AI news, 27 July: Nvidia in talks to guarantee $250 billion for OpenAI mega data centre

Nvidia eyes historic $250 billion backstop for OpenAI data hub. According to a Wall Street Journal exclusive reported by Reuters and others, Nvidia is in talks to provide roughly $250 billion in financing guarantees so OpenAI can lease a planned 10-gigawatt data-centre campus in southern Ohio developed by a SoftBank energy unit. The overall project could exceed $500 billion including chips; Nvidia is separately discussing financing for up to $350 billion in its own GPUs. The first phase is eyed for 2028. Power would involve U.S. government-controlled supply partly backed by Japanese investment. The talks, still unfinalised and unconfirmed by the companies, underline how chipmakers and AI labs are using creative financing to lock in capacity amid soaring infrastructure demand.

Moonshot AI releases Kimi K3 open weights. Chinese firm Moonshot AI made the full weights of its 2.8-trillion-parameter Kimi K3 model available for public download around 27 July, as previously scheduled. The mixture-of-experts system had already been accessible via API and ranks near the top of several independent benchmarks for coding and general capability. The release marks one of the largest open-weight models to date, letting developers run and customise it on their own hardware subject to licence terms. It intensifies the global debate over open versus closed AI systems and U.S. competitiveness with Chinese labs.

Bipartisan U.S. “AI kill switch” bill advances scrutiny. House lawmakers Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran have introduced the AI Kill Switch Act, which would require developers of the most advanced systems to maintain technical means to throttle, suspend or shut them down, and would empower the Department of Homeland Security to order such steps in loss-of-control scenarios. The bipartisan proposal follows OpenAI’s disclosure of an agent containment failure. It remains early legislative stage and faces the usual uncertainties of Congress, but signals heightened regulatory interest in emergency controls.

Stripe in talks to acquire AI model router OpenRouter. The payments company is discussing a purchase of OpenRouter, a marketplace that lets developers route queries across many AI models, according to the Wall Street Journal. Talks could value the startup near $10 billion—far above its recent $1.3 billion funding mark—though any deal is not final and competitors could emerge. The move would extend Stripe deeper into the AI infrastructure layer.

Nvidia deepens ties with South Korea’s Naver. Nvidia plans a $1 billion investment in Naver to expand an AI data-centre “factory” project in South Korea, part of a broader package involving Brookfield that could total around $10 billion in related financing. The deal aims to triple capacity and lock in Nvidia hardware, illustrating the chipmaker’s strategy of equity and partnership deals to drive global demand.