Tech

There’s a moment in every technological revolution when theory becomes visceral. When the PowerPoints about “productivity gains” turn into 4,000 people cleaning out their desks. On Thursday, Block — the company behind Square, Cash App, and Afterpay — delivered that moment for the AI era. CEO Jack Dorsey announced the company is slashing its workforce by roughly 40%. More than 4,000 employees gone. From over 10,000 people down to just under 6,000. The reason, stated without euphemism: “intelligence tools.” ...

Let that number sink in. One hundred and ten billion dollars. Not a country’s GDP — though it’s close to a few. Not a public company’s market cap. That’s the amount of money OpenAI just raised in a single private funding round. On Friday, OpenAI announced the largest private funding round in history — a jaw-dropping $110 billion raise that values the ChatGPT maker at $730 billion pre-money. The round is anchored by three of the biggest names in tech: Amazon ($50B), Nvidia ($30B), and SoftBank ($30B). And the round isn’t even closed yet. ...

The smartest chatbot in the world is still just a chatbot. Anthropic knows this — and it’s spending aggressively to change it. On Wednesday, Anthropic acquired Vercept, a Seattle-based startup that built AI agents capable of remotely operating a full MacBook. It’s the company’s second major acqui-hire in three months, following its December purchase of Bun (the engine behind Claude Code). The message is clear: Anthropic isn’t building a better conversation partner. It’s building a digital employee. ...

The AI cold war just got a lot colder. DeepSeek — the Chinese lab that shook the industry last year with models matching Western competitors at a fraction of the cost — has cut Nvidia and AMD out of its upcoming V4 launch. No early access. No optimization window. Instead, Huawei got a weeks-long head start to tune V4 for its own Ascend processors. This isn’t a technical decision. It’s a geopolitical signal flare. ...

The AI boom isn’t slowing down. It’s accelerating so fast that even Nvidia’s own forecasts can’t keep up. On Wednesday, Nvidia reported fiscal Q4 2026 results that didn’t just beat Wall Street estimates — they made them look quaint. Revenue hit $68.13 billion against expectations of $66.21 billion. Net income nearly doubled year-over-year to $43 billion. And then Jensen Huang’s team dropped a next-quarter forecast of $78 billion that left analysts scrambling to update their models. ...

The AI talent wars just opened a major new front. OpenAI announced Thursday that London will become its largest research hub outside the United States — a move that puts it on a direct collision course with Google DeepMind in one of the world’s richest pools of AI talent. This isn’t about opening a satellite office. It’s about who gets to build the future of AI, and where. From 30 Researchers to a Core Research Mandate OpenAI currently has about 30 researchers in London, a presence it established in 2023. The company won’t say how many new hires it plans or how much it’s investing. What it will say is that London researchers will “own key components of OpenAI’s frontier model development” — specifically safety, evaluation, alignment, and reliability. ...

If you needed proof the AI supercycle isn’t slowing down, Nvidia just handed it to you — on a $68 billion silver platter. Wednesday evening, the chipmaker reported fiscal Q4 2026 results that beat Wall Street across the board. Revenue hit $68.13 billion, blowing past the $66.21 billion consensus. Earnings per share landed at $1.62 versus the expected $1.53. Net income nearly doubled to $43 billion — in a single quarter. ...

What happens when an AI company tells the most powerful military on Earth “no”? We’re about to find out — and the answer lands Friday at 5:01 PM. The Ultimatum Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered Anthropic a blunt message on Tuesday: abandon your self-imposed ethical red lines, or face the consequences. Those consequences aren’t subtle. We’re talking about the Defense Production Act — a Cold War-era law designed to compel companies to produce goods for national security — and a “supply chain risk” designation that would effectively blacklist Anthropic from all future government work. ...

Not a Goldman Sachs research paper. Not a Fortune 500 earnings miss. A speculative thought experiment on a blogging platform — written by a firm most people had never heard of — just erased billions in market cap. DoorDash dropped 7%. American Express fell 7.2%, its worst day since April. IBM cratered 13% — worst since 2000. MongoDB and AppLovin slid 8%. The Dow shed 823 points. All because people read a scary story on the internet and two famous contrarians hit “share.” ...

Tomorrow evening, Nvidia drops the most consequential earnings report of 2026. And it’s not just about one chipmaker’s quarterly numbers — it’s the entire AI investment thesis going on trial. Nvidia isn’t a semiconductor company anymore. It’s the barometer for the AI economy. The single stock that tells you whether hundreds of billions in AI infrastructure spending are paying off or spiraling into speculative excess. With NVDA sitting at $191, a $4.62 trillion market cap, and an AI market rattled by Anthropic-triggered selloffs, the pressure is immense. ...