News linked to both this project and an event.
According to Bloomberg, AI cloud infrastructure company Volta Infra Holdings announced the completion of $300 million in venture financing, achieving a valuation of $2.4 billion, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Altimeter Capital, with participation from NVIDIA and Michael Dell, founder of Dell Technologies. Additionally, Volta secured support from a $5 billion customer financing pool designed to help small and medium-sized AI enterprises lower the barrier to purchasing NVIDIA high-end chips. The company also disclosed it has signed a $10 billion, six-year cloud computing service contract with an unnamed leading AI developer. The contract will be fulfilled in partnership with Bitdeer, delivered via its 133 MW data center in Norway. Volta was co-founded earlier this year by former Brookfield Asset Management infrastructure executives Ricard Boada and Sofia Gumuzio. It has currently secured 1 GW of data center power resources and plans to develop new sites in Texas and Wyoming, aiming to deploy multi-gigawatt compute capacity before 2030.
Odaily News NVIDIA has released Vera CPU storage benchmark results, showing that its NVIDIA BlueField-4 STX storage processor can significantly improve encryption, compression, integrity verification, and data recovery performance in AI-native storage, helping enterprises address the growing data processing demands of the Agentic AI era.NVIDIA stated that as AI agents perform knowledge retrieval, call tools, manage long-term memory, and handle larger context windows, storage systems are no longer just simple data read/write components, but have become a critical link in the AI inference pipeline. Large volumes of data need to be encrypted, compressed, verified, and recovered along the storage path, tasks typically handled by the CPU, which can become a performance bottleneck for AI infrastructure. Benchmark results show that the BlueField-4 STX storage processor equipped with the Vera CPU delivers performance improvements over a comparison x86 CPU across multiple storage tasks: AES-128 encryption performance improved by up to 1.43xAES-128 decryption performance improved by up to 1.29xReed-Solomon data recovery performance improved by up to 3.26xCRC32C integrity check performance improved by up to 3.67xCompression performance improved by up to 3.29xDecompression performance improved by up to 1.72xCompression + encryption multi-stage storage pipeline performance improved by up to 3.21xNVIDIA said that while traditional CPUs typically require adding cores, power consumption, and cooling costs to scale storage processing capabilities, AI-native storage needs to maintain low latency under higher concurrency and larger data volumes. By improving per-unit CPU resource processing capability, Vera helps storage systems support more AI agent workloads without significantly increasing infrastructure costs.
Odaily News: NVIDIA has officially released Video Codec SDK 13.1, offering developers multiple video encoding and decoding upgrades, including AV1 layered reference mode, zero-copy transcoding architecture, precise frame-level search, enhanced hardware decode statistics, and a new Docker development environment, further improving performance and efficiency in AI video processing, streaming, and large-scale content distribution scenarios. On the decoding front, SDK 13.1 adds per-macroblock decode statistics for H.264/H.265 without requiring additional CPU parsing overhead.NVIDIA stated that as demand for high-quality video streaming, generative AI video tools, remote collaboration, and large-scale content distribution continues to grow, Video Codec SDK 13.1 will help developers build more efficient, lower-latency, and more scalable video processing pipelines.
HIVE Executive Chairman Frank Holmes stated that the company's cluster of 504 NVIDIA B200 GPUs at Bell Canada's Manitoba AI fabric generates approximately $2.90 per GPU per hour in revenue; by comparison, HIVE's Bitcoin mining equipment generates approximately $0.12 per hour. HIVE's total revenue for fiscal year 2026 reached $298 million, up 158% year-over-year; digital currency revenue from Bitcoin mining grew 164%. During the same period, average hash rate stood at 22.2 EH/s, up 290% year-over-year, accounting for approximately 3% of the Bitcoin network's total hash rate, and the company mined 2,885 BTC. HIVE's BUZZ HPC division, which houses its AI and high-performance computing business, generated revenue of $19.5 million, up 94% from $10 million in the prior fiscal year. The company also signed GPU cloud agreements worth approximately $220 million with Bell and AI company Cohere, and raised $75 million through a note issuance to fund AI infrastructure expansion. HIVE is building a 320-megawatt AI data center in the Greater Toronto Area, with plans to eventually house more than 100,000 GPUs. The company stated that if the facility becomes fully operational in the second half of 2027, it could generate approximately $360 million in annualized recurring revenue.
Odaily News Four.Meme has announced the launch of the Stock Meme feature. Projects launching tokens on Four.Meme can now choose bStocks US stock tokens as the trading liquidity pool. The first batch supports NVDAb (NVIDIA), with more US stock assets to be added gradually.This feature is jointly launched by Four.Meme, bStocks, and Binance Wallet with the support of the BNB Chain ecosystem, making it one of the first officially supported US stock liquidity pools on BNB Chain. Four.Meme will collaborate with bStocks to provide liquidity support for each bStocks pool on the platform. Additionally, select Stock Meme projects may be featured in the Binance Wallet US Stock Meme section.
According to the official announcement, to meet users' diversified investment needs, Bitget's US stock token rToken has listed rJMKE (Jersey Mike's Subs). As of now, the Bitget platform supports a total of 608 US stock tokens. It is reported that rTokens, identified by the letter r + stock ticker (e.g., NVIDIA as rNVDA), are issued by Bitget's licensed RWA protocol Reality, directly connecting to global liquidity pools such as Nasdaq and NYSE through cooperation with compliant broker Alpaca. Its features include: underlying assets 1:1 reserved and custodied by licensed custodians, stock dividends distributed 1:1 in token form, support for synchronized mapping of corporate actions (stock splits, etc.), and holdings can serve as joint margin for unified accounts and USDT-margined contracts, allowing users to flexibly manage funds while holding global stock assets.
According to TechFlow Research, Morgan Stanley released a research report on July 27, quantifying for the first time the Incremental Return on Invested Capital (ROIC) of Generative AI investments. The report constructed three estimation frameworks: the ROIC for hyperscale cloud service providers' GPU leasing business is approximately 31%, the ROIC for proprietary infrastructure model API business is approximately 46%, and the ROIC for third-party compute API business is approximately 25%. Under base case assumptions, a single 1 gigawatt (GW) data center is configured with approximately 410,000 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs, with a utilization rate of 75% and an hourly leasing price of $8.5. The combined capital expenditure of the three major cloud giants is expected to exceed $1.4 trillion. Morgan Stanley maintains an Overweight rating on Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Google. The report points out that as AI moves from the training phase to the inference phase, demand for GPU compute power will continue to grow. Providers with self-built compute infrastructure will achieve considerable profits by leveraging their pricing power in an ecosystem where compute is scarce. If Morgan Stanley's calculations hold true, the hundreds of billions of dollars in AI capital expenditure will shift from being perceived as "costs" to "growth assets".
Axe Compute announced the signing of a five-year dedicated AI infrastructure contract with a customer, totaling over $1.5 billion. Under the agreement, the company will deploy a cluster of approximately 9,200 NVIDIA Blackwell B300 GPUs in the United States to support production-grade AI workloads, including real-time inference and continuous fine-tuning.
Axe Compute Inc. (Nasdaq: AGPU) today announced a new five-year contract with a customer valued at over $1.5 billion to deploy a large-scale dedicated AI infrastructure cluster in the United States based on the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture. Secured through Axe Compute's Build program, the contract will provide over 9,200 NVIDIA Blackwell B300 GPUs to construct a dedicated cluster designed, deployed, owned, and operated by Axe Compute.Combined with previously announced Build agreements, this new contract brings the total value of contracts signed by Axe Compute in 2026 to over $3 billion. Axe Compute expects to receive over $534 million in customer prepayments related to this agreement and previously announced contracts within the next 30 days. These payments are expected to cover most of the associated GPU and infrastructure capital expenditures.The Axe Build program is expected to start generating monthly revenue this quarter, with additional clusters becoming operational in the fourth quarter of 2026. It is anticipated that this agreement, along with previously announced contracts, will bring the annualized run rate to over $696 million after deployment is complete, nearly double the $385 million run rate the company reported earlier this month.It is reported that Axe Compute Inc. is an artificial intelligence infrastructure platform based on a new cloud architecture.
Musk reposted on X, stating, "I fully support this, Jensen is right," publicly supporting the open letter previously signed by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang that advocates for the importance of open models.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has published his first post on X, sharing an open letter titled "Open Weight and American AI Leadership," jointly signed by more than 20 technology companies and institutions, including NVIDIA.The open letter argues that open-weight models can expand economic access to AI, enhance market competition, and grant users more control. Signatories include Meta, Microsoft, Andreessen Horowitz, Hugging Face, IBM, Mistral AI, Palantir, Perplexity, Mozilla, Y Combinator, among others.The letter states that while open-weight models carry risks, they should not be restricted through bans. Instead, openness should be leveraged to advance AI safety and cybersecurity capabilities. Huang noted: "The world needs cutting-edge closed-source models, and it also needs cutting-edge open models."
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang stated in an Axios interview that distillation (AI learning from other AI) is the foundation of intelligence, that it is good that AI can learn, and that smarter AI is also safer. He predicts that in the coming years, 99% of internet content may be generated by AI, and AI systems will continuously distill knowledge and intelligence from other AI. Previously, there was controversy in the industry over whether open-source models should be allowed to distill closed-source models; Jensen Huang's statement supports open learning paths.
According to TechFlow Research, Bank of America's July 22 report pointed out that NVIDIA and AMD are engaged in a battle for definition in the Agent CPU field. NVIDIA unveiled the Vera CPU architecture last week, featuring 88 custom ARM cores and 1.2TB/s memory bandwidth, arguing that single-core performance determines agent response speed, emphasizing "faster". AMD responded at Thursday's AI Day, stating that its EPYC 9965 rack-level throughput in a 100kW deployment is already 2.4 times that of Vera, arguing that concurrent throughput determines production-grade AI efficiency, emphasizing "more". BofA believes the underlying thread of the x86 vs ARM battle is equally critical; the decades of optimization barriers of x86 in the enterprise software stack cannot be replaced overnight. BofA expects AMD will redefine metrics rather than compete on benchmarks; the real winner is the one that can get the industry to accept its framework. BofA maintains Buy ratings for NVIDIA and AMD, with price targets of $350 and $620 respectively, believing this is not a zero-sum game, both can win, just via different paths.
AMD CEO Lisa Su stated that the second-generation AI server Helios has entered full production, with shipments expected by the end of the third quarter this year amid strong customer demand. The server features the new AI accelerator Instinct MI455X and the new-generation Venice CPU, both manufactured by TSMC. OpenAI plans to deploy Helios later this year. AMD is leveraging this to catch up with NVIDIA in the data center chip market.
According to IT Home, NVIDIA donated a supercomputer built based on GB300 "Grace Blackwell" servers to the Naval Postgraduate School Foundation, marking the first time the US military has directly deployed NVIDIA's most advanced AI computing platform. The system has been deployed on the campus of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, with the specific scale undisclosed. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang stated that artificial intelligence will become an important pillar of the US defense system.
: Bitcoin mining company Bitdeer Technologies Group mined 990 BTC in June, representing a 7.5% increase from 921 BTC in May and a 388% surge compared to 203 BTC in the same period last year. As of the end of June, its proprietary mining hashrate reached 73 EH/s, up from 70.2 EH/s in May and 16.5 EH/s in the same period last year. Bitdeer's proprietary mining machine count increased by 12,000 units to 243,000 units in June, while operating 56,000 self-owned mining machines under joint mining arrangements at third-party data centers. The related hashrate increased by 59% month-over-month to 15.9 EH/s. The company held 150 BTC at the end of June, down from 171 BTC at the end of May. Bitdeer stated that its AI Cloud annualized revenue run rate increased from $69 million in May to approximately $76 million, with GPU utilization rising from 90% to 95% and externally subscribed GPUs increasing from 3,305 units to 3,517 units. This run rate is calculated by annualizing the daily revenue from contractual GPU orders still active at the end of the month and does not represent recognized annual revenue or revenue projections. Bitdeer has completed customer delivery for a five-year GPU cloud contract, with the deployment including two NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 clusters. The company has also signed a 10-year lease for a data center in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, providing 21.7 megawatts of information technology capacity. Scheduled for delivery in the first quarter of 2027, the facility will support 128 NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 systems.
According to an official announcement by the FCA, Anthropic will provide access to its suite of Claude products (including Claude Code and Claude Cowork) for the second batch of participating enterprises in the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) "Super Sandbox" to accelerate their AI development process. A total of 21 institutions were selected for the second batch, including Scottish Widows, Money Advice Trust, and TrueLayer, among others. The number of applications this time increased by 51% compared to the first batch, with a total of 199 applications received. Participating enterprises will test AI solutions focusing on the following areas: agent payment security, fraud and financial crime detection, AI governance and accountability, financial inclusion for vulnerable groups, and compliance and business automation. Additionally, the FCA simultaneously launched the "Agentic Academy"—a 10-week AI specialized training program co-hosted by the FCA and the Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship (CFTE). Participating enterprises will continue to have access to NayaOne digital sandbox infrastructure and NVIDIA accelerated computing resource support.
Nasdaq-listed Bitcoin mining company Bitdeer released its unaudited production and operations update for June 2026. The company mined 990 Bitcoins in June, a 388% increase year-over-year; self-mining hash rate reached 73 EH/s, with total managed hash rate at 86.1 EH/s and 243,000 self-owned mining machines. Its Sealminer manufacturing facility in Nevada has broken ground, with completion expected by the end of 2026.On the AI cloud business front, monthly ARR rose to $76 million, with GPU utilization at 95%, and delivery of the NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 cluster has been completed. Bitdeer's total global controllable power capacity has reached 3.02 GW, with multiple crypto data centers simultaneously advancing plans to transition into AI computing centers. (Globenewswire)
According to Chaoxiang Research, UBS released a SemiBytes Flash Note on July 20, 2026, judging that the semiconductor sector is transitioning from a broad-based rally to a phase of severe divergence, while the AI-themed crowded trade continues. The report covers five core topics. The release of Kimi K3 drives another upgrade in open-source model scale; longer context windows boost demand for HBM and storage, with NVIDIA being the biggest beneficiary. Micron's cumulative free cash flow over the next few years is expected to exceed $400 billion; after the buyback ban is lifted, the theoretical buyback ratio could exceed 40%, which is not yet fully priced in by the market. Divergence within the analog chip sector is intensifying; stocks with higher AI exposure have gained a 42x P/E premium, while valuations for stocks with automotive and industrial exposure remain near historical averages. Position crowding data shows that Lam Research, Broadcom, Seagate, Micron, and AMD remain in a state of extreme long positioning crowding.
According to monitoring by the BlockFlow KOL opinion aggregation platform, NVIDIA (NVDA) has received bullish views from multiple KOLs, with key arguments including AI model release speeds exceeding compute supply, Morgan Stanley issuing a best risk-reward rating, and continued growth in advanced packaging capacity.