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Hurricane Milton strengthened to a category five storm as it moved across the Gulf of Mexico on Monday, with US agencies warning of a possible life-threatening storm surge on the west coast of Florida and northern coast of the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico.

The US National Hurricane Center upgraded the storm to the highest level on the Saffir-Simpson wind scale on Monday, saying its wind speed was as high as 180 miles per hour.

Milton is due to make landfall in Florida on Wednesday, and is expected to bring heavy rainfall and storm surges as high as 15 feet to the southern state, hitting areas still recovering from hurricanes Helene and Debby.

Hurricane Helene, a category four storm, caused flooding and mudslides across several southern US states less than two weeks ago, killing more than 225 people.

President Joe Biden declared a state of emergency in Florida late on Monday morning in advance of the hurricane’s arrival. Milton could cause the largest number of evacuations since Hurricane Irma in 2017, in which 6.7mn residents relocated, according to global risk advisory firm Guy Carpenter.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis said the state had suspended road tolls to make it easier for people to evacuate safely.

The speed and intensity of this year’s hurricanes have led scientists to raise the alarm on the frequency of “compound events”, or dangerous weather episodes that occur at the same time or in short succession, making it more difficult for communities to prepare and recover from natural disasters.

Climate change is increasing the frequency of compound events, according to the latest US government National Climate Assessment.

Milton moved from being declared a hurricane on Sunday afternoon to a category five storm by Monday morning. Its wind speed accelerated faster than all but two previously recorded storms, increasing by more than 90 miles an hour in less than 24 hours, the NHC said.

“I am stunned by how quickly this storm has intensified,” said Rachel Cleetus, policy director for climate and energy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“This is the unmistakable fingerprints of climate change that we are seeing here,” she added. As storms intensify more quickly and with less warning, the risk of serious harm and casualty increases, Cleetus said. “People have very little time to react to how strong a hurricane is going to be, and the scale of the devastation.”

For parts of Florida still recovering from Helene, “people are still reeling and resources are very stretched. That is going to make the harm worse,” she warned.

Federal assistance for Hurricane Helene had already exceeded $210mn, according to the White House, with almost $90mn of that bound for Florida.

A number of events have been cancelled as officials prepare for Milton’s arrival. Donald Trump’s presidential campaign postponed an event for Latino voters to be held in Miami on Tuesday because of the storm. “Our thoughts and prayers are with those in the path of Hurricane Milton,” the campaign said.

In an emergency briefing on Monday afternoon, Ken Graham, director of the National Weather Service, warned some parts of Florida could receive as much as 15 inches of rain.

He also warned the public that the area affected by the storm’s intense wind was expected to expand when it makes landfall.

“To everyone in the path of Milton, the time to prepare is right now,” said Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary.

Additional reporting by Steff Chávez in Washington

A slew of falsehoods about Hurricane Helene, including claims of funds diverted from storm survivors to migrants and even that Democrats somehow directed the hurricane itself, have hampered the response to one of the deadliest hurricanes to ever hit the US, the nation’s top emergency official has warned.

Misinformation spread by Donald Trump, his supporters and others about the hurricane has shrouded the recovery effort for communities shattered by Helene, which tore through five states causing at least 227 deaths and tens of billions of dollars of damage. Many places, such as in western North Carolina, are still without a water supply, navigable roads or vital supplies.

“It’s frankly disappointing we are having to deal with this narrative, the fact there are a few leaders having a hard time telling the difference between fact and fiction is creating an impedance to our ability to actually get people the help they need,” Deanne Criswell, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), told MSNBC on Monday.

Trump has accused Joe Biden’s administration of “abandoning” people to the crisis and, baselessly, of being short of disaster relief funds due to money spent on undocumented migrants. Such claims are “frankly ridiculous” and creating a “truly dangerous narrative that is creating this fear” among affected people, Criswell said.

In multiple rallies in the past week, Trump has accused Biden and Kamala Harris of favoring migrants over disaster-hit areas. “They stole the Fema money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season,” Trump has said.

“Kamala spent all her Fema money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal immigrants.” Trump added the places worst hit are “largely a Republican area so some people say they did it for that reason”.

JD Vance, Trump’s Republican running mate, echoed this theme on Monday, telling Fox News that Fema’s focus on migrants is “going to distract focus from their core job of helping American citizens in their time of need”. Last week, Stephen Miller, a far-right Trump adviser, said that “Kamala Harris turned Fema into an illegal alien resettlement agency”.

Fema does, in fact, have a housing program that offers shelter to migrants leaving detention but this is separate from its disaster relief program. “No money is being diverted from disaster response needs. None,” the White House has stated.

In remarks on Monday after speaking to Criswell by phone, Harris urged politicians to stop “playing games” with lives at stake. According to the White House pool, the vice-president said: “There’s a lot of misinformation being pushed out there by the former president about what is available, particularly for the survivors of Helene. First of all, it’s extraordinarily irresponsible. It’s about him, it’s not about you. The reality is Fema has so many resources that are available to those who desperately need them.”

Congress recently provided an extra $20bn for disaster relief but Biden has warned that more funding will be needed to help the long-term recovery of places increasingly assailed by powerful storms fueled by global heating.

Other conspiracy theories and erroneous claims have swirled online and in areas affected by Helene, such as the assertion that Fema will give only $750 to individuals as a loan (it is, in fact, a grant, and can be followed by further claims for more than $40,000) or that the agency is seizing people’s land.

Fema has, unusually, put up a web page to counter these claims, with a spokesman saying the misinformation is “extremely damaging” to response efforts as it deters people from seeking assistance. “We are going to continue to message aggressively so everyone understands what the facts are,” he said regarding the looming Hurricane Milton, which is set to hit Florida.

Some social media posts spreading misinformation about the hurricanes called for militias to be formed to confront Fema workers, while other posts contained antisemitic hatred aimed at figures such as Esther Manheimer, mayor of Asheville, North Carolina, a city badly affected by the storm.

“It’s surprising to me how this is developing but unfortunately it seems antisemitic hate speech is becoming more common in the United States today,” Manheimer said.

“I’ve tried to steer clear of X and other platforms but there is a lot of misinformation that people tend to believe. We’ve had people in the community reaching out to ask if false things are true because folks are intentionally misleading them.”

Manheimer said that Asheville, including her own home, still lacks running water but is being “overwhelmed” with support by Fema to clear roads and get power back on.

“People have lost everything here and the last thing we need is for people to spread false information,” she said. “There are talking points being distributed throughout the Republican party that just aren’t correct. They seem to think spreading misinformation will help win this election.”

One of the more outlandish claims about the hurricane came from Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extremist Republican congresswoman who previously claimed that Jewish lasers from space caused forest fires. “Yes they can control the weather,” Greene posted on X about the hurricane last week. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”

Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, said: “There is no mechanism to control a hurricane and no evidence that anyone was trying to modify it. This is just a crazy conspiracy theory.”

“While humans don’t ‘control’ the weather we are affecting the weather. Human activities, mainly the emission of greenhouse gases, did indeed make Helene more destructive.”

He added: “If she wants humans to stop affecting the weather she should support phasing out fossil fuels.”

So far, Biden has declared the federal government will pay for the entire cost of activities such as debris removal, search and rescue and food supplies for Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. The president has also already approved disaster help for Florida ahead of Milton’s arrival.

This approach has garnered some rare praise for Biden from Republican governors of affected states, with some Republican lawmakers calling for the conspiracy theories to abate.

“Will you all help STOP this conspiracy theory junk that is floating all over Facebook and the internet about the floods,” Kevin Corbin, a Republican state senator for western North Carolina, posted on Facebook last week. “Please don’t let these crazy stories consume you or have you continually contact your elected officials to see if they are true.”

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The past seven decades of microchip production have been a race to get smaller. Cerebras Systems, which hopes to break a drought in initial public offerings, is instead going big. Its Frisbee-sized chips are, it says, as fast as it gets at handling super-complex artificial intelligence models. In that sense, size may be on Cerebras’ side. In another, the opposite is true.

Cerebras hopes its jumbo wafers can take on industry champ Nvidia. The idea is that by plonking more memory and processing power on a larger area, data can be moved, stored and crunched faster and with less power consumption. The company’s tests suggest it enables Meta Platforms’ Llama 3.1 model to spit out answers about 20 times faster than rivals.

It is not just its speed that is unusual. The lossmaking firm gets almost all of its revenue from a single customer, Abu Dhabi’s G42. Large prepayments from that and other customers make up the lion’s share of its cash. If G42 makes a sufficiently big order in future it gets more shares at a discounted price, diluting IPO investors.

A further risk could come from irritating a colossus. Nvidia is the go-to for AI, and engineers are used to using its own proprietary programming language. Cerebras warns in its filing that large rivals could pressure their customers to give it the cold shoulder. They might not need to: anyone splurging vast sums on building bots may favour a supplier soundly tested in the field. Switching isn’t simple: using Cerebras chips means also using its other hardware and cooling systems.

Nvidia isn’t the only giant with sway over Cerebras’s future. Both firms’ chips are manufactured by the ubiquitous Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. But where Nvidia is a big influential customer of TSMC, Cerebras is a tiny one. Semiconductor supply chains are long and brittle. The company has been stuck with unsold inventory before, and warns it may again.

Being a flea on the ankle of a giant could pay off: a little more business would go a long way. Assume Cerebras can keep up its recent habit of doubling revenue each six months, and it would be in line for $400 million or so this year. Put that on Nvidia’s 25-times multiple, and it is worth $10 billion.

Given the paucity of tech IPOs and the heat around anything AI, there is every chance investors might entertain that kind of valuation. But given the unusual risks, Cerebras would be best keeping its price ambitions smaller than its outsize chips.

john.foley@ft.com