OpenAI says its first in-house chip beats Nvidia's Blackwell on AI work per watt Meta agrees to pay up to $16.68 billion to settle 29 states' claims over teen users Nvidia reports earnings after the bell with roughly $92 billion in quarterly revenue expected Amazon is closing Mechanical Turk after 21 years as AI absorbs the work it was built for Emerald AI raises $150 million to make AI data centers ease off the grid when it is strained Gatik raises $200 million as driverless freight moves from pilot projects to real contracts China's Moonshot AI is in talks with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to host its Kimi K3 model OpenAI says its first in-house chip beats Nvidia's Blackwell on AI work per watt Meta agrees to pay up to $16.68 billion to settle 29 states' claims over teen users Nvidia reports earnings after the bell with roughly $92 billion in quarterly revenue expected Amazon is closing Mechanical Turk after 21 years as AI absorbs the work it was built for Emerald AI raises $150 million to make AI data centers ease off the grid when it is strained Gatik raises $200 million as driverless freight moves from pilot projects to real contracts China's Moonshot AI is in talks with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to host its Kimi K3 model
Daily AI Intelligence — Edition #43

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Wednesday, August 26, 2026

Today's Blast

7 Stories
01
Breaking Hardware Infrastructure

OpenAI Says Its Own Chip Now Beats Nvidia’s Best on Energy Efficiency

At the Hot Chips conference, OpenAI published the first benchmarks for “Jalapeño,” the inference chip it designed in-house, claiming 1.5x to 1.9x more AI work per watt than Nvidia’s Blackwell systems and up to 3.6x lower response latency. Independent analysts who verified some of the runs noted the comparison is flattering — Jalapeño uses newer memory than the Nvidia systems it was tested against — but said it still edges out Nvidia’s next-generation platform. It is the clearest sign yet that OpenAI intends to stop renting all of its computing power from its biggest supplier.

CNBC 3 hours ago
02
Breaking Policy Regulation

Meta Agrees to Pay Up to $16.68 Billion Over How Its Apps Treat Teenagers

Meta settled claims from 29 states that it engineered Facebook and Instagram to keep children hooked, striking the deal mid-trial in a California federal court. Beyond the money, Meta agreed to cap under-18 users at two hours a day, lock them out between midnight and 6 a.m., mute notifications during school hours, and tighten age verification. Roughly $5 billion of the total only applies if YouTube and TikTok reach similar deals; Meta denied wrongdoing, and its stock rose more than 4% on the news.

Axios 5 hours ago
03
Business Hardware

Nvidia Reports Earnings Today, and Wall Street Wants to Know if the Boom Holds

Nvidia releases quarterly results after the market closes today, with analysts expecting somewhere between $92 billion and $95 billion in revenue — up around 70% from a year ago — and about $86 billion of that from data centers alone. The company guided to $91 billion while assuming zero revenue from China. Because Nvidia sells the chips nearly every major AI company depends on, its numbers function as the closest thing the industry has to a quarterly health check.

S&P Global 6 hours ago
04
Workforce Business

Amazon Is Shutting Down Mechanical Turk, the Human Workforce That Helped Train AI

Amazon will retire Mechanical Turk on September 30, ending a 21-year run for the marketplace Jeff Bezos once called “artificial artificial intelligence.” Launched in 2005, it paid hundreds of thousands of people pennies per task to label images, transcribe audio, and fill out surveys — the unglamorous human labor that trained the first generation of machine learning systems. A 2023 study found nearly half of its remaining workers were using AI tools to complete the tasks themselves, which is a fitting way for the platform to end.

CNBC 1 day ago
05
Funding Energy Infrastructure

A Startup Raised $150 Million to Stop AI Data Centers From Breaking the Power Grid

Emerald AI closed a $150 million Series A at a $1.05 billion valuation for software that lets huge AI data centers dial their electricity use up and down in response to grid conditions, rather than drawing flat maximum power around the clock. The company argues that flexibility alone could free up more than 100 gigawatts of capacity on the existing U.S. grid — enough to host far more AI without building new plants or raising household bills. Nvidia, Siemens, Samsung Ventures, and GE Vernova all joined the round.

SiliconANGLE 1 day ago
06
Funding Agents Startups

Driverless Trucking Company Gatik Raises $200 Million After a PepsiCo Deal

Gatik pulled in $200 million led by the Qatar Investment Authority and Koch Disruptive Technologies, bringing its total to roughly $500 million. Unlike robotaxi companies chasing open-ended city driving, Gatik runs fixed short routes between warehouses and stores for PepsiCo, Walmart, Kroger, and Tyson — a narrower problem that has produced 85,000 completed driverless deliveries and more than $600 million in contracted revenue. It aims to have over 100 driverless trucks running by year’s end.

TechCrunch 1 day ago
07
Business Models Policy

China’s Moonshot Wants Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to Host Its AI — for a Cut

Moonshot AI is negotiating with all three big American cloud providers to put its Kimi K3 model on Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud, reportedly asking for up to 30% of the revenue it generates. Any agreement would be the first significant revenue-sharing arrangement between a Chinese AI developer and a major U.S. cloud company. Chinese models are considerably cheaper than Western ones and have been gaining American users, which puts the deals squarely in the path of Washington’s security concerns.

Quartz 4 hours ago
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