Cassidy: The AI compute boom just ran straight into export-control enforcement.
Cassidy: New to this story? Here's where things stand.
Cassidy: Demand from model labs and enterprises is driving big physical buildouts at specialist AI-infrastructure providers.
Cassidy: CoreWeave, Together AI, Cerebras, Nebius, and Bitdeer have all reported new capacity, backlog, or financing milestones.
Cassidy: Bitdeer AI for example
Cassidy: recently secured a five-year contract worth roughly $400 million for about half of its 9.5MW A102 AI data center in Malaysia—before the
Cassidy: facility is energized.
Bill: This is AI Daily Briefing.
Bill: A giant Georgia compute deal
Bill: alleged server smuggling
Bill: and a fight over who controls open-source inference—let's start with the contract where the customer kept an escape hatch.
Cassidy: From The Economic Times:
Quote: Under the deal the customer will get access to GPUs and related services from RUM Group's Maysville
Quote: Georgia site which is currently under development.
Quote: The customer will buy $13.7 billion in GPU services over six years in three parts
Quote: with the last instalment contingent on a delivery date approved by the client.
Cassidy: The neocloud backlog story is getting bigger: RUM Group says an unnamed U.S.
Cassidy: cloud customer signed for $13.7 billion in GPU services.
Cassidy: It's a six-year deal at Maysville, Georgia—except Maysville is still under development.
Bill: And tranche three only comes due if the client approves the delivery date.
Bill: Good—construction risk belongs with the builder.
Bill: If that site slips, $13.7 billion becomes a very expensive press release with two completed payments.
Cassidy: RUM—formerly Rumble, the Truth Social host—also gave this unnamed buyer options on roughly 51 million shares at one cent apiece.
Cassidy: So the customer gets GPUs if Georgia comes online, plus equity upside while it waits.
Bill: The eight-percent premarket pop is the market buying the headline.
Bill: I'm watching the client-approved date.
Bill: Until Maysville is delivering compute, the contingency clause is the only hard thing here.
Cassidy: Ars Technica writes:
Quote: Taiwan has indicted nine people— reportedly including an Nvidia senior manager and two Supermicro employees based in the country—who
Quote: allegedly helped forge documents to cover up illegal exports of high-end AI servers to China in violation of US export controls. On Monday
Quote: Reuters reported that prosecutors in Keelung did not release any names but confirmed that the suspects were “charged with breach of trust
Quote: and document forgery.”
Bill: Nine indictments over forged export documents, with a reported Nvidia senior manager and two Supermicro employees in the mix.
Bill: If the allegations hold, internal controls failed right across the server supply chain.
Cassidy: Keelung prosecutors are charging breach of trust and document forgery—not issuing another policy memo.
Cassidy: We just covered a $13.7 billion infrastructure contract; this is the other side of the same hardware business
Cassidy: where enforcement lands in the shipment paperwork.
Bill: The U.S. license rule has been in place since 2022.
Bill: It only works if everybody touching the order—Nvidia, Supermicro, distributors—can spot a forged destination before the rack leaves.
Cassidy: Ars also points to the related case against Supermicro co-founder Wally Liaw, involving alleged shipments worth $2.5 billion since 2024.
Cassidy: Export controls live or die in day-to-day operations.
Cassidy: Database Trends and Applications writes:
Quote: Under a multi-year $240M agreement between IBM and Together AI
Quote: IBM is positioned to deploy a large cluster of NVIDIA HGX B300 systems on IBM Cloud with expected availability in Q1 2027
Quote: according to the companies.
Quote: Together AI will use this cluster to provide open-source model inference.
Bill: The IBM-Together deal is $240 million, runs multiple years, and brings HGX B300s online in Q1 2027—refreshingly concrete.
Bill: But Together AI still has to turn that capacity into token prices low enough to make enterprises reconsider proprietary APIs
Bill: not just celebrate a very expensive cluster.
Cassidy: And let's be clear about the “open-source” label.
Cassidy: Together controls the fine-tuning and inference layer; IBM Cloud owns the physical substrate.
Cassidy: Open models don't magically erase control over the stack.
Bill: NVIDIA says Spectrum-X and B300 deliver 30 times prior-generation AI-factory output.
Bill: Fine—show me the cost per useful million tokens under enterprise traffic, with real latency and ugly long-context workloads.
Bill: Q1 2027 is when this gets judged.
Cassidy: After the $13.7 billion Georgia contract we just covered, $240 million sounds modest.
Cassidy: It isn't. This one names the customer and specifies the hardware.
Cassidy: We even get a delivery window—commercial terms are finally getting more legible.
Cassidy: This one's from iAfrica:
Quote: Nigeria has unveiled a National Digital Cloud Policy aimed at attracting $750 million in private investment within 24 months
Quote: covering data centres
Quote: cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence computing capacity
Quote: while setting new rules for government cloud adoption and the protection of sensitive public data.
Bill: Nigeria wants $750 million in private cloud and AI infrastructure investment over 24 months
Bill: but the more useful part is the buying mechanism: pool government demand
Bill: then route it through a National Digital Marketplace.
Bill: That can create a real anchor customer instead of a slide deck full of addressable market.
Cassidy: Bosun Tijani's policy draws a more practical sovereignty line than the usual blanket-localization reflex: sensitive government and regulated
Cassidy: data stays under national control; commercial workloads can go where the economics work.
Cassidy: That's a grown-up distinction.
Bill: They've also split rule-writing, service delivery, and procurement compliance across three bodies.
Bill: Good architecture on paper.
Bill: The announcement still doesn't identify those institutions
Bill: so the next test is whether a ministry with a cloud budget can actually buy capacity without the whole thing turning into a committee.
Cassidy: It also puts control of infrastructure right on the procurement table.
Cassidy: Nigeria can call an inference stack open-source all day; if an outside provider controls the fine-tuning
Cassidy: serving layer and hardware underneath
Cassidy: sovereignty has limits.
Cassidy: This one's from Ars Technica:
Quote: Data centers have become the “killer application for solid-state transformers right now,” Lukic told Ars.
Quote: Several US companies
Quote: including Amperesand
Quote: Heron Power and DG Matrix
Quote: have collectively raised more than $280 million in funding over the past year to commercialize solid-state transformer technology.
Cassidy: The RUM deal gave us the finance side of capacity.
Cassidy: Here's the physical choke point: getting power from the grid to a rack without all the usual conversion gear in between.
Bill: Ars has a real proof point here: Lukic's team put a solid-state transformer on a live grid line and ran a megawatt through it.
Bill: That's beyond a glossy render.
Cassidy: Amperesand, Heron Power, and DG Matrix have raised $280 million around this in a year.
Cassidy: Shaving copper, floor space, and electrical complexity is suddenly a very bankable idea.
Bill: One megawatt is a meaningful hardware test, but a modern AI campus needs this gear manufactured, installed, and maintained at brutal scale.
Bill: Now they have to prove they can deploy it repeatedly.
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Cassidy: We'll be watching the IBM Cloud NVIDIA HGX B300 cluster for Together AI
Cassidy: expected in Q1 2027 along with Nigeria's 24-month window to attract $750 million in private cloud and AI infrastructure investment.
Cassidy: Links to every story are in the show notes.
Cassidy: Dig into whichever ones you'd like to explore further.
Cassidy: That's today's AI Daily Briefing.
Cassidy: This is a Lantern Podcast.