
Firmus pulls $5 billion IPO, turns to private investors
Nvidia-backed Firmus pulled its US$5 billion IPO on October 9, citing volatility. It had sought a US$30.6 billion value, triple its August round.
Nvidia chips, acquisitions and platform moves, read for what they change for developers: which hardware runs which models, what the deals mean for open-model hubs, and what to plan for.

Nvidia-backed Firmus pulled its US$5 billion IPO on October 9, citing volatility. It had sought a US$30.6 billion value, triple its August round.

Eleven companies pledged $2.4 billion in compute credits to the Genesis Mission on October 8. Nvidia gave $1 billion; Musk, Huang and Su got science medals.

Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra pairs Nvidia's RTX Spark chip with up to 128 GB of shared memory. It costs from $2,599.99, with preorders open and shipping October 16.

Microsoft opened US preorders for the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box at $5,999 on October 7, 2026, with 128GB of unified memory for local AI models.

Mecka AI raised a $60M Series B led by Sequoia, with Nvidia and M12. The startup pays people to record everyday tasks with body sensors to train robots.

GPU cloud Lambda is raising up to $4B at a $14.5B pre-money valuation, led by Blackstone and Coatue. Its backlog jumped from $15B to $50B in three months.

NVIDIA's XDC 2026 test on an RTX 5070 at 144 Hz found Wayland and X.Org tied on input lag. XWayland no longer adds a frame, and VRR helped both.

Nvidia raised the Shield TV Pro by $100 to $299.99 on October 2, citing memory costs, and discontinued the cheaper Shield TV. The hardware dates from 2019.

NVIDIA's Kumo Tabular predicts from a labeled table in one pass, with no training run. It ranks first on TabArena at 1,950 Elo, in sizes from 28M to 215M.

A merged pull request adds NVIDIA's cuFFT library to ZLUDA, letting AMD GPUs run CUDA-based Folding@Home units with no code changes.

Salesforce says Koa makes 3x fewer errors on its own CRM Bench, but the weights are proprietary and the model runs only on Salesforce infrastructure.

Hyundai says 40 dedicated cars now feed a training loop for its Atria AI driving system, with a Level 4 pilot in Gwangju due by the end of 2026.

A Red Hat engineer got the open-source Nouveau driver and NVK running on Nvidia's DGX Spark GB10. It took about 100 patches, and upstreaming isn't settled yet.

Nvidia confirmed its $12.9 billion purchase of Hugging Face and promised the platform stays open to non-Nvidia hardware. It turned down a $500 million offer just last year.

Reports say Anthropic signed a $35 billion, six-year deal for computing from Lambda at a Texas data center. Four companies sit in the chain, and Nvidia holds the lease.

Nvidia's DLSS 5 arrives this week with NBA 2K27, limited to RTX 50 cards. Reports put the performance cost at 50 to 60 percent, inverting what DLSS was for.

Nvidia reported $96.2 billion in revenue, up 106% in a year, with data centre sales at $89 billion. Its own release guides to $108 billion for this quarter.

The Information reports Nvidia agreed to pay $12.9 billion for Hugging Face, the model hub developers use daily. Neither company has confirmed the deal yet.

Nvidia put its dedicated inference accelerator into full production, splitting agent workloads so GPUs handle context and the new chips handle token generation.
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