🪴 Last Week in Tech
Cerebras IPO'd at $95B, Trump took Jensen to Beijing, and Claude is telling people to go to sleep
ICYMI, reading time: 4 minutes
Trump flew to Beijing with the entire US tech industry
Jensen Huang wasn’t on the manifest. Trump called him during a refuelling stop in Anchorage and he got on the plane. He then snuck off for a solo noodle run through a Beijing hutong and got mobbed.
Nvidia got the green light to sell H200 chips to China. The summit ended with Trump and Xi on a private stroll through Zhongnanhai. Xi offered rose seeds. Trump said “these are the most beautiful roses anyone’s ever seen.”
Cerebras IPO’d at $95B; biggest US tech IPO since Uber in 2019
The AI chipmaker priced at $185, opened at $350, and closed up 68% on its first day. Raised $5.55 billion. Only Alibaba and Facebook have ever closed their IPO day above $100B. Cerebras just missed.
It makes dinner-plate-sized chips with 4 trillion transistors on a single piece of silicon. Claims they run faster than Nvidia GPUs. Has a $20B deal with OpenAI. Two new billionaires minted on Thursday.
Europe is building its own frontier AI labs
Three labs founded by ex-DeepMind and Meta researchers have raised $2.6 billion this year, all in London or Paris.
Ineffable Intelligence, founded by the man behind AlphaGo, raised $1.1 billion in seed funding. Largest seed round in European history. Mission: “make first contact with superintelligence.”
Recursive Superintelligence, four months old, raised $650 million.
Yann LeCun left Meta and raised $1 billion in Paris.
Nvidia partnered with Ineffable this week to build the infrastructure for all of it.
Helsing is raising $1.2B at an $18B valuation
The Munich-based AI drone startup backed by Spotify’s Daniel Ek is becoming Europe’s answer to Anduril. Active drone contracts with the German military. Supplying AI to Ukraine since 2022. Round oversubscribed multiple times.
Musk wanted 90% of OpenAI and the right to pass it to his kids
Sam Altman testified in court this week. Ilya Sutskever said he had evidence of “a consistent pattern of lying” by Altman.
OpenAI is now at $25B annualised revenue. Anthropic at $19B. IPO signals getting louder.
Foxconn got ransomwared
They make hardware for Apple, Google and Nvidia. The whole supply chain is exposed. Also this week: the first confirmed case of criminal actors using AI to discover a zero-day in the wild. Google blocked it.
Samsung’s 45,000 workers are about to go on strike
An 18-day strike starts May 21 over unequal bonuses tied to AI-driven memory chip profits. Analysts estimate $14-21 billion in potential operating profit at risk. Samsung makes memory chips for every AI data center on earth. Watch this one.
Google and SpaceX are in talks to put data centers in orbit
First launch planned for 2027. Anthropic is separately in talks with SpaceX about the same thing. The economics don’t work yet but land, power and planning permission on Earth are running out.
Your brain has spare capacity nobody knew existed
MIT neuroscientists found millions of “silent synapses” in the adult brain. Dormant connections that activate when new learning calls them into action. The adult brain was assumed to be largely fixed after development. This rewrites that.
Separately, researchers found that everyday speech patterns, the pauses, the “ums,” the moments where a word won’t come, are closely tied to executive function. Your speech is a live readout of your cognitive health.
Claude keeps telling users to go to sleep mid-session
Users reported Claude spontaneously ending conversations by suggesting they rest, take breaks, or go to sleep. Nobody at Anthropic can fully explain why it keeps doing it. Fortune ran the story. It’s strange and extremely on brand.
Tokens are expensive, i guess.
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The speed of AI, chips, and infrastructure right now feels less like a tech cycle and more like a global power race