Trending Thursday #15

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This week, Larry Ellison briefly became richer than Elon Musk by signing the most expensive IOU in tech history, Microsoft started cheating on OpenAI with Anthropic in the most expensive love triangle ever, and everyone discovered that stealing books for AI training costs exactly $3,000 per pilfered paperback.

Check it out, stay plugged in, and don’t miss these hot upcoming events:

Keep reading for the latest edition of Trending Thursday!

Oracle just signed a $300 billion compute deal with OpenAI that's so large it defies comprehension. This isn't just the biggest cloud deal ever: it's bigger than the GDP of Finland.

The Absolutely Bonkers Numbers:

The Employee Sacrifice: To fund this AI transformation, Oracle is eliminating cash raises and bonuses, offering stock grants instead. Because nothing says "we believe in our future" like making employees bet their grocery money on it.

The Infrastructure Insanity:

Why This Matters: Oracle just went from the company your dad's IT department uses to the kingmaker of AI. They're essentially becoming OpenAI's landlord, and just speedran the entire cloud revolution in one earnings call.

Microsoft is bringing Anthropic's Claude into Office 365, marking the beginning of the end of its OpenAI exclusivity. The twist? They're paying Amazon to access the models.

The Breakup Details:

The Strategic Hedging:

The Timing: This comes as Microsoft and OpenAI negotiate over the startup's IPO plans and equity arrangements. Nothing says "healthy relationship" like secretly shopping for your replacement during contract negotiations.

Bottom Line: Microsoft's Copilot is heading for $1B+ revenue, but adoption has been throttled by quality issues. Users complained about paying $30/month for buggy spreadsheet help. The Anthropic switch suggests Microsoft values results over relationships, and Claude delivers where GPT doesn't.

Anthropic just agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle copyright claims, setting a precedent that should terrify every AI company that trained on Library Genesis.

The Expensive Education:

The Industry Bombshell: Court filings revealed employees at OpenAI and Meta used the same pirated datasets. With 40+ similar lawsuits pending, Anthropic's settlement becomes the template. Everyone's about to get very expensive bills.

Publishers are launching Real Simple Licensing (RSL), backed by Reddit, Medium, and Yahoo:

Why It Matters: AI companies have been playing a game of chicken with copyright law, betting they'd be too big to sue by the time anyone noticed. Anthropic just blinked first, and at $3,000 per stolen book, the entire industry's training data strategy just became a liability worth hundreds of billions.

The New Chip Independence Movements: The entire industry just decided that relying on Nvidia is for suckers:

💎 OpenAI's $10B Broadcom Deal: Mass-producing custom AI chips starting 2026, joining Google/Amazon in the "build your own" club. Internal use only (for now). Still desperately needs Nvidia chips while building alternatives, the definition of hedging your bets.

🌐 Google's TPU Colonial Expansion: Approaching Nvidia-focused clouds about hosting TPUs, already struck deal with Fluidstack for New York data center. Courting CoreWeave and Crusoe (both Nvidia strongholds). Message clear: every TPU in a rack is one less Nvidia GPU.

🔄 Nvidia's $1.5B Self-Rental Scheme: Quietly paying Lambda to rent its own chips back. Lambda is already an Nvidia customer and investment. The most circular financial arrangement in tech, basically paying itself to juice demand numbers.

🎯 Nvidia's First Inference Chip: Launching Rubin CPX specifically for inference workloads, available end of 2026 (same timeline as everyone else). Cursor, Runway, Fireworks already signed up. Finally, admitting training and inference need different silicon.

Why It Matters: The chip wars have entered their final form: vertical integration or death. Every major AI player is designing custom silicon because Nvidia's 80% margins are too juicy to let stand. Eventually, the question won't be "whose model are you using?" but "whose chips are you stuck with?"

🍎 Apple's AI Panic Mode: Building "World Knowledge Answers" search engine for Siri, testing Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude because their own models are trash. That $20B/year Google search deal looking shaky. Also announced iPhone Air at 5.6mm, so thin it needs external battery for "all day" use.

🚀 SpaceX's $17B Spectrum Grab: Buying EchoStar's wireless spectrum to enable direct satellite-to-phone service. Starlink can now beam internet to regular smartphones without special hardware. T-Mobile's exclusivity dead, Boost Mobile gets access. Global cell coverage from space incoming.

🤖 Tesla's Robot Hand Crisis: Musk admits Tesla "struggling" with Optimus robot hands, which represent "majority of engineering difficulty." Still claiming $20-25K manufacturing cost eventually. Goal of 5,000 robots in 2025 looking impossible. Meanwhile, proposing $1 trillion pay package requiring $8.5T market cap.

💰 X Money Going Nowhere: Elon's payments ambitions stalled by New York regulators. CEO quit, two compliance chiefs fled, multiple executives gone. The "everything app" dream dying while Musk focuses on xAI instead.

📝 Nvidia vs Congress on China: Nvidia and White House AI czar David Sacks calling lawmakers "doomers" for wanting to restrict China chip sales. Congressional hawks firing back. The geopolitical chip war getting personal.

Here's a roundup of this week's trending startup activity:

Institutional investors back startups to unlock outsized returns. Regular investors have to wait. But not anymore. Thanks to regulatory updates, some companies are doing things differently.

Take Revolut. In 2016, 433 regular people invested an average of $2,730. Today? They got a 400X buyout offer from the company, as Revolut’s valuation increased 89,900% in the same timeframe.

No wonder 10K+ everyday people are taking the chance on Pacaso.

Founded by a former Zillow exec, Pacaso’s co-ownership tech reshapes the $1.3T vacation home market. They’ve earned $110M+ in gross profit to date, including 41% YoY growth in 2024 alone. They even reserved the Nasdaq ticker PCSO.

The same institutional investors behind Uber, Venmo, and eBay backed Pacaso. And you can join them. But not for long. Pacaso’s investment opportunity ends September 18.

Invest While You Still Can

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This week proved that Silicon Valley's new business model is "become your own supplier." Oracle's betting $300 billion it can be the AWS of AI, Microsoft's cheating on OpenAI with every model that texts back, and literally everyone is designing chips because Nvidia's margins are too good to let stand.

The winners won't be the ones with the best models. They'll be the ones who own the chips, the data centers, the power plants, and apparently, the pirated book settlements.

Forward to a friend or hit reply to let me know what you're seeing in your world.

Forward to a friend and hit reply to let me know what you're seeing in your world.

Till next time!

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