Tech news today is being driven by one force above all: the scramble to build the hardware backbone for AI. SK Hynix is seeking roughly $29 billion through a Nasdaq listing, one of the biggest proposed U.S. share sales on record, as it races to fund booming demand for the high-bandwidth memory chips that power AI data centers. OpenAI, meanwhile, is pushing deeper into that stack with Broadcom, unveiling its first custom inference chip, Jalapeño, aimed at making AI responses faster and far cheaper than relying solely on general-purpose GPUs. At the edge of the market, South Korea’s SPHERE AX is teaming with U.S. chipmaker Blaize on AI semiconductor products for vision and edge computing, underscoring how international the AI buildout has become. In a separate and more personal headline, newly released testimony from Bill Gates revisits his ties to Jeffrey Epstein and his fear that Epstein contemplated blackmail.