Black Sea attacks choke grain exports and drive up global prices
Escalating attacks on Black Sea ports, cargo vessels and export infrastructure have crippled a vital global grain trade route, threatening supplies...
Nvidia’s new Blackwell chips are twice as fast as their predecessors in training massive AI models, cutting chip use and time dramatically, new benchmarks reveal.
Nvidia's (NVDA.O), opens new tab newest chips have made gains in training large artificial intelligence systems, new data released on Wednesday showed, with the number of chips required to train large language models dropping dramatically.
MLCommons, a nonprofit group that publishes benchmark performance results for AI systems, released new data about chips from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O), opens new tab, among others, for training, in which AI systems are fed large amounts of data to learn from. While much of the stock market's attention has shifted to a larger market for AI inference, in which AI systems handle questions from users, the number of chips needed to train the systems is still a key competitive concern. China's DeepSeek claims to create a competitive chatbot using far fewer chips than U.S. rivals.
The results were the first that MLCommons has released about how chips fared at training AI systems such as Llama 3.1 405B, an open-source AI model released by Meta Platforms (META.O), opens new tab that has a large enough number of what are known as "parameters" to give an indication of how the chips would perform at some of the most complex training tasks in the world, which can involve trillions of parameters.
Nvidia and its partners were the only entrants that submitted data about training that large model, and the data showed that Nvidia's new Blackwell chips are, on a per-chip basis, more than twice as fast as the previous generation of Hopper chips.
In the fastest results for Nvidia's new chips, 2,496 Blackwell chips completed the training test in 27 minutes. It took more than three times that many of Nvidia's previous generation of chips to get a faster time, according to the data.
In a press conference, Chetan Kapoor, chief product officer for CoreWeave, which collaborated with Nvidia to produce some of the results, said there has been a trend in the AI industry toward stringing together smaller groups of chips into subsystems for separate AI training tasks, rather than creating homogenous groups of 100,000 chips or more.
"Using a methodology like that, they're able to continue to accelerate or reduce the time to train some of these crazy, multi-trillion parameter model sizes," Kapoor said.
The collective-defence agreement between Türkiye, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signals that regional powers no longer want to rely solely on external security guarantees. Whether it becomes a stabilising deterrent or another axis of rivalry remains unresolved.
U.S. President Donald Trump says Washington is not seeking an extension of its memorandum of understanding with Iran, claiming the U.S. already controls the Strait of Hormuz through its naval blockade.
Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has slowed, according to the latest data, as uncertainty over the waterway’s reopening kept most shipowners away. Six commodity vessels crossed the strait on Tuesday, down from nine the day before and below the 10-day daily average of 11.
Iran has said the Strait of Hormuz will remain closed until the U.S. fulfils the terms of an interim deal, including lifting the maritime blockade and sanctions and releasing Iran’s frozen assets.
Ukraine has targeted at least 20 Wildberries warehouses across Russia since 18 July, disrupting a major logistics network. Kyiv says the strikes aim to disrupt alleged military-linked supplies, while the attacks have caused billions of dollars in losses and wider economic pressure.
Once associated mainly with Muslim-majority countries, Islamic finance has become a global industry. Its assets reached around $5.98 trillion in 2025, according to ICD–LSEG, as more countries explore Shariah-compliant finance.
Azerbaijan exported goods worth $17.372 million to Armenia between January and July 2026, according to data from the State Customs Committee, as commercial ties between the two South Caucasus neighbours showed signs of expansion.
Online fast-fashion platform Shein lost a London copyright lawsuit against rival Temu on Thursday over photographs used to promote some products.
Norway’s $2.3 trillion sovereign wealth fund has revealed a 0.05 per cent stake in SpaceX worth $1.22 billion, marking its first reported holding in Elon Musk’s space company.
U.S. data analytics firm Palantir Technologies has reported a 93 per cent year-on-year jump in second-quarter revenue, even as the company faces continued criticism over its work with Israel's military and allegations linking its technology to the war in Gaza.a.
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