What's up: Nvidia pushes further into cloud with GPU marketplace; the ‘Great Hesitation’ that’s making it harder to get a tech job; OpenAI launches new AI coding agent

Good morning, CIOs. What do the vampires of "Sinners" and AI agents have in common? Both require permission to enter.

Let a vampire past the doorstep and they are free to do their vampire-y stuff. Likewise, agents need permission to access apps, APIs and websites to call an Uber or book a flight. Not quite as cinematic perhaps, but as WSJ Tech Columnist Steven Rosenbush reports,  permissioning "could be the last major challenge in building agents that can perform complex tasks for people."

To learn more, he talked with Alex Salazar, chief executive of startup Arcade.dev in South San Francisco, Calif., which is developing tools to enable agents to sign into websites, APIs and apps.

“Tool-calling agents are the emerging phase of agent AI development,” Salazar told Rosenbush. 

And once the key engineering problems are solved, the world is poised for a new technological shake-up, he added. Read the story.

Nvidia on Monday said it is planning to build Taiwan’s first AI supercomputer, the Journal reports. Foxconn Technology Group, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer, will provide the AI infrastructure, while Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. researchers plan to use the system to advance research and development.

The announcement was made at the industry conference Computex on Monday in Taipei, where the semiconductor giant also shared details on a new service, DGX Cloud Lepton, that makes its AI chips available on a variety of cloud platforms.

“We saw that there was a lot of friction in the system for AI developers, whether they’re researchers or in an enterprise, to find and access computing resources,” Alexis Bjorlin, Nvidia’s vice president of the DGX Cloud unit, told the Journal's Belle Lin.

Meanwhile, Nvidia’s original customers are feeling unloved, the Economist reports. Before becoming an AI chip giant feted by presidents and Saudi princes, Nvidia was redefining PC gaming with its graphics chips and cards. But now its more recent gaming products are receiving backlash by some gamers, who cite high prices and poor quality. Nvidia is set to unveil this week its newest mass-market graphics card, the GeForce RTX 5060.

OpenAI unveiled a research preview of a new software engineering agent on Friday, pushing forward in one of the most in-demand areas for artificial intelligence tools. The agent, known as Codex, will be able to perform several tasks at the same time, including writing code, fixing bugs, running tests and answering questions about a customer’s codebase, OpenAI said.

It is built on a model called codex-1, a version of OpenAI’s o3 reasoning model optimized for software engineering, and will be available to ChatGPT Pro, Team and Enterprise users.

The uncertain economic climate is adding to tech workers’ woes as companies prolong their hiring processes, the Journal's Katherine Bindley reports.

“It’s the great hesitation,” George Denlinger, operational president of U.S. technology talent solutions with staffing firm Robert Half, tells the Journal. “The hiring process might be two to three times longer than it was a year ago.”

The tech unemployment rate dropped to 4.6% from 5% the month before, according to the BLS data. But 5% to 6% of unemployed IT professionals left the sector in that period, Victor Janulaitis, chief executive of Janco Associates, told the WSJ's Belle Lin.

Some senior administration officials fear recent AI deals made by the Trump administration during last week's tour of the Middle East could also benefit China, which has deep ties in the region, Bloomberg reported.

These  deals include agreements with Saudi and U.A.E partners for hundreds of thousands of advanced AI chips. According to The Wall Street Journal, this represents a break from the Biden administration, the WSJ reports, which had limited chip access for the U.A.E. over concerns that the technology could be diverted to China, a major trading partner of the country.

Last week's deals also raised questions about whether the administration was “outsourcing the industry of the future to the Middle East,” the NY Times reported.

Sriram Krishnan, the administration’s senior policy adviser for AI, tells the NYT that “We want American A.I. to spread.”

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology said Friday it can no longer stand behind a widely circulated paper on AI written by a doctoral student in its economics program. TMIT didn’t name the student in its statement Friday, but it did name the paper. That paper, by Aidan Toner-Rodgers, was covered by the Journal and other media outlets. 

Elon Musk’s social media platform X accepts subscription payments from —and provides blue checks to — groups barred from doing business in the U.S., including terrorist organizations, says the New York Times, citing a recent report from non-profit Tech Transparency Project.

Former President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with prostate cancer just months after he left office, his representatives said Sunday. (WSJ)

Britain and the European Union signed a deal to ease trade and bolster security cooperation, taking the biggest step to improve their relationship since the U.K. quit the bloc five years ago. (WSJ)

House Republicans pushed President Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax-and-spending bill past a key hurdle late Sunday night, but the last-minute grappling has them colliding with a stark reality: The plan won’t reduce federal budget deficits and would make America’s fiscal hole deeper. (WSJ)

Tax credits for clean-electricity generation and manufacturing are set to vanish under a plan proposed last week by congressional Republicans. Meanwhile, lawmakers in states such as Texas and Arizona—home to some of the country’s biggest renewable-energy projects—are considering clamping down with tougher permitting and rules. (WSJ)

The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.