Loading summary
A
Anthropic is building their own custom silicone team to design their own AI chips. And AMD has just unveiled something called the Helios Rack system. Their goal is to challenge Nvidia head on in AI data centers. Anthropic is upgrading Claude's voice mode. It's going to be now running on Opus and Sonnet. And Google cloud revenue jumped 82% to $24.8 billion. And if anyone has been following Google for the last few weeks when they've released how much their AI spending is and their stock took a massive hit, well, evidently this is the reason why they announced that OpenAI and Anthropic are both lobbying Washington to curb Chinese open weight AI. We've talked about this a lot on the podcast, but this is kind of the latest news on the lobbying front. If you want to get a deep dive on these and a dozen more stories every single day, I'd love for you to check out aichatdaily. Com. That's my own sister website news site that is partnered with this podcast. It's essentially like a show notes, but it also goes deeper and has extra stories I don't cover in here. There's dozens of stories every single day on all the latest AI news. And there's a newsletter that you can subscribe to on the website. So every single morning, if you like, you'll get the top five AI news stories straight into your inbox to keep you up to date with everything happening in AI. And you get some really quick breakdowns of all of the facts so that you understand what's going on. The website is aichatdaily. Com. The first story I wanted to talk about is the fact that Anthropic is building their own AI chip design team and it's going to be for creating custom hardware for Claude. It's the same thing that OpenAI, Google and Meta, they're all doing it right now. And the big reason is everyone wants to get off of Nvidia. It's these companies are incredibly dependent on Nvidia. Nvidia basically has quotas and they dole out their GPUs and their chips and they only give a certain amount to, you know, different companies and nobody wants to feel bottlenecked by one player that they're obviously spending a ton of money on. So everyone's building their own chips right now. They're also scouting Samsung as a manufacturing partner, which is ending Anthropic status as the basically the last major AI lab without a public silicone program. They're like, all right, it's time to get serious on that one. Anthropic currently relies on a bunch of different suppliers. So there's aws, Google, Nvidia, amd, all of them give them Compute. But of course that means that they don't get to control the pricing allocation or any of the roadmap timing. OpenAI shipped their Broadcom designed chip which is called Jalapeno. It's an inference chip and that was in June of this year. Google now runs their own TPUs. Meta is building MTIA accelerators and Anthropic basically was the only one that wasn't working on this. Custom silicone typically takes between 18 to 24 months to design and it's going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars per chip version. But every single efficiency gain that they can get on this compounds across billions of dollars that Anthropic and is, you know, using for these Claude calls. So I think this is something that is kind of a play on margin. It's not a shortcut. This is going to take a long time. Anthropic can tune memory and math formats to Claude's exact workloads in a way that no off the shelf GPU can really match. But they're also betting on a two year Runway before any of that investment is going to get paid back. So this isn't something that's very quick, but over the long run this might be a good play for them. After announcing a strategic partnership with in Anthropic, AMD has just unveiled Helios, which is a rack system for AI data centers. And they're saying that this is basically a direct competitor to Nvidia's products that they have right now. Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta, Oracle and Anthropic have all committed to deploying it at a gigawatt scale and it's going to be starting shipments later this year. Anthropic and AMD both announced a strategic partnership to deploy up to 2 gigawatts of GPUs on Helios, which, which is, you know, the exact same scale of Nvidia's largest AI training cluster. So they're, you know, they're really being quite competitive in the market. AMD also introduced Venice X which is a data center CPU designed to pair with Helios that's going to be launching in 2027 and it's going to compete on kind of this full stack alternative to a lot of the different competitors that are out there. The CEO Lisa Su projected the AI accelerator market will reach 1.4 trillion by 2030, approaching the size of today's entire semiconductor industry industry. So, you know, this one segment of the market she's saying, is going to be as big as the entire semiconductor industry. This is the first time that AMD has landed all five major frontier AI labs on a single rack platform. They have everyone signed up for it. I think this is showing that they're really like a strong contender for a quote unquote second place option for a lot of these massive AI infrastructure buildouts that are coming up the scale of all of these different deals that they've done with these, these five hyperscalers. I think they're all measured in gigawatts and I think that shows that the hyperscalers are, all of them are ready to diversify away from Nvidia's almost complete dominance. So it looks like we're having a real second player in the market and AMD is going to get some serious market share. Does that, you know, is that like super bad for Nvidia? I think their market is just going to keep growing like crazy. But there are other competitors now. Anthropic is upgrading Claude's voice mode. It's now going to work with their most powerful models, OPUS and Sonnet. So I think in the past it was only working with Haiku. And I will say one thing that I actually did appreciate about about this was I've been going back and forth between OpenAI and Anthropic as far as using like Claude co work and Chat GPT work. And I did find that ChatGPT work after they did their upgrade and everything's running on Sol 5.6 extra high. When I go and ask it to complete a project for me and I'm doing the voice mode on it, it takes a while for it to kind of transcribe and write it all down and it's actually kind of annoying. The leg, it's a few second leg and I noticed that it doesn't always happen but when you have SOL 5.6 extra high on it does. And so I actually appreciated that Anthropic when I was using Claude, it was like instantaneous transcription of what I was doing. It was all on Haiku. Now is it perfect? Is it the, is it the best? Like there's a couple things that it might mess up, but it was instantaneous and super fast. Well, they're going to upgrade it because evidently they think that it needs to be a little bit higher quality. So now they're putting it on OPUS And Sonnet, I hope they don't sacrifice too much of the speed because honestly, that was my first favorite thing. They're going to be able to. They're allowing you to plug that directly into Gmail, Google Calendar, Slack, Canva Notion. So you can now tell Claude by voice to do your emails. I mean, everything else that you've probably been doing. I even have like a literal. I have this device from OpenAI. It's like a little keyboard. It is, I think, built with work, louder and it literally just has a microphone button that I push. So I. This is the way I've been working a lot lately, is just talking to these models and having them go and complete tasks for me instead of typing it out. I think that's what a lot of people are doing. There's a lot of software like Whisper Flow that's out right now that does that kind of stuff. So a lot of different options. But Claude obviously decided they wanted to put a big upgrade here. Voice mode is now going to default to whatever cloud model you last used in text chat. So a Sonnet workflow is automatically going to have that for the audio, which is kind of what OpenAI is doing right now. And I'm not going to lie, that's actually annoying to me. I wish you could choose the audio. Honestly, what I find is when it does the transcription and when it types it out, I would actually rather a faster, worse model because you can. Like many times I'm literally using Apple's like voice to text, which is really ghetto, not very good. And when I, when I do it, there's like a bunch of typos, but Claude understands and it literally fixes it and does everything the way I want. So I find that Claude is very good at getting the meaning out. I'd rather just have the underlying model better and having the voice transcription faster because I absolutely hate talking and then waiting five seconds for it to type out before I can hit send. But I mean, that's just me being impatient. So I guess the quality improvement is probably good. But I wish they would let you choose in the settings what model was powering your voice. Free users are going to keep getting haikus. Maybe I got to go switch to being just a free user. Just kidding. And there's going to be paid users that get the Opus and Sonnet and all of the rest of it. They have a lot of different languages supported on this, by the way. English, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Spanish. And you know, of course auto detects it, so that's fantastic. Google Cloud revenue is up 82% to $24.8 billion last quarter. That absolutely crushed the expectations that Wall street had. I think it's proving that the company's huge AI spending is actually paying off. The $514 billion backlog of signed customer contracts I think is showing that there is a huge demand for AI infrastructure and service is real and it's locked in for years. So a lot of these deals that Google Cloud's doing, it's not just for this year or for this month, but these are multi year deals. Cloud growth is accelerating really fast. It's up from 63% last quarter to 82% this quarter. It's mostly driven by a lot of different companies renting compute power and buying pre built AI products from them. Gemini reached 950 million monthly active users. That's up from 752 quarters ago. So the usage of their own products is accelerating. But also the amount of companies signing deals to power their AI on their infrastructure is also increasing. And Alphabet posted 1:12.1 billion in quarterly profit. That's almost four times the 28.1 billion from the same quarter last year. That is wild. 112 billion up to 21 billion just one year later. That's absolutely insane. Google's 180 billion to $190 billion in annual spending on data centers and chip is now, you know, it's something that kind of crashed their stock a couple of weeks ago when it came out and everyone was like, oh my gosh, Google's overspending. But I think this is showing there is serious demand. The demand is accelerating like crazy. They know they're going to get that money back. And so I think they expect that 2027 is going to be when this massive build out starts turning into some real cash generation. But in order to get that money like they have to spend, they got to spend the money to make the money. But they can see a lot of demand. So evidently they're, they're going all in. OpenAI and Anthropic are both lobbying US regulators to restrict Chinese open weight AI models like Moonshot's Kimi. You know, K3 came out a while ago and it was all the rage. And then we have the latest Quinn model came out a few days ago. What they're saying here is that there are national security concerns. They of course are saying this at a time when it would be quite convenient, it would push these companies towards, you know, being the, the, the winners in this space. No one could really dethrone them. None of these open source models could score, go scorched earth on them. OpenAI's Dean Ball argued the US should create regulatory fear, uncertainty and doubt around open weight models to weaken their competitive position. And then he kind of walked that argument back. But that was like his first thing. We've heard this in, in crypto a lot back in the day, the FUD that he's, you know, openly saying that they should create some fud and he's like, no, no, actually it's serious. It's not, it's not just FUD for, for fud's sake. Kimmy's launch in at the end of last month, I think a lot of people were panicking. There was a viral demo showing it generating a Mac OS like UI mock up in third in 30 minutes. I think a lot of the hype faded after that. A lot of these demos are like, oh my gosh, look at this crazy, incredible thing. And then once it actually comes out and people actually play with it, they're like, okay, it's not as crazy as it seems. Which is why I'm actually a little skeptical. I mean, whatever, you can say I'm dumb, but it's why I'm a little skeptical of like anthropic, always hyping up their models to an insane degree, only giving them to enterprises, not to the regular people and saying, look, it can do all these crazy things. I don't know. Makes me skeptical when they won't give it to you. But maybe it's truly dangerous. I don't know. This is the second time that we've had in the last under a year basically where we've had this kind of cycle where there's a huge cheaper model that comes out and it's super capable. Deep Seek had something that, that kind of was along these lines. And then afterwards there's a bunch of policy restrictions that people were calling for after it came out. So I think we're seeing basically the same pattern play out over and over again. Chinese labs are going to ship like a super cheap open model. It's going to be really competitive in the benchmarks. A lot of the American executives are going to start warning about security and regulation and, and we need to have restrictions. And of course the people that are really winning are those big closed model companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, et cetera. So I think whether those security concerns are legitimate or not doesn't change the fact that all of the people asking for these policy changes happen to be the people that are going to be winning from it. So I am a little bit skeptical of it, if I'm being honest. And I actually think open weight models are fantastic for innovation and for my own company being able to use a model that's 90% cheaper, 90 times cheaper than an open or then a closed source model if it can do some of the same tasks that we need it to get done on a repeated basis. To me, that makes a lot of sense, but there's a lot of there's a lot of debate on this topic for sure. Guys, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcast. If that's over on Spotify, you got to hit the about tab. If it's on Apple, you can leave a little comment. Drop some Stars I know people have complained that Apple's not intuitive for leaving reviews, but go to the main podcast page, scroll down, hit some stars, leave a review. It helps the show out so much. I would be incredibly grateful. Go check out aichatdaily. Com if you want to get all of these news stories in article format. And if you want to get a news brief sent to you every single day, you can subscribe to our newsletter. I will catch you guys all in the next episode.
Episode: Exploring the Latent Spaces of AI Chips
Date: August 5, 2026
Host: AI Space
In this episode, AI Space delivers an information-packed summary of the major shifts happening in the AI hardware landscape, with a focus on Anthropic’s move into custom chip design, AMD’s Helios Rack and market positioning, and a suite of updates from industry giants like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The host also explores the intensified debate over regulation of Chinese open-weight AI, highlighting industry self-interest and implications for innovation.
[01:00–06:40]
“No one wants to feel bottlenecked by one player that they’re obviously spending a ton of money on.”
(Host, 01:40)
[06:41–13:45]
[13:46–19:55]
“I would actually rather a faster, worse model because...Claude is very good at getting the meaning out.” (Host, 18:10)
[19:56–23:16]
[23:17–29:45]
“OpenAI’s Dean Ball argued the US should create regulatory fear, uncertainty and doubt around open weight models to weaken their competitive position.”
(Host paraphrasing, 24:32)
“To me, that makes a lot of sense, but there’s a lot of debate on this topic for sure.”
(Host, 29:22)
This episode delivers a brisk, critical look at the AI hardware arms race, the business decisions shaping the field, and the complicated political maneuvering around open-source AI models from China. Listeners gain both a technical snapshot of where the industry is headed—and a candid take on who stands to gain or lose as the next phase of AI infrastructure takes shape.