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October 28, 2026 · Blogs

Chips, clouds and a $1.7bn UK deal: this week in AI infrastructure

Oracle brings Google's TPUs to its cloud, Guidewire buys UK AI firm Hyperexponential for $1.7bn and data centres push grid innovation. What it means for businesses buying AI.

Behind every AI feature sits a chain of chips, cloud capacity and electricity, and this week brought big moves at every link. Here is a round-up of the AI infrastructure and deal news from the week of 26 October 2026, and what it means for businesses that buy AI services.

Oracle adds Google's TPUs alongside Nvidia

At its event in Las Vegas, Oracle announced that Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) will be available on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) from 2027, with capacity growing over several years. Oracle says this makes it the first hyperscale cloud outside Google's own to offer the chips. It has not said how many will be available.

Oracle is not leaving Nvidia behind. It announced general availability of Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 systems and Vera CPUs, with HGX Rubin NVL8 systems to follow at an unspecified date. It also launched:

  • Oracle AI Workspace, which uses ChatGPT plugins to make Oracle applications, data and cloud services available to OpenAI's models.
  • Oracle AI Security Mesh, a managed security service built on OpenAI cybersecurity models.
  • Snowflake on OCI as a native service, billed by Oracle and payable with Oracle Universal Credits.

"Different AI workloads have different compute needs," said OCI president Mahesh Thiagarajan. Oracle's revenue rose 30% year on year in the quarter to 31 August. The Register noted, though, that much of the announced activity is spending among AI's biggest players while businesses elsewhere still wait to see returns.

A UK AI company sells for $1.7bn

Insurance software company Guidewire is buying Hyperexponential, a UK-based AI underwriting company, for $1.7bn in cash, TechCrunch reported on 27 October. With a further $400m available if revenue targets are met, the deal is worth around $2bn. It is expected to close next year.

Founded in 2017 and backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Battery Ventures, Hyperexponential had raised nearly $90m, according to PitchBook. Nearly 600 insurers in 40 countries use its software. Guidewire's aim is to bring AI agents to work alongside people in underwriting, analysis and pricing: a good example of AI value being captured by specialist software built for one industry.

The power problem, and its upside

AI data centres are putting heavy new demand on electricity grids. At TechCrunch Disrupt this month, industry figures argued that the pressure is also speeding up grid modernisation:

  • WeaveGrid sells software that orchestrates electricity loads such as electric vehicles, heat pumps and data centres to get more out of the existing grid.
  • Veir makes superconducting power lines that, it says, carry power five times farther than conventional cables in 20 times less space. It raised a $110m Series C this month.

Kristin Eberhard of Rewiring America called this "a very improv era" in which the industry is saying yes to more transmission, more power plants and the efficiency measures it had previously left on the table.

What it means for businesses buying AI

  • More choice of hardware, more choice of price. As clouds offer TPUs alongside Nvidia GPUs, the cost of running the same AI workload will increasingly depend on where you run it. Software built to move between providers can take advantage.
  • Specialist beats generic. The Hyperexponential deal shows that the most valuable AI products often solve one industry's problem well. That is worth bearing in mind when you decide what to build.
  • Capacity is not unlimited. Chip supply and power constraints are real, as Anthropic's own listing documents acknowledge. Build in fallbacks for when a provider is slow or rationing capacity.

Webmasters LDN builds AI-powered software and apps that are not tied to a single cloud or model provider. If you are weighing up where to run your AI workloads, we can help you compare the options.

This article summarises news reports published up to 28 October 2026.

Sources