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

Apple CEO Tim Cook. Getty Images

What Investors Are Missing in Apple’s iPhone 17 Sales Surge

By Martin Peers · Oct 20, 2025 5:00pm PDT

It’s the calm before the earnings storm. Netflix kicks off tech earnings on Tuesday with its third-quarter report, and most of the big tech names come next week. Already, though, investors are anticipating the news. That’s most obviously true of Apple, whose shares jumped 4% on Monday on a research report about strong sales of the recently... It’s the calm before the earnings storm. Netflix kicks off tech earnings on Tuesday with its...

The Oracle data center for OpenAI in Abilene, Texas. Photo via Getty

AI Infrastructure

The Data Center Boom Enters a Speculative Era

By Anissa Gardizy · Oct 20, 2025 10:19am PDT

The Wynn in Las Vegas was buzzing last week as executives, investors and dealmakers from across the data center, cloud and finance world converged at an event to trade notes on how quickly the industry has changed. A year ago, most conversations at Infra/Structure, hosted by Structure Research, focused on how hard it was to find land and... The Wynn in Las Vegas was buzzing last week as executives, investors and dealmakers from across...

Peter Hoeschele. Screenshot via YouTube

OpenAI Executive Explains the Insatiable Appetite For AI Chips

By Sri Muppidi · Oct 20, 2025 7:00am PDT

Peter Hoeschele, who runs OpenAI’s Stargate data center team, said at an event last week that the company’s models are essentially in constant training mode. That’s a change from the past, when OpenAI would stop training them when they reached a certain point. “Let’s stop talking about training versus inference,” Hoeschele said after Oracle... Peter Hoeschele, who runs OpenAI’s Stargate data center team, said at an event last week that the...

Art by Clark Miller.

Yan image via YouTube.

Inside Hyperliquid, Ground Zero for the Latest Crypto Controversy

By Yueqi Yang · Oct 20, 2025 6:44am PDT · 5 comments

Art by Clark Miller.

Yan image via YouTube.

Inside Hyperliquid, Ground Zero for the Latest Crypto Controversy

By Yueqi Yang · Oct 20, 2025 6:44am PDT · 5 comments

When a crypto crash ricocheted across markets earlier this month, the spotlight landed on Hyperliquid, an exchange that handles more than $13 billion in trades a day with around 11 employees based largely in Singapore. The two-year-old exchange is little known outside crypto markets but wildly popular among traders for offering anonymity, high... When a crypto crash ricocheted across markets earlier this month, the spotlight landed on...

DeepRoute CEO Maxwell Zhou, in Seoul in April. Photo: Photo: Costfoto/NurPhoto/Getty

The Electric: A Chinese AI Expert On What It Will Take For Cars To Go Completely Autonomous

By Steve LeVine · Oct 20, 2025 4:30am PDT · 1 comment

Global automakers agree that very soon consumers will expect all new cars to function autonomously, requiring little or no attention from the driver. But they are sharply divided about how to get there. Global automakers agree that very soon consumers will expect all new cars to function...

Art by Clark Miller

OpenAI’s Erotica Experiment Won’t Last

By Abram Brown · Oct 18, 2025 7:00am PDT · 1 comment

Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:• The Arena: Call it moneyball for minors—inside the booming business of youth sports apps• The Top 5: Best new places for a tech holiday party • Plus, our Recommendations: “The Big Short” with “Against the Rules: The Big Short Companion,” “Murderland,” and “John Candy: I Like Me”Two months ago, Cleo... Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:• The Arena: Call it moneyball for minors—inside the...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...