Markets
Funding and the business of technology
A $16.8 billion down payment on a $119 billion claim: reading Terafab at announcement value
Tesla and SpaceX committed real money to a Texas chip factory this week; the part of the plan that would rewrite the semiconductor industry is still a projection.
The shortage did what sanctions policy dreaded: Chinese DRAM is now in global laptops
HP, Asus and Acer have started shipping notebooks with CXMT memory outside the US, and the AI buildout that starved them into it is still accelerating.
Same buildout, opposite verdicts: the week the market graded AI spending line by line
Six earnings reports in four days produced a record one day gain for Microsoft, a $430 billion morning for Apple, and the quietest retreat yet from a frontier model program.
An 80% cut three weeks after launch: what OpenAI's repricing says about pricing power
OpenAI cut its cheaper GPT-5.6 tiers by up to 80% and gave 100,000 researchers free access, and both moves point at the same competitive squeeze.
The chipmaker becomes the bank: Nvidia's $250 billion backstop for a customer that cannot borrow
Reported talks to guarantee OpenAI's Ohio campus, plus a same day bet on a lab with no revenue, show Nvidia underwriting its own demand.
DeepSeek walked away from a $71 billion round, and the reason is the story
A company that could raise almost any sum stopped the process because its founder's private assessment of China's position leaked, which tells you what the scarce resource is.
Good value, bad math: the GLP-1 affordability gap
New health economics work says obesity drugs clear the bar for value per patient and fail it in aggregate, and the two answers are not in conflict.
The market stopped paying for capex it cannot date
Tesla and Alphabet both beat on the top line and both got sold, because the cash going out is now visible and the return date is not.
Brent at $100, and the closing of Saudi Arabia's back door
Two struck tankers in the Red Sea did not remove much oil from the market, but they put a price on the one export route Riyadh had left after Hormuz.
Microsoft underwrites Europe's AI champion, and calls it sovereignty
A US hyperscaler agreeing to spend billions on Mistral's European compute strengthens the continent's independent lab and, at the same time, deepens its reliance on an American partner.
AMD pays to be bought: the $5 billion Anthropic deal is a bid to break into the compute Anthropic already buys from Nvidia
AMD will invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic and deploy 2 gigawatts of MI450 GPUs, a structure that buys AMD a reference customer at the frontier and locks Anthropic into a second silicon supplier.
A rocket company buys a code editor: what the $60 billion Cursor deal is really for
SpaceX is paying $60 billion in stock for the maker of Cursor. The logic sits inside Musk's AI holdings, not his launch manifest.
Anthropic Passes OpenAI on Paper, at About Twenty Times a Run-Rate
A $65 billion raise put Anthropic at a $965 billion valuation, the most valuable AI startup for the first time. The multiple is defensible only if revenue keeps compounding at its recent pace.
Nvidia clears $81.6 billion in a quarter, and the market still sells the beat
Record revenue up 85% and a $91 billion forecast confirm the AI buildout is still accelerating, but a fourth straight post-earnings decline shows the bar has moved past even Nvidia.
Cerebras Pops, and the AI-Hardware IPO Window Reopens on a Concentrated Bet
Cerebras raised about $5.5 billion and soared on its Nasdaq debut. The listing reopens the tech IPO market, but two customers drive most of its revenue and Nvidia still owns the field.
Nvidia at $5.5 Trillion: One Company, and Everyone's Portfolio
Nvidia became the first company worth $5.5 trillion. The valuation has real earnings behind it, but its size makes every index investor an involuntary Nvidia holder tied to a single spending cycle.
A record $300 billion venture quarter that four companies made
Global venture funding hit an all-time high in Q1 2026 and a record $510 billion for the half, but the totals are a handful of frontier-lab megarounds standing in for a market that is otherwise flat.
ElevenLabs triples to $11 billion, betting distribution beats the foundation models moving into audio
A $500 million Series D led by Sequoia values the voice specialist at $11 billion, a price that assumes ElevenLabs can out-execute general models adding native speech faster than they can commoditize it.
Decagon triples to $4.5 billion: the case for and against application-layer agents
A customer-service AI startup tripled its valuation in under six months. The bet is that owning the workflow beats owning the model.
Baseten hits $5 billion, and Nvidia writes half the check for the layer that sells its chips' output
A $300 million Series E values the inference startup at $5 billion, a bet that the plumbing between models and applications is a durable business rather than a feature the clouds absorb.
OpenEvidence at $12 billion: a clinical AI priced on reach, funded by pharma ads
A free tool for doctors doubled its valuation in three months. The unanswered questions are liability and where the money comes from.