Anthropic is moving to take greater control of the infrastructure powering its AI models, signing more than a dozen preliminary agreements to lease US data center facilities while exploring arrangements under which Google could backstop some of its lease obligations, according to a report by The Information.

Breaking the inference barrier requires a rethink of the whole system architecture, not just faster compute. This was the key takeaway from a recent panel discussion at SuperAI Singapore, which brought chip makers and an AI model accelerator together to address how to overcome inference bottlenecks at a time when compute workloads are hitting up against physical limits.

China's export controls on the key semiconductor material indium phosphide (InP), imposed since February 2025, are threatening global AI data-center buildouts and squeezing the optical supply chain across the US and Taiwan. The restrictions have triggered shortages and delayed export licenses, while sending prices soaring for a material with no substitute in photonics. InP is a core material for high-speed optical chips and is irreplaceable in photonics technologies that transmit signals over fiber, making it a potent "materials choke point" weapon in Beijing's US-China trade war.

Robotics has progressed rapidly in the past few years, but major obstacles — including data collection and trust infrastructure — remain barriers to widespread deployment. This was the takeaway from a recent panel of robotics experts at SuperAI Singapore, where they discussed the present and future of the industry.