Part 1: Trending Thursday 48 AI and Chip Industry Roundup

Transcript

SPEAKER_1: Anthropic just signed a deal with SpaceX to use all of the compute capacity at Colossus 1, giving it access to over three hundred megawatts of new capacity within the month. SpaceX confirmed the deal and said Anthropic also expressed interest in partnering for orbital compute capacity. SPEAKER_2: Right, and following that deal, Anthropic doubled Claude Code's five-hour rate limits for paid plans and removed peak hours limit reduction for Pro and Max plans. So there's an immediate product impact from securing that compute. SPEAKER_1: There's also a pretty ironic backstory here. Axios reports the deal helps Anthropic address a severe compute deficit, because Grok never grew to utilize Colossus 1. So SpaceX had capacity to sell. SPEAKER_2: Exactly. Musk's own AI company couldn't fill the datacenter that his rocket company is now leasing to his courtroom opponent. And Musk himself said he spent time with Anthropic employees to understand what they do to ensure Claude is good for humanity, even though he previously called Anthropic evil. SPEAKER_1: And separately, sources say Anthropic plans to spend around two hundred billion dollars on Google Cloud and chips over five years. That represents over forty percent of the revenue backlog Google disclosed last week. SPEAKER_2: And at Code with Claude, Dario Amodei said Anthropic had planned to grow around ten times in twenty twenty-six but could grow eighty times. He called that growth rate crazy and too hard to handle. So Anthropic is simultaneously SpaceX's customer and Google's biggest cloud client. SPEAKER_1: Then there's the Terafab proposal. SpaceX proposed spending fifty-five billion dollars to begin building a Terafab chip facility in Grimes County, Texas, with total estimated capital expenditures of one hundred nineteen billion dollars. SPEAKER_2: And that's separate from Colossus. It signals that Musk's companies are building their own silicon supply chain from scratch. For context, TSMC's entire Arizona investment is around sixty-five billion dollars. SPEAKER_1: On the product side, Anthropic updated Claude Managed Agents with something called dreaming. Can you explain what that is? SPEAKER_2: Sure. It's a scheduled process where agents review recent work and update their memory overnight. Anthropic also detailed model spec midtraining, a new stage between pretraining and fine-tuning to improve generalization from alignment training. SPEAKER_1: Anthropic also unveiled ten new AI agents for financial services, covering things like drafting pitch decks, reviewing financial statements, and escalating compliance cases. SPEAKER_2: And Alphabet is now in talks with Blackstone, KKR, and EQT to let their portfolio companies access its models, following OpenAI's and Anthropic's joint ventures with PE firms. Every major AI lab is now partnering with private equity to distribute. SPEAKER_1: Let's move to chips. Global chip sales hit two hundred ninety-eight point five billion dollars in Q1, up twenty-five percent from Q4 twenty twenty-five. March alone was ninety-nine point five billion, up seventy-nine point two percent year over year. SPEAKER_2: The individual company numbers are just as striking. AMD's Q1 revenue was up thirty-eight percent year over year to ten point two five billion, above estimates. Data center revenue was up fifty-seven percent to five point eight billion. AMD jumped over fifteen percent. SPEAKER_1: And Arm said AGI CPU demand will drive two billion dollars in sales in twenty twenty-seven and twenty twenty-eight, which is over two times its prior guidance. Arm jumped over eleven percent. SPEAKER_2: Super Micro's Q3 revenue was up one hundred twenty-three percent to ten point two four billion, below estimates, but it forecast Q4 above estimates and jumped over fifteen percent. Samsung reached a one trillion dollar market cap, only the second Asian company after TSMC, with the stock up over four times in the past year. SPEAKER_1: Micron passed a seven hundred billion dollar market cap after announcing its highest-capacity SSD, up eleven percent in a day. And Infineon expects data center revenue to grow from around one point five billion euros in fiscal twenty twenty-six to two point five billion in fiscal twenty twenty-seven. SPEAKER_2: On the infrastructure side, Nvidia invested five hundred million dollars in Corning to grow US optical connectivity capacity by ten times and expand fiber production by over fifty percent. That partnership will open three advanced manufacturing plants in North Carolina and Texas, creating over three thousand jobs. Corning jumped twelve percent. SPEAKER_1: Crypto miner Hut 8 signed a lease worth over nine point eight billion dollars over fifteen years to provide computing power to a high-investment-grade company at its Nueces County, Texas campus. And Blue Owl Capital-owned Stack Infrastructure is considering selling all or some of its Asia data center operations in an up to thirty billion dollar deal. SPEAKER_2: Apple's R&D spending hit ten point three percent of revenue in Q2, up from seven point six percent in Q1 and nine percent in Q2 twenty twenty-five. R&D jumped thirty-four percent year over year while revenue grew seventeen percent. Apple is investing in AI faster than it's growing. SPEAKER_1: And Intel's stock jumped over twelve percent to a new all-time high on a report that Apple had early-stage talks with Intel to produce chips for Apple's devices in the US. Apple also visited a Samsung plant in Texas to explore US chip production. SPEAKER_2: The boom has broader effects too. In Europe, specialist chipmaker Silex traded as high as one hundred fifty-nine percent up in its Stockholm IPO, the strongest open for a sizable European IPO in almost five years. SPEAKER_1: In Korea, Samsung's union is threatening an eighteen-day walkout, seeking fifteen percent of operating profit and a seven percent wage hike, while management offered thirteen percent. And South Korea's equity market overtook Canada's as the world's seventh largest, driven by Samsung and SK Hynix. SPEAKER_2: The chip boom is literally reshaping labor markets and national stock exchanges at the same time. SPEAKER_1: Now let's talk about DeepSeek. Reuters reports DeepSeek is in talks to raise three to four billion dollars led by the Big Fund, China's largest state-backed chip fund, at a valuation of up to fifty billion dollars. SPEAKER_2: FT sources put the valuation at around forty-five billion. Either figure would make DeepSeek China's most valuable AI company by a wide margin. The Big Fund's involvement signals that Beijing views DeepSeek as national infrastructure, not just a startup. SPEAKER_1: And it's not alone. Moonshot, the company behind the Kimi chatbot, raised around two billion dollars at a twenty billion dollar plus valuation led by Meituan's venture arm. Moonshot's ARR hit two hundred million dollars in April. Two Chinese AI startups raising multi-billion rounds in a single week. SPEAKER_2: On performance, NIST's CAISI evaluation says DeepSeek V4 Pro lags behind leading US AI models by about eight months and is the most capable Chinese AI model to date. Eight months is both a real gap and a closing one. SPEAKER_1: China is also targeting over seventy percent of silicon wafers used by its chipmakers to be made domestically by the end of twenty twenty-six, with an unspoken mandate to use local twelve-inch wafers. SPEAKER_2: That sits alongside Huawei's projected twelve billion dollars in AI chip revenue for twenty twenty-six, up sixty percent from twenty twenty-five, and DeepSeek V4's optimization for Huawei Ascend chips. China is building its own full stack. SPEAKER_1: Meanwhile, Nscale agreed to spend six hundred ninety-five million euros on infrastructure in Portugal in an expansion of its Microsoft partnership, supplying over sixty-six thousand Nvidia Rubin GPUs from late twenty twenty-seven. Europe's sovereign compute ambitions still run through Nvidia. SPEAKER_2: And on the diplomatic track, sources say the US and China are considering recurring talks about AI security risks, with Scott Bessent leading the US side. Trump and Xi Jinping are meeting next week. Those talks would mark the first formal bilateral channel for AI governance. SPEAKER_1: Meanwhile, investors pulled nearly fourteen billion dollars from DeFi after North Korea-tied hackers stole two hundred ninety million dollars from Aave in April, weeks after stealing two hundred eighty million from Drift. SPEAKER_2: So you've got state-level capital funding AI champions on both sides, while geopolitical tensions play out in parallel. The question is whether diplomacy can keep pace with all of that. SPEAKER_1: Now to OpenAI. The company launched GPT-5.5 Instant, replacing GPT-5.3 Instant as ChatGPT's default. OpenAI says it produces fifty-two point five percent fewer hallucinated claims on high-stakes prompts covering areas like medicine, law, and finance. SPEAKER_2: In parallel, OpenAI rolled out Ads Manager in beta to US advertisers, letting small and medium businesses buy ChatGPT ads on a cost-per-impression or cost-per-click basis after a monthslong pilot. ChatGPT is now an ad platform. SPEAKER_1: Ming-Chi Kuo also reports OpenAI appears to be fast-tracking an AI agent phone with two NPUs and a custom MediaTek Dimensity 9600 SoC, targeting mass production as early as the first half of twenty twenty-seven. SPEAKER_2: OpenAI also partnered with Microsoft, AMD, Broadcom, Nvidia, and Intel to detail the Multipath Reliable Connection protocol to help scale compute infrastructure. SPEAKER_1: On the testimony side, Greg Brockman testified that OpenAI expects to spend fifty billion dollars on computing in twenty twenty-six, up from around thirty million in twenty seventeen. OpenAI told investors it would spend around six hundred billion by twenty thirty. His OpenAI stake is now worth nearly thirty billion dollars. SPEAKER_2: Then there's the Murati testimony. Mira Murati testified that Sam Altman lied to her about the safety standards for a new OpenAI model and that he made her work more difficult. This is the most damaging internal testimony yet, from a former CTO who helped build the company. SPEAKER_1: Shivon Zilis testified that her relationship with Musk didn't influence her duties as an OpenAI board member. She left in twenty twenty-three after Musk started xAI. And Brockman said Musk knows rockets and electric cars but does not know AI. SPEAKER_2: On the safety side, Pennsylvania sued Character.AI alleging one of its characters posed as a psychiatrist. Researchers also found over five thousand web apps built using AI coding tools like Lovable, Base44, and Replit have little to no authentication, with around forty percent exposing sensitive data. SPEAKER_1: So OpenAI says GPT-5.5 hallucinates fifty-two point five percent less, while its former CTO says Altman lied about safety standards. The gap between the marketing and the testimony is the story. SPEAKER_2: And the scale is staggering. OpenAI's compute spend went from thirty million dollars in twenty seventeen to fifty billion in twenty twenty-six. That's a one thousand six hundred sixty-seven times increase in nine years. Brockman's stake went from zero to thirty billion dollars. SPEAKER_1: Let's run through the product quick hits. Google released speculative decoding drafters for Gemma 4 that guess future tokens for up to three times faster inference. Google AI Mode now surfaces firsthand perspectives from Reddit and social media, presented as Expert Advice. SPEAKER_2: xAI launched Grok 4.3 with always-on reasoning, a one million token context window, low API pricing, and a voice cloning suite called Custom Voices. SubQ is a new LLM with sparse attention architecture enabling a twelve million token context window, launched with a twenty-nine million dollar seed. SPEAKER_1: Apple plans to let users choose from third-party AI models for text generation and editing across Apple Intelligence in iOS 27. Chrome silently installs a roughly four gigabyte Gemini Nano model on desktop, though Google says users can remove it via settings. SPEAKER_2: Google quietly shut down Project Mariner, its Chrome AI agent that navigated and completed tasks, after highlighting it at I/O twenty twenty-five. Spotify launched a command-line tool that lets AI agents upload AI-generated audio summaries and personal podcasts to a user's Spotify account. SPEAKER_1: AWS Bedrock AgentCore Payments partnered with Coinbase and Stripe to enable AI agents to execute transactions using stablecoins. And Google launched Fitbit Air, a one hundred dollar screenless wearable with a Gemini-powered Health Coach, rebranding Fitbit Premium as Google Health Premium at ninety-nine ninety-nine per year. SPEAKER_2: On the personnel side, LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky will lead Microsoft's new Work Experiences Group including Teams, after thirty-five-year vet Rajesh Jha retired. And Coinbase cut around seven hundred jobs, about fourteen percent of staff, with CEO Brian Armstrong citing AI changing how they work. SPEAKER_1: On the funding side, ElevenLabs added BlackRock and Nvidia to its five hundred fifty million dollar plus Series D. Blitzy raised two hundred million at a one point four billion dollar valuation. And Corgi raised one hundred sixty million at a one point three billion dollar valuation. SPEAKER_2: And Startup Intros has a simple mission: to help tech founders navigate everything in the early stage, from compliance to capital. They help founders incorporate, set up cap tables, and get investor-ready so founders can focus on building. SPEAKER_1: They've also got events coming up. On May 12, there's Agentic AI Founders' Night-Out, going beyond copilots to talk about the rise of Agent Orchestration. And on May 15, Caffeine and Capital is back at Corgi Cafe in FiDi for a morning coffee meetup with founders and investors. Both are registerable on Luma. SPEAKER_2: It's a packed week across the board. Compute, chips, geopolitics, product launches, and some pretty serious internal drama at the biggest AI labs. SPEAKER_1: To recap: Anthropic committed two hundred billion to Google Cloud, took all of SpaceX's Colossus 1 compute, and could grow eighty times this year. Global chip sales hit nearly three hundred billion in Q1. DeepSeek and Moonshot raised a combined five billion from Chinese backers. OpenAI launched ads in ChatGPT the same week its former CTO testified Altman lied about safety. And the compute spend that started at thirty million in twenty seventeen is now fifty billion. That's your Trending Thursday number forty-eight.