☕️ Google copies Nvidia's playbook to sell AI chips

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.

In today's Techpresso:

💰 Google copies Nvidia's playbook to sell AI chips

🔓 New unpatchable exploit hits older iPhones

🕵️ US suspects ASML's banned chip tool reached China

⚡ US regulators give AI data centers a grid fast lane

🇪🇺 EU set to declare AWS and Azure gatekeepers

Plus: 🎁 12 other news you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 2 papers.

💰 Google copies Nvidia's playbook to sell AI chips LINK

Google is challenging Nvidia by borrowing its own financing tactics, using financial guarantees and "circular financing" to win data-centre customers for its tensor processing units, or TPUs, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation.

At the Lake Mariner cluster in western New York, Google has provided a $3.2bn guarantee, letting developers TeraWulf and FluidStack raise cheaper debt and rent thousands of TPUs to Anthropic, the same trick Nvidia used to stoke demand.

Google is backstopping more Anthropic projects with this logic, including a $7bn data centre called River Bend near Baton Rouge and $1.4bn in guarantees for a computing lease in Colorado City, Texas.

🔓 New unpatchable exploit hits older iPhones LINK

Security firm Paradigm Shift released "usbliter8," a new BootROM exploit hitting Apple's A12 and A13 chips, which cannot be patched and affects iPhones from the XS through the iPhone 11 series.

The exploit abuses a bug in the USB controller, where sending unusually small packets makes an internal hardware pointer walk backwards through memory, writing data to places it should never reach during startup.

A12 devices are easy to take over, while A13 chips were much harder because of Pointer Authentication Codes; once controlled, the exploit installs a handler that boots unsigned software and survives restarts.

🕵️ US suspects ASML's banned chip tool reached China LINK

U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has told ASML executives he suspects one of the Dutch company's banned EUV lithography machines, the only tools capable of printing the most advanced chip patterns, may have reached China.

Administration officials told Bloomberg they have evidence that ASML shipped EUV-related components and transport equipment to China but have repeatedly declined to show it, while the company insists no such machine has ever existed there.

A sale would breach export controls barring ASML from selling EUV to China since the first Trump administration, risking the roughly 20% of its 2026 revenue from already-permitted China sales and its standing as Europe's most valuable company.

⚡ US regulators give AI data centers a grid fast lane LINK

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ordered grid operators across the country to show how they will speed up the connection of AI data centers to transmission systems while keeping grids reliable and costs down.

The orders went to six grid regions covering over 200 million people in 30 states, including PJM, and lay out five categories for reforms such as efficient connection studies and preventing "cost shifting" to ratepayers.

Grid operators must give initial responses within 60 days, with added details on "resource adequacy" 30 days later, and the orders also push projects that pair new data centers with new power generation.

🇪🇺 EU set to declare AWS and Azure gatekeepers LINK

The European Commission plans to release preliminary findings as soon as next week saying Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure appear to qualify as gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act, with a final decision expected by late 2026.

If designated, AWS and Azure would face interoperability requirements, curbs on customer lock-in, and restrictions on self-preferencing, with fines reaching up to 10% of global turnover, rising to 20% for repeated breaches.

The Commission opened its formal market investigation in November after several major outages, including a 15-hour AWS failure that disrupted Apple, McDonald's, and Epic Games, and Azure problems that halted Scottish Parliament votes.

Other news you might like

• Amazon hopes to challenge Nvidia more directly by selling its AI chipsLINK

• US court rules Ohio can restrict children’s use of social mediaLINK

• Amazon investigating engineers who criticized AI data center expansionLINK

• Circumvention tool or essential security software? The shifting role of VPNs in the UKLINK

• Kalshi Eyes Public Markets as Revenue Hits $2B and Trading Volume SoarsLINK

• OpenAI's head of enterprise AI sales quits after 5 monthsLINK

• Leaked records expose Peter Thiel's invite-only Dialog society and its 222-person retreat rosterLINK

• Penske Media Acquires Remaining Vox Media Brands, Creates PMX DivisionLINK

• Scammers in China sell $222 RTX 4090 with fake GPU die made out of plastic instead of real siliconLINK

• The RAM crisis just killed Nothing’s next budget phoneLINK

• Amazon won't release Sam Altman biopic focused on OpenAI's 2023 leadership crisisLINK

🧰 Trending tools

Zernio WhatsApp API: lets developers integrate WhatsApp messaging, inbox management, and analytics into apps without handling Meta's native API complexity directly.LINK

Claude Code Artifacts: a desktop app for running parallel Claude coding sessions across multiple repos with diff review, terminal, and file editing built in.LINK

API to MCP: converts REST, GraphQL, and SaaS APIs into hosted MCP servers so AI agents can connect using OAuth, API keys, and workflow tools.LINK

Midjourney Scanner: a radiation-free full-body ultrasound device that scans in 60 seconds using sound and water, removing barriers to routine health screening.LINK

Unreal Engine 5.8: real-time 3D engine for building games and simulations, offering professional rendering, physics, and cross-platform deployment in one toolkit.LINK

QuackScreen: a macOS notch tool that lets you record screen clips and screenshots, then drag them instantly into any app without uploading files.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

Superintelligent machines more capable than entire large organisations of humans may arrive via four routes, scaling, paradigm shifts, self-improvement, or vast networks of cooperating systems, but key bottlenecks remain deeply uncertain.LINK

Virtual society simulation running 100 autonomous agents through 10 simulated years teaches language models richer human social behavior, boosting performance on role-playing tests by 15.6%.LINK

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