 | Jun 02, 2025 | | | | | | Welcome back! President Trump withdraws the nomination of Jared Isaacman, an ally of Elon Musk, as the head of NASA. A federal judge questions whether he should impose restrictions on Google's actions in AI. Nvidia is developing a new chip for China that will allow customers to connect multiple chips together.
| | | | President Donald Trump intends to withdraw the nomination of Jared Isaacman to lead NASA, an agency that is the source of some of the most lucrative contracts for SpaceX, Elon Musk's rocket company, The New York Times reported. The decision—which came after Trump learned that Isaacman had given money to prominent Democrats in the past—is a blow to Musk, who had played a major role in advocating for Isaacman's appointment to lead the space agency. Isaacman, a billionaire tech founder, had twice gone on space missions aboard SpaceX rockets before Trump nominated him to lead NASA. Isaacman's exit comes as Musk is leaving his role as an adviser to the Trump administration on its government efficiency efforts. Mr. Isaacman's nomination had already been confirmed by a Senate subcommittee and was due to be voted on by the full Senate next week. A White House spokesperson told The Times that Trump would announce a new NASA nominee soon. | | | | A federal judge questioned whether he should impose restrictions on Google's actions in AI in order to address its illegal monopoly in search, as both the government and Google made their closing arguments in the remedies phase of the Google search monopoly trial on Friday, Bloomberg reported. The judge has said that he expects to issue a ruling by August. The judge called a potential Chrome divestiture "from a judicial standpoint, a little cleaner and a little more elegant and a little less speculative" than some of the other remedies proposed, although he also questioned whether the open-source browser engine Chromium would survive a Chrome divestiture, according to the Verge. His comment seemed to suggest he was more open to the Chrome divestiture—one of a number of remedies the Department of Justice has sought—than previously believed. The government's other proposed remedies, also include restricting Google's distribution deals for its Gemini chatbot, banning Google from paying for search distribution and forcing it to share data with its rivals. Google has argued that those remedies represent a vast overreach and has proposed instead that it only be required to stop the exclusive Search distribution deals that lay at the center of Judge Amit Mehta's monopoly ruling. On Friday, Mehta asked whether there could be a middle ground on data sharing and questioned whether his remedies in the search market should harm browser makers like Mozilla, which has said it could die if Google is not allowed to pay for search, the Verge reported. In AI, Mehta asked the government to explain its position that Gemini counted as part of the search market. | | | | Nvidia is developing a new chip for China that for the first time will allow customers to connect multiple chips together to create higher-performance computing clusters, The Information reported. The move comes as the U.S. tightens restrictions on sales of advanced chips to China, though the guidelines have focused on the performance of a single chip. Nvidia has repeatedly complied with the U.S. export controls by redesigning its chips for China. However, the company, which supplies the majority of the world's AI chips, is running out of ways to rework the chips while still keeping its products competitive in China. The new chip, tentatively called the B30, will be part of a new system that can link the chips together so they can work in unison. The new product has already attracted interest from major Chinese customers like ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent. Nvidia has told customers that it plans to produce more than 1 million B30s this year. | | | | The Trump administration has chosen Palantir to be the main provider of data analytics technology to the federal government, as the firm in recent months has landed more than $113 million in software contracts with the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense and other agencies, according to The New York Times. Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency also played a role in Palantir's selection, according to the report. Musk, a close ally of Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, stepped down from his role overseeing DOGE earlier today. Musk's startup xAI wants to use data from government agencies to build AI models and applications that it could sell to government customers, as we reported earlier this week. Palantir earlier this month announced a partnership with xAI and investment firm TWG Global to help financial organizations adopt AI. Many of Palantir's federal government deals include its well-known Foundry product, which helps customers organize their data and analyze it to find ways to operate more efficiently. Government agencies could use Foundry to comply with President Trump's executive order issued in March, which requires them to share data, The New York Times reported. | | | | President Donald Trump said that "almost all" the employees with Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency are staying behind in the administration after Musk leaves this week. Trump made the comments at a joint press conference with Musk in the Oval Office Friday, during which Musk said he planned to remain a "friend and advisor" to the president. The display of unity followed reports that Musk had grown frustrated with Washington, D.C., and was unhappy about the president's tax and spending bill. It also came after several other high-ranking DOGE leaders followed Musk in leaving the administration, throwing uncertainty over who will run DOGE's day-to-day operations. Musk is leaving the administration without it getting close to the $1 trillion in savings DOGE set out to achieve. At the press conference, Musk said the stumbling blocks were "mostly just a lot of hard work," but said he believed the team could achieve the $1 trillion goal "over time." | | | | A Nokia pension plan has told some U.S. VC funds that it was selling its stakes in those funds, The Information reported on Thursday. Lexington Partners, a New York investment firm that specializes in buying VC funds and startup shares from other investors, bought some of those stakes, worth hundreds of millions of dollars each. The sale is an example of how more limited partners are cashing out of their stakes in venture funds, as initial public offerings remain rare. Family offices are also shedding fund stakes. Last year, the family office of Lee Fixel, a founder of VC firm Addition, sold dozens of stakes in early-stage funds. Some were sold at a discount of more than 50% of their value. Meanwhile, venture funds are also selling exposure to startups. Early-stage VC firm Basis Set Ventures last year sold part of its first $136 million fund in a strip sale and ended up making about five times what it originally invested, The Information reported. | | | | Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been meeting with President Donald Trump more than what's publicly known in an effort to persuade the administration to roll back restrictions on its sales to China, The Information reported. The move comes as Trump's second term has upended the dynamics of Nvidia's lobbying efforts, requiring Huang to become more engaged with U.S. officials. Huang has been traveling regularly to Mar-a-Lago, Trump's residence and private club in south Florida, as part of efforts to persuade the president to let Nvidia sell advanced AI chips to China. The U.S. has repeatedly tightened rules on chip sales to China to contain its AI development, which has hurt Nvidia's sales. The CEO has been forced to take his message directly to the president as many people in the U.S. Commerce Department have disappeared since Trump took office, making it difficult to find other channels to get this company's message across. | | | | Mary Meeker says artificial intelligence is growing faster than anything that came before it. The technology has spread rapidly across the globe and "AI leadership could beget geopolitical leadership." The most famous internet analyst of the dot-com boom era says that and a lot more in a 340 page report on AI called "Trends – Artificial intelligence." With colleagues at Bond, the venture capital firm she founded, Meeker reprises her 1996 "Internet Report," for the AI era. Like other Meeker reports, this one covers a lot of ground, including the invention of the printing press and the introduction of the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, and some things in between. It has little clear focus but provides lots of material to digest. Some of the sharper takeaways: Rising AI performance and falling costs is causing an explosion of users; momentum is growing for open-source models; ChatGPT has great expectations for its own future powers. And finally this: "AI is a compounder – on internet infrastructure, which allows for wicked-fast adoption of easy-to-use broad-interest services." | | | | Banking app Chime has discussed about an $11 billion valuation with investors ahead of its initial public offering this month, The Information reported. That would rise from the about $8 billion its bankers were discussing earlier this month, but down from the $25 billion mark at which it raised in 2021. It would be the latest in a string of venture-backed companies to go public at lower valuations than their previous private round of financing. The company expects to set an initial price range Monday for its IPO, before setting out on about a week of an investor road show. The company improved growth and profits last year, and has gotten deeper into lending its customers money. | | | | Microsoft has hired a former Biden administration official—and promoted a former Trump official—to serve in two senior legal roles as the company aims to maintain friendly relationships with both Democrats and Republicans in Washington. Microsoft hired former Biden administration lawyer Lisa Monaco to lead its global policy efforts, Microsoft president Brad Smith told Axios on Friday. The company also recently promoted CJ Mahoney, who served as a deputy trade representative during Trump's first term, to serve as the general counsel for its Azure cloud unit, Mahoney said in a post on LinkedIn. Mahoney has been a part of Microsoft's legal org since 2021. The moves show Microsoft's willingness to forge ties with members of both political parties. While the company worked closely with the Biden administration on topics like the government's use of cybersecurity software and expanding data centers, Smith told The Information last year that he also sees Trump's presidency as an opportunity to expand Microsoft's access to energy resources for its data center buildout and to sell more AI software to the government. | | | Popular articles By Wayne Ma and Aaron Tilley
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