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Daily · 2026-08-18 00:00 UTC

OpenAI's $105B Ohio data center — Higgsfield raises $400M — 2026-08-18 00:00

Top 10 AI news for Aug 18: OpenAI's $105B Ohio data center with Nvidia, Higgsfield's $400M Series B, Groq's neocloud pivot, Wispr's $2B voice AI, MiniMax-Music3, and more.

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Ten high-signal stories from the last 24 hours, led by a $105 billion bet on AI infrastructure.

1. OpenAI signs record Ohio data center lease with Nvidia backing up to $105B — A 20-year lease for an 8-gigawatt data center, with Nvidia guaranteeing up to $105 billion for the facilities' residual value and becoming the exclusive chip supplier. The Decoder · Aug 17
2. Higgsfield raises $400M Series B, quadrupling valuation to $5.4B — The AI video startup founded by a former Snap exec quadrupled its valuation in eight months. TechCrunch · Aug 17
3. Groq raises $350M at $3.5B valuation, pivoting from AI chips to neocloud — The former AI chipmaker now rents out Nvidia-powered compute, expanding its data center footprint. TechCrunch · Aug 17
4. Wispr raises $280M at $2B valuation, expanding beyond dictation — The AI voice-to-text startup ventures into meetings with a new note-taker tool. TechCrunch · Aug 17
5. MiniMax releases MiniMax-Music3, an open-weights music model — Generates complete five-minute songs from lyrics and a structured caption, open source on Hugging Face. Hugging Face · Aug 17
6. Amazon, which started as a bookseller, is destroying rare books to train AI — An AirTag hidden in a shipment reportedly caught the destruction in action; rare texts are uniquely valuable for training. TechCrunch · Aug 17
7. YouTube will now count a view as soon as a video starts playing — Matching the approach it already applies to Shorts, a bookkeeping change that nudges creator metrics upward. TechCrunch · Aug 17
8. AI automation startup Relay shuts down, staff joins Google's Chrome team — Relay founder Jacob Bank and his team will build AI features into the browser. TechCrunch · Aug 17
9. Sainsbury's pauses AI scanning after a false shoplifting accusation — The U.K. supermarket blames "human error," not its Facewatch technology, for ejecting a customer. The Guardian · Aug 17
10. AI video market bounces back after Sora's false start — Production companies like Promise set up shop near Hollywood studios, and Netflix now uses AI in 300 of its 1,000 titles. The Decoder · Aug 17

Try This Next

• 🔧 Grab MiniMax-Music3 on Hugging Face and turn a lyric idea into a full five-minute song
• 🎥 Watch Higgsfield — its AI video toolset just got a $400M vote of confidence
• 📝 Save a note on OpenAI's $105B Ohio data center — the AI buildout is now the biggest infrastructure story in tech

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