June 15, 2025: Geopolitical Setback, Just As IPO Window Begins To Open

Last week, as geopolitical tensions resurfaced once again, Dow Jones fell 1.3%, S&P 500 index lost 0.4%, and Nasdaq composite was down 0.6%. Voyager Technologies’ IPO surged 82%, reflecting strong investor appetite for space technology stocks. Crypto exchange Bullish confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO, continuing the trend set by Circle’s recent blockbuster debut. Meta finalized a substantial US$14.3 billion investment in Scale AI to accelerate superintelligence development. Databricks projected reaching US$3.7 billion annual revenue. Qualcomm announced it would acquire semiconductor firm Alphawave Semi for US$2.4 billion to bolster its data center capabilities, while DoorDash acquired Symbiosys for US$175 million to enhance its ad technology platform. OpenAI, despite competition, opted to rent chips from Google Cloud to expand its AI computing capabilities. OpenAI claims to have hit US$10 billion in annual revenue, and according to Sam Altman, AI will be able to have ‘novel insights’ next year. Nvidia’s CEO confidently predicted competitors’ AI chip projects would likely be canceled given Nvidia’s accelerating innovation. A more than two-fold gain in CoreWeave’s shares since the end of April has saddled short sellers with US$1.6 billion in paper losses. Snap plans to sell AR glasses in 2026. Walmart, Amazon, Expedia and other companies have explored whether to issue their own stablecoins in the US. Shopify announced it will be integrating stablecoin payments through partnerships with Coinbase and Stripe, marking a significant crypto expansion slated to roll out widely later this year. Thinkific announced a $13 million secondary share offering. In news pertaining to Sophic Capital clients, Boardwalktech renewed a key multi-year agreement with a major U.S. bank, expanding the use of its Velocity product, which has demonstrated strong ROI potential, further attracting other banks including entering proof-of-concept stages in Mexico.

Sophic Client Boardwalktech, Inc. (BWLK-TSXV, BWLKF-OTCQB) renews multi-year license agreement with top-5 U.S. bank.

Boardwalktech renewed a multi-year license agreement with a top-5 U.S. bank. The Company also provided an update on recent developments and continued progress and expansion within its banking and financial services vertical. Initially deploying the Company’s Velocity product in 2024, a top-5 U.S. bank has now renewed a multi-year license to expand Velocity across its footprint. Velocity is now an integral part of the bank’s strategy as Velocity provides an 8-10x ROI for small, medium and high complex End User Computing (EUC) remediations versus alternatives. Following this successful deployment, teaming partners and other banks are beginning to cross-sell Velocity into other opportunities. Given the value Velocity can demonstrably provide from both a regulatory as well as financial point of view, interest in new deployments is significantly rising. Some examples of new opportunities include: Entered Proof of Concept (POC) phase with a new top bank in Mexico with evaluation software installed. This engagement is a direct byproduct of the progress and ROI demonstrated at the Company’s first top-5 U.S. bank customer as well as a reflection of the success of the Company’s teaming strategy. Boardwalktech entered a POC phase with another large bank, via an existing teaming partner. The POC is a re-engagement with this bank prospect, after it opted to utilize Boardwalk for its new project. The Company also announces the introduction of the Boardwalk EUC Asset Tracker, a separate product extension that augments Velocity by tracking risk management for EUCs using the Velocity platform specifically for banks. https://t.co/3zoRIDAmlS

Thinkific (THNC-TSX) announces secondary offering of approximately $13 million of Rhino Group’s shares.

Thinkific announced that the Rhino Group, through Rhino Co-Invest 1 Limited Partnership, Vancouver Founder Fund (VCC) Inc., Vancouver Founder Fund Limited Partnership and VFF II Limited Partnership (collectively, “Rhino Group”), has, together with the Company, entered into an agreement with Cormark Securities Inc. and CIBC Capital Markets(the “Co-Lead Underwriters”), as co-lead underwriters and joint bookrunners, on behalf of a syndicate of underwriters (collectively the “Underwriters”) for the sale, on a “bought deal” secondary basis (the “Offering”), of 5,777,780 Common Shares (as defined below, the “Offered Shares”) held by the Rhino Group at a price of $2.25 per Offered Share (the “Offering Price”). Net proceeds of the Offering will be paid directly to the Rhino Group and Thinkific will not receive any proceeds from the sale of the Offered Shares associated with the Offering nor will there be any dilution incurred. As part of the transaction, the Rhino Group has agreed to be locked up from selling any further securities of Thinkific for six months from closing and the Chief Executive Officer of Thinkific and certain holders of more than 10% of the Company’s Common Shares have agreed to be locked up from selling any securities of Thinkific for three months from closing. The Underwriters have also been granted an over-allotment option (the “Over-Allotment Option”) to purchase up to an additional 866,667 Common Shares (the “Additional Shares”) from the Rhino Group at the Offering Price for additional gross proceeds of approximately $1.95 million if the Over-Allotment Option is exercised in full. https://tinyurl.com/58xn4pe7

Shopify (SHOP-NASDAQ, SHOP-TSX) partners with Coinbase and Stripe in landmark stablecoin deal.

Big Tech’s fever for stablecoins won’t stop. The e-commerce giant Shopify announced Thursday that it was rolling out stablecoin payments to all users on its platform later this year in its largest crypto play yet. The publicly traded tech company lets merchants—including vintage clothes sellers, cosmetics businesses, and electronics companies—set up their own online marketplaces. By late June, Shopify will let a select group of users accept payments in USDC, a stablecoin issued by the crypto company Circle, which recently had one of the year’s hottest IPOs. “In our own philosophical framework, we are extremely aligned with everything that crypto stands for,” Tobias Lütke, the CEO of Shopify and a Coinbase board member, said onstage at a Coinbase conference on Thursday. Shopify will then gradually expand access to merchants across its network in the U.S. and Europe before opening up stablecoin payments to every merchant who uses its platform. The e-commerce company worked with Coinbase to develop a payments protocol to handle chargebacks, refunds, and other intricacies of retail payments on Coinbase’s blockchain, Base. It also collaborated with fintech giant Stripe, one of Shopify’s payments processors, to integrate stablecoins into the e-commerce company’s existing software stack. https://tinyurl.com/bdrf3se2

Tailscale founder talks future IPO as revenue surges on AI adoption.

Canadian software networking startup Tailscale Inc. is sketching out a long-range plan to go public after unexpectedly becoming a beneficiary of the artificial intelligence boom and quickly doubling its valuation to US$1.5 billion. An initial public offering in “three years would mean we’re doing really well,” founder Avery Pennarun said in an interview. But it’s “probably more like five years plus,” he cautioned. Tailscale provides virtual private networks, which allow users to control and protect their data traffic, but uses a different architecture from other corporate and consumer services. Other VPN firms encrypt user data, shielding it from external snoopers, but some consumer-oriented VPN operators can still see the traffic flowing between their own nodes, said Pennarun, a former Google engineer. Tailscale tells devices in a network how to connect with each other and distributes keys, but the company can’t decrypt and read traffic itself, he said. AI companies have adopted Tailscale, Pennarun says, because it turned out to be good at securely stitching together the disparate islands of processing power that they use around the world. Founded in 2019, the Toronto-based company’s revenues are “more than doubling year over year and continuing to do so,” Pennarun said at the Web Summit conference in Vancouver. “It’s a joke, but not a joke. We discovered mid-last year that we had accidentally won the entire AI market,” he said. “There was no mention of AIs or GPUs or LLMs or machine learning or anything on our website. It was just word of mouth.” Tailscale is used by Perplexity AI Inc., Mistral AI SAS, Hugging Face Inc., Cohere Inc. and other firms. “If you can think of an AI company, they are using us,” spokesperson Will Moore said. New York Times Co. is also a client. Pennarun said he’s been approached by big connectivity and cloud companies, but he’s not interested in selling the company. In 2008, his first startup, Net Integration Technologies Inc., was acquired by International Business Machines Corp. — and IBM “sort of ground it up and disintegrated it” afterward, he said. Tailscale raised US$160 million this year in a Series C round that was led by Accel, with participation from CRV, Insight Partners, Heavybit and Uncork Capital. The chief executive officer of CrowdStrike Holdings Inc., George Kurtz, also invested. https://tinyurl.com/mtuerdzz

Taiv lands $14.4 million Series A to put targeted ads on bar and restaurant TVs across North America.

Winnipeg-based advertising technology startup Taiv wants to turn business televisions across North America into revenue generation tools. The company has announced US$10.5 million ($14.4 million) in Series A funding to accelerate its expansion into more large markets in the United States (US) and bring its adtech solution to Canada, with an initial rollout in its hometown this July ahead of a broader expansion next year. Taiv has developed a product to help bars, restaurants, and retailers deliver more targeted ads and content to customers through their existing TVs, from commercials to sports highlights, venue-specific events and specials, and trivia. The company offers its solution for free, and makes money by selling ads, sharing a portion of those sales with venues. https://tinyurl.com/5x7zk4cd

ENVGO raises $2.7 million seed round to bring its electric “flying” boat to market.

Waterloo, Ont. based ENVGO has raised US$2 million ($2.7 million) in seed funding to bring its (somewhat) flying electric boat, NV1, to market. The all-equity round was led by Toronto-based Two Small Fish Ventures, with participation from Waterloo, Ont.-based Garage Capital, which led ENVGO’s undisclosed pre-seed round, as well as other undisclosed angel investors. Two Small Fish Ventures, an early-stage investment fund created by Eva Lau and her husband, Wattpad co-founder Allen Lau, is gaining a board seat as a result of the round. https://tinyurl.com/4xury2kn

Space firm Voyager shares rocket 82% after upsized IPO.

Shares in Voyager Technologies jumped by 82% in their trading debut, after the defense and space firm raised US$383 million in an upsized initial public offering. The Denver-based firm’s stock surged as much as 139% and closed at US$56.48 on Wednesday. The company sold more than 12.3 million shares at US$31 each, pricing above their marketed range of US$26 to US$29. Voyager is the second space company to go public this year, and investor demand has been strong for the shares. Karman Holdings went public in February and is currently trading more than double its US$22 IPO price, as of Wednesday. Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan were Voyager’s lead underwriters. https://tinyurl.com/4y2fc65y

Crypto exchange Bullish files confidentially for IPO.

Bullish, the crypto exchange and owner of news publication CoinDesk, has confidentially filed paperwork for a US initial public offering in recent weeks, the Financial Times reported, joining the growing list of crypto IPOs after stablecoin issuer Circle’s blockbuster debut. Jefferies will work as lead underwriter on the deal, the publication said. Bullish was founded in 2021 and led by CEO Tom Farley, a former president of NYSE Group. It acquired CoinDesk from DCG in 2023. Bullish had previously attempted to go public through a special purpose acquisition vehicle, but the deal was terminated in late 2022 after failing to satisfy SEC review. Crypto firms are rushing to take advantage of market enthusiasm by going public or exploring sales. Crypto exchange Gemini announced its confidential IPO filing last Friday. Uphold, another crypto trading platform, is also exploring an IPO or a sale and has hired FT Partners as adviser, Uphold CEO Simon McLoughlin told The Block this week. https://tinyurl.com/43uzd96b

Meta finalizes US$14.3 billion deal with Scale AI.

Meta Platforms on Thursday finalized a deal to invest US$14.3 billion in Scale AI, according to a Scale spokesperson. Through the deal, Meta will acquire a 49% stake in the data labeling startup. Scale said in a statement that the investment round will value the company at US$29 billion, including the money invested. As part of the deal, Scale CEO Alexandr Wang will join Meta and work on its efforts in superintelligence, or the idea that AI could surpass the abilities of the human brain. In recent months, as Meta has struggled with AI, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has increasingly consulted Wang for advice and the two have become closer. Wang will continue to serve on the Scale board of directors. “As part of this, we will deepen the work we do together producing data for AI models and Alexandr Wang will join Meta to work on our superintelligence efforts,” Meta said in a statement. “We will share more about this effort and the great people joining this team in the coming weeks.” https://tinyurl.com/3ve3ubns

Databricks expects to hit US$3.7 billion in annualized revenue next month.

AI software provider Databricks expects annualized revenue to reach US$3.7 billion by next month, up 50% from last year, according to a company spokesperson. The growth suggests that Databricks is benefiting as more large companies invest in building AI applications from their business data. Databricks didn’t specify how much of the US$3.7 billion will come from generative AI products versus traditional machine learning and data science offerings. Snowflake executives have told staff they want to reach US$100 million in annual recurring revenue from sales of generative AI products by the close of the company’s fiscal year ending in January, as we reported last month. It’s also unclear when Databricks, valued at US$62 billion after a funding round early this year, will have its long-awaited IPO. Until that happens, direct comparisons with Snowflake, its public-traded rival, will be tough to make. Snowflake generated nearly US$3.5 billion in product revenue (the primary metric it shares with investors) for the 12 months to January 31, up 30% from the previous year. Databricks told investors late last year that it expects sales to grow more than 40% in 2025 and 2026, which would mean its sales will be around US$5.4 billion by the year that ends in January 2027. That would make Databricks as big as Snowflake that year, according to FactSet estimates. https://tinyurl.com/3w2efz5f

Waymo fleet manager targets funding that would lift valuation past US$1 billion.

Moove, a five-year-old startup whose employees clean and charge Waymo’s electric robotaxis, is aiming to raise about US$300 million in new funding, according to a person who spoke to the startup’s executives. The new round is likely to lift the Uber-backed company’s valuation past US$1 billion, according to an investor in Moove. The startup recently generated annualized revenue of US$360 million, mostly from its main business of extending loans to Uber drivers, according to Moove Co-CEO Ladi Delano. That’s up from US$115 million just over a year ago. The Dubai-based company has also started to generate revenue from Alphabet-owned Waymo, which is expanding in several U.S. markets. The growth plans show how the advances of Waymo, which is now ferrying paying customers in five cities, are encouraging a new generation of startup entrepreneurs to expand into autonomous vehicle services. Moove last year raised US$100 million, at a valuation of US$750 million, from investors including Uber and Emirati investor Mubadala Investment Co. Uber has a stake of more than 10% in the company, according to a Moove investor. https://tinyurl.com/2r9xfmv3

DoorDash makes US$175 million Ad Tech acquisition.

Food delivery firm DoorDash said on Wednesday it is buying advertising technology company Symbiosys for US$175 million, a deal that will help restaurants and other advertisers on DoorDash place ads on external sites and apps. DoorDash also disclosed a breakout of its ad revenue, which it doesn’t break out in earnings, saying it topped US$1 billion in annualized run rate last year. That figure includes sales from Finland-based delivery firm Wolt, which Doordash acquired in 2022, and means DoorDash’s ad business is roughly the size of Instacart’s and Uber’s. “That’s like a milestone that everybody looks at to basically say you’re a part of this big club,” said Toby Espinosa, vice president of advertising at DoorDash, who said the company has ambitions to be a $20 billion ad business. DoorDash also announced a new ad product that uses AI to decide where and what types of ads a business should place on its platform. Google and Meta already offer similar automated ad-buying tools. https://tinyurl.com/bdr4f596

Disney to pay Comcast US$438.7 million to complete Hulu purchase.

Walt Disney Co. will pay US$438.7 million more to Comcast to complete its purchase of the Hulu streaming service, the company said in a regulatory filing on Monday. In November 2023, Comcast exercised its right to sell its 33% stake in Hulu to Disney, which owns the rest of the service. Under the agreement between the companies, Hulu’s value would be determined through a complex process involving each side’s bankers putting forward a number, and if needed, a third appraiser getting involved to come up with an estimate. Disney had already paid Comcast US$8.6 billion for its Hulu stake based on an already agreed-upon floor value of US$27.5 billion set several years ago. The appraisal process was completed on June 9. The deal is expected to close on or before July 24, Disney said. In a statement, Disney CEO Bob Iger said completing the Hulu purchase will pave the way for a deeper integration of Hulu’s content and service within Disney+. In a separate statement, Comcast said, “Hulu was a great start for us in streaming that generated nearly US$10 billion in proceeds for Comcast and created an important audience for NBCUniversal’s world-class content.” https://tinyurl.com/3enk9wrj

Qualcomm to acquire semiconductor firm Alphawave Semi for US$2.4 billion.

Qualcomm has agreed to acquire Alphawave Semi, a U.K.-based semiconductor company focused on high-speed data center connectivity, for around US$2.4 billion. According to Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon, the deal will help Qualcomm grow its data center business. “The combined teams share the goal of building advanced technology solutions and enabling next-level connected computing performance across a wide array of high-growth areas, including data center infrastructure,” Amon said in a press release. Qualcomm’s acquisition of Alphawave, which makes a range of wired connectivity and compute technologies, comes a few months after the bigger chip company bought the generative AI division of Vietnamese startup VinAI, as well as internet of things company Edge Impulse. Qualcomm has sought to diversify its portfolio as it faces headwinds, including a weakening smartphone market — smartphone processors make up a big portion of Qualcomm’s revenue — and potentially tariffs. The deal is expected to close during the first calendar quarter of 2026. https://tinyurl.com/hbr73z6v

CoreWeave shorts face 150% borrow costs after US$1.6 billion loss.

A more than two-fold gain in CoreWeave’s shares since the end of April has saddled short sellers with $1.6 billion in paper losses, according to data from S3 Partners. Undeterred by an eye-watering cost to borrow that’s hit about 150% of the stock price, there are plenty of traders willing to bet against CoreWeave, according to Ihor Dusaniwsky, S3’s managing director of predictive analytics. “A lot of new guys think this new price level is an extraordinarily attractive short,” Dusaniwsky said. “Shorts are staying in because they believe the expected P&L more than offsets the financing costs.” Borrow fees, which are annualized, are typically much lower for most other stocks. Tesla Inc. and Apple Inc., for example, both have borrow fees of less than 1%. After a disappointing IPO in March, CoreWeave shares have jumped following a better-than-expected second quarter revenue forecast, new cloud-computing deals with companies like OpenAI and a resurgence in AI-related stocks. One of the challenges for short sellers is the limited amount of shares available to trade because of lock-up restrictions related to the initial offering and large stakes owned by a handful of holders including Nvidia Corp. About 32% of the so-called float is on loan to short sellers, according to S3. Short interest in Tesla, another short-seller favorite, is about 3% of the float. https://tinyurl.com/yc52thdu

OpenAI to rent chips from Google cloud despite AI rivalry.

OpenAI is planning to rent artificial intelligence chip servers from Google’s cloud computing unit, Reuters reported on Tuesday. The move isn’t completely unexpected, given that OpenAI has been desperate to expand its compute capacity and has inked deals with several other cloud providers after it broke away from its exclusive server deal with Microsoft last year. Google, though, is a major rival of OpenAI in developing AI known as Gemini. It’s not clear whether OpenAI will rent Nvidia AI server chips or Google’s own AI server chips, tensor processing units. A spokesperson for Google declined to comment. https://tinyurl.com/35ky59v3

Google cloud experiences major outage.

Google Cloud on Thursday experienced a major outage that impacted several services globally, according to a Google website tracking the status of its products. The Google Cloud dashboard indicated that the Google Cloud Console—a main interface where customers access the Google Cloud platform—identity and access management services, and its storage product were down, among other products. By early afternoon Pacific Time, Google said on the dashboard that the issue was fixed in “some locations” but that there was no estimate on when it would be fully resolved. Google spokespeople did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In the meantime, companies using Google to host their websites, such as the AI startup Julius AI, started posting publicly and notifying customers that their services were down. Google has sought to catch up with Amazon and Microsoft in cloud computing, or hosting web services on remote servers, where it is still third in the market. Google Cloud recently scored a win with a deal to rent AI chip servers to OpenAI, Reuters first reported. https://tinyurl.com/yej962hy

Snap plans to sell AR glasses to public in 2026.

Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, announced on Tuesday that it would introduce a new generation of augmented reality glasses for sale to the public in 2026. The glasses, called Specs, will display content for wearers to see and offer apps from Snap, other companies and independent developers. “We believe the time is right for a revolution in computing that naturally integrates our digital experiences with the physical world,” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said in a statement. Snap first introduced smart glasses, which don’t display content for wearers to see, in 2016 and sold three generations to the public. It then introduced AR glasses in 2021 and again last September, though both generations were only available to developers. The glasses slated for release in 2026 will be lighter and smaller than the most recent generation of AR glasses. Snap will now allow developers to build apps using OpenAI and Google’s Gemini. It is also partnering with Niantic, the creator of Pokémon Go, to add Niantic’s map technology to Specs and Snap’s tool for making AR features. Competition in AR and smart has heated up over the past year. Meta Platforms in September demoed AR glasses that aren’t for sale, codenamed Orion, and is working on AR glasses for consumers, codenamed Hypernova. The company has also sold Ray-Ban smart glasses for years. https://tinyurl.com/5tzkn4zz

Tesla robotaxi spotted on Austin streets.

Tesla still has not given a public launch date for its robotaxi service in Austin, but an observer on Tuesday posted a video of a Model Y on city streets without a human driver behind the wheel, prompting some early celebrations from Tesla’s workers and fanbase. “Beautifully simple design,” CEO Elon Musk wrote on X. “Its go time,” a Tesla engineer added. “Slowly slowly at first, then …” wrote Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s vice president of AI software. The service was expected to launch this month with a small fleet of Model Y cars that will be remotely monitored by staff at Tesla’s nearby factory. Federal safety regulators requested information on the company’s approach to autonomous driving, which has been scrutinized for contributing to past crashes, prompting recalls. Tesla is currently listed as “testing” in Austin on the city’s autonomous vehicle dashboard, an online portal that tracks incidents from robotaxi services. The dashboard also includes competitors like Waymo, which has been operating in the city since March through a partnership with Uber and is identified as being in “deployment.” Residents have reported three incidents with Waymos this month, including blocked traffic and a safety concern. Experts have expressed concerns about the reliability of Tesla’s autonomous driving technology because it uses fewer sensors than competitors. https://tinyurl.com/54ws2b5a

Apple announces smaller AI upgrades and new software design.

At Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, the company said artificial intelligence will be making its way into more of its apps, even though the new and improved Siri it announced at last year’s event isn’t ready. Apple said it plans to integrate live language translation into phone calls and iMessage. The company’s visual AI system will now be able to take a look at apps—through the iPhone screenshot function—and pull out important information, such as searching for a piece of clothing on Google or asking OpenAI’s ChatGPT for more information about what it’s in an image on a screen. On the Apple Watch, the company announced Workout Buddy, a personalized AI-powered workout coach. Apple is also making its on-device AI models available for developers for the first time. That means apps won’t have to ship as much data to the cloud and can run certain features offline. Apple highlighted an example of the hiking app AllTrails suggesting hikes even if the user is camping off grid. Apple also introduced a new look for all of the company’s operating systems. App icons and menus will have a shiny glass-like transparency. https://tinyurl.com/354ewwzk

OpenAI claims to have hit US$10 billion in annual revenue.

OpenAI says it recently hit US$10 billion in annual recurring revenue, up from around US$5.5 billion last year. That figure includes revenue from the company’s consumer products, ChatGPT business products, and its API, an OpenAI spokesperson told CNBC. Currently, OpenAI is serving more than 500 million weekly active users and 3 million paying business customers. The revenue milestone comes roughly two and a half years after OpenAI launched its popular chatbot platform, ChatGPT. The company is targeting US$125 billion in revenue by 2029.  OpenAI is under some pressure to increase revenue quickly. The company burns billions of dollars each year hiring and recruiting talent to work on its AI products, and securing the necessary infrastructure to train and run AI systems. OpenAI has not disclosed its operating expenses or whether it is close to profitability. https://tinyurl.com/4ekfkdt6

Sam Altman thinks AI will have ‘novel insights’ next year.

In a new essay published Tuesday called “The Gentle Singularity,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared his latest vision for how AI will change the human experience over the next 15 years. The essay is a classic example of Altman’s futurism: hyping up the promise of AGI — and arguing that his company is quite close to the feat — while simultaneously downplaying its arrival. The OpenAI CEO frequently publishes essays of this nature, cleanly laying out a future in which AGI disrupts our modern conception of work, energy, and the social contract. But often, Altman’s essays contain hints about what OpenAI is working on next. At one point in the essay, Altman claimed that next year, in 2026, the world will “likely see the arrival of [AI] systems that can figure out novel insights.” While this is somewhat vague, OpenAI executives have recently indicated that the company is focused on getting AI models to come up with new, interesting ideas about the world. When announcing OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini AI reasoning models in April, co-founder and President Greg Brockman said these were the first models that scientists had used to generate new, helpful ideas. Altman’s blog post suggests that in the coming year, OpenAI itself may ramp up its efforts to develop AI that can generate novel insights. OpenAI certainly wouldn’t be the only company focused on this effort — several of OpenAI’s competitors have shifted their focus to training AI models that can help scientists come up with new hypotheses, and thus, novel discoveries about the world. In May, Google released a paper on AlphaEvolve, an AI coding agent that the company claims to have generated novel approaches to complex math problems. Another startup backed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, FutureHouse, claims its AI agent tool has been capable of making a genuine scientific discovery. In May, Anthropic launched a program to support scientific research. If successful, these companies could automate a key part of the scientific process, and potentially break into massive industries such as drug discovery, material science, and other fields with science at their core. https://tinyurl.com/bdzh3b7d

Walmart, Amazon explore issuing stablecoins.

Walmart, Amazon, Expedia and other companies have explored whether to issue their own stablecoins in the U.S. amid a rush into the market ahead of legislation moving ahead in Washington that would legitimize the tokens, The Wall Street Journal reported. The companies are exploring using stablecoins to circumvent traditional payment systems, which could help reduce fees and allow them to pay overseas suppliers faster. They have also explored using stablecoins issued by others, such as a consortium of merchants, the publication reported. Financial companies are also looking into stablecoins. The Depository Trust and Clearing Corp., the clearinghouse that processes U.S. stock trades, along with a consortium of big banks including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo, are considering whether to issue the coins. Amazon’s efforts are still in the early stages, and some of the discussions have been about issuing its own coin for online purchases, the publication said. Representatives from Amazon, Walmart and Expedia did not immediately reply to requests for comment. Stablecoins are pegged 1:1 to dollars and backed by cash and U.S. Treasurys. They are used by crypto traders and for international money transfers. The U.S. Congress is deliberating stablecoin legislation that would legitimize the tokens, with a Senate floor vote set for next Tuesday. The legislation, if approved, could pave the way for their broader use in payment and finance. https://tinyurl.com/4hjpnveu

Societe Generale launches Stablecoin pegged to the Dollar.

French bank Societe Generale said it plans to launch a stablecoin that will be available on crypto exchanges and payment platforms, making it the first major bank globally to offer a dollar-pegged stablecoin accessible to retail users. The token, called USD CoinVertible, will be used for crypto trading, cross-border payments, foreign exchange transactions, and collateral and cash management, targeting both retail and institutional investors, the bank said. It will start trading in early July on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains. BNY will serve as a custodian for the reserve assets. The launch kicks off competition from banks against popular stablecoins Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC, which amassed US$155 billion and US$61 billion in circulation, respectively. More banks could launch their own stablecoins, though some also plan to make use of existing ones. SocGen plans to provide instant 24/7 conversion between cash and its stablecoin for clients, which could be attractive to users. SocGen’s dollar-pegged stablecoin will not be available to U.S. users. It is compliant with MiCA, the European Union’s crypto regulation. The U.S. Congress is currently deliberating legislation that will provide a framework for stablecoin registration and regulation, with the Senate set to make a key procedural vote this week. https://tinyurl.com/a786vc9x

Nvidia CEO thinks other AI chip efforts will get canceled.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says he isn’t threatened by the fact that his largest customers—from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft to OpenAI—are trying to build their own chips for artificial intelligence. Speaking to analysts this week in Paris, Huang said Nvidia is improving at such a fast rate that he believes most of those companies will cancel their chip projects. He reiterated that building chips for AI is quite difficult. “If it was that easy, gosh, I don’t know why I am working so hard,” he said. At the same time, Huang said he is excited that some of those firms have approached him about using Nvidia’s networking technology to connect Nvidia graphics processing units with other chips, such as a central processing unit. These firms told Nvidia that if they can use its networking with their own chips, “we will buy everything else from you,” Huang said, meaning they would standardize their data centers with Nvidia equipment. Huang previously only sold networking alongside Nvidia chips but has since changed his stance, calling the idea a “super clever strategy.” https://tinyurl.com/5fd6w6ba