Chips & Supply · United States

Oracle, Broadcom, and SpaceX looking to secure ten of billions in financing to support AI compute purchases – report

Credited to Data Center Dynamics · datacenterdynamics.com · 17h ago

Photograph · Data Center Dynamics

Broadcom is seeking $50bn, while SpaceX is looking to secure $40bn

Oracle, Broadcom, and SpaceX are looking to secure large-scale financing deals to fund future AI compute hardware purchases, the Wall Street Journal has reported.

The news outlet said that in recent weeks, Broadcom has been seeking more than $50 billion to support the ongoing development of the custom AI chip it has partnered with OpenAI on.

Meanwhile, Oracle is reportedly in talks with private equity firm Apollo and Goldman Sachs, and SpaceX is looking to arrange a $40bn chip financing deal for the purchase of Nvidia hardware, the report added.

The deal Broadcom is looking to broker could include “several gigawatts of OpenAI chip capacity,” the WSJ said, and is slated to close before the end of the year. Few details about the agreement Oracle is looking to secure were disclosed, but the report noted that the financing is intended to help the company bridge the gap between when it has to pay for the hardware and when its cloud computing revenue starts coming in.

A separate report from the FT this week said that SpaceX is seeking to raise $10bn in bank loans and $30bn in investment-grade debt to fund the purchases, noting that Apollo is expected to lead the deal and help sell the debt. The transaction is expected to close in 2027.

The report comes in the same week that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk confirmed on X that the company has held talks with Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC regarding the former's $16.8 billion TeraFab project in Grimes County, Texas.

October 3, Musk said that so far there had been “just discussions, but something may come of it.” Later that same week, in response to speculation about how the potential partnership might look, Musk said: “[SpaceX] will build and run the fab … Maybe TSMC subleases part of the TeraFab if they want, but nothing more than that.”

SpaceX is planning to invest $16.8bn in the proposed fab in Grimes County, Texas. In August 2026, Musk claimed that, once built, “it will be the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far,” adding that “TeraFab will be 50 times the size of the Pentagon when complete.”

Earlier this year, Nvidia overtook Apple as TSMC’s largest customer.

Chips & SupplyUnited States

Scaling 3D IC design: Trends, Challenges and Practical Workflows

Credited to EE Times · eetimes.com55m ago

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Chips & Supply · United States

Nvidia found $1B under the couch to help secure American scientific computing dominance

Credited to The Register · theregister.com · 11h ago

Photograph · The Register

Commitment comes as GPUzilla prepares to fortify Uncle Sam's arsenal with at least seven AI-optimized supers

Nvidia on Thursday scraped together some spare change to commit $1 billion — about 1/60th of its quarterly profits — to funding US scientific discovery over the next five years.

The commitment, announced during an event in Washington, DC, aims to support the research and development of AI — or is it " super intelligence " now? — in fields including quantum computing, healthcare, and energy security.

Nvidia's choice of technologies is not surprising as it has long aspired to fuse AI and high-performance computing. And while LLM training and inference pay Nvidia's bills, the GPU giant has continued to introduce new CUDA libraries specifically for AI-assisted quantum computing, healthcare, drug discovery, and physics simulation.

The initiative is part of the US government's broader Genesis Mission, announced late last year by the Trump administration, which aims to use AI to drive the scientific discoveries necessary to ensure the country's continued technological leadership.

The program marks Nvidia's return to US supercomputing in a big way. The Department of Energy's (DoE) last flagship supercomputers powered by Nvidia, Summitand Sierra, were commissioned all the way back in 2018. The A100-based Perlmutter system launched in 2021 is also notable, but fell far short of the older systems. And while Nvidia never stopped building supers for the US government, they tended to be significantly smaller than the massive AMD-based platforms like Frontier and El Capitan.

That changed last year when Nvidia revealed it would supply the US government with no fewer than seven new supercomputers across the Argonne, Los Alamos, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories.

Argonne will house the 100,000 Blackwell-GPU-based Solstice system. Built in collaboration with Oracle, the machine is largely aimed at emerging AI workloads, which don't depend on ultra-high precision computation and instead can get by with 16, eight or even four bits of precision.

That puts Nvidia in a strong position to meet the US government's goals under the Genesis Mission. Over the past few generations of GPUs, Nvidia has traded much of its accelerators' double-precision FP64 grunt in favor of higher throughput at precisions used by more lucrative AI workloads. In the case of its upcoming Vera Rubin platform, Nvidia relies heavily on an FP64 emulation capability based on the Ozaki scheme we looked at in more detail earlier this year.

Los Alamos' upcoming Mission and Vision systems will be powered by these same chips and take advantage of Nvidia's Quantum-X800 InfiniBand.

FP64 emulation comes with compromises, but for workloads that are predominantly AI-optimized and only occasionally need higher precision, it can be worthwhile for the additional matrix FLOPS.

While Nvidia is playing a much bigger role in US scientific computing efforts, it's worth noting that the DoE's biggest super — at least for pure FP64 — will still be powered by AMD. Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Discovery system, which is expected to come online 2029 will be built by HPE's Cray division and feature The House of Zen's FP64-optimized MI430X GPUs and Venice CPUs.

Discovery is expected to offer peak theoretical performance somewhere between 3.3 and 8.5 exaFLOPS depending on whether or not Oak Ridge gets a facility power upgrade.

Meanwhile, China's LineShine leads the Top500 ranking of Earth's mightiest computers. That system made its debut this northern spring with 2.2 exaFLOPS measured out of a 2.7 exaFLOPS of theoretical performance. With Uncle Sam's nose bloodied by China's return to the ranking, Oak Ridge may not have to fight hard for the extra power. ®