Base Power Raises at $12B Valuation

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang visited Kazakhstan on October 23, meeting with President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and Deputy Prime Minister Zhaslan Madiyev to discuss the country's AI infrastructure expansion. Firebird announced a major investment agreement securing 45,000 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs for a data center launching in Q3 2027, while Kazakhstan pursues Kazakh-language AI models and physical AI applications in mining, agriculture, and logistics. The visit signals Kazakhstan's shift from planning to deploying compute infrastructure as part of a broader strategy to export AI capabilities alongside its energy resources.

Meta announced plans to issue a new class of non-voting shares to fund its artificial intelligence initiatives, according to its third-quarter earnings report released Wednesday. The company will use proceeds from the share issuance for AI investments, potential acquisitions, and employee compensation, with trading expected to begin in 2027. Meta cited the significant scale of investment required to compete in the AI transformation sweeping the industry.

NVIDIA has released StormScope EU, a regional weather forecasting model trained on European data, as part of its Earth-2 open AI platform. The model predicts cloud conditions across 16 satellite channels at 10-minute intervals and is being deployed by organizations including AXA, Vaisala Xweather, TotalEnergies, and University of Manchester for weather forecasting, cyclone risk assessment, air-quality modeling, and solar-energy prediction. Earth-2 provides developers with customizable open models and tools to build localized applications for energy, insurance, and transportation sectors.

U.S. Hunger, a nonprofit that has delivered over 250 million meals across 59 countries, adopted Amazon Quick to enable direct data exploration by leadership without requiring repeated requests to the technology team. The organization achieved 500 percent growth over four years with only 15-20 percent headcount growth, making efficient data access critical for decision-making. Quick pulls data from U.S. Hunger's Impact Manager platform into an in-memory engine with nightly refreshes, allowing the CEO to explore organizational and financial data alongside information about the families served.