Nvidia projects 70% growth, denies circular dealing

Microsoft plans to triple Azure's data center capacity to over 38 gigawatts by 2032, up from 12 gigawatts currently. The expansion reflects the company's response to server shortages constraining its cloud operations. The buildout will add approximately 26 gigawatts of new compute capacity over the next six years.

Skild AI launched S1, a robot foundation model that learns new tasks from single video demonstrations without retraining, using in-context learning to adapt to dynamic manufacturing and warehouse environments. Built on NVIDIA infrastructure, S1 achieved a 66% success rate per step on unfamiliar multistep tasks, compared to 9% for competing systems. The company has reached $100 million annual revenue run rate within 10 months of first commercial deployment, with over 60 partnerships across manufacturing, logistics, and other sectors.

Shanghai Enflame Technology, a Chinese AI chip developer backed by Tencent, raised 6.12 billion yuan ($911 million) in its IPO and surged on its first trading day Friday. The strong market reception reflects investor appetite for domestic alternatives to Nvidia chips as China pursues semiconductor self-sufficiency. Enflame's debut signals growing confidence in homegrown AI hardware capabilities amid geopolitical tensions and export restrictions.

AI data centers are causing grid reliability problems not because of power generation shortages, but because their architecture doesn't match how modern electrical grids work. Two major outages in Virginia, including a July 2026 fault that knocked 3 gigawatts offline, exposed how AI campuses can swing 70% of their load in milliseconds, triggering protection systems designed for predictable industrial loads. The fix requires moving power conditioning from inside data halls to medium-voltage systems at substations, fundamentally changing how data centers connect to the grid.