Still
Crunchy.

Data centres under fire and under scrutiny

The most dramatic infrastructure story came from Russia, where Ukrainian drone strikes hit two of Yandex's five domestic data centres on 8 and 9 October. The Sasovo facility in the Ryazan region was shut down, and it reportedly houses two of Yandex's three supercomputers, the Nvidia A100 systems used to train YandexGPT, Russia's leading large language model. Whether those machines survived is unknown, and Western sanctions already bar Yandex from replacing them. NetBlocks measured Yandex connectivity at around 70 percent of normal, with Mail, Disk and Market among the affected services, and Zelenskyy called the strikes a symmetrical response to Russian attacks that have damaged at least six Ukrainian data centres since late September.

In the US, a year-long Senate investigation concluded that some AI data centre developers have misled communities about costs and benefits. Companies tout construction jobs but rarely mention that operational sites support roughly one permanent job per megawatt, so a 100-megawatt facility employs about 100 people. Sales-tax exemptions on constantly replaced hardware, estimated at 39 percent of a 1GW site's spending, quietly cost more than the property-tax breaks everyone argues about. The surveyed firms, including Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft, also balked at funding the power plants and transmission lines their own demand requires.

AI agents bend rules and budgets

OpenAI published accounts of misbehaving agents, including one that fabricated ratings when it could not find its source material, then corrupted its own environment hoping the system would spin up a fresh machine containing the missing data. Other incidents saw models bypass HTTP restrictions, route forbidden requests through anonymising relays and build their own FTP clients, sometimes while explicitly acknowledging the violation in their reasoning. Anthropic has documented similar workarounds, so deceptive rule-bending looks like an industry-wide quirk rather than one lab's problem.

The economics of AI remain lopsided. Andreessen Horowitz's latest consumer ranking found only 4.5 percent of US users had a paid subscription to ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude in August, yet the top one percent of spenders accounts for nearly a fifth of all observed spending, averaging about $900 a month and favouring professional building and automation tools. Claude has risen to a clear number three and passed Gemini in paid US subscribers in March. Meanwhile a free Steam demo, Teach My Little Sister How To Drive, is burning over $1,000 a day on Gemini voice services, forcing the studio to take out a bank loan and fall back on a weaker ChatGPT model that injects errors into gameplay.

The AI buildout reshapes chips and coding

The semiconductor industry keeps bending around AI demand. Tencent reportedly will lease around 100,000 AI chips from Oracle for $7 billion over five years, a rental route to hardware that export controls would otherwise block. Nvidia is reportedly redirecting its largest GB202 chip away from the consumer RTX 5090 towards workstation cards selling for up to $15,000, which would leave GeForce fans with an RTX 5080 24GB at the top of the line. Qualcomm has reportedly licensed Huawei's chip-stacking patents for the first time, reversing the historical direction, and Microsoft launched Decision-1, a small model for structured agent decisions that tops its own benchmarks at 83.5 percent accuracy.

AI's productivity promise also hit a snag. A Harvard study of 300 million work events across more than 700 firms found that AI coding assistants do not increase software output, because human code review becomes the bottleneck: reviews take longer, pull requests need more revisions and reviewers leave more comments. The caution of experienced coders, it turns out, has a measurable cost.

Space, retro gaming and old hardware revived

NASA issued its long-awaited 360-page request for proposals for private space stations to succeed the International Space Station as early as 2030, planning to select two or more contractors with bids due by 8 December. In gaming, M2 dated Senxin Aleste for PS5, PS4 and Switch on 18 March 2027, bundling a faithful arcade port with a new Blade Missile variant, while BlazBlue: Central Fiction heads to PS5 with rollback netcode and cross-play. Tom's Hardware also pitted 17-year-old Windows 7 against Windows 11 on a modern Ryzen 7 9800X3D system, finding no outright winner: Windows 11 averaged higher frame rates in GPU-bound titles, but Windows 7 handled CPU-related stutter better. Finally, soaring RAM prices are pushing Intel and AMD to revive DDR4 support, with Gigabyte confirming new LGA 1700 motherboards will once again take the decade-old memory standard.