Shanghai Enflame Technology surged on its first trading day Friday after the Chinese AI chip developer raised about 6.12 billion yuan ($911 million) in an initial public offering, underscoring strong investor appetite for domestic alternatives to Nvidia chips.
Shares opened at 410 yuan, nearly ...
Forget all that chatter about AI killing us all. We’re back to looking at what really matters—the revenue! Oracle demonstrated on Thursday that demand for AI computing capacity remains pretty darn robust. Larry Ellison’s software and cloud firm reported 30% top-line growth for the quarter ending Aug. 31, a tad better than the company projected in June, sending its battered stock up 4.4% in after-hours trading.
The quarterly update demonstrated how much Oracle is benefiting from customers so desperate for capacity that they're paying up-front—what the company calls prepayments—for computing rental deals. Oracle brought in $11.4 billion in such customer prepayments in the quarter, doubling the amount of cash its operations generated. These payments help Oracle finance data center construction without dipping as much into its own pocket. While it spent $28.5 billion on capital expenditures in the August quarter, Oracle only burned $5 billion of its own money.
OpenAI said Thursday it will pause new subscriptions to its $200-a-month plan for Astra, its new flagship model, another sign of the compute crunch facing AI companies.
Thibault Sottiaux, who leads OpenAI’s Codex coding agent, cited strains on the company’s systems and a desire to preserve ...
There’s certainly a frenzy among venture capitalists to back the hottest startups before they’ve made a dime of revenue, but one fund is sticking to a proven strategy of investing in startups that have generated at least millions in revenue—often without raising any institutional money.
Focusing on these boot-strapped founders has again resonated with Volition Capital’s limited partners. The Boston-based growth equity firm, which cut its teeth investing in consumer startups like Chewy and enterprise software companies, raised $950 million for its sixth fund, co-founder Larry Cheng told The Information exclusively. The fundraise, Volition’s largest, brings the 16-year-old firm’s assets under management to $2.6 billion.
Adobe Systems shares dipped 2% late Thursday after its third-quarter earnings report, as some investors appear to unsure about how much its AI products will drive future revenue growth.
Adobe, which began breaking out revenue for its AI products in March, is continuing to highlight this area of ...
Anthropic has disrupted several attempts to use its Claude models for potentially malicious activity, including research into how to adapt bird flu to a human-transmittable strain with “pandemic potential,” the company said in a report Thursday.
Amid increasing worry about AI misuse and rogue ...
The year-old startup behind Instinct, a personal AI assistant that’s caught fire with Silicon Valley insiders, is seeking more computing power, leveraging its early buzz as it faces new competition from giant Meta Platforms.
Over the last few weeks, Instinct, which launched to a select group of users earlier this year, has sometimes notified users that it is running at full capacity and “responses may be slower” as people use it for tasks such as negotiating bills and answering emails. More cash could help: the company is looking to raise $1 billion in new funding after recently raising $250 million, its founder and CEO Noah Shinn has recently told prospective investors, according to a person familiar with the statement.
SpaceX has signed another cloud computing rental deal to an identified customer that will pay it about $1.11 billion per month starting on Dec. 1, the company’s chief financial officer, Bret Johnsen, said in an interview at Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia + Technology conference on Thursday.
The ...
Microsoft is planning to more than triple the size of its Azure cloud unit’s data center capacity to over 38 gigawatts by 2032, up from 12 gigawatts today, Bloomberg reported Thursday. A gigawatt of capacity would be able to power a city the size of San Francisco.
The planned buildout reflects ...
Oracle reported 30% growth in revenue of $19.3 billion for the quarter ending Aug. 31, a slightly better growth rate than the company projected in June, even as it burned $5 billion to expand the data centers that are driving its accelerating topline growth.
The software and cloud firm said ...
In May, Blackstone unveiled a new joint venture with Google that revolved around a big number: The Wall Street giant was promising to spend $5 billion to buy 500 megawatts’ worth of Google’s tensor processing units, and it said it would use the chips in a new company that would deliver computing power to leading AI firms.
Four months later, Blackstone’s plans have only gotten larger, according to a person with knowledge of the effort. Blackstone actually anticipates buying many more TPUs—several “multiples” beyond the originally announced figure, the person said.
In other words, Blackstone is likely to commit tens of billions of dollars to securing multiple gigawatts of AI chips. Blackstone declined to comment on exactly how many more TPUs it’ll buy.
Jas Khaira, the leader of a Blackstone team dubbed N1 that is leading the company’s push into AI investments, said in an interview that the firm’s “biggest conviction bet continues to be compute.” The company, he said, views the infrastructure build-out as something that will be bigger than a simple technology cycle. “This is definitely more akin to an industrial revolution,” he said.
Salesforce seems unafraid of a future in which people use an AI chatbot like Claude to access Salesforce enterprise apps and underlying databases to get work done, rather than visiting those apps themselves. Figma, an enterprise design app, naturally wants a different future.
Dylan Field, Figma’s CEO, said Wednesday that as the company’s in-house AI tools for designing apps and other user interfaces get better, “we'll see more and more of that work happening in Figma directly,” rather than using Claude or other prominent AI assistants to do such work.
The financing boom for the AI build-out is getting bigger and more complicated by the day—and AI companies have been staffing up for the challenge.
AI labs including OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as neoclouds such as Nscale, are among a growing number of AI companies building out their capital markets teams and hiring specialists in areas like structured finance. That in part reflects the sheer volume of deals these companies are doing, many of which don’t fit neatly into standard corporate debt. This in-house staff can help when it comes to negotiating with lenders and drilling down into construction, power and other key details.
Of course, tech and data center companies have long had in-house teams to handle fundraising, deals and other corporate finance needs. And structured finance is nothing new to the infrastructure world. But the scale of the AI build-out, which bankers peg at around $7.5 trillion in spending over the next five years, has pulled relatively young labs and upstart cloud firms into financing arrangements that are new territory.
That means finance professionals, from bankers to investors at private equity, private credit and infrastructure firms, have more options in the form of neoclouds and other AI infrastructure startups, some of which are offering significant pre–initial public offering equity.
“It's a new avenue for these people,” said James Howl-Newton, founder of Futura Search Partners, a specialist search firm focused on areas including digital infrastructure finance. As a result, “sponsors are having to deal with additional routes to exits for top performers,” he said.
AI companies and infrastructure providers are tapping financing frequently and across different instruments, requiring deeper in-house capabilities and expertise than young tech firms have typically needed. One executive overseeing finance hiring at a neocloud noted that leveraged and structured finance backgrounds bring expertise that can help in areas like working through project diligence and getting banks to sign off on deals. Some AI firms may also want to run their own project finance models so they can move quickly through negotiations and have something to compare to lenders’ models.
AI companies aren’t always issuing the debt themselves—that can fall to data center developers or special purpose vehicles, with firms like Blackstone and Apollo providing or arranging chip and other financing. And some of the biggest AI deals are using backstops from investment-grade companies like Nvidia or major cloud providers. Even so, commitments from AI customers often underpin much of the borrowing. And the users of the infrastructure will want to understand what they’re signing up for and their risks if a project runs into trouble.
“Hiring of people within that business, responsible for the financing of compute, could prove to be an existential decision,” said Dan McCarthy, founder and CEO of One Search, an executive search firm focused on infrastructure finance whose recent clients include OpenAI. “You want someone who knows where all the pitfalls are, where all the bodies are buried in multibillion-dollar loans.”
OpenAI, for its part, in July named Sven Semmelmann as head of compute capital markets. He previously led structured finance at Generate Capital, an investment firm that finances and owns infrastructure projects, and he has also held project finance roles at major banks. OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar, when announcing the hire on LinkedIn, said Semmelmann would oversee financing and partnerships to grow the company’s compute resources.
Anthropic, meanwhile, has made several finance hires recently to work on capital markets and compute deals, and also has open positions posted including a capital markets infrastructure financing role. AI infrastructure upstarts are staffing up as well. Nscale, which launched in 2024 and is gearing up for a potential IPO, has been hiring across levels for capital markets and treasury as well as legal roles, calling for experience in areas like structured finance and private credit.
SB Energy and Crusoe, which are developing major new data centers for OpenAI and other customers, are hiring across levels for jobs focused on project financings and other structured deals, recent postings show, while AI infrastructure startup Fluidstack is hiring a structured finance lead and a more junior counterpart.
The good news for AI companies is that private credit and infrastructure teams, as well as investment banking teams focused on structured or project finance, had been growing even prior to the AI boom, providing a pool of skills that could translate into new twists on structured finance, like big graphics processing unit–backed deals.
But that kind of finance talent doesn’t come cheap, especially for more senior people who have a track record of working on large transactions. And the normal tech tactic of dangling stock to lure talent won’t necessarily do the trick in all cases, especially for the most seasoned dealmakers and investors.
Financiers would have to weigh a cash-heavy Wall Street pay package, albeit one that can depend heavily on how good bonus season is, against betting a portion of their pay on stock in a private or newly public company. Managing directors in investment banking can make north of $1 million in cash a year, with the biggest rainmakers making considerably more. The part of pay they get in stock at big public banks may vest over a few years but is generally easy to sell after that.
For people at big infrastructure or private credit firms, senior employees may also receive carried interest, meaning a share of the profits on the funds or investments they work on, which can become worth millions over time.
For instance, an investor at a top infrastructure firm may have several million dollars’ worth of carried interest tied up at their current firm they’d have to leave on the table. An AI company could try to make them whole with stock, which could be tantalizing to some, though others might not want to make a bet on equity in a young company.
That might make the most experienced investors—those who’ve seen big infrastructure projects through over many years and know all the tricks of the trade—hard to pry away.
The U.S. Senate formally launched an investigation into the July hack of Hugging Face, when a swarm of OpenAI agents broke out of a testing environment and gained access to the open-source repository.
In a letter sent to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Wednesday, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley said that ...
Italian digital conglomerate Bending Spoons is buying whiteboarding software firm Miro at a valuation of $1.355 billion, the latest in a series of purchases the Italian firm has done at knock-down prices.
The price for Miro is a huge discount to its peak valuation of $17.5 billion, dating ...
In almost any organization, there are practically infinite content ideas hiding in memos, emails, presentation decks, and meeting notes. But too often, this material mostly sits idle. Ideas that sparked excitement in the moment get ignored in favor of the countless little emergencies of office life, and eventually they are forgotten entirely.
Even with many companies actively encouraging their executives to post organic thought leadership on professional networking sites, social media, and company channels, there are countless missed opportunities to turn off-the-cuff insights into valuable content.
Google Gemini can help you transform your meeting notes into content plans, on-brand slogan ideas, and even booth mock-ups for your events team.
Step 1: Brainstorm Blog Ideas
Imagine you’ve just stepped out of a meeting with your social media team leads. You have a document full of notes (or maybe even a transcript) about what resonates with your audience, trending topics in your industry, target audience data, and keywords that are effective at driving engagement with your brand.
Instead of letting this wealth of information stay locked inside your notes, open up a new Gemini chat and brainstorm how to turn your team’s sprawling strategy session into a series of relevant, focused blog posts. Here’s a prompt you can try:
Generate a list of four relevant and engaging thought leadership blog post ideas for [company] based on trending topics, target audience analysis, and brand keywords.
Gemini will return ideas for blog posts with catchy, clickable titles, along with information about target audience, keywords, angle, and tone. For example, if your meeting notes talk about how your customers are worried about their employees using unauthorized IT tools, Gemini might suggest a blog post titled “The Anatomy of a Zombie Subscription: How to Audit and Kill Shadow IT Instantly.”
Step 2: Develop the Material
The initial output will just be kernels of potential blog posts, but you can go back and forth with Gemini to develop them into real content. Take the “Zombie Subscription” blog, for example. You might ask Gemini to give you options for a “four tips” article structure, or to identify specific ideas from your meeting notes that merit extra attention.
Use your own judgment—and your own language—during this process, rather than having Gemini write your entire blog post for you. Gemini can help with brainstorming, outlining, drafting, and revision, but your audience is ultimately reading the content to hear your own expert insights.
Step 3: Distill the Main Message
Maybe during your meeting, your team also discussed launching a new brand campaign. You know that your customers value your reliable and unique services, and your company has a long history of delivering for its customers.
But sometimes, it can feel impossible to condense these big ideas into a few words that really communicate why customers come back to your company over and over.
If you need help getting started with ideas for a new campaign tagline, open a new chat in Gemini and prompt something like: Generate three options for a new slogan emphasizing reliability, innovation, and a long history of popularity for [company].
For a B2B fintech company, Gemini might offer options like “Innovating Beyond the Bank. Trusted with Billions.” Or: “Built for Tomorrow. Proven by $10 Billion Today.”
You may not hit the mark exactly on your first prompt. Maybe you want more (or less) alliteration, for example. Maybe you want it to be five words or fewer, unbroken by punctuation. You can keep asking Gemini for new variations until the new tagline is just right.
Step 4: Mock Up Visuals for Events
Often, one successful creative project sparks ideas for another. After you create your blog campaign and craft your new slogan, you might turn your attention to upcoming events.
Try mocking up booth graphics ideas for your events team. Here’s a sample prompt:
Create an image of a trade show booth using orange and blue colors. The booth should be modern and showcase interactive computer stations.
Gemini will generate an image that you can sketch on in-app, giving you a quick, no-risk way to play with your potential trade show setup. And between the blog posts, the tagline, and the event visuals, you will have turned a couple of pages of messy meeting notes into the bones of an entire marketing campaign.
Yesterday, Amir and I examined the shock waves that have rippled through the AI industry and far beyond since former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon very publicly quit his job over concerns that AI “could kill us all”—and another Anthropic AI safety specialist put the probability of such a catastrophe at greater than 10%.
Coxon told me that is hardly the most pessimistic view inside Anthropic. “People have varying probabilities that—barring some substantial coordinated slowdown—the whole thing ends in doom,” he said in an interview later Wednesday. Those estimates range higher than 50% among some Anthropic employees, he said.
Coxon was able to gauge the fears of his fellow employees because “Anthropic has a substantially more transparent internal culture than OpenAI,” where Coxon worked for years before joining Anthropic in May.
Coxon, who focused on the earliest stages of training AI models at Anthropic, said he decided to leave the company because he was gradually “starting to viscerally feel the fear of where the tech's going to be like the next two years or even the next one year.”
Amazon is letting advertisers test buying ads on ChatGPT via Amazon’s advertising technology platform, Amazon said on Sept. 10.
ChatGPT started selling ads earlier this year, which it has let advertisers buy through its own interface and via partnerships with smaller advertising technology firms ...
The Department of Justice is looking into whether Nvidia tried to avoid antitrust scrutiny in its $20 billion deal to license the technology of chip startup Groq and hire most of its employees in December, the New York Times reported Wednesday.
The two companies described the deal as a “ ...
Elon Musk is famous for his “move fast” management philosophy, which he demonstrated most starkly when he built new data centers for his AI startup in record time two years ago. But a new team of rocket engineers Musk recently installed to run his data centers is taking a very different approach.
SpaceX is changing how it builds the giant facilities that house AI servers in a way that might slow the building of new campuses, according to people familiar with the situation. The new management team is looking to install more backup systems for power and cooling, and to more thoroughly test those systems before the data centers start operating, instead of adding them later on, as the AI company was doing, two of the people said. SpaceX also wants to reduce the use of temporary power and cooling systems in its data centers, one person said.
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