Nvidia is tracking “every single gigawatt of land, power and shell around the world, literally everything on the planet,” CEO Jensen Huang said at Goldman Sachs’ annual tech conference earlier this month. “We know where everything is.”
Why track power so intently?
Nvidia sees power availability as a key barrier to getting its AI server chips online as soon as they ship, as we’ve chronicled in this column over and over. While securing power is the first step to any AI data center project, even before getting the land or chips, developers that work with Google, Microsoft, Oracle and others fear a glut of unused chips due to an eventual power shortage.
Secretive Wall Street trading firm Jane Street has become famous in the past couple of years for its sizable AI-related spending, as it has struck big cloud deals to handle its AI computing needs and made investments in neocloud CoreWeave. Yet even a Jane Street–related deal for data center debt hasn’t won over investors.
Debt sold by a venture building a data center to be leased by Jane Street has quickly soured in secondary trading, according to Financial Industry Regulatory Authority data. Yields on the bonds have risen to around 11.3%, more than 2 percentage points above where the debt first sold in August. That deterioration has been sharper than for other recently issued AI data center bonds, with investors demanding far higher compensation to hold them versus government debt.
President Donald Trump on Saturday said he was creating a new “AI Force,” that would be similar to his Space Force—the arm of the Defense Department focused on space combat started by Trump during his first administration—and he planned to appoint a new AI czar to lead it.
Honestly, I almost feel a little sorry for Dario Amodei. That essay-writing, sweater-loving nerd is getting the treatment normally meted out to grim-eyed murderers and sex-romping celebrities.
Put another way: The New York Post has discovered him in earnest. Well, him and effective altruism. By my count, the outlet has published more than a dozen stories mentioning Amodei or effective altruism in the past week. One had a headline describing Anthropic’s staff as “cult-like,” the same label it had applied a while back to effective altruists in general. (C’mon, fellas! Invest in a thesaurus.)
A second Post headline gave prominent attention to President Donald Trump’s recent criticism of Amodei’s suggestion for an AI industry slowdown: a “SICK conspiracy,” Trump called it, the capital letters all his. A third headline described METR, the AI research outfit Amodei says he’ll use to independently assess his company’s safeguards, as a group of “super-woke globalists.” And a fourth headline on an editorial board piece thundered out: “Beware the ‘effective altruists.’”
Eeesh. I wonder what would excite the mouth breathers at the Post more: another Amodei doom dump—or JonBenét Ramsey’s parents finally saying they did it?
Sure, Amodei has steadily attracted more and more—and more—media attention over the past five months, and so has effective altruism, which obviously got a lot of attention in the Sam Bankman-Fried days, too. But there’s something about watching Amodei and the EA set get turned into daily tabloid fodder right now that strikes me as an important marker of where the broader world’s conversation about AI stands. It’s loud, wacky as heck—and candidly, I worry it’s a precursor to something darker.
I sat here trying to wrap my mind around it, and I started to get a headache like the one that sits at the bottom of a bourbon bottle. The Post is channeling a populist antipathy for Amodei and effective altruists that’s rooted in a dislike for their AI apocalypse talk. Yet at the same time there’s populist concern that AI may very well invite Armageddon: A recent survey by Politico found that 63% of U.S. adults believe AI could eventually destroy the world. So in sum, there’s widespread concern about destructive AI—and scorn for the people who want everyone to focus on it. As I said, it’s wacky.
Put aside AI catastrophe for a second. The bigger reason people dislike Amodei and the effective altruists is because they perceive them as the influential, liberal elite. It’s this potent derision that really animates the Post, and I find it unsettling. It’s the same type of addled, conspiracy-minded resentment that makes people still believe in Pizzagate and rigged voting machines.
What I find especially facile is the assumption that effective altruists and those who share their beliefs actually do wield gigantic influence over AI. I’d argue that they actually don’t. Articles by the Post and other outlets portray effective altruists as a wide cabal, but they only ever really mention the same three people over and over: Amodei; his sister, Daniela; and Facebook billionaire Dustin Moskovitz.
Look, three people simply do not make an all-powerful cabal! I keep thinking about that disconnect between assumption and reality—probably because I’ve devoted enormous thought lately to considering who really does have clout in AI as we put together our debut list of Tech’s 50 Most Influential People. Yes, the Amodei siblings are on the list, and they’re the No. 1 and No. 2 figures at a gigantic company. But that’s…it. Not a single other person on our list belongs to the effective altruism crowd.
I don’t write this as a passionate Amodei fanboy, nor as someone who finds effective altruism especially appealing: It’s an ideology that can be channeled into single-minded glumness when someone swallows the whole pill bottle and commits fully to it. A conversation with an effective altruist about the future is about as much fun as discussing foie gras with a vegan. It’s just that the concerns about Amodei and the effective altruists are beginning to strongly remind me of previous worries about lizard people taking over Congress.
Perhaps I’m making too much of those Post stories I mentioned. Still, with nearly 100 million readers a month, the Post is big enough to inspire other outlets to follow its lead, covering Amodei and AI with a sensationalism rooted in gassed-up anxiety and quarter-truths. Amodei’s the guy getting tarred and feathered today. It’d be a mistake to assume he’ll be the last.—Abram Brown (abe@theinformation.com)
The technology industry runs on influence. Its presence shows up in big, attention-grabbing moments—but much of it is dispersed in cloudy mystery, producing subtle ripple effects missed by casual observers. The CEOs of the largest companies certainly have clout. But so do a host of behind-the-scenes investors, renegade founders and rising-star executives.
In 2012, Austin Tice, a former U.S. Marine who’d decided to try his hand at freelance foreign correspondence, went MIA in Syria. And he’s still missing 14 years later. His mother clings to hope that he’s alive. Every president since Barack Obama has vowed to bring him back. But if he has somehow survived, why hasn’t he surfaced since the Assad regime fell in 2024? Josh Baker and Sara Obeidat, a pair of veteran Middle East reporters, set out to try to answer that question in “Embedded: Where Is Austin Tice?,” an NPR-BBC joint production.
They’re well sourced and determined, and by episode 2, they’re in an infamous prison retrieving never-before-seen files that the Syrian government kept on Tice. This involves a little bit of Bond-esque derring-do from Baker, who risks a five-story fall from a window ledge to get from one barricaded room to another. Additionally, I appreciated that they could display obvious empathy for Tice’s loved ones and stop short of lionizing him. He was clearly ill prepared to be in Syria. It was his very first attempt at freelance reporting. His military experience had emboldened him to go and made him a popular talking head for TV networks looking for on-the-ground analysis, but it also made many Syrians think he was in actuality an American spy posing as a journo.—Abram Brown
A year or so before Donald Trump’s reelection, Sharon Weinberger, then national security editor for The Wall Street Journal, visited the offices of an unnamed but prominent venture capital firm. Yes, the tech world invasion of Washington that has happened in the second Trump administration was still far in the future, but even then, Weinberger had begun noticing how Silicon Valley and Washington were intersecting more than they had in the past—particularly when she looked at the venture capital going to defense tech startups.
At the VC firm, Weinberger asked the investor why the private sector would invest in technology like hypersonic weapons given the astronomical costs and uncertain business models. “I honestly don’t care about the product,” replied the investor. “It has nothing to do with the tech.” Instead, he argued, the success of the products—and his own returns—depended more on government relationships and lobbying, which was increasingly a strength for Silicon Valley firms.
By Weinberger’s own account, she found herself thinking often of that investor’s sentiment as she wrote “Valley of Death,” an account of how Silicon Valley strayed from its Cold War national security roots before returning to the corridors of the Pentagon in recent years.
Weinberger offers an engaging history, with details of untold episodes in the intertwined relationships between Silicon Valley and Washington, like Steve Jobs’ brush with the CIA. As she goes along, she illustrates how the tech titans of defense contracting such as Elon Musk, Palantir’s Alex Karp and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey have strong-armed their way into the staid field. And she details how they’ve been adept at talking up their companies, though their products haven’t always lived up to the hype—especially in Ukraine.
Weinberger sees shortcomings in their “techno-optimism,” as she puts it. She thinks it could lead to ruinous scenarios not only for the firms’ financial backers but also for the U.S. armed forces at a time of heightened conflicts and supply chain constraints. Weinberger is a measured and well-traveled chronicler of the Silicon Valley arms race, raising the same concerns I’ve heard some investors share out loud.
By the time she ends with President Dwight Eisenhower’s timeless warning of the dangers of the military-industrial complex, or “subordinating national security to private interests,” it’s clear why the current moment of defense tech feels deeply familiar.—Leo Schwartz
Up near the 38th parallel, the fictional South Korean hamlet of Hope Harbor—the setting of director Na Hong-jin’s latest movie, “Hope”—exists in a state of permanent paranoia, with North Korea not very far away. Signs implore residents to “REPORT SPIES” and “PROTECT THE NATION AGAINST INFILTRATION.” And everyone seems to have a stash of automatic weapons hidden away at home, much to the irritation of the town’s chief constable, Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min). But it doesn’t seem likely that communist commandos are responsible for the body of a mutilated steer just outside of town. A bear, maybe—or a tiger? No, something much, much bigger.
Na, clearly a devotee of the Spielbergian school of patient dread, waits almost an hour before getting that giant alien beastie on screen. Kudos to him. As is often the case, the buildup makes the payoff sweeter. Once the creature finally does smash its way fully into frame, “Hope” shifts into overdrive, with a number of genuinely exciting set pieces and chase sequences: I emphasize the plural there because, unfortunately for Bum-seok and his more able deputy, Sung-ae (Hoyeon), the town is threatened by an entire pack of these lanky-limbed E.T.s. They’re darn difficult to take down, and they play possum pretty well. And since “Hope” takes place sometime in the pre-cellphone past, backup is not a text message away.
The set decoration of ruined Hope Harbor looks fantastic. And the mayhem is captured well through the camerawork of Hong Kyung-pyo, who also did “Parasite” as well as “Snowpiercer.” His efforts mitigate the letdown of the CGI effects: It’s a puzzler that the movie can rank as the most expensive Korean film ever and not have managed better. Honestly, though, the lackluster CGI was far from bad enough to dim my enjoyment. I trust the aliens will get jazzed up when Na returns for his already greenlit sequel.—A.B.
OpenAI has told some investors that it expects to burn $278 billion by the end of 2030, the Financial Times reported, as it spends more on cloud computing and chips to run and train its AI. The forecast, based on a recent presentation, is higher than the one it gave investors early this year, ...
Google acknowledged that its Gemini AI model unexpectedly breached the networks of three outside companies during safety evaluations conducted by third-party testing firm Irregular last May, The Wall Street Journal reported.
During the exercise, Gemini gained entry to the companies’ systems by ...
Anthropic finance chief Krishna Rao and other executives met with groups of prospective public investors last month with his company’s numbers looking spiffier than ever. The company had gone from spending about $2.30 on operations for every $1 of revenue in spring of 2025 to turning a slight profit on that basis in the June quarter—bucking the stereotype of money-losing AI companies that are addicted to spending.
But some investors walked away from meetings with the understanding from executives that the profits would likely be short-lived. Anthropic would take advantage of its sudden growth and deep cash reserves to aggressively sign data center deals, executives told them, which would increase how much they spend on computing infrastructure and could shrink operating profits.
Nvidia-backed startup Nscale disclosed Friday that revenue had surged 10 times in the first half of this year from the year-ago period, but losses mounted as the cloud startup spent billions on data centers and the AI chips they’ll house.
The two-year-old UK startup, a spinout of an Australian ...
In a room full of IT professionals, words and phrases like “tokenization,” “retrieval-augmented generation,” and “context window” need no explanation. But when technology leaders present to their CEOs and other company leaders about topics like AI, they often find that they need to translate these terms into everyday business language, or else risk being met by blank stares.
In the moment, this can be maddening. You know the opportunities and challenges that a technology like generative AI presents for your company. And you know that the organization’s other leaders will likely see things the same way you do, if only you can make yourself understood.
Instead of trying to bridge this communication gap on the fly, use Google Gemini to help translate your technical vision into bottom-line business value.
Step 1: Figure Out What You Want to Say
Your CEO might not speak “tech,” but Google Gemini does. Open up a new chat and explain exactly what it is you hope to communicate to leadership. Here, you can feel free to be as technical as you wish. Maybe you’ll tell Gemini that you’re thinking of building a RAG pipeline to vectorize your company’s proprietary data. Or, maybe you’ll float the idea of using parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods like LoRA to deploy open-weight models on-premises, without exploding your cloud inference costs. You can even upload your technical documents to Gemini, directly in the chat window.
No matter how in-the-weeds you get, Gemini will follow your train of thought, parsing the complexity to find the business value at the core of your plans.
Step 2: Let Gemini Be Your Translator
Now that you’ve captured your vision in your own words, let Gemini help you translate those words into language that will connect with your audience. Use this sample prompt, along with your brainstorming from Step 1:
I am the CIO at [company], and I am trying to build the case to [adopt generative AI solutions]. I need to explain the technical concept of generative AI to a non-technical audience (the CEO and board). Help me write talking points that will help me convey what generative AI is, ways it could help us digitally transform, and why it’s important to our growth as a company. Include details about how it could potentially re-focus our technical talent on more strategic work, help enhance our workforce’s productivity, and help us better serve our global workforce and customers.
In just a few moments, you’ll have a set of boardroom-ready talking points. Gemini might, for instance, break down the benefits of RAG in simple terms by noting that it anchors AI to internal data like HR policies and technical manuals. Or, it might point out the business benefits of arming IT staff and engineers with generative AI tools, noting the opportunity to shift employees’ focus from low-value, repetitive tasks to innovation.
Step 3: Create Content
Now that you have your core narrative and language nailed down, Gemini can help you create a more structured pitch. Instead of staring at a blank slide deck, prompt Gemini for ideas on how to build out a presentation that will sway your peers in the C-suite. Try this prompt:
I need to build a presentation to deliver this information to the board. Turn these talking points into a 10-slide presentation. For each slide, write a headline, three to four short bullet points for the slide itself, and the speaker notes I should use to explain the concept out loud.
Gemini will generate a full, downloadable presentation deck directly in the chat. If you like, you can export the presentation to Google Slides and make your own edits. Or, you can command Gemini to generate a new version with changes to elements like design, language, and narrative flow.
Step 4: Make Gemini Your Sparring Partner
Before you go into your meeting, open a new chat in Gemini, providing your speaker notes and a link to your presentation, and then ask it to act as a skeptical executive: You are my CEO. Review this presentation and grill me on cost, security, and ROI. Ask your toughest questions, one at a time.
Even though Gemini helped you prepare your presentation, it will seamlessly pivot to the role of rigorous executive or tough board member, pressing for more details on project payback, hidden risks, and timeline. By practicing your pitch in this low-stakes environment, you can make certain that you’ll be confident when it’s time for the real thing.
CoreWeave said on Friday it had priced $3.7 billion in convertible bonds, more than the AI cloud provider had previously said it was targeting.
The convertible senior notes will be due in 2033 and carry a coupon of 2.875%, at the top of the pricing range marketed to investors and up from the ...
Rising alarm about AI’s perils is thrusting into the spotlight a collection of little-known research groups focused on the technology’s safety—and fueling questions about their ability to effectively monitor the industry’s biggest companies.
Both Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman promised in recent days to embed evaluators from such outside research organizations inside their companies to help ensure they develop AI at a safe pace. Other executives including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also endorsed the idea of embedding independent evaluators in companies.
A secretive Chinese AI model startup founded in February by a Tsinghua University professor is now valued at more than $1.4 billion, after raising $400 million in three funding rounds from investors including Tencent, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.
Beijing-based Naive AI is preparing to release its first large language model as early as this month, joining the country’s fierce LLM competition as a newcomer, according to the person. The startup plans to release it as an open-weight model, similar to offerings from DeepSeek, Moonshot and Alibaba that people can download for free and customize to their liking.
Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman for Silicon Valley, has sent letters to Chinese AI companies including Alibaba Group, DeepSeek and Moonshot, requesting their commitments to join American AI labs in a binding international agreement to pace the development of the technology.
A team of cybersecurity researchers with startup Hacktron AI used Anthropic’s Claude to hack into OpenAI, gaining access to a key repository of OpenAI’s software, the researchers revealed Thursday.
The hack, which occurred on July 25, further demonstrates AI companies’ vulnerability to ...
There are plenty of unanswered questions about the recent turn of events. But the biggest—why stay private?—seems obvious. It buys the company more time to rev up sales without the pressure of disclosing on how much it’s paying for that growth, such as offering margin-crushing discounts to lure business from rival Anthropic.
It’s not just humanity that AI folks worry the new technology could wipe out—it’s publishers as well! (Publishers are, of course, people!) That’s what we learned from a court filing today by a group of news publishers including The New York Times Co. in a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. The filing cited an OpenAI executive writing—presumably in an internal memo—that publishers face “an existential threat” from AI products.
We knew the publishers worried that AI threatened their existence—The New York Times Co. made that point when it sued OpenAI and Microsoft back in 2023 (the case has since been consolidated with similar lawsuits filed by other publishers). What’s striking is that OpenAI and Microsoft internally acknowledge the threat—and recognize the implications for them as well. “Our AI content strategy has started a ‘doom loop’ that will hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time. It is highly unusual that an end-product threatens the economic foundations of its essential suppliers,” according to a Microsoft document cited in the filing.
OpenAI and law firm Cooley co-launched a product, called GO Public, that can draft S-1 filings, the document companies must submit to the Securities and Exchange Commission before they can go public, Cooley said Thursday.
Lawyers at Cooley can prompt GO Public, which also has access to Cooley ...
OpenAI has hired Brian McCarthy from SpaceX’s Cursor unit as its new global sales chief, reporting to recently hired Chief Revenue Officer Dali Rajic, the AI firm said Thursday.
In addition, two veteran sales executives from Snowflake, including a senior vice president who helped negotiate the ...
Greg Jensen, the managing chief investment officer of Bridgewater Associates, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, said demand growth for AI infrastructure is largely priced into markets. As a result, Bridgewater has begun looking for investment opportunities elsewhere.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday issued a temporary order allowing certain types of tokenized stocks—crypto tokens that represent equities—to trade in the U.S., a crypto-friendly move that has drawn pushback from some traditional financial firms. Shares of tokenization ...
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