 | Jun 13, 2025 | | | | | | TGIF! Meta Platforms finalizes a deal to invest $14.3 billion in Scale AI. Google Cloud experiences a significant global outage. A senior U.S. official says China's Huawei has limited capacity to produce AI chips this year.
| | | | Meta Platforms on Thursday finalized a deal to invest $14.3 billion in Scale AI, according to a Scale spokesperson. Through the deal, Meta will acquire a 49% stake in the data labeling startup. Scale said in a statement that the investment round will value the company at $29 billion, including the money invested. As part of the deal, Scale CEO Alexandr Wang will join Meta and work on its efforts in superintelligence, or the idea that AI could surpass the abilities of the human brain. In recent months, as Meta has struggled with AI, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has increasingly consulted Wang for advice and the two have become closer. Wang will continue to serve on the Scale board of directors. The company's board appointed Jason Droege, Scale's chief strategy officer, to serve as its interim CEO. "As part of this, we will deepen the work we do together producing data for AI models and Alexandr Wang will join Meta to work on our superintelligence efforts," Meta said in a statement. "We will share more about this effort and the great people joining this team in the coming weeks." In its statement, Scale said it will distribute the proceeds from Meta's investment to Scale shareholders and vested equity holders. | | | | Google Cloud on Thursday experienced a major outage that impacted several services globally, according to a Google website tracking the status of its products. The Google Cloud dashboard indicated that the Google Cloud Console—a main interface where customers access the Google Cloud platform—identity and access management services, and its storage product were down, among other products. By early afternoon Pacific Time, Google said on the dashboard that the issue was fixed in "some locations" but that there was no estimate on when it would be fully resolved. Google spokespeople did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In the meantime, companies using Google to host their websites, such as the AI startup Julius AI, started posting publicly and notifying customers that their services were down. Google has sought to catch up with Amazon and Microsoft in cloud computing, or hosting web services on remote servers, where it is still third in the market. Google Cloud recently scored a win with a deal to rent AI chip servers to OpenAI, Reuters first reported. | | | | A senior U.S. official said Huawei Technologies, China's leading chip developer, has limited capacity to produce artificial intelligence chips this year, suggesting that U.S. restrictions on the export of chip manufacturing equipment to China are proving effective. U.S. Commerce Under Secretary Jeffrey Kessler said at a congressional hearing that Huawei won't be able to manufacture more than 200,000 Ascend AI chips in 2025. Huawei's AI chip output is far from sufficient, given China's booming domestic demand. In 2024, Nvidia sold over 1 million H20 chips to China, according to SemiAnalysis. "We shouldn't take too much comfort in the fact that China's production of these advanced chips is relatively small, because we know they have global ambitions," Kessler said. Huawei's Ascend chips are gaining market share in China, especially after U.S. export controls banned Nvidia from selling advanced AI chips to China. But Huawei's ability to supply AI chips is limited by U.S. restrictions on key chip manufacturing equipment. Those restrictions affect Huawei as well as its Chinese chip manufacturing partner, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Company. | | | | AI software provider Databricks expects annualized revenue to reach $3.7 billion by next month, up 50% from last year, according to a company spokesperson. The growth suggests that Databricks is benefiting as more large companies invest in building AI applications from their business data. Databricks didn't specify how much of the $3.7 billion will come from generative AI products versus traditional machine learning and data science offerings. Snowflake executives have told staff they want to reach $100 million in annual recurring revenue from sales of generative AI products by the close of the company's fiscal year ending in January, as we reported last month. It's also unclear when Databricks, valued at $62 billion after a funding round early this year, will have its long-awaited IPO. Until that happens, direct comparisons with Snowflake, its public-traded rival, will be tough to make. Snowflake generated nearly $3.5 billion in product revenue (the primary metric it shares with investors) for the 12 months to January 31, up 30% from the previous year. Databricks told investors late last year that it expects sales to grow more than 40% in 2025 and 2026, which would mean its sales will be around $5.4 billion by the year that ends in January 2027. That would make Databricks as big as Snowflake that year, according to FactSet estimates. | | | | Tesla sued a former robotics engineer who launched his own robotics startup shortly after leaving the company last year, accusing him of stealing confidential information about Tesla's Optimus humanoid robot. The company alleged that Zhongjie "Jay" Li, who worked on the hands of the robot, downloaded information onto two personal smartphones a week before incorporating his own company, Proception, Inc, according to the complaint filed Wednesday in a San Francisco Federal Court. Proception's hands "bear a striking resemblance to the designs Li worked on at Tesla," the complaint said. Li did not respond to a request for comment. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has bet the company's future on two major artificial intelligence projects: humanoid robots and driverless cars. The head of Optimus, Milan Kovac, announced his departure last week. | | | | Dalton Caldwell, a managing partner at Y Combinator and one of the longest serving partners at the accelerator, is leaving after over twelve years to start a venture capital firm to back early-stage companies, according to two people with direct knowledge of the discussions. Caldwell will make Series A investments into AI businesses and use artificial intelligence when filtering through startups, according to one of those people. Y Combinator had a growth fund for several years that invested in more mature companies, but discontinued it in 2023. Caldwell, who is transitioning to a partner emeritus role at Y Combinator, is starting the firm with Paul Buchheit, a partner emeritus at Y Combinator and one of the creators of Gmail, as well as Bryan Berg, a staff software engineer at Stripe. The departures and fund efforts have not been previously reported. | | | | BlackRock set an ambitious $400 billion fundraising target for its private investment business, part of its plans to double its market capitalization to $280 billion by 2030. The world's biggest asset manager aspires to generate at least $35 billion a year in revenue by 2030, compared with $20 billion in 2024, according to a presentation posted on its website Thursday ahead of its investor day. This goal is largely fueled by hopes that BlackRock's private markets business, plus its business selling data and portfolio management technology, will generate 30% of revenue, up from 15% at the end of last year. BlackRock has spent $28 billion over the past year on acquiring private-asset firms including Global Infrastructure Partners, private credit shop HPS Investment Partners and data provider Preqin to muscle deeper into private market investing long dominated by buyout shops like KKR and Blackstone. | | | | Elon Musk's SpaceX demolished a former United Launch Alliance tower in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Thursday, paving the way for a new complex that will provide a second launch site for its largest rocket, Starship. SpaceX is planning to launch Starship up to 76 times a year from the complex, according to an environmental review prepared by the Air Force. The rocket, which Musk hopes will eventually ferry humans to Mars, remains under development and has launched nine test flights from the company's facility in south Texas. The second site is necessary for SpaceX to eventually achieve the frequency of launches it has so far demonstrated with its workhorse Falcon 9, a considerably smaller and simpler rocket. Longtime space observers shared videos of the demolition on social media, calling it the "end of an era." The site launched ULA's Delta IV rocket, which ferried Pentagon satellites. | | | | Amazon Web Services is revamping a key cloud service for developing and running artificial intelligence in a bid to catch up to Google and Microsoft, The Information reported. AWS is preparing to make it easier for businesses to use a wider array of AI models and other software for developing AI apps such as agents, which can perform tasks like maintaining a spreadsheet to keep track of unpaid bills. The AWS effort involves beefing up the Bedrock runtime, a set of tools that lets AI apps and agents run on the cloud service. | | | | Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says he isn't threatened by the fact that his largest customers—from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft to OpenAI—are trying to build their own chips for artificial intelligence. Speaking to analysts this week in Paris, Huang said Nvidia is improving at such a fast rate that he believes most of those companies will cancel their chip projects. He reiterated that building chips for AI is quite difficult. "If it was that easy, gosh, I don't know why I am working so hard," he said. At the same time, Huang said he is excited that some of those firms have approached him about using Nvidia's networking technology to connect Nvidia graphics processing units with other chips, such as a central processing unit. These firms told Nvidia that if they can use its networking with their own chips, "we will buy everything else from you," Huang said, meaning they would standardize their data centers with Nvidia equipment. Huang previously only sold networking alongside Nvidia chips but has since changed his stance, calling the idea a "super clever strategy." | | | Popular articles
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