US Seeks $9 Billion in Nvidia Superchips for CIA, NSA AI Push

3 articles · Updated · ZDNet · May 27

$9 billion in secret funding has been cleared by the US government for Nvidia AI superchips and related infrastructure for the CIA and NSA, though Congress still must approve the request.
Nvidia's Grace Blackwell systems are the target because modern frontier models need vast compute, memory, cooling and power; a single GB10 delivers about 1 petaflop of FP4 performance, while full racks can cost $1.8 million to $4 million.
$800 million from the defense budget has already been redirected to buy more cloud computing capacity as agencies wait for new chips and data-center expansion, and intelligence services are still using Anthropic's Mythos model.
$9 billion is modest by current AI spending standards: AWS is investing $50 billion in government cloud upgrades, underscoring how intelligence agencies are trying to catch up after years of underinvestment in an escalating AI arms race.

Can next-gen AI superchips be secured before autonomous agents create new national security threats?

How will the government's secret $9B chip buy affect an already strained global tech supply chain?

With tech firms setting AI's moral code for war, is official government policy falling behind?