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Luke Kawa10/9/25

Nvidia reportedly receives US government approval to ship some AI chips to the UAE

Nvidia has received the all clear from the US Commerce Department to start sending its powerful AI semiconductors to the United Arab Emirates, per Bloomberg.

These shipments are part of the “Stargate UAE” project, announced in May, which saw the UAE offer to invest over $1 trillion in the US in exchange for access to American technology — including massive amounts of Nvidia chips — to support the build-out of a cluster of data centers in the Gulf nation.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, as well as some senior White House officials, were frustrated by the lack of progress on this deal amid national security concerns held by others in the administration, including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. The apparent internal strife underscores the difficulties involved in the pursuit of “sovereign AI” by many nations, with the US government aiming to balance the best interests of its leading technology companies with a desire to maintain a national competitive edge in the space by controlling the flow of key AI hardware.

The Stargate UAE venture — which also includes OpenAI, Oracle, Cisco, SoftBank, and G42 — came amid a spree of multiyear, multibillion-dollar pacts between US tech giants and companies or sovereign-affiliated entities in the Middle East, which were announced in May as President Donald Trump toured the region. This included Super Micro Computer’s $20 billion partnership agreement with Saudi Arabian data center firm DataVolt as well as Nvidia’s deal with the Kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund to build “AI factories of the future.”

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Michael Burry flags “troubling” jump in Nvidia’s supply commitments

“The Big Short” investor Michael Burry — famous for betting against the 2008 housing bubble — just warned of a major risk in Nvidia’s latest annual report, pointing to a sixfold surge in purchase obligations over the past year.

In a Substack post Thursday, Burry called the increase from $16.1 billion to $95.2 billion in just 12 months “troubling,” noting that Nvidia has been forced to place noncancelable purchase orders well before knowing the final demand for its AI chips. The surge is partly tied to supplier TSMC requiring longer-term contracts, he added.

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Vistra beats Q4 earnings expectations for adjusted EBITDA, but dips on income decline

Power provider Vistra, a key player in the AI energy trade, reported better-than-expected adjusted earnings results early Thursday, but shares dipped in early trading as Q4 net income dropped.

The Texas-based company, which supplies nuclear- and natural gas-fueled power to wholesale and retail markets, reported:

Net income of $233 million, a decline of 52% from Q4 2024.
Adjusted EBITDA from ongoing operations of $1.74 billion vs. the $1.71 billion expected by Wall Street analysts.
Vistra maintained previously issued guidance for full-year EBITDA from ongoing operations and adjusted free cash flow from ongoing operations.

Vistra shares soared 258% in 2024 amid a flurry of excitement over the AI energy boom. Last year was more muted, with the stock rising 17%. So far in 2026, shares were up roughly 9% before the report.

Vistra beats fourth-quarter core profit estimates on AI-driven power demand

Vistra beats fourth-quarter core profit estimates on AI-driven power demand

Net income of $233 million, a decline of 52% from Q4 2024.
Adjusted EBITDA from ongoing operations of $1.74 billion vs. the $1.71 billion expected by Wall Street analysts.
Vistra maintained previously issued guidance for full-year EBITDA from ongoing operations and adjusted free cash flow from ongoing operations.

Vistra shares soared 258% in 2024 amid a flurry of excitement over the AI energy boom. Last year was more muted, with the stock rising 17%. So far in 2026, shares were up roughly 9% before the report.

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Sandisk rises on partnership with SK Hynix to standardize memory chip architecture tailored for AI data centers

Sandisk is up 3% in premarket trading on Thursday after it began its global standardization strategy of high-bandwidth flash (HBF) memory solutions with SK Hynix.

SK Hynix commented in a press release on Thursday that “by making HBF an industry standard, together with Sandisk, we will lay the foundation for the entire AI ecosystem to grow together,” adding that the companies will set up a dedicated workstream to work on the standardization under the Open Compute Project, the world’s largest organization dealing with data center technologies.

First debuted last February, Sandisk’s HBF technology lies in between ultrafast high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and high-capacity SSDs. That is, these have more storage capacity than HBMs, but are still fast enough to be utilized in AI inferencing (albeit not as quick as HBM).

Sandisk has previously argued that this hybrid architecture is central to AI services that need user applications but require a significant amount of fast interconnect between GPUs. The latest announcement also notes that HBF technology is expected to be more cost-efficient compared to alternatives of similar scale.

The launch, which was shared in an kickoff event on Thursday evening, starts SK Hynix and Sandisk’s workflow, which was announced when the two companies signed a memorandum of understanding “to standardize the specification, define technology requirements and explore the creation of a technology ecosystem” last August, per Sandisk’s press release at the time. Ultimately, by collaborating with SK Hynix, one of the three key HBM suppliers, to standardize and commercialize the technology, Sandisk is manufacturing somewhat of a first-mover advantage to offer the system-level “AI-optimized memory architecture” required for AI inference markets, rather than focusing on the performance of a single chip element.

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