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Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered a halt on new data center grid connections on August 3, directing PUCT and ERCOT to audit all pending projects. ERCOT is tracking more than 474 gigawatts of interconnection requests — over five times Texas's record peak demand — with roughly 90% from data centers. Projects that fail the audit face denial of grid access.
Apple filed for a preliminary injunction on August 3 to block OpenAI and two former Apple employees from using its trade secrets, while widening its investigation to at least eleven additional OpenAI staff. OpenAI responded with a public blog post titled 'Apple is getting this wrong,' releasing redacted emails to dispute Apple's account and arguing that any file access resulted from Apple's own access management failures, not theft.
Anthropic has signed a $10 billion, six-year computing services agreement with Volta Infra Holdings, a newly launched AI infrastructure startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, and Altimeter Capital. The deal gives Anthropic access to 133 megawatts of capacity at a data center in Tydal, Norway, running on 100% renewable hydroelectric power and equipped with Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips.
Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics 2 suite — announced July 30 — is the first publicly documented system to put a single AI policy in charge of a humanoid from feet to fingertips. The Embodied Reasoning model (ER 2) is available now in AI Studio. The full-body VLA and On-Device 2 are restricted to early-access partners, including Apptronik, whose Apollo 2 is the primary demo platform.
Google DeepMind released Gemini Robotics 2 on July 30 — a three-model suite for humanoid robot control. Gemini Robotics ER 2 is publicly available via AI Studio; the full-body VLA and On-Device 2 models are restricted to early-access hardware partners including Apptronik.
Alibaba launched Qwen 3.8 Max on August 3, 2026 — a 2.4-trillion-parameter sparse MoE model with 95B active parameters, a 1-million-token context window, and native multimodal input (text, image, video, documents). It is available now via Alibaba Cloud Model Studio and QwenWork, with open weights promised for the week of August 10. Alibaba positions it as second only to Claude Fable 5 on frontier benchmarks, and it holds the top spot among Chinese models on the LMSYS Chatbot Arena.