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The man who built the company everyone else builds around quit on Thursday.
He ran it for thirty-three years. He was also the loudest corporate voice for open models, and had agreed to buy the place they live for nearly thirteen billion dollars. That deal now waits on a chief executive nobody has named.
The chips still ship.
The models just lost their sponsor.
I'm Ben Baldieri. Every week, I break down what's moving in GPU compute, AI infrastructure, and the data centres that power it all.
Here's what's inside this week:
Let's get into it.
Jensen Huang Resigned From NVIDIA After 33 Years
Finance chief Colette Kress is interim chief executive, and Huang is heading to Congress.
Jensen Huang quit NVIDIA on 12 November, giving up the chief executive's job and his board seat at once. The board accepted his resignation on 11 November, the 8-K shows. Colette Kress, chief financial officer since 2013, is interim chief executive and keeps the finance job, and Harvey Jones becomes the board's first chair. NVIDIA gave no reason. The resignation followed a Wall Street Journal report that the board was preparing to remove him, and a New York Times report of an affair with Kimberly Powell, NVIDIA's vice president of healthcare, who reports directly to him. Reuters has since reported a third affair. The Times has also reported his relationship with Alice Huang, no relation, an executive at Megaspeed, the Singapore company that reportedly bought $4.8 billion of NVIDIA chips over two years. A US government memo described her as a spy for China's Ministry of State Security, the Times reports. The board hired former acting US Attorney Joon H. Kim to investigate. Three House committees will hear Huang testify behind closed doors before Thanksgiving. Democrats Ron Wyden and Richard Neal have asked the Commerce Department to preserve its records on NVIDIA's China sales. President Trump has suggested Apple chairman Tim Cook as the replacement. No one has been charged.
Why this matters:
Open source loses its loudest corporate backer. NVIDIA agreed in September to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. The Justice Department has been asking how the deal affects competition, TechCrunch reports, citing Reuters. Huang organised a July letter urging Washington not to over-restrict open-weight models, while Anthropic and OpenAI reportedly pushed for a ban on Chinese ones. Hugging Face chief executive Clément Delangue says the company will "keep fighting for open-source AI, harder than ever."
The best open models are Chinese, and so is the scandal. Kimi, Qwen and LongCat are among the strongest open-weight models, and two congressional inquiries are now asking how NVIDIA chips reached China. A successor under that scrutiny has less reason to champion models that mostly come from China.
NVIDIA's guarantees hold up part of the build-out. It agreed in August to backstop as much as $105 billion of OpenAI's Ohio lease payments if OpenAI defaults. Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR committed as much as $500 billion, with NVIDIA guaranteeing the chips hold their value, TechCrunch reports. Lenders get a first read on 17 November, when NVIDIA reports results with its finance chief in charge.
Anthropic Promised Its Suppliers $900bn. Now They're Buying Its Stock.
The second amended S-1 sets the price range, and seven companies from Anthropic's compute supply chain have agreed to buy its stock.
Anthropic filed a second amended S-1 on 10 November. It is offering 825 million Class A shares at $70 to $78 each on Nasdaq, under the ticker ANT. At the top of the range that raises about $64.4 billion. A further $26.0 billion comes from a private placement at the offer price with AMD, Broadcom, Google, Micron, Microsoft, NVIDIA and TSMC, and the underwriters' lock-up does not cover those shares. TechCrunch puts the implied valuation at $1.404 trillion. Run-rate revenue reached about $81 billion on 31 October, the filing says, a seventh more than a month earlier. Commitments now total $900.9 billion, up from $895.4 billion eight days earlier. Pricing is expected on 18 November and trading on 19 November, CNBC reports. Each of the seven co-founders is selling about 3.4 million shares, worth about $250 million at the midpoint.
Why this matters:
Anthropic's compute supply chain is now buying its stock. Anthropic has committed to spend at least $121.3 billion with Google, which also backstops its Kentucky lease (#132). The filing shows Google bought $10.0 billion of preferred stock in March. Google also agreed, subject to conditions, to lend or invest as much as $30.0 billion more before 2031.
TSMC is buying into both labs. TSMC's board approved buying as much as $500 million of Anthropic stock at the offer price on 10 November. The same resolution approved up to $500 million for OpenAI preferred stock.
Revenue has to keep outrunning the bill. Anthropic owes $70.7 billion of commitments in the twelve months after September, less than a year of its current run-rate. The price cuts below show what that growth costs.
Rackspace Signed Together AI for $380m Before It Had Financed the GPUs
The GB300 deployment depends on a loan Rackspace has not yet secured.
Rackspace and Together AI announced a multiyear agreement on 10 November. Rackspace will provide and operate dedicated NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 systems for Together's inference workloads. Chief executive Gajen Kandiah put the contract at $380 million over several years on the third-quarter call. No lender has yet agreed to finance the GPUs, the release says, and Rackspace may not find one on acceptable terms. Rackspace sold about $66 million of new shares on 6 and 9 November, partly to fund GPU projects. Third-quarter revenue fell 9.3% to $609 million. Rackspace puts its AI contract value at about $610 million, excluding a 30MW AMD agreement.
Why this matters:
Rackspace carries the hardware and the debt, and Together keeps the software and the customer. Last week the question was what risk Fluidstack carries when Google backs both ends of a lease (#132). Here no backstop has been disclosed.
A shrinking business is buying GPUs. Public cloud revenue fell 17.2% in a year, and none of the AI contracts starts deploying until 2027.
The lender will be underwriting Together AI. Whoever finances the GB300s is betting on an inference company's revenue, the same bet NVIDIA was weighing on Nscale's West Virginia campus.
Anthropic Cut Fable's Price by a Fifth in the Week It Set Its IPO Range
Ramp's card data shows business AI spend stalled in August and September while token volumes kept rising.
Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2 on 9 November. Both list at $8 per million input tokens and $40 per million output tokens, down from $10 and $50 for the 5.1 versions, the same as OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra. Fable leads 13 of the 15 benchmark lines in Anthropic's launch comparison, VentureBeat counts, and scores 49.1% on FrontierCode 2.0 to GPT-6 Astra's 42.8%. Ramp's card data shows business AI spend rose 42% in July, 1.5% across August and September and 8.9% in the month to 23 October, while token volumes kept rising. Ramp economist Ara Kharazian blames price competition, not weaker demand.
Why this matters:
The filing puts a number on price cuts. Lower prices cost Anthropic about $600 million of revenue growth from the June quarter to the September quarter, the S-1 says. The same effect cost about $70 million in the December 2025 quarter.
The open models are still far cheaper. Meituan's LongCat-2.5 launched at a discounted $1.20 per million output tokens (#132), about a thirtieth of Fable 5.2's list price.
The cut lands inside the IPO roadshow. Investors pricing the stock see run-rate revenue up a seventh in October. They also see list prices down a fifth.
Alibaba Is Taking Its Chip Unit Public in Hong Kong
T-Head filed two months before Alibaba said so. Denglin's debut the same week closed 7.8% below its offer price.
Alibaba said on 10 November that T-Head, its chip unit, filed confidentially on 11 September to list on the Hong Kong Main Board, China AI Dispatch reports. The size and timing are not set, and the listing still needs sign-off from the exchange and the China Securities Regulatory Commission. T-Head designs the Zhenwu AI chips and the Yitian server CPU. Zhenwu had more than 650 customers by August, 36Kr reports, and Alibaba chief executive Wu Yongming put T-Head's annualised chip revenue at about 10 billion yuan in March. Alibaba raised HK$80 billion of new shares in August for AI, and the placing document did not mention T-Head. Denglin, a Suzhou GPU designer, raised HK$1.41 billion in its Hong Kong IPO on the same day.
Why this matters:
Chinese chip designers are raising money in the same weeks as Anthropic, from a harder market. Anthropic's anchor buyers are its own suppliers. Denglin priced at the bottom of its range and fell on its first day.
T-Head sells the chips Chinese buyers are being pushed towards. Meituan says it trained LongCat-2.5 on domestic accelerators, and Oracle's Tencent lease fell through after Guangdong officials told Tencent to back Chinese chips, the FT reported (#132). A listed T-Head puts a public price on that demand.
Investors in Alibaba's August raise are down. Placing buyers were 9.85% below their HK$112.70 price at the close on 10 November, China AI Dispatch calculates, and Zhipu's Hong Kong shares are about 80% below their June peak.
Google Built a TPU for Buyers Who Won't Share Hardware
The 8tx is for regulated customers. The 8i Max fits two 8i chips into one package in the same rack space.
Google announced TPU 8tx and TPU 8i Max on 9 November, its third and fourth TPU systems this year. The 8tx uses the 8t's silicon with AMD EPYC hosts and hardware isolation that protects data and model weights in use. It is aimed at regulated companies and governments running models on sensitive data. Google says it cuts latency by up to half against the 8t. The 8i Max puts two 8i chips on one package, doubling compute, SRAM and HBM bandwidth. Google gave no prices, dates or absolute specifications. It also open-sourced TPU Sync, which it says cuts time to first token by more than 90%.
Why this matters:
Google is on every line of Anthropic's compute bill. It rents it TPUs and cloud, backstops a lease, holds preferred stock, offers credit and is in the IPO placement.
The 8tx goes after buyers who will not put sensitive data on shared hardware. Anthropic made Fable 5.2 compatible with zero data retention for the same enterprise buyers, TechCrunch reports.
Twice the silicon in the same rack footprint points to more power per rack. Google is building its own power for its Wyoming campus, below.
Google Bought Crusoe's Wyoming Site and Will Spend $17bn on It
Crusoe tried to sign Google as the tenant and ended up selling it the project.
Crusoe confirmed on 6 November that it sold its unfinished southeast Wyoming project to Google. The sale includes Crusoe's power plan, drawn up with Tallgrass Energy. Neither company disclosed the price. Google said on 5 November that it will invest $17 billion in the Laramie County campus near Cheyenne. It will pay for all the power it uses, including 702MW of Bloom Energy fuel cells under a contract with AEP and gas from Tallgrass and Black Hills Energy. Crusoe had tried and failed to sign Google as a customer, and Google had raised concerns about the cost and timeline under Crusoe, TechCrunch reports. Crusoe is still building a campus for Google near Amarillo, Texas.
Why this matters:
Google kept the site and dropped the developer. Last week it backed the tenant at TeraWulf's Kentucky campus (#132). Here it took over the land, the approvals and the power plan.
Power equipment is what changed hands. Google takes on the fuel cells and the contracted gas. Anthropic paid about $3.4 billion to take over 1.7GW of Caterpillar gas generator orders, the Financial Times reports.
Independent developers carry the delivery risk. Microsoft turned down about 500MW more from Nscale in Texas, the FT reported. Crusoe sold.
Everything Else
Nscale is considering delaying its IPO until next year, The Telegraph reports.
Alibaba opened a preview of Qwen4-Max with a million-token context, on its Token Plan subscription only, with no benchmarks or weights published.
Humain signed SAR 2.5 billion (about $667 million) of financing with Saudi Arabia's National Infrastructure Fund.
LS Power agreed to pay NRG $4 billion for almost 5GW of gas plants, and its two pending gas deals total about 9.4GW.
GE Vernova will spend $34.5 million expanding transformer production in Shreveport, Louisiana.
The NRC issued a construction permit for four X-energy Xe-100 reactors at Dow's Seadrift site in Texas.
Duke Energy agreed upfront charges and deposits for large data centre loads with Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and North Carolina's Public Staff.
