC · Trade press
The company says third-party tests put single-card throughput at 1.05 times the H200, though the test method was not disclosed.
Southeast Asia · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 06:30 UTC · Newsroom
China · ▲ Bullish · 29 Oct 02:00 UTC · Trade press
The training stack has been used on 10,000-GPU clusters and supports blockwise FP8 and slime and miles RL.
US · ▲ Bullish · 29 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
Non-GAAP diluted EPS reached $1.23 against $0.72 a year earlier, and Q4 guidance is $1,025 million to $1,055 million.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 06:01 UTC · Trade press
Hitachi Energy is expanding its collaboration with Celonis to use AI to identify supply chain risks and production bottlenecks across its global operations, as part of its AI Nexus programme.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
Remi El-Ouazzane becomes Chief Technology Officer and Marco Cassis becomes Chief Strategic Officer, with the reorganisation completed by end March 2027.
Global · ▲ Bullish · 29 Oct 20:11 UTC · Company/PR
BMW Group's engineering team migrated its connected vehicle platform to AWS Graviton, cutting NGINX ingress CPU by about 57 percent. The article is an AWS-published architecture write-up.
HYPERSCALER · 7
US · ▲ Bullish · 29 Oct 23:42 UTC · Trade press
Amazon's chief executive said on Thursday that AWS aims to become the first $1 trillion revenue business and that the company will keep spending heavily on capex to build AI cloud capacity.
US · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 08:45 UTC · Newsroom
US · ▲ Bullish · 28 Oct 23:15 UTC · Company/PR
Microsoft described the quarter as a fast start to its fiscal year and framed its strategy around building a tech stack for agentic AI.
Earlier: Microsoft disclosed Azure revenue of $33.2 billion for the quarter (28 October)
US · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 08:15 UTC · Newsroom
Earlier: Microsoft offers voluntary exit programme to eligible staff in four countries (26 October)
Global · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 16:00 UTC · Company/PR
The system caught 74 serious privacy bugs at the diff stage in the first half of 2026 and cut privacy SEVs by 20%, with a 60% true-positive rate.
Germany · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 08:00 UTC · Company/PR
US · ◆ Neutral · 28 Oct 08:00 UTC · Company/PR
DATA CENTRE · 7
Global · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 16:45 UTC · Trade press
The forecast is more than double its 25 GW estimate for 2026, with over 60 GW under construction and nearly 12 GW of the 2027 figure still classed as planned.
Australia · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 11:00 UTC · Newsroom
Ireland · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 06:15 UTC · Newsroom
US · ▼ Bearish · 29 Oct 09:45 UTC · Newsroom
Canada · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 11:00 UTC · Newsroom · 2 sources
US · ▼ Bearish · 28 Oct 16:44 UTC · Company/PR
The Fed raised its benchmark rate by 25 basis points in September to 3.75% to 4.00%, and Kevin Warsh has taken over as Fed chair.
US · ◆ Neutral · 26 Oct 00:00 UTC · Company/PR
ISO 7 cleanrooms permit 352,000 particles of 0.5 micrometres or larger per cubic metre, one-tenth the ISO 8 limit, and small modular cleanrooms can be completed in 4 weeks.
ENERGY & POWER · 39
US · ▲ Bullish · 29 Oct 17:29 UTC · Trade press
The federally guaranteed loans support over 2.6 GW of new or upgraded capacity, with QTS and Meta among the data-centre customers driving demand.
US · ▲ Bullish · 29 Oct 13:00 UTC · Trade press
FirstEnergy's data centre load pipeline grew 4.8% quarter over quarter to 26 GW, and its Maidsville project seeks approval for a $2.7 billion, 1,200 MW gas-fired plant.
Australia · ▲ Bullish · 29 Oct 21:52 UTC · Trade press
ERM projects 62 TWh of annual contracted volume by 2030-2032, including about 12 TWh from data centres, and only 21 per cent of Australia's 50 GW renewables pipeline is fully committed.
US · ▲ Bullish · 29 Oct 21:14 UTC · Trade press
The $4.5 billion increase goes entirely to Houston Electric projects, with at least 14 GW to be energised by 2030 and industrial leasing in Houston up more than 30% year on year.
US · ◆ Neutral · 28 Oct 23:33 UTC · Trade press
US · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 21:01 UTC · Trade press
The laboratory projects data centres could consume 11.8% of US electricity by 2030, within a range of 9.5% to 15.3%.
US · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 15:21 UTC · Trade press
The bill would let FERC penalise utilities that miss cost-effective grid upgrade timelines, including cutting their return on equity, and would cap the cost of a $2.5 billion DOE fund.
Asia · ▲ Bullish · 29 Oct 05:45 UTC · Newsroom · 3 sources
US · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 18:56 UTC · Trade press
US · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 07:30 UTC · Trade press
PJM has approved only 2 of 14 surplus interconnection service requests as of November 2025, and its Market Implementation Committee takes up SIS reform at its November 4 meeting.
Egypt · ▲ Bullish · 29 Oct 09:30 UTC · Trade press
Scatec signed $217 million in non-recourse loans for the first phase of its Dandara project in Egypt, a 569 MW solar and 100 MWh battery plant supplying Egypt Aluminium.
US · ▲ Bullish · 29 Oct 17:58 UTC · Trade press
The Round Rock facility will expand production of pressure and temperature sensors for commercial reactors, with SMR providers targeted.
US · ◆ Neutral · 28 Oct 22:19 UTC · Trade press
US demand peaked at 666 GW on 27 January, and the review found weather forecasts missed at both temperature extremes.
Spain · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 10:15 UTC · Trade press
Standalone solar PPA prices fell 7.7% year on year in Q3 2026, while hybrid solar-and-storage contracts averaged €48/MWh.
US · ▲ Bullish · 29 Oct 17:36 UTC · Trade press
US · ▲ Bullish · 29 Oct 16:30 UTC · Trade press
The Gaffney facility brings 1.7 GW of thin-film capacity online, with the second phase due by mid-2027 to reach 3.4 GW.
Chile · ▼ Bearish · 29 Oct 06:23 UTC · Trade press
The plant and its 98 MW/312 MWh battery have been offline since a cyberattack reported on August 27, with no restoration timeline announced.
Australia · ▼ Bearish · 29 Oct 01:38 UTC · Trade press
Main works estimates rose from $2bn in 2017 to $22.2bn, with a $25bn scenario allowance and completion now pushed to late 2029.
US · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 20:12 UTC · Trade press
Earlier: General Matter applied for NRC licence to build uranium enrichment at Paducah (6 October)
Czech Republic · ▼ Bearish · 29 Oct 16:15 UTC · Trade press
The dispute centred on contract structure; KHNP plans to pick a replacement contractor by July 2027, with completion of the two APR1000 units in 2039 and 2040.
US · ▼ Bearish · 29 Oct 00:17 UTC · Trade press
The proposed 500-kV project from Oklahoma to Arkansas was dropped after the study ended without a transmission recommendation.
Global · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 05:40 UTC · Trade press
The HPU Agile-H delivers 80 kW of continuous three-phase power, with pre-orders open and first deliveries set for Q1 2027.
Australia · ▼ Bearish · 29 Oct 03:31 UTC · Trade press
The 2,000 MW project's costs had already risen about $4 billion, and the government cited the Snowy 2.0 blowout.
US · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 14:47 UTC · Trade press
The utility integrated more than 5,000 miles of existing fibre across all 67 counties, finishing ahead of schedule and under budget.
Australia · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 00:19 UTC · Trade press
The Mount Britton Battery would sit beside the Nebo substation and clear nearly half its tree-covered site, including 11.1 hectares of koala habitat.
Turkey · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 10:45 UTC · Trade press
A one-year feasibility study funded by the US Trade and Development Agency will assess US SMR designs for electricity, heat and steam at TÜPRAŞ's refineries.
Canada, Turkey · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 15:50 UTC · Trade press
AtkinsRéalis will run a feasibility study for CANDU reactors at Sinop, and the US DFC could lend up to $5bn to the Philippines for nuclear.
China · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 07:51 UTC · Trade press
Carbon Brief projects China's 2026 clean-tech exports will avoid 450 million tonnes of CO2 outside China, roughly Brazil's annual fossil fuel emissions.
Australia · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 03:50 UTC · Trade press
Support for local wind in western Victoria reached 60.3%, with 20 projects cancelled after social pressure, according to Squadron Energy.
Why this matters: Company-commissioned polling, so the result is company-stated and may favour the developer's own view.
US · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 00:29 UTC · Trade press
The report covers energy emergency alerts issued on three summer days in the RTO's West balancing authority area.
US · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 13:27 UTC · Trade press
Slovakia · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 12:08 UTC · Trade press
The study is partly funded by a US State Department FIRST Programme grant, with Slovakia targeting 2040 completion of the new Bohunice unit.
US · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 21:27 UTC · Trade press
France · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 07:30 UTC · Trade press
Renault Group and EDF plan to launch a vehicle-to-grid home charging service in France in summer 2027, with tariffs still to be set.
US · ◆ Neutral · 28 Oct 22:16 UTC · Trade press
India · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 17:00 UTC · Trade press
India's cabinet approved a support mechanism in July aiming to add 5 GW of floating solar over five years, from roughly 700 MW deployed in 2026.
Italy · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 12:00 UTC · Trade press
SNPA data shows ground-mounted PV occupied 2,798 hectares in 2025, up from 1,700 in 2024, and data centre development took 13 hectares, mainly in Lombardy.
Portugal · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 11:23 UTC · Trade press
Earlier: Portugal mandates grid-forming for battery plants, €100M awarded to 43 projects (28 October)
Australia · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 22:24 UTC · Trade press
Jarrod Leak of the Australian Alliance for Energy Productivity says aquatic centres, laundries and food processors are switching, while upfront costs and a shortage of refrigeration mechanics slow projects.
REGULATION & POLICY · 10
Australia · ▼ Bearish · 29 Oct 01:30 UTC · Trade press
AEMO identified 225 data centre projects totalling 67 GW against about 77 GW of current NEM generation capacity.
Singapore, US · ▼ Bearish · 29 Oct 16:42 UTC · Trade press
Megaspeed, a Singapore AI cloud firm, was investigated in 2025 over concerns it resold restricted Nvidia chips to Chinese companies; Nvidia says the meetings were routine.
US · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 09:00 UTC · Trade press
US, Russia · ◆ Neutral · 23 Oct 00:00 UTC · Trade press
CSIS describes a joint data centre proposed as part of broader US-Russia negotiations as a threat to US national security.
Earlier: Russia proposed joint US data centre project as sanctions remain (26 October)
US · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 13:21 UTC · Trade press
The court ruled on 16 October that Texas has a 'free lane' to restrict foreign-owned access, affirming dismissal of GH America Energy's complaint over a cancelled interconnection application.
Australia · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 04:07 UTC · Trade press
Iberdrola, Tilt, RWE, Stromlo and Mint were rated first, and participation is now required for Capacity Investment Scheme tenders.
US · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 19:33 UTC · Trade press
UK · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 08:45 UTC · Trade press
The UK Boiler Upgrade Scheme budget was cut by around GBP 700 million, and VAT on home solar and battery storage rises from 0% to 5% from 1 April 2027.
US, Ethiopia · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 14:26 UTC · Trade press
CBP released Toyo shipments from its Ethiopia factory after reviewing polysilicon and wafer sourcing, while a Commerce inquiry into Ethiopian cells with Chinese components runs to a mid-December preliminary determination.
US · ◆ Neutral · 29 Oct 16:00 UTC · Trade press
