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Architechnosecurigeek. Tinkerer. General trouble maker.
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On Tuesday, Westinghouse announced that it had reached an agreement with the Trump administration that would purportedly see $80 billion of new nuclear reactors built in the US. And the government indicated that it had finalized plans for a collaboration of GE Vernova and Hitachi to build additional reactors. Unfortunately, there are roughly zero details about the deal at the moment.
The agreements were apparently negotiated during President Trump’s trip to Japan. An announcement of those agreements indicates that “Japan and various Japanese companies” would invest “up to” $332 billion for energy infrastructure. This specifically mentioned Westinghouse, GE Vernova, and Hitachi. This promises the construction of both large AP1000 reactors and small modular nuclear reactors. The announcement then goes on to indicate that many other companies would also get a slice of that “up to $332 billion,” many for basic grid infrastructure.
So the total amount devoted to nuclear reactors is not specified in the announcement or anywhere else. As of the publication time, the Department of Energy has no information on the deal; Hitachi, GE Vernova, and the Hitachi/GE Vernova collaboration websites are also silent on it.
Without explanation, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under the Trump administration has reverted from using the disease name "mpox" to the obsolete "monkeypox," which the world abandoned in 2022 because it was seen as racist and stigmatizing.
Mpox is the name of the disease caused by Orthopoxvirus monkeypox, a relative of smallpox and cowpox that has exploded to global prominence in recent years. In 2022 and 2024, the spread of mpox caused the World Health Organization to declare international public health emergencies.
Amid the attention, health officials became acutely aware of the problematic name.
On Monday, OpenAI and Nvidia jointly announced a letter of intent for a strategic partnership to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems for OpenAI's AI infrastructure, with Nvidia planning to invest up to $100 billion as the systems roll out. The companies said the first gigawatt of Nvidia systems will come online in the second half of 2026 using Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform.
"Everything starts with compute," said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, in the announcement. "Compute infrastructure will be the basis for the economy of the future, and we will utilize what we're building with NVIDIA to both create new AI breakthroughs and empower people and businesses with them at scale."
The 10-gigawatt project represents an astoundingly ambitious and as-yet-unproven scale for AI infrastructure. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC that the planned 10 gigawatts equals the power consumption of between 4 million and 5 million graphics processing units, which matches the company's total GPU shipments for this year and doubles last year's volume. "This is a giant project," Huang said in an interview alongside Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman.
Sean Duffy, the acting administrator of NASA for a little more than a month, has vowed to make the United States great in space.
With a background as a US Congressman, reality TV star, and television commentator, Duffy did not come to the position with a deep well of knowledge about spaceflight. He also already had a lot on his plate, serving as the secretary of transportation, a Cabinet-level position that oversees 55,000 employees across 13 agencies.
Nevertheless, Duffy is putting his imprint on the space agency, seeking to emphasize the agency's human exploration plans, including the development of a lunar base, and ending NASA's efforts to study planet Earth and its changing climate.
After spending last week hyping Grok's spicy new features, Elon Musk kicked off this week by threatening to sue Apple for supposedly gaming the App Store rankings to favor ChatGPT over Grok.
"Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation," Musk wrote on X, without providing any evidence. "xAI will take immediate legal action."
In another post, Musk tagged Apple, asking, "Why do you refuse to put either X or Grok in your 'Must Have' section when X is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps?"
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