The Briefing by Martin Peers, Jessica Lessin and the team at The Information

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The Briefing

By Martin Peers, Jessica Lessin and the team at The Information

Get smarter about the day’s news in tech, media and finance by following Silicon Valley’s most-read executive newsletter.

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Recent Editions

Photo by David Kawai/ Getty Images.

Shopify Seeks Licenses to Push Deeper Into Fintech

By Ann Gehan · Apr 30, 2026 6:00am PDT

Commerce giant Shopify is seeking regulatory approvals to take a bigger role in offering financial and payments services to the millions of merchants using its software. Shopify has already secured money transmitter licenses in more than a dozen U.S. states to hold and move funds itself, and it is seeking them nationwide. If that happens, the... Commerce giant Shopify is seeking regulatory approvals to take a bigger role in offering...

Photo by Amy Osborne/Getty Images

Artificial Intelligence

Musk Battles OpenAI Lawyer Over Claims Co-Founders Stole a Charity

By Rocket Drew · Apr 29, 2026 8:01pm PDT

The AI era’s mega-trial delivered its first real drama, as an OpenAI lawyer sought to portray Elon Musk as resentful and double-dealing during a tense cross examination Wednesday. Bill Savitt, OpenAI’s outside counsel, and a veteran of legal combat with Musk, called into question Musk’s motivations for bringing the lawsuit and sought to... The AI era’s mega-trial delivered its first real drama, as an OpenAI lawyer sought to portray...

Left to right: Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon's Andy Jassy and Google's Sundar Pichai. Getty Images.

Google Cloud and AWS Shine in Big Tech's Quarterly Update

By Martin Peers · Apr 29, 2026 5:00pm PDT

It was the Super Bowl of quarterly tech earnings today, with March-quarter results from Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta Platforms. The tsunami of numbers, all released within a few minutes of each other, might overwhelm even a top AI model. But for a human, what was clear was that surging demand for AI computing capacity is lifting cloud... It was the Super Bowl of quarterly tech earnings today, with March-quarter results from Google,...

Michael Nicolls, senior vice president for Starlink at SpaceX, during a keynote speech at MWC Barcelona 2026 in Barcelona, Spain, on Monday, March 2, 2026. Photo by Angel Garcia/Getty Images

SpaceX’s Starlink Revenue Per User Fell 18% As Customers Quadrupled

By Valida Pau and Theo Wayt · Apr 29, 2026 10:53am PDT

Michael Nicolls, senior vice president for Starlink at SpaceX, during a keynote speech at MWC Barcelona 2026 in Barcelona, Spain, on Monday, March 2, 2026. Photo by Angel Garcia/Getty Images

SpaceX’s Starlink Revenue Per User Fell 18% As Customers Quadrupled

By Valida Pau and Theo Wayt · Apr 29, 2026 10:53am PDT

SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service quadrupled its individual subscribers between 2023 and 2025—but the average revenue each subscriber brought in fell 18% to $81 a month in that period, a draft version of SpaceX’s initial public offering prospectus shows. The decline in Starlink’s ARPU reflects the service’s introduction of... SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service quadrupled its individual subscribers between 2023...

Craig Warga/The Information.

The Information Finance

The Hidden Risks in AI Funding

By Guest · Apr 29, 2026 8:34am PDT · 1 comment

Bankers and investors, especially when they are sitting in front of an audience, are not shy about offering their opinions. Yet when I asked a panel of money types at our Financing the AI Revolution conference on Monday about risks in the current market, I got near silence.We had been discussing the billions of investment dollars pouring into... Bankers and investors, especially when they are sitting in front of an audience, are not shy...

Art by Mike Sullivan

XAI Shows How Hard It Is to Use a Lot of GPUs at Once

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Apr 29, 2026 7:05am PDT

AI developers have been desperately scrambling to get ahold of Nvidia server chips lately, as we wrote last week. When developers do get the graphics processing units, they’re under a lot of pressure to wring as much performance as possible from that expensive hardware.That’s easier said than done. Training AI models can be “bursty,” meaning... AI developers have been desperately scrambling to get ahold of Nvidia server chips lately, as we...

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz. Michael Nagle/Bloomberg/Getty Images.

CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks Are Underappreciated AI Cybersecurity Bets

By Anita Ramaswamy · Apr 29, 2026 6:00am PDT · 5 comments

If there was ever a time to be buying cybersecurity stocks such as CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks, this would be it. A spate of hacks has hit high-flying startups this month, including data-labeling firm Mercor and software development company Vercel. Also this month, Anthropic announced it had developed an AI model, Mythos, that it deemed “... If there was ever a time to be buying cybersecurity stocks such as CrowdStrike and Palo Alto...

Art via Getty Images

The Asterisk on Benchmark’s Manus Exit

By Julia Hornstein · Apr 28, 2026 5:27pm PDT

Art via Getty Images

The Asterisk on Benchmark’s Manus Exit

By Julia Hornstein · Apr 28, 2026 5:27pm PDT

Benchmark’s investment in the startup behind the AI agent Manus drew flack last year from some venture capitalists who viewed the investment in the company, which was founded in Beijing, as a national security risk. But when Meta said in December that it was buying the startup, called Butterfly Effect, for over $2 billion, the early-stage... Benchmark’s investment in the startup behind the AI agent Manus drew flack last year from some...

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar. Lauren Justice/Bloomberg/Getty Images.

OpenAI's Wall Street Disconnect

By Martin Peers · Apr 28, 2026 5:00pm PDT

Talk about out of touch with reality. Investors slammed the tech sector on Tuesday, spurred in part by a Wall Street Journal report that OpenAI had missed some internal revenue projections. Among the biggest to take a hit were two cloud firms that depend heavily on OpenAI for business: Oracle and CoreWeave, whose stocks fell 4% and 5.8%,... Talk about out of touch with reality. Investors slammed the tech sector on Tuesday, spurred in...

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Photo by Getty.

OpenAI Sees $8 ChatGPT Driving Consumer Subscribers to 122 Million This Year

By Sri Muppidi · Apr 28, 2026 2:56pm PDT · 6 comments

For three years, OpenAI has generated most of its revenue from people paying $20 a month for subscriptions to ChatGPT. This year, it is forecasting a massive shift, expecting a cheaper, ad-supported tier will both draw new users and cause tens of millions of its paying subscribers to downgrade, according to previously undisclosed projections. ... For three years, OpenAI has generated most of its revenue from people paying $20 a month for...

Photo by Noah Berger/Getty Images

AWS Joins Superagent Race, Pushes Its Own Version of Claude Cowork

By Laura Bratton · Apr 28, 2026 11:50am PDT

Amazon Web Services has been in the spotlight this week because it can now sell OpenAI models to its cloud-server customers for the first time, thanks to a sudden change in OpenAI’s long-running partnership with Microsoft. But AWS is still chasing its white whale: creating a hit enterprise application.With that in mind, AWS on Tuesday... Amazon Web Services has been in the spotlight this week because it can now sell OpenAI models to...

Art via Getty Images

Startup Founded by Ex-Nvidia Researcher Among New World Models Endeavors

By Stephanie Palazzolo and Julia Hornstein · Apr 28, 2026 7:00am PDT

Art via Getty Images

Startup Founded by Ex-Nvidia Researcher Among New World Models Endeavors

By Stephanie Palazzolo and Julia Hornstein · Apr 28, 2026 7:00am PDT

Young startups such as Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs and Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs have raised billions of dollars in funding in the last year to develop world models. That’s the term for foundation models that approximate the physics of how objects and humans interact with their surroundings—attributes some researchers believe are key to developing... Young startups such as Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs and Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs have raised billions of...

Satya Nadella, left, and Sam Altman. Photos by Getty Images.

How Nadella and Altman Averted a Legal War Over AWS

By Aaron Holmes and Sri Muppidi · Apr 28, 2026 6:44am PDT

For years, executives at Microsoft have become accustomed to tussling with OpenAI over the terms of the companies’ complicated business partnership, which gave Microsoft exclusive rights to sell OpenAI’s technology to cloud customers. Then two months ago, the ChatGPT maker announced a surprise deal to sell its AI to businesses through Amazon, a... For years, executives at Microsoft have become accustomed to tussling with OpenAI over the terms...

Tencent headquarters in Shenzhen. Photo by Cheng Xin/Getty Images

Tencent’s New Model Shows Improvement, Partly Thanks to Anthropic

By Juro Osawa · Apr 28, 2026 6:00am PDT

Chinese tech giant Tencent’s latest AI model has generated positive reviews from developers. But the company probably owes some of that success to Anthropic. Tencent employees used Anthropic’s Claude to assist them with evaluating and fine-tuning the model, known as Hy3, to improve its performance, according to two people with direct knowledge... Chinese tech giant Tencent’s latest AI model has generated positive reviews from developers. But...

Google CEO Sundar Pichai attends a dinner with U.S. President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi in the State Dining Room at the White House on March 19, 2026 in Washington, DC. Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Google Signs Classified AI Deal With Pentagon Amid Employee Opposition

By Erin Woo · Apr 27, 2026 9:55pm PDT · 1 comment

Google and the Department of Defense signed a deal allowing the Pentagon to use Google’s AI models on classified work, according to a person with knowledge of the situation. The agreement allows the Pentagon to use Google’s AI for “any lawful government purpose,” according to the person—echoing language that has been controversial in other... Google and the Department of Defense signed a deal allowing the Pentagon to use Google’s AI...

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Sven Hoppe/Getty Images.

Microsoft Comes Out of OpenAI Deal a Winner; Risks in AI Financing

By Martin Peers · Apr 27, 2026 5:00pm PDT

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Sven Hoppe/Getty Images.

Microsoft Comes Out of OpenAI Deal a Winner; Risks in AI Financing

By Martin Peers · Apr 27, 2026 5:00pm PDT

Microsoft and OpenAI had big news this morning but before we dive into that, it's fair to say there’s a lot of excitement among investors (and reporters!) about the upcoming SpaceX IPO. But some people have a refreshingly realistic assessment of the situation. “There’s a trillion ways this can go wrong,” said Ashley MacNeill, co-head of capital... Microsoft and OpenAI had big news this morning but before we dive into that, it's fair to say...

Vista Equity Partners' Ashley MacNeill speaking at The Information's AI financing event. On her right is Michael Harris from the NYSE Group and to her left is Jon Redmond from Discovery capital. Photo by Craig Warga.

Financing the AI Revolution

SpaceX and AI IPOs Hold Risks for AI Buildout, Say Investors at AI Event

By The Information Staff · Apr 27, 2026 4:40pm PDT

With AI and big tech firms seeking to raise hundreds of billions in equity and debt this year to build data centers, any high-profile misstep could throw the broader AI boom off track. That includes the potential public debuts of SpaceX and possibly AI firms Anthropic and OpenAI. Poor performance from those initial public offerings could dampen... With AI and big tech firms seeking to raise hundreds of billions in equity and debt this year to...

Art via Getty Images

AI Infrastructure

Startup GridCare Aims to Tap Hidden Power Capacity

By Ann Davis Vaughan · Apr 27, 2026 8:00am PDT

Power scarcity is all anyone talks about in the AI world. Funny how we actually have plenty.GridCare, which emerged last year from a Stanford University sustainability accelerator, has surprised AI developers and even utilities by finding power that they can tap even in congested urban markets where the grid appeared sold out.Power grids are... Power scarcity is all anyone talks about in the AI world. Funny how we actually have plenty....

Art via Getty Images

The Nuances of Cursor’s Gross Margin; Comparing GPT-5.5 and Claude Mythos

By Stephanie Palazzolo and Cory Weinberg · Apr 27, 2026 7:00am PDT

Before we get to today’s column, we’ve got an update in tech’s favorite relationship: OpenAI and Microsoft. As a result of a revision to their deal, Microsoft Azure no longer has exclusive rights to sell OpenAI models and that Microsoft no longer has to share 20% of the revenue it makes from selling OpenAI models on Azure with OpenAI. Both... Before we get to today’s column, we’ve got an update in tech’s favorite relationship: OpenAI and...

AWS CEO Matt Garman delivers a keynote address during AWS re:Invent 2025. Photo by Noah Berger/Getty Images.

OpenAI’s AWS Push Comes As Customers Embrace Rivals

By Catherine Perloff · Apr 27, 2026 6:00am PDT · 1 comment

AWS CEO Matt Garman delivers a keynote address during AWS re:Invent 2025. Photo by Noah Berger/Getty Images.

OpenAI’s AWS Push Comes As Customers Embrace Rivals

By Catherine Perloff · Apr 27, 2026 6:00am PDT · 1 comment

Amazon has touted a deal to finally bring OpenAI to its Amazon Web Services cloud unit with a new offering geared toward running AI agents. But some AWS customers have shrugged at the announcement, in part because they’ve come to rely on other model makers in the three years since OpenAI set off the AI boom. Six firms that work with AWS, either... Amazon has touted a deal to finally bring OpenAI to its Amazon Web Services cloud unit with a new...