The Compute Gold Rush

The AI boom has become so frothy that for the top companies, securing computing power can be a much bigger stress than raising capital.

There’s an ongoing desperate scramble to find available AI chips and data-center infrastructure from cloud providers, neoclouds and a number of upstart marketplaces offering quick access to computing power. It’s redrawing tech’s battle lines, determining who can compete and which investors can win the best deals.

Inside the largest tech companies, top AI researchers are feuding over which projects should take priority if computing power is finite. At the same time, former rivals like Anthropic and SpaceXAI are forming new alliances in an effort to secure more processing.

Many startup leaders are concerned that smaller companies trying to compete with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic—already at a disadvantage in a David-vs.-Goliath dynamic—are being crippled by their struggle to source computing contracts.

Venture capitalists are even trying to get their hands on clusters of AI chips that they can then rent to portfolio companies, hoping to stand out in a sea of investment firms all vying for the same group of elite AI startups.

David Katz, a partner at Canadian venture firm Radical Ventures, said it best: “It used to be, ‘Where am I getting my capital?’ Now it’s like, ‘Who’s going to help me?’”

—Kate is a New York-based reporter who covers startups, venture capital and AI

Nearly half of U.S. adults—over 119 million people—have high blood pressure, according to the CDC. Wouldn’t it be convenient if a wearable health tracker could take measurements without the panic-inducing arm squeeze? Several devices have recently launched insights into blood pressure trends, including Hilo, Whoop, Oura Ring, Pixel Watch and Apple Watch.

A spate of acute AI-related delusion and psychosis cases—including some that culminated in suicide and other violence—appears to have abated after OpenAI retired an overly sycophantic model that revealed the novel dangers of prolonged chatbot use.

Already a polarizing political issue this fall, the AI industry’s latest challenge is emerging from the pulpit. Unlike recent generations of technology, the Christian community appears poised to put its stamp on AI early in an attempt to ensure it benefits all of humanity rather than a few tech billionaires.

An unprecedented number of answers that had eluded mathematicians for decades arrived in a single night. The deluge included AI solutions to more than 300 problems across number theory, algebraic geometry and other fields with names that could give anyone haunted by high-school math a migraine. Among the major findings in a collection of 722 papers were advances related to three of the five remaining Millennium Prize Problems, including the Riemann hypothesis.

Tom Brown, who was one of the original six to found Anthropic with Dario Amodei, is parlaying his background negotiating deals for the chips needed to train AI models into something even more valuable: the business and political alliances Anthropic needs to pull off an IPO that could value it north of $2 trillion.

Anthropic edged to the front of the AI race earlier this year with cutting-edge models and a coding tool that corporate America loved. By some measures, OpenAI is now hot on its heels. Demand for Anthropic’s Claude Code was so strong in the spring that the company faced frequent outages and a computing crunch.

Flip-Phone Drone: A field test of the U.S. Army’s new desert tech exposed equipment limitations and institutional hurdles in the push to modernize and keep pace with an AI-savvy adversary.

Debt Deals: Oracle, Broadcom and SpaceX are lining up a series of blockbuster financing deals to pay for computing hardware, part of a rush for capital as data-center build-outs race forward.

Labor Force: Vice President JD Vance said the administration is suspending several tech firms, including Microsoft, from a program that allows H-1B visa holders to apply for green cards.

…when personal AI agents share your bank statement in the work chat.

The Technology newsletter is a weekly digest of tech reviews, columns and headlines from Anne Steele and Wilson Rothman. Write to Wilson at wilson.rothman@wsj.com and Anne at anne.steele@wsj.com. Got a tip for us? Here’s how to submit.