Trending Thursday #25

Here’s what’s been trending in Tech & VC this week:

• Saudi Arabia's $100B+ AI Coronation: US approves 70K Nvidia servers to the Middle East while SoftBank's $100B Izanagi gets 70% Middle Eastern funding

• Microsoft's $45B Hedge Against OpenAI: Drops $15B on Anthropic plus $30B Azure commitment and then rolls out Claude across 365

• Three Mile Island Powers Microsoft's AI: Trump approves $1B to restart nuclear reactor shut down in 2019 for Microsoft under a 20-year deal

• The Model Wars Go Nuclear: Gemini 3 hits 2B users, Grok 4.1 takes #1 on LMArena, GPT-5.1 runs 2-3x faster, Meta's SAM 3 recognizes 270K concepts

• 43-Day Shutdown Creates Jobs Black Hole: September added 119K jobs, but October's full report won't exist due to shutdown, unemployment hits 4.4%

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.

🛢️ Silicon Valley's New Sugar Daddy Speaks Oil Money

🏜️ The Commerce Dept Just Crowned Saudi an AI Superpower

The US Commerce Department approved the sale of 70,000 Nvidia GB300 servers to Middle Eastern partners in a geopolitical reversal that legitimizes the region's AI ambitions:

• 70,000 Advanced Servers: 35,000 each to Abu Dhabi's G42 and Saudi-backed Humain, which is enough compute to build incredible sovereign models

• Earlier 2025: These same chips were blocked over national security concerns

• Strategic Pivot: "High-level diplomatic engagement" unlocked the vault to Nvidia's most powerful hardware

• The Trade: Explicit safeguards keeping Chinese hands off the tech

Translation: DC decided it would rather arm Middle Eastern oil money with AI supremacy than risk China filling that vacuum.

💰 SoftBank's $100B Chip Bet Runs on Saudi Money

Masayoshi Son is planning Project Izanagi, which is a $100B AI chip venture where 70% of funding comes from Middle Eastern sovereign wealth:

• $70B from Gulf States: Same capital source as Vision Fund, but triple the scale

• $30B from SoftBank: Son's putting serious skin in Nvidia's game

• Full-Stack Assault: Design, manufacture, and software, leveraging SoftBank's 90% Arm stake

• Named "Izanagi": Japanese creation deity whose last three letters spell "AGI" (subtlety is dead)

The Reality: This isn't VC anymore; it's sovereign nations using oil wealth to secure strategic positions in AI infra before Western governments even draft legislation.

🏗️ The Rest of the $1T+ Saudi Shopping Spree

Luma's $900M Round With Its Own Power Plant: Raised $900M from Saudi's Humain at a $4B valuation, led by Saudi PIF's vehicle with AMD and a16z following. But the real deal is the 2GW "Project Halo" AI supercluster that came with it.

Elon's xAI Saudi Data Center: Building 500MW facility with state-backed Humain using Nvidia chips. This is enough electricity to power 375,000 homes to now train chatbots.

AMD/Cisco/Humain 1GW Joint Venture: Deploying 1GW by 2030 with AMD Instinct MI450 GPUs. Phase 1 launches 100MW in 2026. Saudi Arabia is going from renting AWS capacity to potentially selling cloud services to regional neighbors.

The Pattern: While US tech fights over power allocations and environmental permits, Middle Eastern sovereign funds are writing checks and approving megaprojects simultaneously. The best tech isn't winning the AI infra race; it's being won by whoever can mobilize geopolitical capital fastest.

💸 The $30B Hedge: When AI Partners Need Backup

💍 Microsoft's $30B Prenup With OpenAI's Rival

Microsoft and Nvidia just dropped $15B on Anthropic in exchange for Anthropic buying $30B in Azure compute:

• $15B Combined Investment: $5B from Microsoft, $10B from Nvidia

• $30B Azure Commitment: One of the largest cloud deals ever

• $350B Valuation: Up from $183B in September, nearly doubling in two months

• 1 GW Contracted: Additional compute capacity with Nvidia Grace Blackwell systems

The Product Rollout: Claude models are now available across Microsoft Foundry, with Sonnet 4.5, Opus 4.1, and Haiku 4.5 in public preview. Microsoft also committed to "continuing access for Claude" across GitHub Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Copilot Studio.

The Nvidia Angle: Jensen Huang called this "a dream come true," marking the first time Nvidia and Anthropic are "deeply partnering" to co-optimize Claude for Nvidia hardware and future Nvidia architectures for Anthropic workloads.

Reality Check: Nothing says "healthy exclusive partnership" like wiring billions to your primary partner's biggest competitor and rolling out their models across your entire product lineup. Microsoft maintains a $135B stake in OpenAI (roughly 27% ownership). Satya Nadella calls this moving "beyond any type of zero-sum narrative," which is CEO-speak for "we're terrified of betting everything on Sam Altman."

⚡ Microsoft's Other AI Insurance Policy: A Nuclear Power Plant

The Trump Admin approved a $1B federal loan for Constellation Energy to restart Three Mile Island's undamaged reactor to power Microsoft's AI:

• $1.6B Total Cost: Constellation's investment to bring reactor back online by 2027

• 800MW: Enough to power a mid-sized city, now dedicated to training chatbots

• 20-Year Lock-In: Microsoft securing long-term baseload power

• Renamed: Now "Crane Clean Energy Center" as Three Mile Island tested poorly

The Economics: The reactor was shut down in 2019 because it couldn't compete with cheap natural gas and renewables. Six years later, tech is so desperate for power that restarting an uneconomical nuclear facility suddenly makes financial sense. Also, Energy Sec Chris Wright said this will "help bring down electricity prices."

Translation: When your AI infrastructure needs are so massive you're literally restarting nuclear reactors shut down for being uneconomical, you've moved past "cloud computing" into "sovereign energy policy."

🏦 The "Primary Partner" That Hedges Too

While Microsoft hedges against OpenAI with Anthropic, Anthropic runs its own insurance policy:

• AWS: "Primary cloud provider" and "primary training partner" status since 2023

• Claude: Only frontier model available on the three most prominent cloud services

• No Exclusivity: Everyone claims "partnership," nobody gets leverage

The Backstory: Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI research executives in 2021. They watched OpenAI's transformation from nonprofit to Microsoft dependency up close, so they're determined not to repeat that mistake.

Translation: Anthropic learned from watching Big Tech hedge their bets and decided to run the same playbook in reverse. Everyone gets their PR win, nobody gets leverage, and Anthropic ensures no single cloud giant can hold them hostage.

🤖 Product Quick Hits: The Model Wars Heat Up

Google Gemini 3's Generative Interfaces: Has "generative interfaces" that let the model choose its own output format instead of defaulting to plain text. Now it reaches 2B monthly users through AI Overviews and claims "state-of-the-art reasoning."

Google Antigravity: The $2.4B IDE Experiment: Agentic development platform where AI agents plan, execute, and explain software tasks across editor, terminal, and browser. Google hired the Windsurf team in July for $2.4B to build this.

xAI's Grok 4.1 Takes #1 on LMArena: Captured the #1 spot on LMArena's Text Arena leaderboard with 1483 Elo rating. Reduced hallucinations from 12.09% to 4.22%, which is a 65% improvement. Also dropped Grok 4.1 Fast out at $0.20 per million input tokens.

OpenAI's GPT-5.1 Gets Adaptive Thinking: Released GPT-5.1 Instant and Thinking versions that dynamically adapt reasoning time based on task complexity. It’s reported to "outperform both GPT-4.1 and GPT-5" while running 2-3x faster.

Meta's SAM 3 Recognizes 270K Concepts: Has object detection and tracking in images and video, plus SAM 3D for 3D reconstruction from a single image. Powered vibe-editing features in Instagram to enable 100K+ creators to quickly edit images.

🔄 Personnel Quick Hits: The Great Talent Reshuffle

September Jobs Beat Expectations: The US added 119,000 jobs in Sept (released Nov 20), exceeding expectations but revealing an August revision from 22,000 gained to 4,000 lost. Unemployment ticked up to 4.4% (highest since Oct 2021). 

October Jobs Report Goes Missing: The Labor Dept won't release a complete October jobs report at all because the 43-day federal shutdown disrupted household survey collection.

Verizon's 13,000-Person Wake-Up Call: New CEO Dan Schulman, one month into the job, is launching Verizon's largest-ever round of layoffs, cutting 13,000+ employees as the telecom giant faces "fierce competition" and recent customer losses.

PyTorch Creator Jumps to Mira Murati's Startup: Soumith Chintala left Meta to join Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab after "major restructuring inside Meta's AI ranks," which is a polite way of saying Meta fired 600 AI researchers last month.

Tim Cook's Retirement Trial Balloon: The FT thinks Tim Cook's retirement could be a "trial balloon" from people close to him, with speculation he might leave after Apple's "blockbuster" Q1 earnings report. Cook just turned 65 two weeks ago.

💸 What Other Startups are Popping Off

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

🤖 Artificial Intelligence

• Group Chats in ChatGPT: Collaborate with ChatGPT in the same convo.

• SIMA 2: Google's most capable AI agent for virtual 3D worlds.

• Swytchcode: Turn your API into an AI experience.

• Koyal: Turn your audio into personalized films using AI.

• YourGPT 2.0: Powerful Conversational AI Agent Builder Platform.

• Typeless: AI voice dictation that's actually intelligent.

• Guideflow: The AI demo automation platform for SaaS.

🛠️ Developer Tools

• Proximity Lock System: Never worry about leaving your PC unlocked again.

• Reindeer: Cursor for databases.

• Snippets AI: Advanced AI Prompt Manager.

• Dimension: AI that connects with your tools and automates the busywork.

🎨 Design & Prototyping

• Paraflow: The canvas-based product design agent.

• Alloy: AI prototyping with your real app.

• GoMarble AI for Meta Ads: AI Agent for Meta Ads.

💼 Business & Productivity

• Scraib.app: AI writing partner in every app on your Mac.

• Juno Digital Planner: All your tasks and events in one offline-first planner.

• Planndu: AI todo list, task manager, planner & reminder app, tasks.

• Welltory: Stop energy drain.

• Ramble by Todoist: Capture tasks by speaking, wherever you use Todoist.

• Markopolo AI: Reach 30-40% more customers with personal outreach at scale.

• delight.ai: The AI concierge for customer experience.

• RingIt: Never lose your phone again.

• Artifacts: Collect, share, and celebrate what endures through objects.

📊 Marketing & Sales

• Email Buttons: Turn email links into buttons that get clicked.

• 2pr v.2.0: Your personal LinkedIn content agency at your fingertips.

• RBD: Celebrate indie makers & their best apps.

🎓 Education & Learning

• MyLens for Youtube: Turn Youtube videos into AI timelines.

• BeFreed: Learn anything with your own personal audio agent.

🌟 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 best tech isn't winning the AI infra race; it's being won by whoever can mobilize capital fastest, whether that's Saudi petrodollars building 2GW superclusters or Microsoft restarting nuclear reactors to hedge against Altman's mood swings. 

The crisis of confidence runs so deep that everyone's betting billions on everyone else's competitors while claiming it's all about "customer choice," and the only certainty is that nobody trusts anybody anymore.

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

Till next time!

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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