power

Evan Conrad published an article on October 22 titled "The end of startups," with the subtitle "The coming credit crunch." Evan Conrad stated that within the next six months, most AI startups will be unable to purchase computing power, as global computing power is sold out. To obtain capacity, new clusters need to be contracted, and it is becoming increasingly difficult for non-investment-grade entities to secure online capacity.Evan Conrad mentioned that startups are not investment-grade, thus they are required to pay larger upfront payments. He has seen cases where 100% of the contract amount is required to be prepaid, as lenders and cloud providers are unwilling to take on additional credit risk. He believes that investment-grade tenants are scarce, and due to leveraging and selling to non-investment-grade token buyers, their ratings are downgraded, which he refers to as a credit bottleneck. He anticipates that investment-grade GPU buyers will increasingly demand that token buyers themselves be investment-grade or pay large upfront deposits.In the article, he provides an example where, at the time of writing, B300 could be purchased for $6 per hour and then sold for approximately $30 per hour for inference. He expects GPU prices to rise, and the gross margin for inference layers to decline, making it harder for clients with poor credit to obtain tokens. He proposed that lenders treat GPU clusters as collateral and stated that the physical delivery forward market SF Compute could allow lenders to use GPU hours on a liquidity book as collateral, rather than relying on a single service provider's cluster.

The official account of Alibaba Cloud stated that the large model company Step Star has globally released its flagship open-source model Step 5 Preview, positioned as a primary working model for real-world intelligent agent tasks, excelling in AI programming, software engineering, professional knowledge work, and financial scenarios. The model has a total of 600 billion parameters and 27 billion active parameters, utilizing sparse MoE, with a maximum context window of 1 million, capable of processing text, images, and videos. The article mentions that it recently ranked second globally in both weekly and daily call volume on OpenRouter. On the day of the release, Alibaba Cloud announced the completion of DAY0 adaptation, optimized for joint inference based on chips, super node instances, and models, with inference computing power provided by the Lingjun super node.Step Star has developed its own intelligent agent reinforcement learning training platform, with the sandbox platform managed by Alibaba Cloud. The solution is based on Alibaba Cloud's Agent Sandbox and Kubernetes container service, aimed at elastic computing power in training mode, claiming to create tens of thousands of sandboxes in a single minute, with a maximum concurrency of up to one million, compatible with E2B API, and providing native Kubernetes interfaces. Through multi-level image caching, intelligent pre-scheduling, and control link optimization, it achieves millisecond-level application and minute-level creation of 30,000 sandboxes, with the sandbox lifecycle uniformly managed by Alibaba Cloud's backend.In terms of storage, each Pod starts with 15GB of free temporary storage, automatically increasing by 30GB each time when usage exceeds 70%, up to a maximum of 300GB. For security, MicroVM-level isolation is adopted by default, covering computing, networking, storage, and permissions, with zero-trust access to cloud products and large model interfaces. The results provided in the article include: a 90% reduction in image startup time, model evaluation cycles compressed from weekly to daily, and an average savings of about 40% on EBS storage costs; relying on ACK One Fleet, it can support the stable operation of hundreds of thousands of sandboxes simultaneously.

According to CNBC, OpenAI is negotiating a commercial agreement to obtain more computing power from the United Arab Emirates. Investors from the United Arab Emirates and Coatue are leading the financing for OpenAI.

According to Catcher Predict monitoring on-chain data, it predicts significant capital movements in the Polymarket. A large whale invested $86,680.99 in the event "Power Balance: 2026 Midterm Elections," betting on "Democratic Victory." Based on the current transaction price, the latest corresponding winning probability for this target is 67%.

According to The Block, holders of Starknet (STRK) supported a research proposal with over 93.5% of the voting power, which aims to explore the transformation of Starknet from an Ethereum Layer 2 network to an independent Layer 1 network with quantum resistance.StarkWare plans to release a draft white paper in November to further investigate the relevant technological pathways. It is important to note that this vote only supports the initiation of transformation research and does not mean that the transformation plan has been officially approved. Further governance approval will still be required to advance the related transformation.

Beating AI news reports that Wen Shilei, the head of ByteDance's commercialization GenAI R&D, has recently left the company, with his next stop likely being the embodied intelligence company Octopus Power, where he will serve as a partner. Wen Shilei joined Baidu in 2011, previously serving as the head of visual technology and chief architect of the smart city division, and has won Baidu's highest award twice. After moving to ByteDance in 2021, he initially focused on digital humans, XR, and other technologies, and later took charge of engineering R&D for generative AI in commercial scenarios such as advertising.This business line has recently lost several core leaders. Former head of the commercialization GenAI department, Peng Bingyue, left in July this year and subsequently joined Google; the former head of the China region, Yuan Zehuan, also left in July to pursue a startup in world modeling. With Wen Shilei's departure, the remaining team members have been reassigned to other departments.Octopus Power was founded in January 2026 by former Horizon and Jianzhihui Robotics executive Du Dalong, primarily developing world models for robots, dexterous hands, and data collection systems, having raised nearly 1 billion yuan in total financing by June this year. On October 15, Octopus Power confirmed that co-founder Liang Zhujin will leave; Liang Zhujin previously oversaw post-training and data operations, and it is currently unclear whether Wen Shilei will take over related responsibilities.

HUMAIN Both parties plan to collaborate on the deployment of up to 84 megawatts of AI computing infrastructure, approximately equivalent to 27,000 NVIDIA GPUs. The deployment of NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra chips is set to begin in the fourth quarter of 2026, with plans to deploy NVIDIA Vera Rubin series chips in 2027.

According to Catcher Predict monitoring on-chain data, significant capital movements are predicted in the Polymarket market. A large whale invested $50,000 in the event "Power Balance: 2026 Midterm Elections" for the outcome "Republican Victory." Based on the current transaction price, the latest corresponding winning probability for this target is 8.82%.

Infineon and NVIDIA announced a collaboration on power conversion for data centers.

According to IPO documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic generated $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of the year, compared to $1.1 billion in the same period last year; the net loss for the first half of the year was $80.7 billion, compared to $13 billion in the same period last year. Approximately $72 billion of the loss came from accounting expenses related to changes in the fair value of financing instruments such as convertible notes.The documents show that spending on computing power and infrastructure in the first half of the year was nearly $9 billion, with total related spending for 2025 projected at $7.3 billion. Over the next 7 to 10 years, cloud computing agreement spending is expected to be around $450 billion, with an additional commitment to pay over $160 billion for leasing Google chips. Future infrastructure spending commitments have exceeded $600 billion, and if agreements still under negotiation are included, this could increase by up to $150 billion.In the first half of the year, about 20% of revenue came from two customers, and the company expects future revenue to still rely significantly on a small number of clients. The documents also state that artificial intelligence models may pose real-world dangers, and the losses from catastrophic incidents may even be uninsurable, while the construction of data centers faces increasingly organized political resistance.

Grayscale Research Director Zach Pandl stated in "The Stack" published on October 20, 2026: AI computing infrastructure stocks have recently declined due to investors' concerns about rising borrowing costs, while the financing needs of related companies are high. The stock index, which includes AI cloud service providers CoreWeave and Nebius, has fallen by approximately 27% since the end of September, according to data from Bloomberg and Grayscale Investments, based on the Indxx High-Performance Computing Index, as of October 19, 2026.Pandl noted: Most of these companies are in early stages and capital-intensive, with some neocloud capital expenditures being several times their current revenue. The top five holdings in the index have a capital expenditure to sales ratio exceeding 230% over the past 12 months, with data as of October 19, 2026. He believes that while stock prices are correcting, the demand and prices for computing power remain stable, with demand for computing power increasing rather than decreasing.He also anticipates: The decline in token prices and the increase in AI agent usage will lead to higher inference demand, thereby supporting the growth of computing power demand; if demand increases and computing power prices remain high, these companies may benefit. He also mentioned the slowdown in GPU depreciation, as well as the overlap between AI computing power and the Bitcoin mining industry, with the possibility of rising Bitcoin prices. Pandl believes: Higher borrowing costs have suppressed computing infrastructure stocks, but the fundamental trend of rising computing power demand remains valid, and this correction should be seen as an opportunity to increase exposure to the energized compute layer.

Elon Musk stated that the bottleneck in the development of artificial intelligence lies more in power, cooling, and infrastructure, rather than in chips.

Elon Musk stated that SpaceX is "quite confident" about achieving 10 gigawatts of computing power online by 2027; the possibility of exceeding 20 gigawatts of computing power online by 2027 is not zero.

Anthropic's IPO draft shows that the company will invest over $600 billion in computing power.

According to Catcher Predict monitoring, in the Polymarket prediction market for the event "Dota 2: Lynx vs Power Rangers," the sub-market "Day Ends" option's win rate has experienced significant fluctuations, soaring from 50% an hour ago to the current 91% (a fluctuation of 41%). Please note the impact of relevant breaking news.

Bitcoin analyst Sam Callahan stated in a video interview published by Bitcoin Magazine that Bitcoin does not need the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates to succeed; what truly determines its long-term value is fiscal dominance and ongoing currency depreciation, rather than the level of interest rates.Callahan pointed out that, according to the inflation metrics preferred by the Federal Reserve, the dollar has lost at least 20% of its purchasing power over the past five years. He believes that financial repression is already occurring—core PCE averaging 3.7%, and the U.S. bond market is experiencing the steepest pullback in history. He bluntly stated that this policy "works well, but is detrimental to the public."In the interview, he also discussed why the global debt binge makes currency depreciation the easiest way out, the role of the Bank for International Settlements, gold's "monetary protest" and central bank credibility issues, and when central banks will adopt Bitcoin. He listed gold, Bitcoin, and the dollar as the three pillars of reserve assets, believing that all roads ultimately lead to currency depreciation.