1.	Nvidia Agrees to Invest Up to $3 Billion in Power Firm Behind Stargate By Ann Davis Vaughan, Valida Pau and Phoebe Liu Source: The Information

Nvidia has agreed to invest $2 billion into Lancium, the power infrastructure developer behind the OpenAI and Oracle AI campus in Texas, and has agreed to commit another $1 billion as the developer secures additional planned power, The Information reported late Friday. The deal values Lancium and its portfolio of land and power connections at around $10 billion in enterprise value, which includes the investment and its debt.

The $2 billion would give Nvidia a roughly 20% stake in the Blackstone-backed power developer. Nvidia’s stake could grow to around 30% with the additional $1 billion once more of Lancium’s campuses hit certain thresholds, including grid hookups, the report said. The deal is intended to help Nvidia secure multiple gigawatts of pending power rights for its chip customers’ data projects at a time when energy for AI data centers is becoming harder to come by.

2.	OpenAI Pauses Astra Work on Cyber Concerns By Laura Mandaro Source: The Information

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Friday on X the company was pausing work on its upcoming Astra model to make sure the rollout was done safely “given its cyber capabilities.” The decision followed revelations that models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta had jumped their guardrails to breach other companies’ systems.

Altman demonstrated Astra—which touts its ability to have multiple agents work together over a long period of time to solve particularly hard problems—to policymakers and regulators late last month in Washington. It’s intended to be the first to go through the Trump administration’s planned new framework for submitting AI models to the federal government before releasing them to the public.

OpenAI’s latest evaluations “indicate significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity,” it wrote in a blog post Friday. “These results, in addition to expert assessments, have led us to conclude last night that we cannot rule out critical cyber capabilities.”

3.	Sony, TSMC to Invest $6.3 Billion in Image Sensor Joint Venture in Japan By Juro Osawa Source: Nikkei

Sony Group and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. are planning to invest about 1 trillion yen ($6.3 billion) in a joint venture that will start mass producing next-generation image sensors in Japan as early as 2029, the Nikkei newspaper reported.

The new joint venture, expected to be established by March 2027, plans to supply high-performance camera sensors for Apple’s iPhones, according to the Nikkei. Sony will own about 60% of the joint venture and TSMC will own the rest, the Nikkei reported. The companies are planning to build large-scale research and development facilities and production lines at an image sensor plant operated by Sony’s chip unit in Kumamoto prefecture in southern Japan.

The two companies are also expecting future growth in demand for image sensors that enable AI-powered robots and autonomous vehicles to recognize objects in greater precision, the Nikkei said.

Sony, which is known for consumer electronics and the PlayStation videogame business, is also the world’s biggest supplier of CMOS image sensors used in smartphones and other camera-equipped devices.

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