Welcome to the newest edition of ID Tech’s AI Update. Here’s the latest big news on the shifting landscape of AI and identity technology:
A bunch of high-level employees have departed Thinking Machines, including co-founders Barret Zoph and Luke Metz, researcher Sam Schoenholz, infrastructure engineer Ian O’Connell, and model architecture researcher Lia Guy. Thinking Machines is led by co-founder and former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, and raised $2 billion in a seed round last summer. Intriguingly, at least a few of the defectors – Zoph, Metz, and Schoenholz – have returned to OpenAI, and there are unverified reports that Murati had told staff that Zoph was terminated for “unethical conduct”.
BlackRock has raised $12.5 billion for an AI infrastructure investment vehicle with Microsoft and Abu Dhabi-backed MGX. It’s working toward a target of $30 billion in equity and up to $100 billion in total capital when debt is included. On BlackRock’s latest earnings call, CEO Larry Fink said the funding had come “from partnership founders and clients.”
AWS has signed a two-year deal to use Rio Tinto’s “Nuton copper”, which is a critical component in its data center supply chain. AWS will use the first copper ever produced using Nuton’s industrial-scale bioleaching deployment at Gunnison Copper’s Johnson Camp mine in Arizona. The bioleaching system uses naturally occurring microorganisms to extract copper from primary sulphide ores, offering a way to eschew parts of the conventional chain (concentrators/smelters/refineries) and recover copper from ore that might otherwise be considered waste or economically unviable.
TSMC is planning $52–$56 billion in 2026 capital expenditures to expand capacity for AI chip production. The Taiwan-based firm, which is central to the global AI supply chain, revealed its plans in a quarterly update, in which it reported strong customer demand and predicted nearly 30 percent revenue growth for the year ahead. While that all sounds pretty bullish, CEO C.C. Wei said management are “very nervous about it,” adding, “We’re investing $52-$56 billion in capex. If we did not do it carefully, that would be a disaster for TSMC for sure.”
OpenAI has signed a $10 billion compute deal with chipmaker Cerebras. The multi-year agreement will add up to 750 megawatts to its capacity, which will go online in tranches through 2028. A source tells Reuters that the aim, at least in part, is to help make ChatGPT and other products respond much faster, especially for longer, “thinking”-style workloads. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is one of Cerebras’ early investors.
Some users will be served ads while ChatGPT is providing those speedy responses. OpenAI has started testing ads for users on its free and Go tiers, and plans a wider rollout. “It is clear to us that a lot of people want to use a lot of AI and don’t want to pay, so we are hopeful a business model like this can work,” Altman said in a social media post, in which he also assured users, “we will not accept money to influence the answer ChatGPT gives you, and we keep your conversations private from advertisers.”
The chatbot’s take: A little bit of new-year prognostication from GPT-5.2:
