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Finally, there’s good news for Nvidia customers who have been contending with more and more difficulties getting data centers up and running: Nvidia’s next-generation chips probably won’t be one of them.

That’s according to several executives at cloud providers that purchase Nvidia AI servers. They told me that based on their initial tests, they expect the company’s upcoming Vera Rubin server racks to be much easier to install than Grace Blackwell racks were in 2025. Back then, Nvidia’s biggest customers struggled mightily with an array of new technologies they hadn’t dealt with before. Their struggles were kept quiet, at least until my colleagues reported on it.

For cloud providers spending billions on hardware, every week spent troubleshooting new servers would delay bringing on lucrative compute capacity for AI customers. Setup delays could also stall orders and squeeze margins for data center builders.

It’s still early going with Vera Rubin racks, which are just beginning to trickle in to customers. The real test will come when customers begin to receive hundreds or thousands of Vera Rubin racks next year.

By the second half of next year, Nvidia aims to produce a more powerful version of the rack, which could present new problems for customers because it will require a lot more energy to run as well as more switches and cables to connect servers to one another.

For now, the racks customers are testing—each of which contain 72 graphics processing units and 36 central processing units—are essentially a third-generation product for Nvidia, not a brand new one. That’s because Grace Blackwell racks had a nearly identical configuration. (The more powerful versions of Vera Rubin racks, which link 144 or 576 GPUs together, aren’t being produced yet.)

“Honestly, we don’t think it will be too difficult” to install Vera Rubin racks at scale, one of the cloud executives said. “Mechanically and thermally, it is now a third generation product.”

Nvidia says Vera Rubin systems are fairly compatible with the software customers already use to run Grace Blackwell servers. Two cloud executives said it would still take a few months to adapt their companies’ software to the Vera Rubin server racks to run them in large clusters.

‘Black Magic’

Vera Rubin racks cost at least twice as much as the initial Grace Blackwell racks did, but Nvidia says the new hardware is 10 times more efficient, based on a metric known as AI tokens per second per watt.

To be sure, Vera Rubins won’t be a cinch to install. Many of its components are brand new, one of the cloud executives said. And the Rubin racks have 1.3 million components, compared to 1.2 million for the initial Blackwell racks.

An Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 compute tray, which includes four Rubin GPUs and two Vera CPUs. Source: Phoebe Liu

In March, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang alluded to the complexity of some of those components when he showed off the new networking switches that connect the new Rubin GPUs to each other. “This is insanely hard to do well. This is insanely hard to do, period,” he said at his company’s annual developer conference.

Huang didn’t say whether the new chip-to-chip networking would be difficult for customers to handle, but such technology slowed the Blackwell ramp-up last year. An Oracle employee who works on large computing clusters, including for upcoming Vera Rubin servers, said that figuring out the location of a networking failure in such clusters was excruciatingly hard, requiring “black magic.”

Rubin racks also consume 75% more power per rack and run hotter than the Blackwell predecessors. Counterintuitively, the new cooling system in the rack is supposed to consume less power than cooling technology for Blackwell racks but it’s harder to set up. One analyst who tracks Nvidia’s stock closely said thermal engineering issues had set back the production of the initial batch of Vera Rubin servers by about two months. An Nvidia spokesperson said that “nothing has changed from what we already announced.”

On top of that, getting Vera Rubin online doesn’t just depend on the Nvidia hardware. Many customers are building new data centers with Nvidia-recommended floor plans, cabling setups and management software to house the Vera Rubins efficiently.

Data center developers “have to build brand new infrastructure from the ground up” for Vera Rubins because retrofitting existing data centers would be too costly, said Kevin Cochrane, chief marketing officer at Vultr, a GPU cloud provider.

Ultra Version

Another test will involve the more powerful Vera Rubin rack, Ultra, which is slated to appear next year. Unlike the first Vera Rubin racks, the Ultra ones will have several new features that could take some time to figure out. Trays containing the chips will slot into server racks vertically like a bookshelf rather than horizontally like a baker’s rack, which means gravity could put a different type of stress on the new system.

The racks will also link as many as 576 GPUs together and need nearly triple the amount of power per rack, compared to the less powerful version, which could all present new challenges.

Andrew Bell, Nvidia’s senior vice president of hardware, said earlier this month that Blackwell “broke everything” because Nvidia completely redesigned the GPU system, making life difficult for customers.

By comparison, Vera Rubin is a less jarring change and “way easier to manufacture,” he said. There’s a 95% chance of getting a tray of Rubin chips assembled correctly on the first attempt, compared to 20% for the first Blackwell systems, he said.

Not everyone is a believer. One cloud executive was skeptical of Bell’s claims, saying they expect the advanced Vera Rubin systems to “break everything” again and be as difficult to install as Blackwell racks were.

If only Amazon hadn’t abandoned the Fire phone! The e-commerce and cloud conglomerate took a big step toward launching its planned satellite-delivered mobile phone service: It applied to the Federal Communications Commission for permission to launch 5,105 satellites to deliver the direct-to-device service it announced on Monday.

Amazon had signaled its intention to launch such a service—which will compete with one already offered by SpaceX—when it agreed to buy Globalstar in April (here’s what we wrote then). Globalstar already offers some satellite-to-cellphone services, including satellite connectivity available on Apple’s iPhones. The new service also builds on Amazon’s yet-to-launch Leo broadband service, which will compete with SpaceX’s Starlink.

Amazon isn’t advertising this cell service as a competitor to Verizon or T-Mobile, to be sure. It said today the new service would “complement existing mobile networks, filling coverage gaps.” That’s a strategy similar to what SpaceX is pursuing. So how big a business could that be? It’s hard to tell. But one thing is for sure: It won’t be as profitable a business for either SpaceX or Amazon once they’re both in it.

Talk about a nervous market! Shares of Nvidia fell 5% on Monday on news of a $500 billion partnership the AI chip giant struck with South Korean conglomerate SK Group, along with a Wall Street Journal report that Nvidia was separately in talks to help OpenAI finance a $500 billion data center campus in Ohio. Investors should take a chill pill: Neither of these deals was actually news. Nor were they fully fleshed out.

For instance, Nvidia and SK have only signed letters of intent to formalize a partnership, they said on Friday. Letters of intent are not worth the paper they’re written on. Remember, Nvidia and OpenAI signed a letter of intent last September for what they called a “landmark strategic partnership,” only to abandon the idea a few months later.

Moreover, the SK Group–Nvidia announcement from Friday was mostly a reprise of two other announcements from early June. In one, Nvidia and SK Telecom (a part of SK Group) had announced plans to build a “gigawatt-scale AI Cloud in Korea” using Nvidia’s DSX technology. (Funnily enough, while Friday’s press release linked to that announcement, the latest update doubled the scale of the AI cloud in Korea to 2 gigawatts.) In the other, Nvidia and SK Hynix (another part of SK Group) announced a memory chip partnership. As to details of the $500 billion, such as which company is putting up how much, Nvidia isn’t saying. My colleague Phoebe Liu reported on Friday that executives at a press briefing wouldn’t talk about those details.

Then there’s the OpenAI-Nvidia Wall Street Journal report that drew attention on Monday, which wasn’t news: It was outlined in a report in The Information in early June! As was the case back then, the details aren’t clear. It does imply Nvidia would take on a lot of risk to back OpenAI. But given the history of OpenAI and Nvidia, there’s no guarantee this deal will get done.

Nvidia likes to make announcements. We got two more today, with news that it is investing in Ilya Sutskever’s AI startup, Safe Superintelligence, and helping launch an open-source software cybersecurity alliance. Keeping track of what’s new and meaningful about AI isn’t easy, and the media’s reporting often makes things more confusing by recycling different versions of the same news. But before investors panic about Nvidia’s financial commitments, they need more details about what’s real and new and what’s not.

A key agency has circulated a draft of the framework to OpenAI, Anthropic and Google

The Trump administration is close to finalizing its voluntary framework for AI companies to submit their most advanced models to the government before releasing them to the public, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The White House’s Office of the National Cyber Director circulated a draft of the framework to OpenAI, Anthropic and Google around two weeks ago, said the people, adding that the three companies jointly submitted their own edits. An executive order on AI signed by President Donald Trump in early June set a deadline of Aug. 1 for the creation of the framework, which aims to establish a more formal process for powerful new forms of AI capable of swiftly discovering cybervulnerabilities.

The framework would represent a more concrete set of rules for AI companies after weeks of uncertainty over how the Trump administration will manage the release of frontier models. The administration created the executive order largely in response to Anthropic’s frontier model, Mythos, which the company held back from wide public release because of its offensive cybersecurity capabilities. Since the signing of the order, the White House has imposed export controls on Anthropic over apparent security vulnerabilities in its most advanced models and has ordered OpenAI to do a staggered release of its latest model, GPT-5.6.

Those actions sparked criticism that the White House was imposing an ad hoc licensing regime on the AI industry. In contrast, the goal of the framework is to create a more standardized process for determining what constitutes a frontier model and allowing the government to review those models before sharing them with outside partners.

With days to go until the deadline, some AI companies have expressed concerns in meetings with White House agencies over how the framework will define frontier models, as well as whether it will treat closed- and open-source models differently, according to two people familiar with the matter.

There is also a looming question of how voluntary the framework will be in practice, especially after the White House’s decision to impose export controls on Anthropic. The Trump administration has maintained that adhering to it will not be mandatory. Still, the framework’s completion would represent a major win for the White House as it seeks to boost the U.S. AI industry amid rapidly accelerating competition from China.

The early June executive order was the result of weeks of debate between different White House agencies, as well as engagement with AI companies, over how to deal with frontier models like Anthropic’s Mythos. The Trump administration sought to maintain the hands-off approach to AI regulation championed by former AI and crypto czar David Sacks while still ensuring that it could supervise the new model’s national security risks.

Trump held off on signing the initial version of the executive order after a last-minute intervention from Sacks over concerns that it would be too onerous for companies. Later, Trump signed an updated version stating that AI labs would provide the federal government with access to “covered frontier models” for a period of up to 30 days before releasing them to other partners. The order, signed on June 2, provides a 60-day window for various government agencies to design the framework that would define frontier models, along with a government process for reviewing them.

Since June, the White House has held feedback sessions with companies on the framework, including a joint meeting on June 9, as it raced toward the Aug. 1 deadline. Still, some smaller AI companies worried that the framework would keep only the three largest labs—OpenAI, Anthropic and Google—in mind, according to two people familiar with the concerns, particularly for the definition of a covered frontier model.

There are different metrics to determine what to consider a frontier model, including the model’s size, how it’s deployed and its use-case–specific capabilities as measured by third-party evaluations. But if the definition focuses only on the leading, closed-source models such as Mythos and GPT-5.6, it could exclude open-source models that are often trained with fewer parameters or deployed on premise, rather than through cloud providers, even if they have comparable capabilities.

For AI companies, there could be advantages to inclusion in the program. The executive order directs more funding to supporting critical infrastructure and cybersecurity defenses, though it isn’t clear how meaningful those resources will be or how they will be shared with companies participating in the program.

Open-source models that the framework does not label as frontier models could be cut off from participation. Meanwhile, there has been a parallel discussion between companies and the government about whether open-source models should have exemptions from the voluntary review process based on their capabilities, to reduce the additional regulatory burden, The Information previously reported. Publicly available U.S. open-source options still lag behind their Chinese counterparts, and figures like Sacks argue for less regulation to ensure they can catch up.

Key details of how the model review process will work couldn’t be learned. The White House has communicated to some companies that the entity conducting the reviews will be a combination of the National Security Agency and the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, a small agency within the Commerce Department that has faced political pressure under the Trump administration, according to two people familiar.

Still, there is growing optimism that the White House understands CAISI’s technical expertise and importance, said one of the people.

Perhaps the most important unanswered question about the new framework: What will happen to companies that decline to participate in the voluntary model review process?

In a May press briefing ahead of the initial executive order’s release, a senior White House official didn’t directly answer a question about what would happen if a company did not submit to the guidelines. “It’s built to be flexible and adaptable and move at the speed of new technology development,” they replied. “We believe that this strikes the appropriate balance between security and innovation.”

Inspectors issue stop-work order at planned 32-story apartment tower in Manhattan, carrying out safety sweeps after former Pfizer building buckled

New York City building officials last week halted construction work at another Manhattan office tower that is being converted into apartments, marking the second time such a project was shut down this month over structural concerns.

Construction stopped on Thursday at 222 Broadway in lower Manhattan, a building formerly home to a number of financial firms that the developer is turning into a 32-story residential building with nearly 800 units, a rooftop pool, a spa and co-working spaces.

The work shutdown came after city inspectors said the contractor failed to notify the city about two concrete beams on the top floor that had developed cracks, according to a spokesman for the developer GFP Real Estate.

The beams initially cracked in March but were repaired quickly, the spokesman said. The contractor and engineers considered it a minor issue, he added, and thought they weren’t required to immediately report it to the city.

The cause of the stop-work order was a “reporting timeline discrepancy,” not “safety issues of any kind,” the spokesman said. Inspectors have found that the building is stable, he added.

The contractor on the project, Leeding Builders Group, and the engineering firm, DeSimone Consulting Engineers, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The construction halt at 222 Broadway followed an inspection blitz from the Department of Buildings, which was prompted by the discovery of structural issues at the former Pfizer headquarters building in Midtown.

MetroLoft, the developer that was in the process of converting the former Pfizer building into 1,600 residential units, was ordered to evacuate the property earlier this month. At that construction site, two columns buckled, placing the high rise at risk of partial collapse and causing nine neighboring buildings to shut down temporarily.

The structural problems were at least partly because of the extra weight of new additions on top of the building, MetroLoft founder Nathan Berman told The Wall Street Journal.

The cracked beams at 222 Broadway were also located on a newly built top floor: The 32nd story was added to support the rooftop pool deck. GFP declined to comment on whether the weight of those new additions contributed to the beams cracking.

Engineers say building expansions can be done safely but adding floors to a structure that wasn’t originally built to hold such weight requires complex engineering. If calculations or assumptions are wrong, floors might be added before columns are properly reinforced and structures could fail.

The Buildings Department is currently reviewing the engineering reports on the cause of the cracks. It won’t lift the halt “until we are fully confident that it is safe to continue construction operations,” a spokesman said.

The office tower at 222 Broadway was a workplace for Bank of America, WeWork and other companies. The developer expects the project to be finished within the next year, and so far doesn’t expect that timing to change. The apartments have already started leasing, with rents ranging from $4,000 to $10,000.

GFP, based in New York City, is a veteran of office-to-residential conversions. It has worked with MetroLoft in the past. The two firms, along with Rockwood Capital, led the development at 25 Water St. in the Financial District, the largest completed office-to-residential conversion in the U.S.

City officials have fanned out across the city to probe other work sites, including ones connected to MetroLoft or Domani Inspection Services, the private building inspector that MetroLoft hired for the old Pfizer building.

Domani plays a prominent role in New York City’s construction industry, acting as an independent third party to inspect work sites to ensure construction complies with safety codes. Records show Domani inspected construction at the 222 Broadway site in 2023, but the work was separate from the conversion to residential buildings.

An acerbic open letter, a lengthy podcast and a new X account mark a shift for the typically discreet billionaire

PARIS—Bernard Arnault has spent decades carefully cultivating the image of some of the world’s most sought after brands, from Louis Vuitton to Dior. Now the LVMH chief is changing tactics when it comes to his own.

The billionaire published an acerbic open letter attacking one of France’s top newspapers on Sunday, taking aim at a six-part examination of his political connections, media ownership and the question of who will eventually succeed him at the top of his luxury empire. On Monday, the 77-year-old took to social-media platform X for the first time to amplify his uncharacteristic missive.

The burst of personal communication—which also includes a recent one-hour-and 41-minute appearance on a podcast about his life—marks an abrupt change of tone for Arnault. For much of his career, he has let his luxury empire speak for him, carefully sculpting his own public image through a handful of select interactions with the media.

The new approach comes as Arnault has grown increasingly frustrated with how he and his family are being portrayed. He was furious about a recent series of articles about him and his business in Le Monde, according to people close to the businessman. The final installment, published Friday, described succession as “the poison at the heart of LVMH.”

The newspaper series followed a recent French-language book that Arnault regarded as deeply unfair, the people added, and a steady stream of articles in other French publications about tensions within his family and jockeying among his five children.

Arnault has traditionally shrugged off bad press. When his children complain about a newspaper article, he reminds them that he endured worse at their age, when he was fighting bruising corporate battles. “You need a thick skin,” he told one of them earlier this year after they complained about what they perceived as an unfair story.

His response this week reflects a broader shift among business leaders and other powerful figures, who are increasingly using podcasts and social media to bypass traditional news outlets and speak directly to the public. Nvidia chief Jensen Huang joined X last week, debuting on the platform with a letter defending open AI models.

In his first post on X, Arnault reposted his open letter to Le Monde—issued Sunday via LVMH’s press account—and said he was “deeply touched by the many messages” he had received following its publication.

Arnault’s arrival on X was amplified by Elon Musk, who reposted the luxury tycoon’s inaugural post and endorsed the idea of communicating directly with the public rather than via the media.

In the three-page letter published Sunday evening, Arnault responded to a series of points raised in Le Monde’s articles with a mix of sarcasm, self-defense and score-settling.

Arnault appeared particularly exercised by suggestions of a “Succession”-style struggle among his children—Delphine, Antoine, Alexandre, Frédéric and Jean—to take over. They all have roles at LVMH.

“Among the Arnaults, apparently, we don’t discuss, we plot; we don’t deliberate, we compete,” he wrote. In reality, he said, his children run businesses, manage teams, make decisions and call one another on Sundays.

“What, in an ordinary family, is called a Sunday is called an intrigue in ours,” Arnault wrote.

The dispute itself has a familial twist. Arnault’s eldest son, Antoine, oversees LVMH’s communications and image, while Xavier Niel, the telecoms billionaire and longtime partner of Arnault’s daughter Delphine, is a shareholder in Le Monde.

“He doesn’t deny anything. That’s the most important thing for us,” said Raphaëlle Bacqué, one of the Le Monde journalists who wrote the articles.

Bacqué defended Le Monde’s reporting, saying the newspaper’s sources were “as close to the group as you can get.” Arnault’s more humorous response was “cleverly done,” she added.

Arnault’s anger was heightened by the fact that he had spoken with the newspaper for the series, as had his children and several longtime LVMH executives.

“I very clearly suspect you of having punished transparency,” he wrote in the letter, arguing that rivals who had refused to engage with the newspaper had received more favorable treatment.

Arnault has long been a polarizing figure in France. Admirers credit him with turning brands such as Louis Vuitton and Dior into global powerhouses and helping establish France as the dominant force in the luxury industry. To critics, he is a symbol of inequality, his face appearing on placards during protests against President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reforms.

Arnault ended his letter on a more conciliatory note, inviting the Le Monde journalists for an aperitif at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the brand’s contemporary-art museum in Paris. The wines, he promised, would be French.

He also said he would continue doing the newspaper’s crossword puzzles.

Those, Arnault conceded, “are excellent.”

At least 24 new projects are under way to reshore explosives or propellants across NATO countries, with three in Arkansas alone

The business of explosives is booming as Western governments unleash spending to bring production home.

At least 24 new projects are under way for propellants or explosives across NATO countries, according to information assembled by The Wall Street Journal. Three new factories are set for just Arkansas, a center of U.S. weapons production.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine four years ago exposed the West’s struggle to churn out ammunition. Although artillery-shell output has increased, producers still rely on constricted supplies of dangerous chemicals manufactured in a globe-spanning supply chain with lots of chokepoints.

Before the war in Ukraine, Washington and its allies believed they had ample stockpiles and reliable manufacturing sources. Pentagon dogma for decades centered on surgical strikes using a limited number of expensive and ultraprecise munitions packed with computer chips and digital sensors.

Now, war in “Ukraine and elsewhere is bringing back munitions that have a very different supply chain,” like artillery shells, said Will Somerindyke, the chairman of Regulus Global, a defense manufacturing and logistics company. The U.S. and Europe don’t have that supply chain, meaning they don’t have sovereignty over their own ammunition—and reversing that won’t be easy, he said.

Conflicts and tensions are now prompting countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to restart production and reshore supply chains, though slowly and with gaps.

Regulus aims this year to start work on a site to produce triple-base propellant, a particularly powerful variant that the U.S. hasn’t produced since 1986, Somerindyke said. Plans for the factory haven’t previously been reported.

The U.S. currently has only one propellant factory, a World War II-era plant in southern Virginia, and none has been built since the early 1970s.

Regulus will be one of three companies setting up in Arkansas. U.S.-based ammunition-component maker D&M Holding is already building a propellant factory there. D&M is in talks with the Pentagon to help finance it, according to a person familiar with the matter. South Korea’s Hanwha Defense also plans to build a propellant factory in Arkansas.

Artillery shells, attack drones and missiles generally require at least one of two broad types of concoctions that expand violently: propellants to launch a projectile and explosives to destroy the target. Together known as “energetics,” they are usually toxic, complex to produce and dangerous to handle. After the Cold War, falling defense budgets and fear of pollution and accidents pushed production offshore.

The production surge covers all types of energetics and extends beyond NATO countries. TNT, an explosive, will soon be produced in the U.S. for the first time in decades, and three companies are building TNT plants in Europe. The U.K. plans to complete at least six new energetics factories by 2030.

“Everyone is looking for surge capacity,” said Neelesh Tungar, chief executive of Kalyani Strategic Systems, an Indian industrial conglomerate. Kalyani produces 60,000 shells monthly and wants to produce more of the chemicals that go into them.

India supplies energetics to the West, but isn’t self-sufficient in some of the most essential chemicals, including TNT.

“Production was based around a 40-day intense war, but what Ukraine tells us is you need to go on and on” in modern conflict, said Tungar.

Making explosives is dangerous and Western companies face high regulatory hurdles. Even so, a blast at Accurate Energetic Systems, a Tennessee manufacturer of explosives for civilian and military customers, killed 16 workers last year.

Energetics makers in Russia and China face fewer hurdles. The Kremlin relaxed planning regulations for explosive-makers looking to establish new plants after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

After the Cold War, the U.S. and Europe closed most of their explosives factories and outsourced their dangers to Asia and elsewhere. The U.S. in 1978 had 32 government-owned ammunition plants, according to the U.S. Army Sustainment Command, and now has 11. Europe had seven TNT manufacturing plants and now has one. The U.S. is entirely reliant on imports for its TNT, particularly from Poland.

Then came the war in Ukraine. After two years of fighting, U.S. customers of the Polish TNT maker, Nitro-Chem, received notice the company couldn’t guarantee shipments because of the Ukraine war, according to Clark Mica, president of the Institute of Makers of Explosives, a trade body with mainly commercial members. Nitro-Chem declined to comment.

Since 2024, the cost of TNT has increased almost fourfold, Mica said.

Supplies of other explosives also tightened as Ukraine, Russia and the West increased production of munitions, particularly artillery shells. To address shortfalls and long supply lines, the U.S. and Europe are trying to fill gaps in the market.

Almost $50 billion of the Trump administration’s proposed $1.45 trillion defense budget is for developing domestic sources of critical minerals, chemicals and energetics essential for weapons production.

Among other efforts, last year the U.S. Army reopened a gold mine in Idaho to access a vital chemical byproduct used in nearly a third of all military ammunition. America’s supply of antimony sulfide currently comes entirely from abroad.

But a U.S. attempt to increase production of RDX—a more stable replacement for TNT—and IMX, another explosive, is delayed by roughly eight years. Production remains at 2017 levels despite ongoing projects to increase output. The target date for boosting production has slipped from last year to around 2030, an Army spokesman said.

Helmut Rauch, chief executive of the defense unit at Diehl Group, a German company making missiles and artillery shells, said that despite Europe’s recent increases in explosive production, the supply of RDX is a concern.

In Europe, regulations mean production could take years to come online. Joakim Sjöblom, a former software executive who turned to explosives after being surprised by the large discrepancy between European and Russian production, has spent two years and more than $2 million to get the correct permits to set up a TNT factory in rural Sweden.

Demands included an analysis of the local water table, a survey for potential archaeological sites, a seismic-risk assessment and wider environmental analyses. His company, Swebal, has also completed detailed work for planning permission for the factory, looking at issues such as the proximity of schools and housing.

Sjöblom got permission from national and local governments to go ahead in January, but now faces appeals from local residents.

Swebal won’t begin production before late 2028, five years after he began assessing the possibility. Sjöblom said that while there are ways to speed the process, thorough regulation of ammunition plants should be expected in a democracy.

Russia “doesn’t have the same permitting process,” he said. “They can do it in one to two years.”