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Here's what's been trending:
Anthropic took all of SpaceX's Colossus 1 compute and committed ~$200B to Google Cloud. SpaceX proposed a $55B Terafab.
Global chip sales hit $298.5B in Q1. Samsung reached $1T. Arm says AGI demand will 2x its prior guidance.
DeepSeek is raising $3-4B at up to $50B from China's national AI fund. NIST says it still lags US models by eight months.
OpenAI launched GPT-5.5 Instant and rolled out Ads Manager in beta. ChatGPT is now an ad platform.
Murati testified that Altman lied about safety standards for a new model. Brockman said Musk "does not know AI."
ElevenLabs added BlackRock and Nvidia to its $550M+ Series D. Blitzy raised $200M at $1.4B.
Startup Intros has a simple mission: to help tech founders navigate everything in the early-stage, from compliance to capital.
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🎁 Soft Launch: Incorporation & Accelerator Resources
Thanks for showing up!
To everyone who joined our A16Z Speedrun AMAs over the last two weeks. Thank you! Sharp questions that lead to action!
Here's what we're putting in front of you next.
1. Incorporate Your Delaware C-Corp:
Cert of Incorporation, EIN, founder stock, 83(b)
Bylaws, IP assignments, board consents
Clean cap table on day one, ready for your first SAFE
2. The Accelerator Tracker (60+ programs):
Antler Japan: $150K SAFE · May 11
Neo 2026: $750K for 1% · May 15
AngelPad: $120K for 7% · May 30
Boost VC: $500K for 15% · Jun 1
Techstars AI Healthcare Baltimore: $220K · Jun 10
🔥 Startup Intros Events Coming Up
May 12: Agentic AI Founders’ Night-Out: We are going beyond copilots and talking about the rise of Agent Orchestration! Register on Luma!
May 15: Caffeine & Capital: Our morning coffee meetup is back at Corgi Cafe in FiDi! Grab coffee, meet founders and investors & register on Luma!
🚀 Anthropic's $200B Compute Blitz
⚡ The SpaceX Deal
Anthropic signed a deal with SpaceX to use "all of the compute capacity" at Colossus 1, over 300MW of new capacity, available within the month. SpaceX confirmed and said Anthropic expressed interest in orbital compute too. Within hours, Anthropic doubled Claude Code's rate limits and removed peak-hour throttling entirely. That's how hungry they were for GPUs.
The SpaceX Capacity: Grok never grew to utilize Colossus 1. Musk's own AI company couldn't fill the data center that his rocket company is now leasing to his courtroom opponent. Let that sit for a second. He says he spent time with Anthropic employees "to understand what they do to ensure Claude is good for humanity." Weeks earlier, he called Anthropic "evil."
Not Just Leasing: SpaceX proposed spending $55B to build a Terafab chip facility in Grimes County, Texas, with a total capex of $119B. For context: TSMC's entire Arizona investment is ~$65B. Musk is building an entire silicon supply chain from scratch.
🤖 The $200B Google Commitment
Meanwhile, Anthropic plans to spend ~$200B on Google's Cloud and chips over five years, which is 40%+ of the "revenue backlog" Google disclosed last week. At Code with Claude, Dario Amodei said they planned for ~10x growth in 2026 but are tracking toward 80x. His words: "crazy" and "too hard to handle." So yes, Anthropic is now both a SpaceX customer and Google's biggest cloud client.
Where’s the Compute? Alphabet is in talks with Blackstone, KKR, and EQT to push AI models into their portfolio companies, mirroring Anthropic's and OpenAI's own PE partnerships. The labs are locking up infrastructure and distribution simultaneously.
Translation: Anthropic committed $200B to Google Cloud, took all of SpaceX's Colossus 1 compute, and says it could grow 80x this year. SpaceX is proposing a $119B chip fab. When a single AI lab's cloud spend exceeds most countries' GDP, what does the infrastructure endgame look like?
📈 The Chip Supercycle Goes Parabolic
💰 The Numbers
Every chip company beat. Here's the scorecard:
Global chip sales: $298.5B in Q1, up 25% from Q4 2025. March alone was $99.5B, up 79.2% YoY.
AMD: Q1 revenue up 38% YoY to $10.25B, above est. Data Center revenue up 57% to $5.8B. Forecasts Q2 above est. AMD jumped 15%+.
Arm: Q4 revenue up 20% to $1.5B. Says AGI CPU demand will drive $2B in sales in 2027 and 2028, over 2x its prior guidance. ARM jumped 11%+.
Super Micro: Q3 revenue up 123% to $10.24B, below est., but forecasts Q4 above est. SMCI jumped 15%+.
Samsung: Reached a $1T market cap, only the second Asian company after TSMC. Stock up 4x+ over the past year.
Micron: Passed $700B market cap after announcing its highest-capacity SSD. Up 11% in a day.
Infineon: Expects data center revenue to grow from ~€1.5B in FY2026 to €2.5B in FY2027.
🔌 The Infrastructure Build
Nvidia/Corning: Nvidia invested $500M in Corning to grow US optical connectivity capacity by 10x and expand fiber production by 50%+. The partnership will open three advanced manufacturing plants in North Carolina and Texas, creating 3,000+ jobs. Corning jumped 12%.
Hut 8: The crypto miner signed a lease worth $9.8B+ over 15 years to provide compute to a "high-investment-grade company" at its Texas campus. Bitcoin mining is now a side hustle.
Stack Infrastructure: Blue Owl Capital-owned Stack Infrastructure is considering selling all or some of its Asia data center operations in an up to $30B deal.
📊 The Market Signal
The earnings are one thing. Here's what the market is pricing in:
Apple's R&D: Apple's R&D spending hit 10.3% of revenue in Q2, up from 7.6% in Q1 and 9% in Q2 2025. R&D jumped 34% YoY while revenue grew 17%. Apple is investing in AI faster than it's growing.
Intel's Run: Intel's stock jumped 12%+ to a new all-time high on a report that Apple has had early-stage talks with Intel to produce chips for Apple's devices in the US. Apple also visited a Samsung plant in Texas to explore US chip production.
The Boom's Side Effects: Silex traded up 159% in its Stockholm IPO, the strongest European debut in five years. Samsung's union is threatening an 18-day walkout to demand 15% of operating profit. And South Korea's equity market just overtook Canada's as the world's seventh largest. The chip boom is now reshaping labor markets and national stock rankings.
Translation: Global chip sales hit $99.5B in March alone, up 79% YoY. Samsung is worth $1T. AMD's data center revenue grew 57%. Arm says AGI demand will 2x its prior guidance. When every company in the semiconductor supply chain is beating estimates, who's left to be skeptical?
🇨🇳 DeepSeek Eyes $50B
💰 The Raises
DeepSeek is in talks to raise $3-4B led by the Big Fund, China's largest state-backed chip fund, at a valuation of up to $50B. FT sources put it at ~$45B. Either way, DeepSeek becomes China's most valuable AI company by a wide margin. When the national chip fund leads your round, you're not a startup anymore. You're infrastructure.
Not Just DeepSeek: Moonshot raised ~$2B at $20B+ led by Meituan's venture arm, with ARR hitting $200M in April. Two Chinese AI startups are raising multi-billion-dollar rounds in a single week.
The Performance Gap: NIST's CAISI evaluation indicates that DeepSeek V4 Pro lags leading US models by about 8 months. It's also the most capable Chinese AI model to date. Eight months is both a real gap and a closing one.
🏭 The Self-Sufficiency Push
The money tells one story. The hardware tells another. China is targeting 70%+ domestic silicon wafers by year-end, with an unspoken mandate to use local 12-inch wafers. Huawei projects $12B in AI chip revenue for 2026 (up 60% from 2025). And DeepSeek V4 is optimized for Huawei Ascend chips. The stack is coming together.
🤝 The Diplomatic Track
Here's the Twist: While both sides pour state capital into their AI champions, the US and China are considering formal talks about AI security risks. Scott Bessent is leading the US side; Trump and Xi meet next week. It would be the first bilateral channel for AI governance.
Translation: DeepSeek and Moonshot raised a combined ~$5B from Chinese backers in one week, while NIST says the performance gap is eight months. China is mandating domestic wafers, and Huawei chip revenue is up 60%. The US and China are considering AI security talks. When both sides are funding their AI champions with state-level capital, does diplomacy keep pace?
🤖 OpenAI's Week of Contradictions
🧠 The Product: GPT-5.5 Instant
OpenAI launched GPT-5.5 Instant, replacing GPT-5.3 as ChatGPT's default. The pitch: 52.5% fewer hallucinated claims "on high-stakes prompts covering medicine, law, and finance." The same week, OpenAI rolled out Ads Manager in beta to US advertisers, cost-per-impression, cost-per-click, and the whole playbook. ChatGPT is now an ad platform.
The Agent Phone: Ming-Chi Kuo reports OpenAI is fast-tracking a dedicated AI agent phone targeting mass production in H1 2027. The company that started as a research lab now wants to be a hardware company, an ad platform, and a $50B-a-year compute buyer simultaneously.
⚖️ The Testimony
The Numbers: Brockman testified OpenAI expects to spend $50B on computing in 2026, up from ~$30M in 2017. They told investors they'd spend ~$600B by 2030. Oh, and his stake is now worth nearly $30B.
The Murati Bombshell: Mira Murati testified that Altman lied to her about safety standards for a new model and made her work more difficult. This is the most damaging internal testimony yet, from the former CTO who helped build the thing.
The Zilis Defense: Shivon Zilis testified that her relationship with Musk didn't influence her duties as an OpenAI board member; she left in 2023 after Musk started xAI. Brockman said Musk "knows rockets, he knows electric cars," but "does not know AI."
💸 The Business Tension
The marketing says 52.5% fewer hallucinations. The testimony says Altman lied about safety. That gap is the entire story.
The Scale: Compute spend: $30M in 2017, $50B in 2026. That's 1,667x in nine years. Brockman's stake: $0 to $30B. The nonprofit is now spending more on compute than most countries spend on defense.
Translation: OpenAI launched ads in ChatGPT the same week its former CTO testified that Altman lied about safety. It's spending $50B on compute this year while claiming 52.5% fewer hallucinations. When the product is getting safer, and the business is getting more aggressive simultaneously, which trend defines what OpenAI actually is?
🚀 Product Launch Quick Hits
Google Gemma 4 Multi-Token Prediction: Speculative decoding drafters for Gemma 4 that guess future tokens for up to 3x faster inference.
Google AI Mode "Expert Advice": AI Overviews now surfaces firsthand perspectives from Reddit and social media, presented as "Expert Advice."
xAI Grok 4.3: "Always-on reasoning," 1M token context window, low API pricing, plus a voice cloning suite called Custom Voices.
Subquadratic SubQ: LLM with sparse attention architecture enabling a 12M-token context window; launched with a $29M seed.
Apple iOS 27 Third-Party AI: Apple plans to let users choose from third-party AI models for text generation and editing across Apple Intelligence.
Google Chrome Gemini Nano: Chrome silently installs a ~4GB Gemini Nano model on desktop; Google says users can remove it via settings.
Google Project Mariner Shutdown: Google quietly shuts down its Chrome AI agent that navigated and completed tasks, after highlighting it at I/O 2025.
Spotify Save to Spotify: Command-line tool that lets AI agents upload AI-generated audio summaries and personal podcasts to a user's Spotify account.
AWS Bedrock AgentCore Payments: Partners with Coinbase and Stripe to enable AI agents to execute transactions using stablecoins.
Google Fitbit Air: $100 Whoop-like screenless wearable with Gemini-powered Health Coach; Google rebrands Fitbit Premium as Google Health Premium at $99.99/yr.
👔 Personnel Quick Hits
LinkedIn CEO leads Microsoft Work Group: Ryan Roslansky will lead the new Work Experiences Group, including Teams, after 35-year vet Rajesh Jha retired.
Coinbase cuts ~700 jobs (14%): CEO Brian Armstrong says "AI is changing how we work."
Freshworks cuts 11% (~500 jobs): CRM company navigating AI disruptions; FRSH down 20%+ in 2026.
PayPal plans ~20% workforce cut: New CEO pursuing turnaround; Q1 revenue up 7% to $8.4B but planning $1.5B+ in savings.
DeepL cuts ~25% (~250 staff): AI translation startup says adapting to AI "means fewer layers" and "faster decisions."
Google DeepMind unionizes: UK-based workers voted to unionize with CWU and Unite, representing 1K+ staff, amid the US DOD deal.
Boston Dynamics C-suite exodus: A slew of top execs have left the Hyundai-owned company as it faces pressure to speed delivery of humanoids.
Scale AI wins $500M DOD contract: Through the Chief Digital and AI Office to help sift data and assist decision-making, after a $100M deal in 2025.
🌟 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.
🚀 Thanks for joining the A16Z Speedrun AMAs.
Two things for the founders who showed up:
→ Incorporate your Delaware C-Corp: And get your EIN, founder stock, 83(b); all in one workspace. Start →
→ Accelerator Tracker: 19 programs closing in the next 90 days, sorted by deadline. See the list →
From day zero to term sheet.
💭 Parting Thoughts
$200B cloud commitments. $119B chip fabs. $50B annual compute budgets. ~$5B raised by Chinese labs in a single week. The numbers are so large that they keep losing meaning.
At some point, the only question left is: does the AI actually work well enough to justify it? OpenAI says 52.5% fewer hallucinations.
That's progress. But it's not proof.
Till next time!
 | Dev Chandra |
Startup Intros Trending Thursday: Your trusted source for founder-investor insights, delivered with clarity and focus.