News

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 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.

OpenAI cut API prices for GPT-5.6 Luna by 80% and GPT-5.6 Terra by 20% on July 30, citing GPU kernel optimisations and speculative decoding improvements driven by Sol. Luna drops to $0.20/$1.20 per million tokens. Terra drops to $2.00/$12.00. Sol's standard price is unchanged, but a new Fast mode — 2.5× throughput at double the rate — replaces the old Priority Processing tier.

MiniMax launched H3 (also known as Hailuo H3) on July 31, a general-purpose multimodal model that generates 2K video at 24fps with native, synchronised stereo audio in a single pass. Previous MiniMax models were specialised video generators; H3 unifies text, image, video, and audio into one context. Open weights are planned. The model is live via the Hailuo AI app and the MiniMax Open Platform API.

Thinking Machines Lab, the startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, released Inkling-Small on July 30 — two weeks after the 975B flagship Inkling. The small model has 276B total and 12B active parameters, runs under an Apache 2.0 licence, and scores 40 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, within one point of the flagship's 41. It is designed for enterprise fine-tuning via the lab's Tinker platform.