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

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Recent Editions

The Best New Places for a Tech Holiday Party

By Jemima McEvoy · Oct 18, 2025 6:19am PDT · 2 comments

Many in tech have seen plenty of reasons to celebrate lately—with AI valuations soaring and paydays getting bigger and bigger. And pretty soon it’ll be time to consider the all-important event for tying a ribbon around the year: the holiday party, with the most-prized venues filling up in the next few weeks. The audacious blowouts of the... Many in tech have seen plenty of reasons to celebrate lately—with AI valuations soaring and...

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. Getty Images

What Microsoft Could Teach Oracle

By Martin Peers · Oct 17, 2025 3:00pm PDT · 1 comment

Was it something they said? Oracle shares fell 7% on Friday, a day after the software and cloud firm offered investors bullish growth projections for the next five years, both for revenue and for profits. In Oracle’s ideal world, those projections would have put to rest concerns about the cost of its artificial intelligence cloud expansion,... Was it something they said? Oracle shares fell 7% on Friday, a day after the software and cloud...

Art by Clark Miller

Moneyball for Minors: Inside the Booming Business of Youth Sports Apps

By Sara Germano · Oct 17, 2025 9:00am PDT · 3 comments

Lauren Drapp has a hectic job working as a gas scheduler for a private equity firm in Houston, triangulating natural gas between suppliers, pipelines and customers. But she’s arguably even busier as a mother of young athletes: Her two daughters, ages 12 and 13, play on club volleyball and softball teams, each traveling some eight times a year to... Lauren Drapp has a hectic job working as a gas scheduler for a private equity firm in Houston,...

Left to right: Broadcom CEO Hock Tan, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, AMD CEO Lisa Su. Art: Shane Burke. Photos: Getty

Nvidia, Broadcom and AMD Face New Risks From OpenAI Deals

By Anita Ramaswamy · Oct 17, 2025 6:00am PDT · 3 comments

Left to right: Broadcom CEO Hock Tan, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, AMD CEO Lisa Su. Art: Shane Burke. Photos: Getty

Nvidia, Broadcom and AMD Face New Risks From OpenAI Deals

By Anita Ramaswamy · Oct 17, 2025 6:00am PDT · 3 comments

The deals keep coming for semiconductor firms and OpenAI. In the past month, Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and Broadcom have each reached very different agreements to supply chips to OpenAI. The arrangements open up all three to the risk that OpenAI, which expects to burn $115 billion through 2029, can’t afford to keep its commitments. The... The deals keep coming for semiconductor firms and OpenAI. In the past month, Nvidia, Advanced...

Oracle co-CEO Clay Magouyrk. Getty Images

Oracle’s Hypergrowth Forecasts

By Martin Peers · Oct 16, 2025 5:00pm PDT

Bearish sentiment about the cost-benefit equation of artificial intelligence has become so prevalent lately that it almost feels like conventional wisdom is now skepticism. But that certainly isn’t the case at Oracle, the nearly 50-year-old enterprise software firm turned cloud provider, which declared itself today to be a “hypergrowth company,”... Bearish sentiment about the cost-benefit equation of artificial intelligence has become so...

Alex Ferrara, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. Photo courtesy of Paul Clarke for Resilience Media.

Bessemer Bets on War Worries in Europe

By Cory Weinberg · Oct 16, 2025 2:38pm PDT

The name of Bessemer Venture Partners is tied closely with the cloud software boom of the 2010s. The backer of Twilio, Shopify and Zoom even created its own Nasdaq index of cloud software companies, which I look at often to track the ups and downs of the market.But it’s not a good time to be a software investor. That index of cloud stocks has... The name of Bessemer Venture Partners is tied closely with the cloud software boom of the 2010s....

Oracle Chair Larry Ellison. Image via Getty

Oracle Assures Investors on AI Cloud Margins as It Struggles to Profit From Older Nvidia Chips

By Anissa Gardizy · Oct 16, 2025 2:15pm PDT · 1 comment

Oracle on Thursday sought to reassure investors that its business of renting out servers packed with Nvidia chips to OpenAI, Meta and other artificial intelligence developers will become far more profitable as revenue surges. Oracle co-CEO Clay Magouyrk told financial analysts Thursday that the company’s AI data center business, which is mostly... Oracle on Thursday sought to reassure investors that its business of renting out servers packed...

Dell Founder, Chairman and CEO Michael Dell. Photo via Getty Images

What We Learned From Salesforce’s Dreamforce; Using OpenAI and Anthropic For Different Tasks

By Kevin McLaughlin and Jing Yang · Oct 16, 2025 11:06am PDT

Dell Founder, Chairman and CEO Michael Dell. Photo via Getty Images

What We Learned From Salesforce’s Dreamforce; Using OpenAI and Anthropic For Different Tasks

By Kevin McLaughlin and Jing Yang · Oct 16, 2025 11:06am PDT

Welcome back!Salesforce is shifting its artificial intelligence strategy to boost flagging growth as even CEO Marc Benioff this week acknowledged a gap between the technology’s capabilities and corporate customers’ willingness to buy it, Erin and I reported Wednesday. At its annual Dreamforce event for customers in San Francisco, we were... Welcome back!Salesforce is shifting its artificial intelligence strategy to boost flagging growth...

Illustration by Mike Sullivan; Getty Images

XAI’s Unusual Dealmaking to Fund Musk’s Colossus 2

By Theo Wayt and Miles Kruppa · Oct 16, 2025 10:02am PDT · 3 comments

Elon Musk’s xAI is aiming to build and control the world’s most powerful data center and a massive natural gas plant to power it. The scale of the project and xAI’s precarious finances are forcing the company into unusual financial arrangements that rely on outsiders to raise funding and shoulder much of the risk. XAI wants to have as much... Elon Musk’s xAI is aiming to build and control the world’s most powerful data center and a...

Sam Altman. Getty Images.

OpenAI’s Growing Ecosystem Play

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Oct 16, 2025 7:00am PDT · 2 comments

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on a podcast last week that he wanted ChatGPT to become “people’s personal AI subscription.” The company last week made moves toward that goal with “apps in ChatGPT,” which lets people use the chatbot to search for homes on Zillow or make Spotify playlists, for instance.In another example, OpenAI has pitched companies... OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on a podcast last week that he wanted ChatGPT to become “people’s...

Left to right: Microsoft's Satya Nadella and Amy Hood, OpenAI's Sam Altman. Art: Shane Burke. Photos: Getty

Why Microsoft Let OpenAI Play the Field

By Aaron Holmes and Amir Efrati · Oct 16, 2025 6:00am PDT · 4 comments

Over the past three years, as OpenAI swelled from a tiny research lab into the world’s most valuable startup, one company has captured nearly all of its billions of dollars in annual spending on the servers needed to power OpenAI’s artificial intelligence: Microsoft. In recent months, though, OpenAI announced megadeals with several Microsoft... Over the past three years, as OpenAI swelled from a tiny research lab into the world’s most...

Peak Energy's sodium ion battery system in Watkins, Colo. Photo: Courtesy Peak

The Electric: The Defiant Startup That's Ignoring Lithium and Making Grid Batteries

By Steve LeVine · Oct 16, 2025 4:30am PDT

Peak Energy's sodium ion battery system in Watkins, Colo. Photo: Courtesy Peak

The Electric: The Defiant Startup That's Ignoring Lithium and Making Grid Batteries

By Steve LeVine · Oct 16, 2025 4:30am PDT

Two of Cameron Dales’ rivals went out of business this year, and skeptics say his novel battery technology is too expensive to beat conventional Chinese products. But Dales, co-founder of Colorado-based Peak Energy, is pushing ahead with grid-scale batteries that use a form of ordinary table salt as a base chemistry instead of the... Two of Cameron Dales’ rivals went out of business this year, and skeptics say his novel battery...

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. Getty Images

The Big Question for Amazon and OpenAI

By Theo Wayt · Oct 15, 2025 5:00pm PDT · 2 comments

Walmart’s announcement this week that it would become the first major retailer to start selling products through ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout shows that big retailers are being forced to take new forms of artificial intelligence–related online shopping seriously. It’s not shocking that Walmart, as a megaretailer that wants to sell more stuff... Walmart’s announcement this week that it would become the first major retailer to start selling...

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff at Dreamforce on Tuesday. Image via Getty

Salesforce CEO Shifts AI Strategy as OpenAI Threat Looms

By Kevin McLaughlin and Erin Woo · Oct 15, 2025 2:22pm PDT · 5 comments

At Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce event for customers last year, CEO Marc Benioff told roughly 45,000 attendees that using artificial intelligence to automate everything from customer service to sales functions was an easy and quick process. At this year’s event, now underway in San Francisco, Benioff toned down the rhetoric. He said Tuesday at... At Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce event for customers last year, CEO Marc Benioff told roughly...

Photo by Craig Warga and Jamie Watts

Partner Content

AI Agenda Live Recap: Why AI Pilots Fail—and How to Find ROI

By The Information Partnerships · Oct 15, 2025 2:01pm PDT · 1 comment

For every enterprise artificial intelligence success story, there are several cautionary tales—pilots that falter due to poor adoption, privacy headaches or bad-fit use cases. Recent studies point to a majority of AI pilots failing. While some dispute the figure, what’s clear is that many projects never make it past the pilot stage, making... For every enterprise artificial intelligence success story, there are several cautionary tales—...

Photo by Craig Warga and Jamie Watts

The AI Memory Crisis: WEKA’s CEO on the Industry’s Hidden Bottleneck

By The Information Partnerships · Oct 15, 2025 2:00pm PDT

Photo by Craig Warga and Jamie Watts

Partner Content

The AI Memory Crisis: WEKA’s CEO on the Industry’s Hidden Bottleneck

By The Information Partnerships · Oct 15, 2025 2:00pm PDT

Analysts worried about an artificial intelligence bubble often point to the staggering costs of computing power needed to power the latest models. Even the most powerful graphics processing units—like Nvidia’s 300GB Blackwell Ultra—can’t keep up with inference demands for models like Meta Llama, which can process nearly 500GB for every instance... Analysts worried about an artificial intelligence bubble often point to the staggering costs of...

Art by Clark Miller

Why Cloud Profits Are Collapsing in the Chip Arms Race

By The Information Staff · Oct 15, 2025 12:27pm PDT

The AI boom is fueling massive cloud revenue growth, yet the true financial story is defined by a deep, hidden vulnerability: the staggering cost of specialized AI chips. This imbalance is creating a profit crisis, forcing cloud providers to accept razor-thin margins on their services and fundamentally altering their core business model. Our... The AI boom is fueling massive cloud revenue growth, yet the true financial story is defined by a...

Art by Mike Sullivan

Universities Are Part of the Cursor Resistance

By Rocket Drew · Oct 15, 2025 7:00am PDT

I recently reported on the software engineers who have resisted using AI coding tools such as Cursor and Claude Code, even when their managers strongly encourage their use. AI still has technical limitations—and it threatens to make engineering jobs obsolete, they say. But there’s a wrinkle to this story: some engineering students have... I recently reported on the software engineers who have resisted using AI coding tools such...

Art by Mike Sullivan

Anthropic Gets Ready to Go Startup Shopping

By Valida Pau and Sri Muppidi · Oct 15, 2025 6:00am PDT

OpenAI has spent roughly $6.4 billion in stock to buy three startups over the last 16 months, while its smaller rival Anthropic has done barely any deals. But Anthropic, recently valued at $170 billion in a funding round, told investment bankers in recent weeks that it is getting ready to move off the sidelines and do more acquisitions,... OpenAI has spent roughly $6.4 billion in stock to buy three startups over the last 16 months,...

Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Getty Images

The Other Bubble

By Ken Brown · Oct 14, 2025 5:00pm PDT · 1 comment

Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Getty Images

The Other Bubble

By Ken Brown · Oct 14, 2025 5:00pm PDT · 1 comment

If there is a bubble in artificial intelligence, much of the blame can be placed on Wall Street, not Silicon Valley. Financial markets are as frothy as they can be, and the appetite for risk appears to be insatiable. That’s why Sam Altman has been able to get otherwise rational companies and investors to fund his audacious growth plans. On... If there is a bubble in artificial intelligence, much of the blame can be placed on Wall Street,...