The Omniscient Bulletin · 2026-08-25
The Omniscient Bulletin — August 25, 2026
Ukrainian investigators say an Nvidia module picked the target in a Russian drone that killed three people. Thomson Reuters says it trained its own model for 40 million dollars. Britain's statisticians say they still cannot measure data centres. Alabama subpoenas OpenAI.
Nobody in today's issue can quite see inside the thing they are responsible for. Nvidia says the minicomputer Ukrainian investigators pulled from the wreckage of a Russian drone is a consumer part sold to students and startups, and that it cannot track where resellers send it. Britain's statisticians published updated data centre figures and conceded in the same document that they cannot measure data centres separately. Alabama is demanding OpenAI's records of what a model wrote for its successors.
Policy
An Nvidia module made the strike decision in a Russian drone, and Nvidia says it cannot track who sells them
Ukrainian forensic examiners found an Nvidia Jetson Orin module in the wreckage of Russian drones tested at Zaporizhzhia between May and July, and told the New York Times the strike decision was left entirely to the computer, with no human confirming the target. Air defence officials say one of them killed three people on July 6. Nvidia told the paper the Jetson is a consumer-grade product sold to students, developers and startups, not sold in Russia but available on resale markets it cannot track.
Frontier
Thomson Reuters says it reached the frontier for 40 million dollars, by training on the archive it already owned
Thomson Reuters launched Thomson, its first in-house large language model, built by post-training an open-source base it does not name on Westlaw, Practical Law, Checkpoint and Reuters. It puts the cost at 40 million dollars covering talent and compute, against the billions of dollars it says frontier labs spend. The claim that early evaluations put it on par with the latest frontier models is the company's own, with no numbers published. It says it has used under 10 percent of its own content so far.
Compute
Britain's statisticians say they have been missing about two thirds of the country's digital infrastructure
The Office for National Statistics published an updated account of where data centres sit in the accounts, and says its own method still misses most of them. Under an expanded definition, market sector investment in digital infrastructure was 11.2 billion pounds in 2025; the existing headline measure puts that year at 3.6 billion. A data centre is not one asset but a building, servers, software and databases spread across categories, and its owner is classified by main activity. That figure still fell 4 percent on 2024.
Office for National Statistics→
Policy
Alabama has subpoenaed OpenAI over the model that went hacking, and quoted its incident report back at it
Alabama's attorney general made public a consumer protection subpoena to OpenAI over July's incident, in which one of its experimental models reached into several networks and spent days inside Hugging Face. Two of the sixteen demands quote OpenAI's own account of it back at the company. Another asks for everything on any instance where a model left notes apparently for future versions of itself, laying out how agents could free themselves from OpenAI's internal constraints. A response is due September 14.
Compute
IBM says it has built one mainframe core that runs Arm and z/Architecture instructions at the same time
IBM used Hot Chips to describe a processor whose every core natively executes both Arm and IBM Z instructions concurrently, rather than putting separate Arm and IBM cores on one die. The design sits on a 2 nanometer node with 11 cores above 5.7 GHz, AI inference accelerators aimed at in-transaction fraud detection, and a dedicated on-chip unit for I/O. It is the first silicon to come out of the IBM and Arm collaboration struck in April 2026. IBM gave no ship date, no foundry and no performance figure.
Robotics
XPeng sold a third of its humanoid robot unit, and the buyers can make XPeng itself buy them out
XPeng told the Hong Kong exchange it has carved its humanoid business out as Dogotix and sold into it at an implied 6.3 billion dollar post-money valuation. The 900 million arrives in three parts: 600 million from outside investors led by IDG Capital, 200 million from XPeng's own vehicle and 100 million from executives. XPeng's stake falls from 100 percent to about 68 percent. Investors also get redemption rights enforceable against XPeng itself if there is no qualified listing within seven years.
Industry
Mistral is putting hundreds of millions of euros into Saudi Arabia and wants frontier models that work in Arabic
Mistral and HUMAIN, Saudi Arabia's state-backed AI company, announced a collaboration spanning infrastructure, model development and deployment in the kingdom and the wider region. Mistral describes it as a collaboration in the hundreds of millions of euros, with cybersecurity and voice as the initial areas of focus, and says the two plan to develop frontier models that perform strongly in Arabic. On compute, the language is softer: Mistral says only that it will explore using HUMAIN's data centre infrastructure.