Afternoon Brief, October 18th 2026
Microsoft reportedly leaves Nscale's delayed Loughton project. Samsung turns to TSMC for Nvidia's custom memory, according to Korean reporting. Claude designs cheaper quantum circuits. European researchers get new pledges of computing resources and model access.
Microsoft reportedly withdraws from Nscale's Loughton data-center deal
Microsoft has terminated its agreement for Nscale's planned Loughton data center in Essex, Reuters reported Sunday, citing the Telegraph. Microsoft declined to comment. Nscale told Reuters its other Microsoft contracts are unaffected and that it is exploring alternative power sources for the site.
The cancellation adds a lost customer agreement to the project's reported grid delays into the 2030s. The Telegraph did not specify Microsoft's reason for withdrawing. Nscale remains committed to Loughton, but the report shows why contracted demand and usable computing capacity need separate scrutiny ahead of its planned listing. SourcesB
Samsung reportedly brings TSMC into Nvidia's custom memory design
Samsung, TSMC and Nvidia are jointly designing the for Nvidia's NVHBM memory, Seoul Economic Daily reported Sunday, citing industry sources. The base die is the logic chip beneath the stacked memory. The reported design moves the memory controller off the and onto that chip, using TSMC's three-nanometer manufacturing process.
This would make Samsung a customer of its rival for a component of its own memory offering. The report ties the arrangement to both performance and manufacturing capacity. It does not establish delivered volumes or independently measured performance, and the companies' underlying agreement was not available for inspection. SourcesB
Claude finds quantum-circuit designs that use fewer costly operations
Anthropic reported Friday that Claude Mythos 5 improved designs across eight quantum-circuit tasks using an automated evaluator. The model proposed code, received correctness checks and resource scores, then revised its designs. Researchers supplied the initial tasks and occasionally prompted it to explore more broadly.
One design uses 12% more , the units of quantum information, but 17 times fewer gates than the smallest previous design. Gates are the operations a quantum circuit performs. A separate reduces gate count twelvefold while allowing a small failure probability within the task's tolerance.
These are circuit-design results, not demonstrations of a working quantum computer solving the applications. They give hardware researchers specific resource trade-offs to examine. The gains remain the authors' reported comparisons; independent replication was not established here. SourcesA
vLLM speeds up Kimi K3 while exposing the conditions behind its headline result
A Friday report describes an optimized generation path for Kimi K3 on Nvidia GB300 hardware. It reports 842 per second on sixteen GPUs, versus 488 for the standard implementation under the same controlled setup. The test fixes how many proposed tokens the main model accepts and excludes the work of processing the initial prompt. It therefore does not measure ordinary end-to-end response speed.
The gains without , where a smaller model proposes tokens for the larger model to check, are also material: the sixteen-GPU configuration reports speedups of 1.62 to 1.92 times across tested batch sizes. The authors found numerical errors through full-model evaluations that isolated component tests missed. Faster generation is useful for making sequential calls, but the supported hardware and correctness checks are part of the result. SourcesA
Europe's RAISE initiative collects concrete pledges of research compute and model access
The European Commission launched its RAISE pledging initiative Thursday in Dublin to bring private and philanthropic resources into AI-enabled science. Google committed $3 million in cloud credits and tokens. Mistral pledged model access, coding-tool seats and credits; the Novo Nordisk Foundation intends to make its Gefion supercomputer available to European researchers.
The commitments give research teams named sources of support to follow. They are voluntary pledges with different delivery arrangements, not evidence that every researcher can claim capacity today. Access conditions and fulfilled allocations will determine how much additional work the initiative enables. SourcesA
Sources
- B Reuters via Euronext: Microsoft withdraws from Nscale's Loughton deal
- B Seoul Economic Daily: Samsung and TSMC cooperate on Nvidia custom memory
- A Anthropic: Designing more efficient quantum circuits with Claude
- A vLLM: Hyper Optimizing Kimi K3 in vLLM
- A European Commission: RAISE AI in Science Enablers