Nscale's IPO pitch, Khosla's robotics warning and Anthropic's discount squeeze

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AI’s price tags got a closer look this week, from a neocloud’s IPO pitch to the discounts Anthropic gives its biggest customers.

The Information’s reporters follow the money behind tech: the deals, valuations and financing decisions that decide who wins, often six to 12 months ahead of the news cycle. Subscribe for $299 and save 25% on your first year.

Here are this week’s top five finance stories.

An IPO built on data centers that don’t exist yet

Nscale is heading to the public markets on a huge contract backlog, but nearly all of it depends on data centers it hasn’t built, and its biggest customer can walk away if they’re late.

Khosla’s warning for robotics investors

Vinod Khosla is one of robotics’ biggest bulls, but he told us most robotics startups are overvalued and named the AI lab he’d bet on to build the robot “brain.”

Anthropic plays hardball on pricing

Anthropic is cutting off discounts for big customers the moment they hit their contract caps, and OpenAI is using the opening to win some of them over.

AI outgrows the old financing playbook

The AI buildout is getting so big that the people building and funding it say the old rules for financing data centers no longer hold, and they’re betting on a new set of investors to fill the gap.

Google starts paying for AI answers

Google long argued that sending traffic to publishers was payment enough, but it’s now quietly paying publishers whose work feeds its AI answers, on terms only Google can see.

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