The AI stack on 3 September 2026. 12 moves, 9 with a primary source.
· L2 Silicon · $40.53bn · Confirmed
Before anyone can make a chip, someone has to sell the machines that make chips. Bills for those machines came to 40.53 billion dollars worldwide in the second quarter, almost a quarter more than in the same quarter a year earlier.
· L4 Models · 8.5% · Reported
A prompt injection is a hidden instruction planted in a web page or a document that an AI assistant reads and obeys by mistake. On one such test set, hidden instructions succeeded against OpenAI's newest model in an estimated 8.5 percent of attempts, against 27 percent for the model before it.
· Band Money · approx $11.9bn · Confirmed
Nvidia's filing with the US securities regulator puts the price for Hugging Face at approximately 11.9 billion dollars payable to its stockholders. Up to approximately 1 billion dollars more is set aside in shares for Hugging Face employees who join Nvidia.
· Band Rules and society · Five expectations · Confirmed
Canada has set out five things it expects from anyone building a large data centre there, including that electricity customers across the country should not end up paying more because of it. The government presents these as expectations meant to work alongside existing regulation.
· L5 Tooling and infrastructure · $12.93B · Confirmed
Nvidia makes the chips nearly all AI runs on. Hugging Face is the site where researchers publish and share their AI models freely. The company that makes the engines has bought the garage everyone parks in.
· L1 Power and land · $4.4B · Confirmed
Electricity arrives from the grid in a form computers cannot use directly, so it has to be converted. Flex has paid $4.4 billion for a company that builds those converters. Even the plumbing between the grid and the machines is now worth billions.
· L3 Iron and cloud · $3.5B · Confirmed
A robot company has agreed to buy $3.5 billion of computing power from a data centre operator. Contracted is not the same as spent: it is a promise to pay over years, and promises can be broken. That distinction runs through most large AI numbers.
· Band Rules and society · 20 years · Confirmed
Two members of Congress announced a bill to make building AI smarter than humans a crime, with prison sentences of up to twenty years. It defines superintelligence in words rather than by any measurable threshold, which is unusual and will be hard to enforce.
· L3 Iron and cloud · $13B · Reported
A firm that trades shares for a living, not an AI company, is reported to have signed a $13 billion deal for computing power. The buyers of very large amounts of AI computing are no longer only AI companies.
· L4 Models · $10 in, $50 out per 1M tokens · Confirmed
OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra API is priced at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens, its release says. A token is a small piece of text. The release gives no comparison with earlier prices. For developers, this is the price of building on OpenAI's top model through its API.
· L4 Models · 428B params · Reported
HUMAIN is owned by Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund. Its new Arabic model is in research preview, so access is limited rather than general. The announcement says MiniMax, a Chinese laboratory, developed it on top of that lab's own model and trained it further on more than one trillion tokens of Arabic text.
· L4 Models · ~10T synthetic · Confirmed
Most laboratories keep secret what their models were taught on. A research institute in Abu Dhabi has published its recipe for six models, from 0.9 billion to 375 billion parameters. Each saw approximately 20 trillion tokens, and approximately 10 trillion synthetic tokens were used across the whole set, with no breakdown per model.
Strata, the whole AI stack, explained simply. Every number carries a source and a confidence label.
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