Power & Sites · United States

Caterpillar and CoreWeave shorten the learning loop for physical AI

Credited to SiliconANGLE · siliconangle.com · 14h ago

Photograph · SiliconANGLE

Demand for new data centers, power plants and highways is fueling a construction boom, even as the industry wrestles with declining productivity and a shortage of skilled machine operators. Physical AI, which lets machines perceive their surroundings and act on them, is emerging as one answer.

Caterpillar Inc. has years of experience with autonomous equipment in mining. Extending that technology to construction requires systems that can adapt to more variable conditions, according to Brandon Hootman (pictured, right), vice president of physical AI platforms and construction autonomy at Caterpillar.

“Once that mine site gets instantiated, it does change, but it doesn’t change frequently,” he said. “You go to construction as an industry. Polar opposite of mining. If you think about all of the dynamics of what has to happen, taking a structured system and matching it to an unstructured environment, it’s really, really challenging to do.”

Hootman and Richard Ahlfeld (left), senior vice president of Physical AI at CoreWeave Inc., spoke with theCUBE Research’s Dave Vellante and John Furrier at the Fully Connected event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed why physical AI reshapes the infrastructure behind autonomy and how the two companies are shortening the learning loop for construction machines. (* Disclosure below.)

Physical AI changes what data centers must deliver

AI clouds were first built to train foundation models, then tuned for agentic inference at scale. Training an autonomous excavator means ingesting telemetry and vision data, simulating a digging scenario a million times and layering reinforcement learning on top. CoreWeave recently launched a Physical AI Field Engineering service that embeds its engineers with customers’ domain experts, according to Ahlfeld.

“Physical AI now is an entirely different beast,” he said. “That requires, first of all, a lot of storage. It requires a different infrastructure.”

Caterpillar’s digital ecosystem already holds about 18 petabytes of federated data from machines, dealers and customers, Hootman noted. Training autonomous equipment also requires perception data synchronized with machine control and performance data.

“That 18 petabytes that we’ve collected so far is just a drop in the bucket to the amount of data that it actually takes to go train physical AI to operate in a world like a construction site,” he said. “But you take [Light Detection and Ranging] data, camera data, that multi-second control data and performance data coming back in, you’re talking about terabytes of data within a given day for just one machine.”

CoreWeave named Caterpillar among its enterprise customers in its second-quarter results announcement. Caterpillar began working with the company this year, drawn by both graphics processing unit capacity and applied expertise, according to Hootman. Working with Nvidia, the partners use AI models to annotate and label incoming field data.

“Now you’re taking things that were months to maybe weeks,” Hootman said. “And now you’re getting it down to hours and your feedback loop between that happening and being able to use it in your simulation environment, or your training environment, happens within the given workday.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Fully Connected event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Fully Connected event. Neither CoreWeave, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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Founded by tech visionaries John Furrier and Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media has built a dynamic ecosystem of industry-leading digital media brands that reach 15+ million elite tech professionals. Our new proprietary theCUBE AI Video Cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to help technology companies make data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industry conversations.

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Chips & SupplyUnited States

SpaceX Seeks To Join AI Borrowing Bonanza

Credited to Bloomberg$ · bloomberg.com5h ago

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SpaceX is joining the AI borrowing bonanza — seeking $40 billion to secure Nvidia chips. Peter Elstrom explains. (Source: Bloomberg)

View the article · $Bloomberg

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Chips & Supply · United States

SpaceX looks to raise $40bn to buy Nvidia chips

Reading from The Hindu BusinessLine · Credited to Financial Times $ · ft.com · 18h ago

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Tech companies and AI model developers are investing and borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars to build and lease giant data centers full of chips to power AI systems

By Bloomberg

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is in talks with banks and investors to raise $40 billion of debt to buy chips from Nvidia Corp., people familiar with the matter said, underscoring the insatiable demand among AI developers for more computing power.

Pacific Investment Management Co. is one of the investment managers looking at the deal, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity as the talks are private. SpaceX’s fundraising discussions are in an early stage and could end without a deal being completed, they said.

Musk’s AI, satellite and rocket conglomerate is seeking to raise about $10 billion in bank loans and $30 billion in investment-grade debt to pay for the chips, the Financial Times reported earlier, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter.

Apollo Global Management Inc. is leading the financing, in a deal that is expected to close in 2027, the newspaper said.

Tech companies and AI model developers are investing and borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars to build and lease giant data centers full of chips to power AI systems.

The worldwide expansion of computing capacity has sent the cost of everything from land to chips and power-generation equipment soaring, touching off a series of massive financing deals.

Nvidia, SpaceX and Apollo didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. SpaceX shares erased gains in postmarket trading following the FT’s report, falling 1.2 per cent in US postmarket trading to $169.79. Nvidia’s stock rose fractionally.

Just last month, Musk said Colossus 2, an AI computing cluster built by his xAI business, may more than double its current Nvidia chip count by the end of the year. It was the most detailed timetable that the trillionaire has given yet for expansion plans for the Memphis-area cluster.

Colossus 2 now has 110,000 Nvidia GB200 chips and 440,000 GB300s, Musk said in a post on X. A further 220,000 GB300s are due to be operational next week, with another 220,000 expected in November, he said. An additional 220,000 may come online late December “if we get lucky,” he said.

Musk’s xAI has recruited multiple Wall Street firms to test its Grok chatbot, including Apollo and Morgan Stanley.

Apollo was among the US investment giants that Nvidia tapped for a high-profile partnership in August to source $500 billion in financing for AI infrastructure.

The coalition — which also includes Blackstone Inc., BlackRock Inc., Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and KKR & Co. — said at the time that they’d “create dedicated pools of capital at significant scale at attractive rates for Nvidia customers.”

Executives indicated that it will focus on debt financing to provide access to compute for Nvidia’s largest customers and signaled that there were already many deals in the works that would qualify toward this commitment.

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com