AI is an arms race, and the US wants $9 billion in Nvidia superchips to keep up - ZDNET

Our gifting experts are obsessively searching for holiday gifts that are unique, thoughtful and suitable for any budget. The government is playing catch-up, but Nvidia has a lifeline. Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. The sudden — even by tech standards — pivot to AI hasn’t just left businesses scrambling to play catch-up; even America’s spy agencies are struggling to keep up. Also: AI isn’t getting smarter, it’s getting more power hungry – and expensive This is why the government has given the thumbs-up to a secret $9 billion request for superchips that will allow the CIA and NSA to keep up with what big AI players like Anthropic and OpenAI are doing. The latest batch of AI models needs a massive amount of computing power — not to mention a huge supply of power and specialized cooling that comes as part of cutting-edge, modern-day data centers — to run, and the silicon to deliver this is Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell superchips, named after American mathematician David Blackwell and American computer scientist and Navy pioneer Grace Hopper. Also: How to learn Claude Code for free with Anthropic’s AI courses – one took me just 20 minutes These superchips, called the