Trending Thursday #20

BlackRock's $40B compute grab + Netherlands seizes Chinese chips at gunpoint

Author

Dev Chandra
October 16, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 14 minutes

This week proved that AI infrastructure has become the new arms race, with companies literally drilling for gas and invoking wartime powers over semiconductors.

From Microsoft bankrolling unknown UK startups to distribute 200K GPUs to the Netherlands, seizing Chinese chipmakers like it's 1940, we're watching the physical world violently reorganize itself around humanity's compute obsession.

As we continue to build at Context Ventures, we've launched Startup Intros with a simple mission: to help early-stage founders find the right investors, faster and smarter.

🎯 BLUF: Bottom Line Upfront

  • The $40B Landlord Play: BlackRock, Nvidia, Microsoft, and xAI bought Aligned Data Centers to become their own landlords to guarantee compute access

  • Drilling for AI: CoreWeave and Poolside are building a 2GW data center directly on Texas gas fields, bypassing the grid to burn natural gas for GPUs

  • Netherlands Goes Nuclear: Dutch government seized Chinese-owned Nexperia using wartime emergency powers, triggering China to ban the company's own exports

  • Microsoft's China Divorce: Pulling all manufacturing from China by 2026, joining the exodus that's rewriting global supply chains in real-time

  • Google's $24B Hedge: Dropping $15B in India and $9B in South Carolina, because apparently building empires on two continents is the minimum viable strategy

💸 The $100B Infrastructure Gold Rush: When AI Companies Buy the Power Grid

🛢️ AI Companies Are Literally Drilling for Power

CoreWeave and Poolside just went full Daniel Plainview, building a 500-acre data center directly on Texas gas fields because waiting for the grid is apparently for losers:

  • 500 Acres: The size of Monaco, but for GPUs instead of millionaires

  • 2GW Capacity: Burning enough natural gas to power San Antonio

  • Direct Gas Pipeline: Bypassing the grid entirely with on-site generation

  • Eight Expansion Phases: Because 2GW is just the appetizer

The Energy Math: While everyone else begs utilities for power allocations, these companies said "screw it" and went straight to the source. They're literally building data centers on top of fracking operations, turning the Permian Basin into Silicon Valley's new power plant. We've spedrun from "the cloud is someone else's computer" to "the cloud needs its own gas fields."

🏢 Tech Giants Drop $40B to Become Their Own Landlords

BlackRock, Nvidia, Microsoft, and xAI just acquired Aligned Data Centers for $40B in what might be the most expensive "we don't trust the market" move in tech history:

  • $40B Price Tag: More than Estonia's entire GDP for concrete and cooling systems

  • 5GW Current Capacity: Enough to power Chicago, now dedicated to training models

  • 20GW Expansion Target: Planning to consume more electricity than Denmark

  • The consortium: Kuwait's sovereign wealth fund, Singapore's Temasek, forming a mini-UN of compute

The Beautiful Absurdity: Microsoft and Nvidia are literally buying the buildings they'll rent space in. When tech companies deploy GDP-sized capital on real estate rather than risk compute shortages, you're watching the infra arms race go complete Manhattan Project, hoping the feds don't notice that AI leaders now control both the software and the power plants.

🇬🇧 Microsoft Drops $14B on a UK Nobody

UK cloud provider Nscale signed a deal worth up to $14B with Microsoft to deploy about 200 Nvidia GPUs globally. If you're wondering, "Who the hell is Nscale," welcome to the club:

  • 104K GPUs in Texas: Heading to Microsoft's hyperscale campus, scaling to 1.2GW by 2027

  • 52K in Norway: Via joint venture with Aker for Narvik facility

  • 35.6K Additional: Split between Portugal's Start Campus and UK's Loughton

  • IPO Trajectory: From unknown to public offering consideration in one deal

The Nobody-to-IPO Pipeline: Nscale went from obscurity to reportedly eyeing the public markets next year, all on the back of one deal. When Microsoft makes an obscure UK startup the conduit for 200K GPUs across four countries, you know the infrastructure scramble has gone global. They're essentially bankrolling an entire European computing infrastructure.

🌏 Google's $24B Geographic Hedge

Google announced $15B for India through 2030 plus another $9B for South Carolina, because apparently one continent-sized bet isn't enough:

  • 1GW in Visakhapatnam: India's biggest AI hub outside the US

  • $9B in Carolina: Parallel investment because redundancy is everything

  • 188K jobs: Projected employment from India alone

  • 900M+ users: India's internet population that will feed this beast

The Strategic Play: Google's partnering with AdaniConneX for the data center and Bharti Airtel for subsea cables, creating an international gateway linking India's coast to their global network. When you're casually announcing $24B in infrastructure commitments in a single week, you're not building data centers, you're building empires.

🌏 The Chip Wars Go Kinetic: Seizures, Embargoes, and Exodus

🇳🇱 Netherlands Invokes Wartime Powers Over Semiconductors

The Dutch government just seized Chinese-owned chipmaker Nexperia using emergency powers, because apparently, semiconductors are now a national security emergency:

  • "Goods Availability Act": Emergency wartime provision for seizing critical assets

  • 10% Stock Crater: Wingtech Technology's shares tanked on the Shanghai exchange

  • China's Retaliation: Immediate export ban on Nexperia's own products

  • The Timeline: The

    Netherlands gets one year to figure out what to do with its hostage

The Corporate Coup: They suspended the Chinese chairman, installed a Dutch overseer with "decisive voting authority," and locked down all operations. Now, Beijing is retaliating by preventing the company from shipping its own products from China. This is essentially shooting its own former subsidiary in the foot.

🏭 Microsoft's $100B Manufacturing Divorce from China

Microsoft is ghosting China's entire manufacturing sector, pulling everything from Surface laptops to Azure servers by 2026:

  • Complete Exodus Timeline: Two years to rewire decades of supply chain

  • The New Map: Vietnam, India, and Mexico are becoming the rebound relationships

  • The Company Lineup: Joining Apple, Dell, and HP in the great uncoupling

  • The Challenge: You can't just Ctrl+Z twenty years of infrastructure overnight

Reality Check: The world's most valuable company decided that completely reorganizing global manufacturing is less risky than staying in China. By 2026, "Made in China" on tech products might sound as dated as "Made in the USSR." The trade war isn't just about tariffs anymore; it's physically reorganizing where our devices get born.

🪞 Europe Copies China's Homework, Demands Tech Transfer

The EU just announced the most "well, well, well, how the turntables" policy in trade history: forcing Chinese companies to hand over technology for market access:

  • The Demand: Technology transfer as entry fee to European markets

  • China's response: Calling it "protectionist" with zero self-awareness

  • Denmark's take: "China benefited from our tech, time to return the favor"

  • The timeline: Comprehensive policy paper coming late 2025

The Beautiful Hypocrisy: China's Foreign Ministry condemned "forced technology transfer" after spending three decades perfecting the art.  This is exactly what China's been doing to Western firms for 30 years.

🤖 Product Quick Hits: AI Solves Everything, Trust Us

⚡ Apple's 4x GPU Flex: Apple launched the M5 chip with a 10-core GPU boasting 4x the peak performance of M4, a 10-core CPU delivering 15% faster multithreaded performance, and 30% more memory bandwidth, hitting 153GB/s. Nothing says revolutionary like chip updates that sound impressive until you realize the CPU improvement barely breaks double digits.

🗣️ Microsoft's Always-Listening Companion: Microsoft launched 'Hey, Copilot!' wake word activation along with Copilot Voice and Vision features for Windows 11, turning regular PCs into AI assistants that can hear commands and analyze on-screen content. Clippy is back, except now he can hear everything and see what you're doing.

⚡ Anthropic's Budget Speed Demon: Released Claude Haiku 4.5 with similar coding performance to Sonnet 4 but at one-third the cost ($1/$5 vs $3/$15 per M tokens) and twice the speed. Nothing says 'our premium model was overpriced' like releasing a cheaper, faster version that does the same thing.

🎬 Google's 8-Second Spielberg: Veo 3.1 now generates AI videos up to 8 seconds long at 1080p with synchronized audio, better prompt adherence, and integration into its Flow video editor. Google's finally adding sound to movies, just a century behind Hollywood.

🤝 Coinbase's 50/50 Stablecoin Play: Launched Coinbase Business to let companies send and receive USDC payments, splitting yield revenue 50/50 with Circle on every transaction. Turns out the real money in crypto is charging businesses for boring payments.

🏃‍♂️ Personnel Quick Hits: Musical Chairs, Tech Edition

🏃 Apple's Blink-and-You-Missed-It AI Chief: Ke Yang left Apple for Meta just weeks after being appointed to lead the AKI team building AI-driven web search for Siri. When your executive tenure is measured in weeks, it's not a resignation, it's a cameo appearance.

💔 LendingTree's Founder Dies in Accident: Founder and CEO Doug Lebda died at 55 in an ATV accident on his North Carolina farm; he founded the online loans marketplace in 1996, and COO Scott Peyree is taking over as CEO.

💔 Salesforce's 25-Year Friendship Implodes: Ron Conway resigned from the Salesforce Foundation board, ending a 25+ year friendship with Marc Benioff over Benioff's Trump endorsement and call for federal troops in SF.

🗡️ Ubisoft's Assassin Gets Assassinated: Marc-Alexis Côté, who spent 20 years building Assassin's Creed into a billion-dollar franchise, departed 2 weeks after Ubisoft moved the series under Tencent-backed Vantage Studios.

🕳️ OpenAI's Black Hole Hire: Prize-winning theoretical physicist Alex Lupsasca joins as the first member of OpenAI for Science, keeping his Vanderbilt professorship while GPT-5 already solves astrophysics problems that took grad students days.

💸 What Other Startups are Popping Off

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

🤖 Artificial Intelligence

🛠️ Developer Tools

  • Buildrrr: The easiest way to create custom branded DMG files.

  • Open SaaS 2.0: Free, open-source SaaS starter kit with superpowers.

  • Replyke: APIs for user content, social graphs, and moderation tools.

  • coss.com ui: Beautiful component library based on Cal.com's iconic design.

  • Emergent: Advanced AI app builder that ships full-stack apps.

  • Traycer AI: Plan-first AI coding for real codebases.

💼 Business & Productivity

💰 Fintech & Crypto

  • blai: AI crypto advisor that trades for you.

  • JustPaid: Autonomous AI for billing, contracts, and collections.

  • AI Mode by Dappier: An answer page for your site, with built-in monetization.

🎨 Design Tools

🌟 Editor's Note

At Startup Intros, our mission is to bring the latest founder-investor news straight to your inbox, keeping you ahead in the fast-paced world of Silicon Valley.

💭 Parting Thoughts

The infrastructure wars have escalated from boardroom negotiations to government seizures, from renting servers to drilling for natural gas, from supply chain optimization to complete geographic divorce.

When peacetime democracies invoke emergency wartime powers over chips, and tech giants would rather own power plants than risk compute shortages, we're no longer watching business competition; we're witnessing the violent birth of a new world order where GPUs matter more than oil.

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

Till next time!

Dev Chandra
CEO @ Startup Intros
Associate @ Context VC
LinkedIn: /in/devchandra

P.S. Raised this week, and we missed you? Want to be featured? Have tips or funding questions? Reply or DM us as we’re here to help.

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