| |  | Apr 03, 2026 | | | | | Supported by |  | | | | | | Friday is here! Blackstone agrees to buy 49% in data center firm Rowan. OpenAI buys tech podcast TBPN. The Department of Defense appeals a federal judge's order to temporarily halt the Pentagon's designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk.
| | | | Blackstone, the world's largest alternative asset manager, agreed to acquire a 49% stake in Rowan Digital Infrastructure, a five-year-old data center developer based in Denver, The Information reported Thursday. The agreement—which follows a report by The Information last week that Blackstone was nearing a deal for Rowan—would likely value the data center company at about $3.8 billion not including debt. Blackstone is expected to gain strong control rights, according to one of the people. Blackstone wasn't the only suitor for Rowan. The data center company's owner, private equity firm Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners, had been in advanced discussions to sell a stake in Rowan to investment firm Sixth Street, but Sixth Street backed out last month, according to one of the people. | | | | OpenAI has acquired "TBPN," the popular tech news talk show that has become a hit over the last year with an enthusiastic embrace of AI and Silicon Valley. OpenAI didn't say how much it had paid for "TBPN," which was reportedly on track for $60 million in revenue this year. "TBPN" will have editorial independence from OpenAI, the company said in a statement, while the show's co-hosts, John Coogan and Jordi Hays, will report to Chris Lehane, OpenAI's chief global affairs officer, who is responsible for helping shape the startup's public image. The deal for "TBPN" comes at a time when OpenAI is feeling pressured by increased competition from Google and Anthropic and just weeks after it had said it would do fewer projects away from its core business, a decision that included shuttering its once-buzzy Sora video app. | | | | The Department of Defense on Thursday appealed a federal judge's order to temporarily halt the Pentagon's designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk. The appeal was expected; Judge Rita Lin's preliminary injunction from last week included a seven-day administrative stay giving the Pentagon time to appeal. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will review Lin's order and either decide to uphold it or overturn it. The Pentagon declared Anthropic a supply chain risk after contract talks between the two broke down over Anthropic's refusal to drop safeguards in its AI. In her order granting the preliminary injunction, Lin wrote that the supply chain risk designation was "likely both contrary to law and arbitrary and capricious." While the Ninth Circuit reviews the order, the preliminary injunction may still go into effect on Thursday night, unless the Pentagon files—and is granted—a motion for an emergency stay of the injunction. The Pentagon is required to submit a questionnaire about the appeal to the Ninth Circuit court by April 7, and an opening brief by April 30. Anthropic must submit a reply to that brief by May 28. In any case, it's not clear that the injunction would result in actual changes to Anthropic's use in the military supply chain. The Pentagon also declared Anthropic a supply chain risk under a separate statute, which has not been paused; Anthropic is challenging that designation in a separate case in the Court of Appeals in the D.C. Circuit. But, the injunction could reassure other companies that they would not face repercussions for working with Anthropic. | | | | OpenAI's CEO of AGI Deployment, Fidji Simo, strongly believes that the company should stay out of social media, a business she knows intimately from her time running Facebook for Meta Platforms, The Information reported on Thursday. That's in contrast to CEO Sam Altman, who has in the past pushed for social media-related products like OpenAI's Sora video app and an X-like social feed in ChatGPT. Though Simo has become well known at the company for her desire to cut "side quests," the executive was a key figure behind a deal announced on Thursday to acquire popular daily tech podcast TBPN, which was so unexpected that some OpenAI employees thought it was a belated April Fools' joke, The Information reported. Simo came up with the idea earlier this year, shortly after OpenAI's previous chief communications officer, Hannah Wong, had left. The decision came as OpenAI had suffered some public relations missteps in recent months. Simo believed that the deal would help the company come up with new ways to communicate its mission and the impact and applications of its technology to the public, The Information reported. | | | | Tesla delivered 358,000 vehicles in the first quarter, a 6% year-over-year increase, the company said in a filing on Thursday. Deliveries in the first quarter were still lower than the same periods in 2023 and 2024, according to Tesla's disclosures. They also undershot an analyst consensus projection published by Tesla last week, which had forecast 367,000 deliveries. The first-quarter deliveries represent a 14% decline from the fourth quarter of 2025, though the last three months of the year are typically the strongest for vehicle sales. Tesla shares were down 4% early Thursday. The slight year-over-year rebound in vehicle sales comes as CEO Elon Musk says he's shifting Tesla's focus to humanoid robots and the driverless Cybercab vehicle, but the company has yet to start selling either product. Musk had said previously that Tesla would "show off" a new version of Optimus in the first quarter, but that did not happen. | | | | Microsoft on Thursday released three new AI models, building on the small but growing catalog of models it has trained internally as it aims to become more self-sufficient in AI. The three models are called MAI-Transcribe-1, MAI-Voice-1, and MAI-Image-2, and are meant to transcribe audio, have spoken conversations, and create images, respectively. Microsoft is aiming to develop in-house models that are comparable to cutting edge models from OpenAI and Anthropic, which the company currently uses to power most of the AI features in its Copilot AI products. That effort has been led since early 2024 by Mustafa Suleyman, who Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella hired to lead the company's consumer AI efforts while paying $600 million to license the technology of Suleyman's startup Inflection. But progress on the models so far has been a mixed bag; while Suleyman has touted image-generating models that his unit created, he has yet to produce a publicly available, general-purpose AI model that can generate text or computer code, similar to ChatGPT or Claude. Suleyman said in August that his unit was making such a model available to some developers to test; but that model, MAI-1-preview, has yet to be made publicly available. Last month, Nadella curtailed Suleyman's purview—he now oversees just foundation model training, while other parts of Microsoft's consumer AI business have been reassigned to other executives. | | | | Amazon is in talks to acquire satellite company Globalstar, which provides backup texting services for iPhones, the Financial Times reported. The move would bolster Amazon's efforts to compete with SpaceX, which has also considered buying Globalstar. Any acquisition of Globalstar would be complicated because Apple owns a 20% stake in the company following a $1.5 billion investment in 2024. As part of the deal, Globalstar is required to use 85% of its capacity to power iPhone services, which include backup texting in dead zones. The Information reported last year that Globalstar wants to sell itself for more than $10 billion. Globalstar shares spiked 8% on Thursday, giving the company a market capitalization of $9.7 billion. Buying Globalstar would give Amazon access to mobile spectrum rights that could help it build a competitor to SpaceX's Starlink Mobile service. SpaceX is spending about $20 billion on spectrum licenses from Echostar to operate the service. While Amazon plans to compete with Starlink's core business of beaming internet to consumer terminals starting later this year, it has not announced plans for a direct-to-cell service. | | | | A Salesforce executive who oversaw its flagship AI tool, Agentforce, has left the company for up-and-coming rival Sierra, an AI startup founded by OpenAI chair and former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor. The executive, Eric Eyken-Sluyters, will serve as Sierra's president of field operations, leading its global sales, sales engineering and partnerships teams. Eyken-Sluyters had been working at Salesforce since 2002, starting as a sales engineer and working his way up to several executive roles across multiple teams in the past decade. Valued at $10 billion as of late 2025, Sierra builds AI agents for customer service, competing head-on with Salesforce's Agentforce application. Sierra has courted and signed deals with some of Salesforce's customers, my colleagues reported last year, sparking an intense rivalry between the companies. Just as Sierra has continued raising capital and garnering attention in the software sector, Salesforce is under pressure as investors worry over how AI could disrupt the industry. Salesforce shares have dropped nearly 30% so far in 2026. | | | | | | | | | Opportunities Empower your teams to stay ahead of market trends with the most trusted tech journalism.
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