⛔ China Halts NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000D Orders
Beijing has ordered tech giants like Alibaba and ByteDance to cancel purchases of NVIDIA’s RTX Pro 6000D chip. The move aims to boost domestic alternatives and reduce reliance on U.S. tech. NVIDIA faces mounting pressure in China, once a key market for its AI chips.

🥇 Gemini Wins Gold at Global Coding Competition
Gemini 2.5 Deep Think hit gold-medal status at the 2025 ICPC World Finals, solving 10 of 12 algorithmic problems under timed conditions. It even cracked a problem no human team solved. The result shows AI’s growing ability to tackle complex, abstract reasoning challenges.

📈 Groq Hits $6.9B Valuation on AI Chip Surge
Groq raised $750M, boosting its valuation to $6.9B as investors bet on its AI inference chips. Backers include Disruptive, BlackRock, and Samsung. With a $1.5B deal in Saudi Arabia, the startup expects $500M in revenue this year, positioning itself as a rising NVIDIA rival.

🧐 Alibaba Drops Open-Source Research Agent Bombshell
Alibaba’s Tongyi Lab released Tongyi DeepResearch Agent, an open-source AI rivaling top proprietary agents with just 30B parameters. It beats major benchmarks, excels at legal research, and powers real apps like Amap’s trip planner and a legal assistant for case citation.

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Larry Ellison wasn't supposed to win the AI wars. Not like this, anyway.

While tech titans battled over consumer chatbots and flashy demos, Oracle—that stalwart of enterprise databases—quietly assembled what may be one of the industry's most compelling AI infrastructure stories.

The proof arrived in a single, staggering number: $455 billion in remaining performance obligations, a 359% year-over-year surge that sent Oracle's stock rocketing 27%. → Continue reading here.

OpenAI launches GPT-5 Codex: optimized for coding, bug catching, 7-hour tasks, faster reviews, IDE/GitHub integration, 90% speed boost.

Meta unveiled new AI-powered smart glasses, headlined by the Ray-Ban “Display” model that adds a subtle heads-up display to the right lens for glanceable info (notifications, navigation, translation) plus always-on voice AI. A wrist “Neural Band” controller enables gestures without touching the frames. Pricing is positioned as premium, with reports pegging the Ray-Ban Display around $799.

Alongside the Display model, Meta launched Oakley Meta Vanguard sport glasses (~$499) focused on fitness: centered action camera, better speakers/water resistance, and integrations with Garmin/Strava for real-time stats. The products were introduced at Meta Connect as a push to make AI wearables mainstream and extend momentum from earlier Ray-Ban models.

Tech giants and startups alike are pouring money into reinforcement learning (RL) environments—interactive, simulated workspaces meant to train AI agents on complex, multi-step tasks. These environments are fast becoming the new “datasets” for agentic AI, sparking a rush to build the most robust, realistic simulations.

Companies like Mechanize and Prime Intellect are betting they can be the “Scale AI” of this emerging space, while data-labeling incumbents like Surge and Mercor are pivoting to keep up. But not everyone is convinced: critics warn RL environments are notoriously hard to scale and vulnerable to AI "reward hacking," raising doubts about whether they can reliably fuel the next wave of progress. → Read the full article here.

China Unicom has launched a massive data centre in Qinghai powered entirely by domestically developed AI chips, a bold move to reduce reliance on U.S. tech amid rising geopolitical strain. The $390 million facility already runs on nearly 23,000 chips—72% from Alibaba’s T-Head unit—and is expected to hit 20,000 petaflops of computing power when complete.

With U.S. export controls tightening and NVIDIA under antitrust scrutiny in China, Beijing is doubling down on indigenous chipmakers like Biren Tech and MetaX. It’s a high-stakes pivot—and a clear signal that China is building not just data centres, but digital sovereignty. → Read the full article here.

Norwegian startup Sonair has developed a 3D acoustic sensor designed to improve robotic safety by giving machines a richer understanding of their surroundings—without relying on costly LIDAR. Using high-frequency ultrasound, Sonair’s sensor offers a depth-sensing method akin to how humans use both sight and sound to perceive space.

Early adoption is already underway in robotics and industrial safety, and the company just raised $6 million to scale. As robots increasingly share space with humans, Sonair is betting that safer machines will require more than just sharper eyes—they’ll need better ears too. → Read the full article here.

🤝 Trump’s TikTok Deal Takes Shape: Oracle and top US investors may soon control 80% of TikTok’s US arm if Trump and Xi finalize talks—keeping the app alive and American-run.

💰 CodeRabbit Raises $60M for AI Reviews: The 2-year-old startup is now valued at $550M as devs flock to its bug-catching tools for messy AI-generated code. ARR has topped $15M.

💼 Fiverr Cuts 30% of Staff for AI Pivot: As it chases “AI-first” dreams, Fiverr lays off 250 employees in what the CEO calls a “painful reset” — while praising AI’s “superpowers.”

💸 Microsoft Bets Big on UK AI: Microsoft is investing $30B over four years to expand AI infrastructure in the UK, including building its largest supercomputer and boosting transatlantic tech ties.

👩‍💻 ChatGPT’s Mostly for Personal Use: 73% of usage is for life advice and curiosity, not work. Young users dominate, and it’s more of a thinking partner than a task doer on the job.

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Thanks for reading today’s newsletter—see you next time!

Matthew Berman & The Forward Future Team

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