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

JP Morgan’s Greek Tragedy

By Michael Roddan · Feb 6, 2025 6:00am PST · 6 comments

JPMorgan Chase’s $917 million investment in a Greek fintech company has gone so wrong that the bank last year offered to sell back half of its stake at a valuation of $175 million. The fintech, Viva Wallet, didn’t take the offer. JPMorgan responded with a lawsuit that accused Viva’s founder of bullying and threatening its... JPMorgan Chase’s $917 million investment in a Greek fintech company has gone so wrong that...

Musk has said Tesla doesn't need subsidies. Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Pool/Getty

The Electric: Plans Afoot to Make It Even Harder to Use Chinese Materials in U.S. EVs

By Steve LeVine · Feb 6, 2025 4:30am PST

Auto and battery makers are bracing for the impact of potential U.S. tariffs. Now they may be facing another challenge: a move in Congress to make it significantly harder for companies that use Chinese-made battery material to get subsidies. Auto and battery makers are bracing for the impact of potential U.S. tariffs. Now they may be...

Mercury CEO Immad Akhund. Art by Clark Miller; Akhund screenshot via YouTube.

Banking Startup Mercury In Financing Talks As Investors Warm to Fintechs

By Sri Muppidi and Natasha Mascarenhas · Feb 5, 2025 8:52pm PST

Investors are warming to fintech startups after a spike in interest rates made these once-hot companies look overvalued. Mercury, a business banking startup whose profile soared after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank nearly two years ago, is in talks to raise more capital, targeting about $250 million, according to a person with direct... Investors are warming to fintech startups after a spike in interest rates made these once-hot...

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. Photo via Getty.

Khan’s Parallel Universe; Uber Is Minting Money

By Martin Peers · Feb 5, 2025 5:00pm PST · 9 comments

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. Photo via Getty.

Khan’s Parallel Universe; Uber Is Minting Money

By Martin Peers · Feb 5, 2025 5:00pm PST · 9 comments

Lina Khan is out of the government, but she hasn’t given up her crusade against big tech. The former Federal Trade Commission chair has written an opinion piece for The New York Times suggesting the success of China’s artificial intelligence firm DeepSeek is a sign that “there isn’t enough competition” in the tech industry. Perhaps Lina... Lina Khan is out of the government, but she hasn’t given up her crusade against big tech. The...

President Donald Trump. Photo via Getty

Creator Economy

Why Trump’s Sovereign Wealth Fund Plan for TikTok Won’t Work

By Kaya Yurieff · Feb 5, 2025 2:36pm PST

President Trump’s plan to set up a U.S. sovereign wealth fund, which he said could play a role in buying TikTok’s U.S. business, is generating a lot of conversation this week. But here’s why it’s unlikely to work out. First of all, it’s unclear where the money to seed such a fund would come from. Sovereign wealth funds are common in... President Trump’s plan to set up a U.S. sovereign wealth fund, which he said could play a role in...

Art by Clark Miller; images via Getty.

How Trump Upended E-Commerce Overnight

By Theo Wayt and Ann Gehan · Feb 5, 2025 12:30pm PST · 4 comments

President Donald Trump’s weekend decision to simultaneously hike tariffs and eliminate a popular duty-free import method for direct-from-China sellers including Temu and Shein has forced e-commerce companies, logistics firms and customs authorities into triage mode to minimize disruptions. The most immediate headache is figuring out how to... President Donald Trump’s weekend decision to simultaneously hike tariffs and eliminate a...

Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI. Photo by Getty

Will DeepSeek Hurt Scale AI’s Business Model?

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Feb 5, 2025 7:00am PST · 1 comment

To understand how OpenAI has been improving the quality of its reasoning models in recent months, check out the following question the company recently asked scores of biology PhDs:“Please write a summary of wet-lab experimental approaches available before August 2024 for assessing in parallel the gene expression effects of many different... To understand how OpenAI has been improving the quality of its reasoning models in recent months,...

Art by Mike Sullivan/Midjourney

Why Net Retention Rates Are All the Rage for AI Investors

By Sri Muppidi · Feb 5, 2025 6:00am PST

Art by Mike Sullivan/Midjourney

Why Net Retention Rates Are All the Rage for AI Investors

By Sri Muppidi · Feb 5, 2025 6:00am PST

Investors in artificial intelligence startups have been wowed by the growth of many young AI startups, which are hitting revenue milestones years earlier than a previous generation of software companies did. But they are worried many of those startups won’t be able to hang on to this phenomenal growth—and are hunting for clues on... Investors in artificial intelligence startups have been wowed by the growth of many young AI...

A Google Cloud data center. Photo via Google.

DeepSeek Doesn't Slow Tech’s AI Capex Splurge

By Martin Peers · Feb 4, 2025 5:00pm PST

Tech’s AI-driven capex splurge lives! Google parent Alphabet today said it expected to lay out $75 billion on capital expenditures this year, a 43% lift over 2024. That puts Google very close to Microsoft, which has said it will spend $80 billion building artificial intelligence data centers in its fiscal year ending June. Meta Platforms, with... Tech’s AI-driven capex splurge lives! Google parent Alphabet today said it expected to lay out...

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan. Photo via Flickr/Fortune.

Creator Economy

YouTube’s Election Boost; Spiegel Goes Public on Snapchat

By Kaya Yurieff · Feb 4, 2025 3:50pm PST

We’re hearing a lot of YouTube creators and media executives have already descended on New Orleans ahead of Super Bowl Sunday. Back at home in rainy Mountain View, Google leaders have been talking up the last national event that boosted YouTube—the 2024 presidential election. In a call with investors late Tuesday, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai... We’re hearing a lot of YouTube creators and media executives have already descended on New...

President Trump, center, signs an executive action to create a sovereign wealth fund for the U.S. Photo by Getty

What Trump’s Sovereign Wealth Fund Could Mean for Tech

By Cory Weinberg and Ken Brown · Feb 4, 2025 3:30pm PST · 1 comment

The U.S. should start a sovereign wealth fund and maybe it should invest in TikTok, President Trump suggested earlier this week. Well, maybe. But if the fund ever does come to life, its money would be arguably better spent on a bigger, more speculative investment: Stargate, the $500 billion OpenAI-SoftBank-Oracle data center expansion that Trump... The U.S. should start a sovereign wealth fund and maybe it should invest in TikTok, President...

Outside DeepSeek's office in Beijing. Photo via Getty.

Eyeing Higher Margins, AWS and Other Cloud Providers Embrace DeepSeek

By Jon Victor · Feb 4, 2025 10:25am PST

Outside DeepSeek's office in Beijing. Photo via Getty.

Eyeing Higher Margins, AWS and Other Cloud Providers Embrace DeepSeek

By Jon Victor · Feb 4, 2025 10:25am PST

The DeepSeek reasoning artificial intelligence, R1, isn’t just a gift to businesses eager to cut their AI costs. American cloud providers looking to boost their server rental businesses moved quickly last week to make R1 available to their customers.So far, however, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google aren’t charging cloud customers to use... The DeepSeek reasoning artificial intelligence, R1, isn’t just a gift to businesses eager to cut...

Photo by Getty

ChatGPT’s New ‘Research’ Feature: The Good and the Bad

By Stephanie Palazzolo · Feb 4, 2025 7:00am PST

It’s been barely a day since OpenAI released Deep Research, a new ChatGPT feature that helps customers conduct multi-step research. And already it’s gotten at least one rave review.Derya Unutmaz, a professor of immunology at the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine who’s been testing the feature since he was granted early access on Friday,... It’s been barely a day since OpenAI released Deep Research, a new ChatGPT feature that helps...

Big Tech’s Capex Gusher Tops Last Oil Spree

By Anita Ramaswamy · Feb 4, 2025 6:00am PST

The tech industry’s project to build out artificial intelligence is proving even more capital intensive than the peak of the last investment supercycle by oil and gas firms in the mid-2010s. Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Amazon and Alphabet spent an estimated average of 17.2% of their revenues on capital expenditures in 2024, up from 12.7% in... The tech industry’s project to build out artificial intelligence is proving even more...

Photo via Getty.

What Trump’s Order Means for Temu and Shein

By Theo Wayt · Feb 3, 2025 5:00pm PST

If you’re planning on buying your significant other a Valentine’s Day gift on Temu, Shein or Amazon’s low-cost rival to those services, Haul, make sure you have a backup plan so you don’t wind up in the doghouse. A (perhaps unintended) consequence of a Trump administration executive order issued over the weekend means packages from the... If you’re planning on buying your significant other a Valentine’s Day gift on Temu, Shein or...

Photo via Getty

OpenAI’s DeepSeek Response: Catch Us If You Can

By Stephanie Palazzolo and Rocket Drew · Feb 3, 2025 7:17am PST · 1 comment

Photo via Getty

OpenAI’s DeepSeek Response: Catch Us If You Can

By Stephanie Palazzolo and Rocket Drew · Feb 3, 2025 7:17am PST · 1 comment

OpenAI’s release on Friday of o3-mini, its latest artificial intelligence reasoning model, wasn’t a surprise. CEO Sam Altman had previously said it would drop by then.But it was impossible to ignore the coincidence of the release coming a few days after a blaze of news erupted over DeepSeek R1, a Chinese reasoning model that has matched or even... OpenAI’s release on Friday of o3-mini, its latest artificial intelligence reasoning model, wasn’t...

Art by Clark Miller

How Google Cleaned Up Its Cloud Act

By Kevin McLaughlin and Catherine Perloff · Feb 3, 2025 6:00am PST · 5 comments

In the months after Thomas Kurian became CEO of Google Cloud in early 2019, he made a discovery: Another Google team that oversaw the company’s centrally managed information technology services had been overcharging the cloud unit for its use of software and other computing resources, according to a former Google Cloud manager who saw the... In the months after Thomas Kurian became CEO of Google Cloud in early 2019, he made a discovery:...

Inside Natron Energy's Holland, Mich. factory. Photo: Courtesy Natron.

The Electric: Why This Next-Gen Battery Startup Isn’t Afraid of DeepSeek

By Steve LeVine · Feb 3, 2025 4:30am PST

The DeepSeek earthquake shook developers of nuclear and natural gas power plants, pummeling their share prices and triggering doubts about billions of dollars of existing and planned investments to power artificial intelligence data centers. The DeepSeek earthquake shook developers of nuclear and natural gas power plants, pummeling their...

Art by Clark Miller

Why Debanking Fears Could Benefit Trump

By Abram Brown · Feb 1, 2025 7:01am PST

Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:• The Big Read: As Microsoft and Google move in, a battle over hallowed ground erupts• The Arena: The NFL and Netflix likely share a supersize dream• Artificial Intelligence: our new Glossary of AI Jargon • Plus, our Recommendations: Trackers of Gilded Age glam; requiem for the rock stars;... Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:• The Big Read: As Microsoft and Google move in, a ...

Art by Clark Miller

What the NFL and Netflix Could Both Want: An Overseas Super Bowl

By Sara Germano · Feb 1, 2025 5:00am PST

Art by Clark Miller

What the NFL and Netflix Could Both Want: An Overseas Super Bowl

By Sara Germano · Feb 1, 2025 5:00am PST

When selecting the venue for next weekend’s Super Bowl between the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles, the NFL went with a traditional choice: New Orleans. It’ll be the 11th time the Big Easy has hosted the Big Game, tying it with Miami for hosting the most Super Bowls ever. Recently, however, the world’s richest... When selecting the venue for next weekend’s Super Bowl between the Kansas City Chiefs and...