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:
It looks like OpenAI is gearing up to mass-produce its own in-house AI chip. Broadcom, which has become a major custom chip maker, recently revealed that it had acquired a new, unnamed customer that had committed over $10 billion to chip orders. People are guessing the whale is OpenAI. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said shipments are expected “pretty strongly” from next year.
Nvidia has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to rent back its own AI chips from Lambda, a company in which it had previously invested. The agreement comprises a $1.3 billion, four-year lease for 10,000 GPUs that Lambda had previously bought from Nvidia, plus an additional $200 million for another 8,000, likely older, units. The move shows how badly demand for AI chips now outstrips supply.
OpenAI rival Anthropic has closed an oversubscribed, $13 billion Series F funding round, bringing its post-money valuation to somewhere between $170 billion and $183 billion. That nearly triples the firm’s value since March of this year. To be fair, the firm’s run-rate revenue has surged from $1 billion earlier in the year to over $5 billion last month.
That strong positioning may have supported Anthropic’s decision to stop selling AI services to any majority-owned Chinese entities, including major firms like ByteDance, Tencent, and Alibaba. The policy covers not only mainland companies but also foreign subsidiaries engineered to circumvent AI export restrictions. The move could cost hundreds of millions in lost revenues, but Anthropic says it is trying to avoid letting its AI get into the hands of autocratic regimes.
China’s DeepSeek is working on its own AI agent, aiming to launch it by the end of the year. It’s expected to be a general purpose AI agent, similar to a tool that OpenAI recently added to its ChatGPT platform in that it will be able to execute multi-step, complex tasks autonomously. If DeepSeek can pull it off, it could be similarly disruptive to the low-cost chatbot model that DeepSeek unveiled earlier this year.
OpenAI is working on an AI-powered Jobs Platform and a companion AI Certification Program, and has already brought onboard Walmart, John Deere, BCG, and Accenture as partners. The aim is to help connect workers with employers, in part by formalizing a way of demonstrating the workers’ skills with AI tools. It’s an interesting twist in a broader narrative of wide-ranging job displacement caused by the rise of AI. “At Walmart, we know the future of retail won’t be defined by technology alone—it will be defined by people who know how to use it,” said Walmart CEO John Furner.
A robotic arm company is reportedly fielding investment offers that would value it at $600 million. Redwood City-based Dyna Robotics is taking a different approach than some of the more attention-grabbing robotics firms that are building versatile, humanoid bots that can tackle various household chores, focusing instead on task-specific automation. To some extent, it can be seen as a bet on the old maxim, “jack of all trades, master of none.”
San Francisco-based startup TurbineOne has been awarded a $98.9 million contract by the U.S. Army. The firm has been tasked with integrating AI software directly into soldiers’ devices – from smartphones to drones – in order to reduce or eliminate the reliance on cloud connectivity. The move comes after pilot testing of TurbineOne’s Frontline Perception System (FPS), which can reportedly cut the time needed for tasks like analyzing terrain imagery from 20 hours down to 20 seconds. The startup was founded just four years ago.
The chatbot’s take: We asked GPT-5 for a bit of colour on the Dyna Robotics strategy. (Not investment advice!)
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By Alex Perala
