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Jul 28, 2026
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Supported by
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Happy Tuesday! Nvidia makes a multibillion-dollar investment in Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence. Shares of Dutch chip equipment firm ASML drop on The Information's scoop that China is mass-producing important chip equipment for the first time. Microsoft launches a new AI security product powered by its own models.
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Nvidia has made a “substantial” investment in Safe Superintelligence, a secretive AI lab cofounded by former OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever. The investment will allow the startup to increase its computational resources by a multiple of 10 over the next year, the companies said on Monday. The companies did not disclose the size of the investment, but the amount is in the multiple billions of dollars, according to a person with knowledge of the investment. Safe Superintelligence, which was founded in 2024 after Sutskever left OpenAI, is part of a wave of new startups, called neolabs, that hope to exploit new approaches to developing AI models and research they say major developers like OpenAI and Anthropic may have overlooked. Safe Superintelligence has disclosed little about its research direction, but Sutskever said in a statement that it is “focused on overlooked aspects of how the human brain functions.” The company has previously raised more than $3 billion in funding from investors including Greenoaks Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital and was last valued at $32 billion in April 2025.
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Shares of Dutch company ASML, which produces chipmaking tools, dropped after The Information reported that a Chinese state-backed company is mass-producing important chip manufacturing equipment for the first time. ASML’s shares slid as much as 6.6% on Monday and ended the day down about 5%. The equipment—immersion deep ultraviolet lithography machines—is key to China’s drive to stop relying so much on foreign technology to make chips. ASML has long been the primary supplier of chipmaking equipment globally, including DUV machines and the even more advanced extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. And chipmakers like TSMC use DUV and EUV machines to etch the microscopic circuits that make chips work. If the Shanghai-based company can successfully mass-produce DUV machines, it could cut into ASML’s dominant market share. In 2025, approximately 30% of ASML’s revenue came from customers in China.
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Microsoft on Monday announced a new AI security product called Project Perception, powered by new homegrown AI models specialized for cybersecurity tasks. Microsoft framed the product as a cheaper alternative to Anthropic’s Mythos model, which similarly uses AI models to automatically find vulnerabilities in software. The new product reflects Microsoft’s efforts to cash in on rising cybersecurity spending as companies prepare for a rise in AI-powered threats. Firms are budgeting to spend more on AI tools to reduce the need for human security analysts that traditionally kept tabs on companies’ IT systems to detect and respond to potential hacks. The new product was announced by executive vice president Hayete Gallot, who took over Microsoft’s security org in February and has overhauled the unit to focus more on AI tools. Project Perception will use a combination of models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft itself, including the newly announced MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, a new homegrown model that Microsoft said could perform as well as Mythos on some cybersecurity tasks at a fraction of the cost. The Information first reported Microsoft’s plans for Project Perception earlier this month.
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Taiwanese prosecutors have detained an Nvidia employee and searched the company’s offices as part of an ongoing probe into the alleged smuggling of the U.S. company’s AI chips into China, Bloomberg reported. Local investigators searched the home of the Nvidia employee and his desk at the company’s Taipei office, according to Bloomberg. The investigation stems from allegations that Super Micro Computer’s servers carrying Nvidia chips were shipped to China using falsified documents and shell companies, in violation of U.S. export controls. Last month, Taiwanese prosecutors raised Supermicro’s offices and searched the homes of six people and the sites of three companies affiliated with Supermicro. In March, The U.S. Justice Department charged three Supermicro employees with illegally shipping at least $2.5 billion worth of advanced AI servers to China, violating U.S. export controls. As demand for AI chips has soared, chip smuggling has become a major underground industry. The Information’s article in 2024 showed how smugglers disguised as legitimate chip buyers leased data centers and moved the chips to China as soon as Nvidia staff finished inspecting the facilities.
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China’s Ministry of Commerce on Monday struck back against Washington’s recent accusations that Chinese AI firms are stealing U.S. intellectual property by distilling American AI models, saying the claim has no factual basis or legal support. “China has always opposed the US politicizing and weaponizing science, technology and trade issues,” the ministry’s spokesperson said. The ministry also criticized the U.S. accusations and potential sanctions against Chinese AI firms as “typical acts of AI hegemony.” Some Trump administration officials last week accused Chinese startup Moonshot AI of using U.S. frontier models to train the firm’s recently released model, Kimi K3, in a practice known as distillation. The Information | | | |
