NVIDIA, Hugging Face Open Robot Foundation Models in LeRobot

Starcloud has raised $250 million to develop orbital data centers as launch capacity becomes constrained. The funding reflects growing competition for space access and suggests that companies are increasingly willing to invest in infrastructure to secure their position in orbit. The article indicates a broader shift in how space-based computing resources are being developed and allocated.

Nvidia has agreed to pay $6 billion to license AI model-development software from startup Poolside, according to a letter Poolside sent to investors. Poolside was an early developer of a coding AI agent before pivoting to data center development and releasing its own open-source models. The deal represents a significant licensing commitment from Nvidia to an emerging AI infrastructure player.

Nvidia plans to begin small-batch shipments of a China-specific AI chip variant by year-end, marking a new market entry strategy for the company. The chip is a language processing unit (LPU) developed with licensed Groq technology that pairs with Nvidia GPUs to improve AI chatbot response times. Chinese customers have already placed orders, signaling demand for the localized product.

Roboticists are celebrating incremental progress toward AI-powered robots that can perform multiple tasks without task-specific training, drawing parallels to the GPT-2 era of language models. At the Actuate robotics conference in San Francisco, Physical Intelligence demonstrated a robot arm making a latte using a single AI model trained on diverse tasks. The field remains early, with robots still struggling with basic manipulation, but venture funding and optimism about a breakthrough moment are high.