US-based AI cloud-computing startup CoreWeave has announced the acquisition of Core Scientific, a leading data centre infrastructure provider, for $9 million in an all-stock transaction.

“This acquisition accelerates our strategy to deploy AI and HPC workloads at scale,” said Michael Intrator, CoreWeave’s CEO and co-founder. 

“Verticalising the ownership of Core Scientific’s high-performance data centre infrastructure enables CoreWeave to significantly enhance operating efficiency and de-risk our future expansion, solidifying our growth trajectory,” he added. 

As a result of this acquisition, CoreWeave will gain ownership of approximately 1.3 gigawatts (GW) of gross power from Core Scientific’s national data centre footprint, with an additional 1 GW or more available for future expansion.

Additionally, it offers the potential for repurposing resources for high-performance computing (HPC) or divesting from the crypto mining sector, supported by approximately 840 gross MW for HPC contracts and 500 gross MW for crypto mining.

According to Reuters, bitcoin miners have leveraged the AI surge to expand their operations beyond cryptocurrency by renting out power and data centre space to accommodate the increasing demand for AI tasks. 

Bernstein analyst Gautam Chhugani told Reuters that the acquisition is anticipated to establish a standard for bitcoin miners seeking to transition to AI, noting that power is the primary limitation for the growth of AI data centres. 

The company anticipates closing the transaction in the fourth quarter of 2025, subject to regulatory approvals and approval by Core Scientific’s stockholders. 

Following CoreWeave’s successful initial public offering (IPO) in March 2025, this acquisition is expected to help CoreWeave streamline its data centre operations, ensuring future revenue growth and improving profitability. 

This deal is expected to yield approximately $500 million in annual cost savings by the end of 2027, primarily through streamlined operations.

OpenAI, the AI startup behind ChatGPT, has ‘overhauled’ its security operations to protect intellectual property from corporate espionage, the Financial Times reported on July 8. 

The development took place after the company claimed that Chinese AI startup DeepSeek had copied its models using distillation techniques. The report noted that OpenAI is implementing tighter restrictions on sensitive data and strengthening staff vetting processes. 

The company’s policies, referred to as information ‘tenting’, have limited the number of personnel who can access the new algorithms being developed at OpenAI, according to insiders quoted by FT. Besides, employees are only permitted to enter certain rooms by scanning their fingerprints. 

OpenAI safeguards its model weights by implementing a ‘deny-by-default egress policy, ‘ which means that no connections to the internet are permitted unless they are explicitly authorised. In addition, the company has also increased physical security at its data centres. 

Earlier this year, Microsoft security researchers believed that individuals potentially connected to DeepSeek are ‘exfiltrating a significant amount of data’ through OpenAI’s API, as per a report by Bloomberg. 

Furthermore, OpenAI also told FT that it had seen “some evidence of distillation”, which is a technique to improve the performance of an AI model by using outputs from another one.

In April, Business Insider reported that OpenAI required developers seeking access to the company’s advanced AI models to verify their identity with a government ID. 

China’s DeepSeek, a subsidiary of HighFlyer, launched the R1 reasoning model a few months ago. It generated significant industry buzz by being open source and providing capabilities comparable to OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model, but at a fraction of the training cost. Since then, there has been a lot of buzz around the threat that models from China potentially pose.

Ruoming Pang, a ‘distinguished engineer’ and the manager in charge of Apple’s foundational models team, has joined Meta, Bloomberg reported on July 7. The report added that Meta offered a package worth tens of millions of dollars per year to him. 

As per Pang’s LinkedIn profile, he began his role as a ‘distinguished software engineer’ at Apple in 2021, after completing his 15-year tenure at Google. At Google, he worked on Google Brain’s speech recognition research and the development of leading deep learning frameworks used by TPUs, the company’s in-house hardware. 

In addition to Pang, Bloomberg also reported that the company hired Yuanzhi Li, a researcher from OpenAI, and Anton Bakhtin from Anthropic on the same day. 

CEO Mark Zuckerberg has gone on a hiring spree, luring top talent from competitors in an attempt to build a team to work on ‘superintelligence’. Meta has reportedly offered signing bonuses reaching up to $100 million. 

One of Apple’s other senior executives, Tom Gunter, has also left the company, as reported by Bloomberg last week. Gunter worked at the company for eight years, and the report added that his colleagues see him as “difficult to replace, given his unique skillset”.

Furthermore, Apple was also reported to have ‘nearly lost’ the team behind MLX, an open-source machine learning framework designed for Apple’s in-house silicon hardware. However, they made counteroffers after the engineers “threatened” to leave, and eventually retained them. 

Apple has been exploring the use of third-party AI models for the latest and upgraded versions of Siri, its virtual assistant on consumer devices, amid these developments. 

According to the report, members have indicated internally that they’re unhappy with Apple’s exploration of third-party options, which is creating a perception that they’re responsible for the company’s AI shortcomings. 

These employees also said that they could leave for ‘multimillion-dollar packages’ being offered by companies like Meta and OpenAI.