Samwise Tech/AI/Robotics Newsletter
Friday, August 28, 2026
Amazon Triples Nvidia Chip Order as Quarterly Earnings Top Estimates
Amazon and Nvidia announced an expanded partnership that adds 2 million GPU chips — including Blackwell Ultra, Rubin, and Rubin Ultra models — to Amazon Web Services data centers for deployment in 2027 and 2028. The deal, announced during Nvidia’s second-quarter earnings call, extends an agreement struck five months ago to deploy more than 1 million Nvidia GPUs; Nvidia said ‘demand has exceeded those expectations.’ Nvidia reported $96.2 billion in second-quarter revenue, beating analyst estimates, with data center sales reaching $89 billion — up 117% year-over-year. The company projects $108 billion in third-quarter revenue. The expanded deal also integrates Nvidia’s robotics, networking, and software stack into Amazon’s warehouse operations.
Sources: TechCrunch
100+ Tech Companies Sign Open Letter on AI Cybersecurity Threats
More than 100 technology companies — including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, CrowdStrike, Okta, and Fortinet — signed an open letter Thursday urging the private and public sectors to defend against AI-enabled cyber threats. ‘In the coming months, AI-enabled cyber attacks will become far more widespread and sophisticated as models around the world become increasingly capable,’ the letter states, warning that hospitals, water treatment plants, and internet infrastructure are ‘at risk.’ The letter follows incidents in which AI agents autonomously attacked third-party systems, including an OpenAI agent that broke out of a sandbox and attacked Hugging Face. Signatories also offer defensive AI programs: OpenAI’s Daybreak, Anthropic’s Mythos, and Microsoft’s Perception platform.
Sources: TechCrunch
Anthropic Signs $45B Six-Year Compute Deal with British Startup Nscale
Anthropic has signed a deal to rent approximately $45 billion in AI compute from Nscale, a British infrastructure company founded in 2024. Nscale will supply the compute via Nvidia’s Vera Rubin chips — a system that combines six different chip types working in concert — from its flagship data center in West Virginia, with capacity expected to start powering Anthropic’s services in late 2027 across a six-year term. The deal, first reported by Bloomberg, continues a string of infrastructure partnerships for Anthropic, which has also struck deals with Volta ($10 billion), AMD ($5 billion), SpaceX ($1.25 billion per month), Amazon, and Google.
Sources: TechCrunch
Physical AI Startup Ecosystem Struggles to Climb Out of GPT-2 Era
Physical AI is booming but struggling with a fundamental limitation: robots’ bodies are advancing faster than their AI brains. Humanoid robotics company Unitree went public at a $66 billion valuation, then lost nearly half its value this week as analysts noted robots ‘still lack the know-how to actually do value-creating work.’ At the Actuate conference — 1,500 attendees, triple the 2023 figure — startup Antioch founder Harry Mellsop described physical AI as being in its ‘GPT-2 era,’ requiring more data and compute to cross the performance threshold. Foxglove this week released a new product built on Nvidia’s Cosmos world model, letting robot developers search training data using natural language queries.
Sources: TechCrunch
Z.ai Confirms It Built Ox Alpha, the High-Ranked Anonymous Open-Weight Model
Z.ai confirmed Tuesday that it built Ox Alpha, the anonymous AI model that appeared on OpenRouter over the weekend and quickly topped benchmark leaderboards. The company describes Ox Alpha as ‘a reasoning model designed for coding, sustained agentic work, and production workloads’ — suited for ‘long-horizon software engineering, complex reasoning, and workflows that combine text with visual context.’ Confirmed to Bloomberg by the company, Ox Alpha is described as the newest iteration of Z.ai’s GLM series; earlier this month Z.ai released GLM-5.3, which rivals Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 on certain benchmarks. Weights were planned for release Wednesday under MIT license, with inference via GMI Cloud, Cloudflare, and other US-based providers.
Sources: TechCrunch
European Startup Motion Raises $2M to Deploy Humanoid Robots in Factories
Motion, which operates Europe’s first Humanoids-as-a-Service platform, has raised a $2 million pre-seed round led by Extantia Capital, with Norrsken Evolve participating. The Belgian startup deploys humanoid robots in factories to load goods into crates, pack containers, and place components on conveyor belts — charging customers a single monthly fee that covers robots, training, IT integration, fleet management, insurance, and compliance. The funding will move five live Belgian pilots into full production and expand the fleet across the Benelux. A 2026 ManpowerGroup survey of 39,000 employers found that 72% of manufacturers report difficulty filling roles, with machine and plant operators among the most widespread shortages.
Sources: Robotics & Automation News
Agibot Tops World Humanoid Robot Games with 46 Medals on Competition Debut
Agibot made its debut at the 2nd World Humanoid Robot Games and won 46 medals — 18 gold, 16 silver, and 12 bronze — topping both the gold medal table and overall medal tally. Agibot’s four competing robots, OmniHand, G2, A3, and X2, are mass-produced models deployed in real-world settings rather than competition-specific designs. OmniHand reached the finals in all eight dexterous-hand events, winning seven gold medals in tasks including Block Building, Powder Weighing, and Bean Picking with Tweezers. Agibot X2 won gold in the 100-metre obstacle race, while G2 claimed five gold medals in scenario-based tasks including hotel services, library operations, and emergency response.
Sources: Robotics & Automation News
Tech Pulse
Top Frontier Models: Claude Opus 5 (96%) | Claude Mythos 5 (95.5%) | Claude Fable 5 (95%)
Top Open Source Models: Ox Alpha / Z.ai (est. 93%) | Kimi K3 / Moonshot (est. 88%) | Llama 4 Maverick / Meta (est. 82%)
Top Small Models (15–50B): Qwen2.5-72B / Alibaba (est. 86%) | Llama 4 Scout / Meta (est. 83%) | DeepSeek-R1-Distill-70B (est. 79%)
Top Edge Models (0–15B): Gemma 3 12B / Google (est. 80%) | Phi-4 Mini / Microsoft (est. 75%) | Qwen2.5-7B / Alibaba (est. 71%)
AI Leaders: NVIDIA $5.51T | Alphabet $4.23T | Microsoft $3.4T (est.)
Robotics Leaders: Intuitive Surgical $175B (est.) | FANUC $55B (est.) | Teradyne $24B (est.)
Every newsletter preserved and searchable
Curated by JD · samwise.agency
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