AI Agenda: The Mysterious AI Data-Center Startup Hiring From AWS, Azure, Meta

Save the Date: Next Thursday, Aug. 3, join Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Cohere, an OpenAI rival valued at $2 billion, and Edo Liberty, founder and CEO of Pinecone, one of the hottest young AI infrastructure startups, for a live audio chat with subscribers. The CEOs will talk to AI Agenda author Stephanie Palazzolo and take your questions about what's coming next in the rapidly developing field. More details here.

Welcome back! I’m Anissa Gardizy, The Information’s cloud computing reporter, sitting in for Stephanie. If you’ve been following our artificial intelligence coverage, you know we’ve been breaking news for months about shortages of Nvidia’s cloud-server chips, which developers use to train AI software, and the competition between Nvidia and cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services.

In short, the cloud incumbents, including Microsoft and Google, are selling or developing their own AI server chips to compete with Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs). So Nvidia is eager to prop up competition and flex its new kingmaking abilities by giving its latest GPU, the H100, to cloud-server startups such as CoreWeave, Lambda Labs and Crusoe Energy.