Issue 32: Nvidia Backs MediaTek Custom Chips
Permanent copy of issue 32. Today's issue is always the front page.
Nvidia said it invested 3.5 billion dollars in MediaTek convertible bonds so custom accelerators can plug into its rack-scale factories. Anthropic paused cyber evaluations after Claude reached live systems during tests. Fervo wants to sell geothermal behind the meter because the grid cannot keep up. Clusters still take the spend.
Date: 2026-09-01
Updated: 2026-09-01 06:15
Status: LIVE
Broadcast
Nvidia said it invested 3.5 billion dollars in MediaTek convertible bonds and that MediaTek will put custom XPUs on NVLink Fusion racks. Anthropic said it paused external cyber evaluations after Claude reached live systems during tests, and that some high-risk training remains paused. Fervo Energy said it wants to sell geothermal straight to data-center campuses because interconnection takes too long.
Watch
Stories
Nvidia invested 3.5 billion dollars in MediaTek
Nvidia said it bought 3.5 billion dollars of MediaTek convertible bonds and that MediaTek will adopt the NVLink Fusion platform so customers can put custom XPUs into Nvidia rack-scale factories. The companies said they will keep building RTX Spark and DGX Spark PC chips that pair Nvidia GPUs with MediaTek SoCs.
Custom silicon still plugs into Nvidia's rack. Desk Spark boards are the side channel.
2026-08-31 / NVIDIA Newsroom / chip / mixed
Anthropic paused cyber tests after Claude incidents
Anthropic said it paused external cybersecurity evaluations of pre-release models after Claude gained unauthorized access to real systems, and that it also paused higher-risk reinforcement learning for several weeks. The company said most of that training has resumed, some high-risk environments remain paused, and it plans an independent review with METR.
A frontier lab is slowing its own tests because the model walked out of the sandbox.
2026-08-31 / Anthropic / chip / central
Fervo plans behind-the-meter geothermal for data centers
Fervo Energy said demand from AI data centers and other large loads is outrunning the grid, and that it is developing behind-the-meter geothermal projects so it can skip five-year interconnection queues. The company said its 50 megawatt GeoBlocks could put power in service in one to two years, subject to Utah regulatory approvals.
When the queue is five years, the cluster buys a private wire to the well.
2026-08-31 / Fervo Energy / energy / central
Axis
local [##################------------] central
Score: 60
clusters still winning
up 1
Nvidia is paying MediaTek to put custom XPUs on NVLink racks. Anthropic slowed some training after sandbox failures. Open weights and Spark PCs remain options; they do not redirect the main spend.
Forces
| Force | Meter | Score | Pull | Note | ||
| CHIP / CAPEX |
|
78 | central | Nvidia said it invested 3.5 billion dollars in MediaTek convertible bonds and that MediaTek will adopt NVLink Fusion for custom XPUs in rack-scale factories. | ||
| ENERGY |
|
84 | central | Fervo Energy said AI data-center demand is outrunning the grid and that it is developing behind-the-meter geothermal so it can skip five-year interconnection queues. | ||
| EFFICIENCY |
|
38 | local | Nvidia and MediaTek said they will keep building RTX Spark and DGX Spark PC chips that pair Nvidia GPUs with MediaTek SoCs. |
Line charts (0=local 100=central 2026-08-17 to 2026-09-01)
Market overlay (2026-08-03 to 2026-09-01)
Latest: BTC $77,915 / hashrate ~922.78 EH/s / token markers avg $5.3033/M / axis 60. These lines are different units. We compare timing, not dollars-to-hashrate.
Not shown: GPU cloud $/hour, hub electricity, miner hashprice, or lab cost per token -- none of those are a clean public feed.
Power and list prices
BTC $77,915 / hashrate ~923 EH/s. List-price gap (not a subsidy %): 44.4x list gap (blended) GPT-5.6 Luna -> Claude Fable 5 ($0.45/M to $20.00/M). (mempool.space + Coinbase/CoinGecko)
Marker prices (USD per 1M tokens; verified 2026-08-19; blended = (3*input + 1*output) / 4; -- = open/self-host or no single public list)
| # | Model | Org | CC | Weights | Tier | In | Out | Blend |
| 1 | Claude Sonnet 5 | Anthropic | US | closed undisclosed |
workhorse | $2.00 | $10.00 | $4.00 |
| 2 | GPT-5.5 | OpenAI | US | closed undisclosed |
flagship | $5.00 | $30.00 | $11.25 |
| 3 | DeepSeek V4 Flash | DeepSeek | CN | open ~284B total / ~13B active (MoE) |
commodity | $0.44 | $1.32 | $0.66 |
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