Category: Insights

The Fed held rates at 3.50%–3.75%, extending the pause as officials cited still-elevated inflation and solid activity. This morning, President Trump nominated Kevin Walsh as the next Federal Reserve Chair. Separately, the U.S. dollar index slid to a four-year low (around 96) as markets repriced U.S. policy risk. In commodities, safe-haven demand lifted gold more than 10% on…

Markets opened on edge this week as politics, policy, and AI power struggles collided. Macro-wise, global stocks whipsawed after Trump’s renewed rhetoric about asserting control over Greenland briefly eased and then reignited trade fears, keeping volatility high, lifting gold, and leaving investors wary of EU retaliation and broader geopolitical risk. In Washington, the Supreme Court…

U.S. core CPI rose 2.6% in December, below consensus, with shelter, food, and recreation higher and used cars lower. In response, markets opened steady, and the base case remains a Fed hold. In D.C., Fed Chair Jerome Powell confirmed he is under a criminal probe tied to tensions with President Trump. Turning to tech, Oracle…

December extended the infrastructure buildout while frontier labs tightened product and go-to-market execution. OpenAI reportedly pursued up to ~$100B of new capital at an implied ~$800B+ valuation, alongside potential strategic deepening with Amazon and a ~$1B Disney licensing deal to support Sora-enabled video workflows. The firm accelerated iteration with GPT-5.2 under a rapid “code red”…

November reflected broad infrastructure acceleration and deepening capital concentration as Hyperscalers, model labs, and investors expanded long-term AI commitments. OpenAI secured a $38B, seven-year AWS cloud agreement to lock in Nvidia GPU supply, while Microsoft advanced $9.7B in partnerships with IREN and Lambda to extend multi-region training capacity. Meta and Anthropic added more than $650B…

October reflected the next leg of AI’s shift from narrative to realized demand, as earnings showed AI workloads driving cloud usage and revenue impact. Google Cloud grew 34% and AWS grew 20% while Apple Services hit an all-time high, signaling that enterprise AI adoption is beginning to show up in P&L and capex guidance rather…

September’s activity reflected continued movement from hype to scaled execution as leading players doubled down on infrastructure and distribution. OpenAI advanced on multiple fronts, closing a $6.6B secondary sale at a $500B valuation, striking a landmark $300B compute deal with Oracle, and expanding U.S. datacenter plans, while Nvidia drove aggressive dealmaking including up to $100B…

August’s headlines reflected a shift from hype to execution as tech giants and leading startups moved aggressively to scale. Nvidia posted record revenues despite export headwinds, Anthropic secured a $13B round to extend its lead in safety and education, and OpenAI both expanded through the acquisition of Statsig and stumbled with a controversial GPT-5 rollout.…

July’s headline deals underscored an aggressive land-grab for talent, compute, and vertical integration. Google licensed Windsurf’s AI-coding technology and key staff, Meta unveiled its new Superintelligence Labs and long-range “Prometheus” cluster, Elon Musk’s xAI secured fresh capital to scale Grok and its Colossus supercomputer, and CoreWeave bought Core Scientific to lock in additional power capacity…

June’s AI headlines shifted from supply‑chain events to blockbuster investments and power‑hungry scale‑ups. Meta made waves with a $14.3B move for 49 % of Scale AI, recruiting CEO Alexandr Wang to lead a new AGI unit within Meta, while OpenAI struck a landmark compute pact with Google Cloud, cut o3 prices 80 %, and locked in a $200M Department of Defense…