Trending Thursday #32

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It was another satisfying week in 2026, and it delivered some clarity on where this AI race is actually heading. Here's what's been trending:

• TSMC posted its best quarter ever: $16B profit, $100B in 2025 revenue, and it's projecting 30% growth in 2026, while Apple fights Nvidia for capacity

• Taiwan committed $250B+ to US chip production: The largest semiconductor deal in history, with a quarter-trillion guarantee in credit

• OpenAI is building an empire: Raiding Thinking Machines for talent (allegedly with leaked info) while issuing RFPs for hardware suppliers

• Apple chose Google over ChatGPT: The Gemini deal is a multi-billion-dollar cloud contract because OpenAI declined to be Apple's model provider

• Claude Cowork is Claude Code for normies: Anthropic's latest play to make Claude feel less like a chatbot and more like a colleague who actually helps

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🏭 TSMC's Record Quarter & Taiwan's $250B Bet on America

TSMC just delivered one of the most dominant earnings reports in semiconductor history, and Taiwan doubled down with the largest-ever chip investment commitment to the US.

📈 The Numbers That Broke the Models

TSMC reported Q4 net profit up 35% YoY to approximately $16B, beating the $15.17B estimate and capping a year where the company crossed $100B in total revenue for the first time.

But the forward guidance is what sent ASML to a $500B market cap:

• 2026 Capex: $52B to $56B, up 25%+ from 2025

• Revenue Growth: Close to 30% YoY projected for 2026

• Both figures: Above analyst estimates

The Capacity Fight: Sources tell Culpium that Apple now has to fight for TSMC production capacity amid the AI boom. Nvidia was likely TSMC's top customer in at least one or two quarters in 2025. The company that once commanded TSMC's best nodes is now competing for scraps.

🇹🇼 The $250B Commitment

Hours after TSMC's earnings, the US announced that Taiwanese companies will invest $250B+ in chip production on American soil as part of a trade deal, with Taiwan's government guaranteeing $250B in credit.

The Geopolitical Math: This isn't just about building fabs. It's about ensuring that if anything happens to Taiwan, the world's most advanced chip manufacturing isn't held hostage. The US gets supply chain security. Taiwan gets a guarantee that America has skin in the game.

The Memory Constraint: A top House Republican warned that severe DRAM and HBM3E supply shortages will constrain H200 export licenses to China. Nvidia says it "can serve all approved" orders, but the bottleneck isn't just GPUs anymore, it's everything that goes around them.

Translation: TSMC's earnings confirm what everyone suspected: AI demand isn't slowing, it's accelerating. The Taiwan deal confirms what everyone feared: the US-China tech decoupling is now about physical infrastructure, not just software. And Apple's fall from TSMC's top customer spot shows just how dramatically AI has reshuffled the chip industry's power structure.

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🚀 OpenAI's Empire: Talent Raids, Hardware Ambitions & Brain PCs

OpenAI isn't just building models anymore. This week revealed a company expanding on every front, sometimes controversially.

🏴‍☠️ The Thinking Machines Raid

Wired reports that at least two more Thinking Machines Lab staffers are expected to join OpenAI soon, with some researchers citing exhaustion from "the industry's constant drama." But the real story is darker.

A source close to Thinking Machines alleges that ex-CTO Barret Zoph, who is returning to OpenAI, had shared confidential company information with competitors before his departure.

The Safety Exodus Continues: Andrea Vallone, who left OpenAI in November as head of its safety research team, joined Anthropic's alignment team. That's now a pattern: OpenAI's safety leadership keeps landing at the company that markets itself as "the responsible AI lab."

🔧 The Hardware Play

OpenAI announced it has issued a request for proposals to US-based hardware manufacturers as it seeks to push into consumer devices, robotics, and cloud data centers.

The Vertical Integration Thesis: OpenAI already makes the models. Now they want to make the hardware those models run on. This isn't about selling gadgets, it's about controlling the full stack from silicon to software.

🧠 Altman's Brain Computer Bet

Merge Labs, the brain-computer interface startup Sam Altman co-founded, raised a $252M seed round from OpenAI, Bain Capital, Gabe Newell, and others.

The Scale: $252M is one of the largest seed rounds in history. For context, Neuralink raised $280M total across multiple rounds before reaching this level. Merge just did it in one shot.

Translation: OpenAI are not just competing with Anthropic and Google on model quality, they're building a hardware supply chain, allegedly acquiring talent through questionable means, and Altman is personally funding the next interface paradigm. The safety researchers leaving for Anthropic just might just be smart enough to see what's coming.

🍎 Apple's AI Pivot: Why They Chose Google Over OpenAI

The most surprising AI partnership detail of the year: OpenAI didn't lose Apple. They walked away.

💰 The Deal Structure

Sources tell the Financial Times that Apple's Gemini deal is a cloud contract where Apple pays Google several billion dollars. But here's the kicker: a source says OpenAI declined to be Apple's custom model provider.

The Terms: The Information detailed how the deal works:

• Timeline: New Siri features will launch in the spring and at WWDC

• Customization: Apple can finetune Gemini for its specific use cases

• Branding: No Google branding, it'll just be "Siri" to users

• Integration: Deep hooks into Apple's ecosystem

🤔 Why OpenAI Said No

The obvious answer is that OpenAI wants to own the customer relationship. Being Apple's backend model provider means being invisible, all the compute costs, none of the brand value. ChatGPT's 800M+ users are worth more than any Apple deal.

The Less Obvious Answer: OpenAI might not have the capacity. With their "code red" declared last month and resources focused on catching up to Gemini 3, taking on Apple's scale might have been operationally impossible.

The Strategic Implication: Google now has a multi-billion-dollar contract with the world's most valuable company, deep integration into iOS, and access to Apple's feedback loops. OpenAI is independent but also faces a competitor embedded in 2 billion active devices.

Translation: Apple wanted ChatGPT. OpenAI said no. Now Google has a deal that could reshape the AI landscape. Sometimes the best move is the one that looks like a loss, and sometimes it actually is one. We'll find out which this was when Siri launches in the spring.

🛠️ Product Quick Hits: What Shipped This Week

🤝 Cowork: Turn Claude Into Your Digital Coworker: Anthropic's latest play to make Claude feel less like a chatbot and more like the colleague who actually answers Slack messages. Productivity meets AI companionship.

📧 Gmail in the Gemini Era: Google's letting you ask your inbox anything, summaries, drafts, search across years of emails. Finally, an AI feature that might actually save time instead of creating new workflows to manage.

📚 Wikipedia Enterprise Adds Microsoft, Meta, Perplexity: The Wikimedia Foundation says Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral joined Wikimedia Enterprise for "tuned" API access. Google was already a member. When everyone's training on Wikipedia, at least now they're paying for it.

📱 Mobile Apps on Replit Launches: Replit dropped the ability to vibe-code iOS apps with integrated Stripe monetization. The App Store's about to get a lot more interesting (or a lot more crowded).

👔 Personnel Quick Hits: Musical Chairs Continues

⚡ Big Tech's Energy Hiring Spree: Workforce.ai data shows Microsoft has hired 570+ people with energy-related expertise since 2022, and they're not alone. When AI companies need more power than some countries, HR becomes an infrastructure problem.

🔄 Anthropic Shakes Up C-Suite: CPO Mike Krieger will become co-lead of Anthropic's Labs incubator, and Head of Product Ami Vora will take over Krieger's duties. When your Instagram co-founder moves to an incubator, something's cooking.

🎧 Spotify's New Co-CEOs Face "Algo Fatigue": Bloomberg interviews Daniel Ek on his CEO exit and new co-CEOs Gustav Söderström and Alex Norström, who inherit a platform where artists are angry and users are tired of algorithmic recommendations.

🌟 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

This week crystallized something that's been building for months: the AI race is now an infrastructure race measured in billions.

TSMC's $100B revenue year and Taiwan's $250B US commitment aren't just big numbers—they're the physical manifestation of AI's compute demands. Meanwhile, OpenAI's expansion into hardware, talent raids, and Altman's $252M BCI bet reveal a company that's stopped thinking of itself as an AI lab and started building a vertically integrated empire.

The Apple-Google deal is the sleeper story. OpenAI turned down the world's most valuable company, betting independence is worth more than Apple's billions. One of those decisions will look brilliant in retrospect; the other will look like hubris.

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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