September 28, 2025: Market Retreats From Record Highs

Last week, Dow Jones fell 0.15%, S&P 500 was down 0.3%, Nasdaq composite lost 0.65%. September is tracking to be the busiest U.S. IPO month since Nov-2021 (US$7.6 billion excluding SPACs) with mixed after-markets (Netskope +18%, Stubhub −6%). Data-center land play, Fermi, is targeting a ~US$13 billion IPO valuation despite no revenue, underscoring the scarcity of land and power. Oracle upsized its long-dated bond sale to fund AI infrastructure to US$18 billion. Nvidia and OpenAI outlined up to US$100 billion of staged funding tied to ~10 GW of capacity. Nvidia could own, for an initial US$10 billion, ~2% of OpenAI equity, with chip-leasing models also under discussion. OpenAI expanded its Coreweave commitment to US$22.4 billion. Microsoft added Anthropic models into Copilot. Apple is testing an internal ChatGPT-like “Veritas” app for the revamped Siri. Google DeepMind released the latest version of its flagship language model designed for powering robots. Humanoid robots are Meta’s next ‘AR-size bet’. Micron beat expectations with +46% sales on strong High Bandwidth memory demand. Alibaba Group’s share price rose more than 9% on Wednesday, after the Chinese tech giant announced a slew of artificial intelligence related developments. Stripe is exploring a US$106.7 billion tender. EA is reportedly being taken private for ~US$50 billion. Tether is evaluating a speculated US$15–20 billion raise. Cloudflare is considering a USD stablecoin (NET Dollar) for AI agent payments. In Canada Sophic client, Intermap, launched a $20.1 million bought deal at $3.00, then upsized to $25.million (greenshoe to $28.8 million), for working capital and growth flexibility. Sophic client, Legend Power commissioned its first SmartGATE install with the U.S. Federal Government via GSA’s CEBT program.

Sophic client Intermap (IMP-TSX, ITMSF-OTC) announces $20.1 million Bought Deal Offering.

Intermap entered into an agreement with a syndicate of underwriters led by Stifel Canada (collectively, the “Underwriters”, who have agreed to purchase, on a “bought deal” basis 6,700,000 Class A common shares (the “Common Shares”) of the Company at a price of $3.00 per Common Share, for aggregate gross proceeds of $20,100,000 (the “Offering”). The Underwriters will also have the option, exercisable in whole or in part at any time on or up to 30 days after the Closing Date, to purchase up to an additional 1,005,000 Common Shares, to cover over-allotments, if any, and for market stabilization purposes. In the event that the option is exercised in its entirety, the aggregate gross proceeds of the Offering will be $23,115,000. The net proceeds of the Offering will be used for working capital and general corporate purposes. The Offering is scheduled to close on or about September 29, 2025 (the “Closing Date”) and is subject to certain conditions including, but not limited to, the receipt of all necessary approvals including the conditional approval of the Toronto Stock Exchange. https://tinyurl.com/y7ww5y9n

Sophic client Intermap (IMP-TSX, ITMSF-OTC) announces increase to Bought Deal financing to $25 million.

Intermap announced that, due to strong demand, the Company has agreed with its syndicate of underwriters including Stifel Canada, Canaccord Genuity Corp. and Beacon Securities Ltd. (collectively, the “Underwriters”), to increase the size of its previously announced $20,100,000 bought deal offering. Pursuant to the upsized deal terms, the Underwriters have agreed to purchase, on a “bought deal” basis, 8,334,000 Class A common shares (the “Common Shares”) at a price of $3.00 per Common Share (the “Issue Price”) for aggregate gross proceeds to the Company of $25,002,000 (the “Offering”). The Underwriters will also have the option, exercisable in whole or in part at any time on or up to 30 days after the Closing Date, to purchase up to an additional 1,250,100 Common Shares, to cover over-allotments, if any, and for market stabilization purposes. In the event that the option is exercised in its entirety, the aggregate gross proceeds of the Offering will be $28,752,300. The net proceeds of the Offering will be used for working capital and general corporate purposes. The Offering is scheduled to close on or about September 29, 2025 (the “Closing Date”) and is subject to certain conditions including, but not limited to, the receipt of all necessary approvals including the conditional approval of the Toronto Stock Exchange. https://tinyurl.com/5eeasyfc

Sophic client Legend Power Systems Inc. (LPS-TSXV, LPSIF-OTC) completes first SmartGATE installation with U.S. Federal government under GSA CEBT Proving Ground program.

Legend Power® Systems announces the completion and commissioning of its first SmartGATE Active Power Management system installation with the U.S. Federal Government. The project, conducted at a U.S. Department of Homeland Security facility in New York State, is part of the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) Center for Emerging Building Technologies (CEBT) Program. This achievement marks a critical milestone in an evaluation process that began more than 24 months ago. The program is intended to assess the performance and applicability of new technologies in support of U.S. Federal Government energy management objectives. As part of the CEBT Program, the SmartGATE system is undergoing independent third-party validation by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The next milestone in the process is an interim efficacy report, expected to span approximately 60 days. Following this 60-day review, the GSA may issue an initial position on the broader inclusion of power management technologies. Going forward, ORNL will conduct an extensive annual review of SmartGATE’s performance and functionality in the field. The outcomes of these evaluations may inform potential recommendations from the GSA regarding such technologies’ suitability for use in Federal Energy Savings Performance Contract (ESPC) projects. ESPCs are a long-standing contracting mechanism through which the Federal Government funds certain efficiency, resilience, and cost-saving improvements in its facilities. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, Federal ESPCs represent billions of dollars in awarded projects annually across the Government’s portfolio of more than 350,000 buildings nationwide. https://t.co/JAd8dELrTy

Cohere’s valuation hits US$7 billion following US$100-million round extension.

The financing comes through a second close of the US$500 million round Cohere raised at a US$6.8 billion valuation last month. The round’s investors now include the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) and Nexxus Capital Management. They join previously disclosed investors like AMD Ventures, Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan (HOOPP), Inovia, NVIDIA, Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP Investments), Radical Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures. https://tinyurl.com/2h2eyp3a

Telegraph Ventures secures $35 million to back enterprise AI startups in Québec.

A spinoff of European venture firm Telegraph Hill Capital has set up a new early-stage fund in Québec to back local AI startups. Telegraph Ventures announced its fund launch alongside nearly $35 million in a first close of financing from the Québec government through Investissement Québec, Teralys Capital, Inovia Capital, and more than 40 entrepreneurs and family offices. The fund plans to reach $40 million before the end of the year. https://tinyurl.com/3uhbk8r6

Canada’s anti-money laundering agency fines crypto exchange KuCoin parent.

Canada’s anti-money laundering agency has imposed its largest ever penalty of $19.6 million (US$14.09 million) on Peken Global Limited, operator of one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, KuCoin, the agency said on Thursday. The Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada said Seychelles-based Peken Global failed to register as a foreign money services business, neglected to report large virtual currency transactions of $10,000 or more, and did not submit suspicious transaction reports, as required for all financial institutions. https://tinyurl.com/yc7f77nz

Klarna, Netskope IPOs spur best month for US volume since 2021.

A burst of activity is powering the US IPO market toward its busiest month since the final innings of a manic 2021. Klarna Group Plc and Netskope Inc.’s successful outings led the charge, lifting September’s US initial public offerings volume so far to US$7.6 billion, excluding financial vehicles such as blank-check firms. That’s the biggest month since Nov. 2021, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Newly-public companies delivered a weighted-average return of 17% — a figure would be higher if it wasn’t for Stubhub Holdings Inc. and Gemini Space Station Inc., which have each tumbled by double-digit percentages since their debuts. The outliers serve as a reminder that despite the steadily improving picture for US IPOs since their post-pandemic nadir, and a handful of outsize successes, investors are still demanding that the crop of fintech upstarts and long-delayed listing candidates make a strong case for their stock’s valuation. The activity comes against a backdrop where equity benchmarks continue to hit strings of record highs as a closely-watched volatility gauge signals calm on the horizon. That environment has helped US IPOs raise US$32 billion in the year to date, modestly trailing the US$35.3 billion average of the corresponding period in the decade before the pandemic-driven frenzy of activity, the data show. US first-time share sales this year have now comfortably surpassed the amount raised in all of 2024. https://tinyurl.com/hukrjuj5

Data center site developer fermi targets US$13 billion valuation in IPO.

Fermi America, a data center site developer founded by former Energy Secretary Rick Perry, is targeting a roughly US$13 billion valuation in its initial public offering on the Nasdaq exchange. Founded this year by Perry and others, Fermi has no revenue. It is aiming to build and power the world’s largest data center complex on a 5,263-acre site in Amarillo, Texas. The company says the site, leased from Texas Tech University, will have access to 1 gigawatt of power by the end of 2026. It’s aiming to raise up to US$550 million in the offering, according to an updated prospectus filed Wednesday. A US$13 billion valuation would be a rich price tag for a site developer with Fermi’s limited track record, likely reflecting the belief that its access to land and power will be attractive to tech companies competing for limited resources to build data centers. UBS, Evercore ISI, Cantor Fitzgerald and Mizuho are acting as the lead book-running managers for the planned IPO. https://tinyurl.com/4ekrbuh7

Nvidia will invest up to US$100 billion in OpenAI for new data centers.

Nvidia and OpenAI said Monday they had signed a strategic partnership in which the chip designer will invest up to US$100 billion in the ChatGPT maker over an unspecified time as the startup increasingly relies on Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips. The move will help OpenAI develop its own data centers in addition to the unprecedented agreements it has struck to rent Nvidia chip servers from Microsoft and Oracle, according to a person who spoke to Nvidia executives about the new deal. The agreement involves OpenAI plans to develop 10 gigawatts of data center capacity—enough power to run numerous large cities. In other words, Nvidia would pay OpenAI roughly US$10 billion per gigawatt of capacity the startup develops. Nvidia and OpenAI said they are still finalizing the details of the partnership, and it isn’t clear how the agreement impacts OpenAI’s plan to develop its own AI server chips with the aid of Broadcom, an Nvidia rival. Shares in Nvidia rose 5% on the news. OpenAI over the summer projected it would spend US$450 billion on AI chip servers before the end of the decade, largely through rental agreements with Oracle and Microsoft, and has projected it will burn US$115 billion through 2029 before starting to generate cash from its business. It isn’t clear how the Nvidia chip-powered data centers OpenAI is seeking to develop would impact those figures. https://tinyurl.com/4hbf8cm4

Nvidia could get 2% stake in OpenAI from US$10 billion investment.

Nvidia has committed to investing the first US$10 billion of a planned US$100 billion investment in OpenAI at the startup’s recent US$500 billion valuation and then will make the remaining staggered investments at future valuations, according to a person with direct knowledge of the plans. The chip giant is making the investment in cash and will receive equity in OpenAI as part of the deal. Based on OpenAI’s recent valuation in an employee share, Nvidia would get about 2% of the company from the first US$10 billion invested. Earlier Monday, both companies said Nvidia would make a US$100 billion investment to support 10 gigawatts of data center capacity for OpenAI. Nvidia will make the investment as each gigawatt comes online. This structure should limit the amount of dilution other OpenAI investors experience, assuming the valuation of OpenAI continues to rise. By the end of this year, OpenAI will have raised over US$70 billion since its founding, including an investment by Nvidia last fall when OpenAI was valued at US$157 billion. OpenAI needs to support the immense costs of training and running its models, which the company has projected will cost at least US$450 billion through 2030. OpenAI is in the middle of a restructuring that could pave the way for an eventual public offering. https://tinyurl.com/yxbjjfvn

Nvidia in talks to lease chips to OpenAI as startup’s server spending plan rises to US$1 trillion.

Nvidia and OpenAI are in discussions to structure their massive artificial intelligence data center partnership around an unconventional business model: OpenAI would lease Nvidia’s AI chips rather than purchasing them outright. The potential arrangement is an undisclosed part of a landmark tentative deal announced Monday, in which Nvidia will provide up to US$100 billion in funding to help OpenAI build its own data centers, starting with a US$10 billion cash infusion next year. It shows how Nvidia is seeking new ways to sell its products to a class of customers that, unlike established cloud giants, would struggle to finance such large hardware purchases on their own. The scale of the potential project is immense, targeting up to 10 gigawatts of data center capacity, with a total cost estimated between US$500 billion and US$600 billion and Nvidia’s chips and networking equipment accounting for the lion’s share of that expense. Those figures would be in addition to the US$450 billion that OpenAI earlier this year projected it would spend to rent 8 GW worth of server capacity from cloud providers through the end of this decade, according to The Information. That implies the ChatGPT maker is already aiming to spend around US$1 trillion to fund its AI ambitions over the next decade. https://tinyurl.com/yc62tz6h

OpenAI signs additional US$6.5 billion contract with CoreWeave.

OpenAI agreed to purchase up to US$6.5 billion of cloud services from CoreWeave, pushing its contracted spending with the cloud provider to about US$22.4 billion, the companies said Thursday. The expanded contract adds to OpenAI’s spending commitments as it tries to secure enough computing power to train new artificial-intelligence models and serve its growing customer base. OpenAI said this week it’s working on five new data center sites with Oracle and SoftBank and signed a US$100 billion deal with Nvidia to use its chips. CoreWeave in July raised US$2.6 billion in debt to help it deliver cloud computing to OpenAI. https://tinyurl.com/3eb3pavk

Intel said to seek investment from Apple.

Intel has approached Apple to seek an investment, Bloomberg reported, as part of the struggling chipmaker’s efforts to shore up its business. Shares of Intel rose more than 6% after the report, while Apple shares fell less than 1% Wednesday. A deal would follow Nvidia’s US$5 billion purchase of stock in Intel, which will build custom-designed CPU chips to integrate in Nvidia’s AI systems. Japanese conglomerate SoftBank also announced a US$2 billion investment in Intel last month. Intel, which has spent heavily on building out its foundry business, is seen as a critical part of President Trump’s plan to reduce reliance on non-U.S. manufacturers TSMC and Samsung to manufacture chips. The U.S. government acquired a roughly 10% stake in the chipmaker in an unusual deal in August. https://tinyurl.com/3n3hm2fp

Oracle raises US$18 billion in upsized debt offering.

Oracle raised US$18 billion in a debt offering that was upsized from an earlier US$15 billion target dueto strong demand, said a person familiar with the deal. The offering includes bonds maturing as far out as 40 years from now, a rarity in the debt markets. The largest portion maturing in 2035 has a coupon that’s roughly one percentage point above the comparable Treasury yield, giving it a higher yield than the overall S&P 500 Investment Grade Corporate Bond Index. Oracle’s offering comes as it plans to spend big on chips and data centers to satisfy more than US$300 billion in cloud contracts with OpenAI and other artificial-intelligence providers. Oracle said this week it’s developing three new data center sites as part of the Stargate initiative with OpenAI and SoftBank. Oracle had more than US$150 billion in current and long-term liabilities at the end of August, according to securities filings. Moody’s and S&P Global Ratings have placed Oracle on negative credit watch, meaning its credit rating could get downgraded if it doesn’t improve its debt levels. “Oracle’s AI infrastructure business has tremendous potential in our view, but we note that this exponential growth and the already high debt burden at Oracle could result in an extended period of high leverage and negative cash flow,” Moody’s wrote in a report this month. Moody’s has given Oracle a Baa2 rating on the lower end of the investment grade spectrum. Bank of America, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC and JPMorgan Chase were the joint book-running manager for the offering. https://tinyurl.com/bdc5dfka

AI coding start-ups reap US$7.5 billion wave of investment.

Start-ups building artificial intelligence-powered coding tools have reaped more than US$7.5 billion of investment in the past three months, as investors increase their bets that software engineering will be the first “killer application” of the technology. Venture capitalists Sequoia Capital and NEA, along with Wall Street bank JPMorgan and chipmaker Nvidia, on Thursday invested US$50 million into AI coding start-up Factory. The start-up sells AI agents, called “droids”, that handle coding and software development to businesses. That deal follows massive funding rounds for a trio of San Francisco-based coding start-ups — Cognition AI, Anysphere and Replit — which have raised a combined US$1.6 billion since June. More than US$5 billion in total has flowed to AI software development start-ups via venture capital deals and mergers and acquisitions in the third quarter of the year, according to PitchBook, far exceeding any quarter since the AI boom began in 2022. In addition to those deals, Google paid about US$2.5 billion to hire the executive team and licence technology from a fourth coding company, Windsurf, in July. https://tinyurl.com/4y5w43v5

Tether CEO says it’s evaluating fundraising.

Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin issuer, is evaluating raising funding from investors to expand across business lines, including stablecoins, AI, commodity trading, and media, by “several orders of magnitude,” said CEO Paolo Ardoino in a tweet Tuesday. His comment came after Bloomberg reported Tether is in early talks with investors to raise between US$15 billion and US$20 billion in exchange for about 3% stake, citing two people familiar with the matter. Tether, a closely-held firm, has said it made US$13 billion in profits in 2024. That would imply a valuation of up to US$500 billion, putting it in the same league as OpenAI and SpaceX. Cantor Fitzgerald, which manages Tether’s reserve assets, is acting as the lead adviser, Bloomberg said, adding details may change and eventual numbers could be significantly lower. Tether issues USDT, which has US$172 billion in market circulation. Circle, the second largest stablecoin issuer with US$74 billion of outstanding USDC, currently has US$33 billion in market value. Earlier this month, Tether announced it will launch a U.S.-focused stablecoin, called USAT, by setting up a new company, which will count Anchorage Digital, the issuance partner of the new stablecoin, as a shareholder. Tether’s U.S. CEO, Bo Hines, former White House crypto adviser, earlier told Bloomberg that Tether has no plans to raise money. https://tinyurl.com/2s4ak49m

Stripe to buy back shares at US$107 billion valuation.

Stripe is in talks to buy back shares from investors at a price that values the payments company at US$106.7 billion, Axios reported. The company recently valued itself at that level, in what’s known as a 409A valuation, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. The price eclipses the payments fintech startup’s valuation of US$95 billion, which it reached through a fundraising round in 2021. Investors then cut its valuation to US$50 billion when it raised money in 2023, at a time when interest rates were spiking and venture capital funding dropped. The payments company is considering allowing employees to sell their shares at this level. https://tinyurl.com/skr6hpyk

Videogame firm Electronic Arts nears private equity megadeal.

Electronic Arts, the company behind popular video games such as FIFA, Madden football and The Sims, could announce a deal to sell itself to investors including Silver Lake, Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund as soon as next week, The Wall Street Journal first reported on Friday. EA’s shares jumped 13% immediately following the report, bringing its market capitalization to just over US$48 billion. That’s close to the US$50 billion valuation investors are reportedly considering ascribing it in the deal, which would make it one of the largest leveraged buyouts in history. EA’s sales growth has been anemic for the last few years, and the company’s top line shrank in fiscal 2025. Still, Wall Street analysts expect to see a comeback from the company. They estimate its sales will grow by more than 7% in 2026, according to Koyfin, as a result of some hotly anticipated new releases this year. That has helped its stock slightly outperform the S&P 500 in 2025, even prior to the news report. Despite its slowdown, the business still throws off a healthy amount of cash: Its free cash flow margin last year was around 25%. With US$1.6 billion in cash on hand and just over US$2 billion in existing debt, that suggests it has room to comfortably borrow. The deal will include a debt financing package worth upwards of US$20 billion, the Financial Times separately reported. https://tinyurl.com/rj4yuyr3

Oura ring maker to become US$11 billion company with latest raise.

Oura Health Oy, the maker of the popular Oura health and fitness ring, is closng in on a roughly US$11 billion valuation after selling about 3 million rings over the past year. The Finnish company is raising US$875 million in a new Series E financing round valuing it around US$10.9 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. That would double Oura’s US$5 billion valuation from its Series D round last November. The new round is expected to close by the end of this month and could still exceed US$900 million, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private matters. Oura plans to use the funds to scale production, invest in development and expand internationally, the people said. Separately, the company said it has secured a US$250 million revolving credit line with a consortium of banks including Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Citigroup Inc. and Barclays Plc. Tom Hale, Oura’s chief executive officer, declined to comment on the company’s fundraising process. But in an interview, he said Oura has been growing “like a rocket ship,” adding that he has “never had a stronger quarter” in his 130 quarters working in business. The company has now sold 5.5 million rings in total — up from 2.5 million through June 2024, Hale said. Oura is on track to generate more than US$1 billion in revenue in 2025, doubling the US$500 million it posted in 2024. Looking ahead, it expects sales to exceed US$1.5 billion in 2026. Recent growth has been fueled by female shoppers, retail store sales, purchases made with health savings account funds, and international expansion. Oura launched its latest ring in Japan and Germany earlier this year and is planning further global rollouts. Today, the company sells its devices across 4,000 stores. The US military is Oura’s largest business customer, with tens of thousands of service members using the rings for fatigue tracking and research. Still, Hale said revenue from that arrangement is a relatively small contributor to overall sales. Hale also said that Oura has widened its margins in recent quarters, though he declined to disclose profitability. Asked about a potential IPO, Hale said there are “real advantages to being a private company,” pointing to the success of firms like SpaceX and Stripe. “I don’t want to say we’re never going public, but I am also not saying we plan to go public or have made a decision to go public,” he said. https://tinyurl.com/ms73ky24

Alibaba shares surge after slew of AI related announcements.

Alibaba Group’s share price rose more than 9% on Wednesday, after the Chinese tech giant announced a slew of artificial intelligence related developments in a conference. The company released the 1 trillion-parameter Qwen3-Max, the latest addition to the Qwen suite of large-language models. It’s the third LLM from China that claims to have 1 trillion parameters, after Kimi K2, developed by startup Moonshot AI, and an unspecified model developed by state-owned China Telecom. Alibaba also said that its cloud services will include Nvidia’s Physical AI software stack, which developers use for autonomous driving and robotics applications. Some Chinese startups in the robotics field already have been accessing Nvidia’s software themselves, and it remains to be seen if being available via Alibaba Cloud will lift the demand from China for Nvidia’s Physical AI software. The Chinese company will also launch its first data centers in Brazil, France, and the Netherlands, with additional data centers to be added in Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Dubai in the coming year, though it didn’t specify whether these data centers will be equipped with Nvidia chips, nor what clients they are for. Alibaba has become an investor darling since February when the company announced that it plans to invest $52 billion in AI infrastructure over the next three years. https://tinyurl.com/4cd8cdy8

Micron beats on earnings as company sales rise 46% on AI boom.

Micron reported better-than-expected earnings and revenue on Tuesday as well as a robust forecast for the current quarter. The stock rose in extended trading. Micron said revenue in the current period, its fiscal first quarter, will be about US$12.5 billion, versus the US$11.94 billion average analyst estimate per LSEG. Micron shares have nearly doubled so far in 2025. The company makes memory and storage, which are important components for computers. Micron has been one of the winners of the artificial intelligence boom. That’s because high-end AI chips such as those made by Nvidia require increasing amounts of high-tech memory called high-bandwidth memory, which Micron makes. https://tinyurl.com/45mp7f28

BYD shares dropped after news that Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway sold its entire stake.

The famed investor’s company likely made around US$7 billion, or 30 times its money, from the 16-year investment, an analysis by Business Insider found. Buffett’s conglomerate purchased the stake through its Berkshire Hathaway Energy subsidiary, which revealed in its first-quarter report this year that it had exited the position. Berkshire confirmed the exit to CNBC, which first reported the disclosure over the weekend. The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. Berkshire paid US$232 million, or just over US$1 a share, for 225 million shares of BYD in late 2008. It bought around 25% of the automaker’s Hong Kong-listed shares, or 9.9% of the entire company. BYD stock soared about 50-fold from there to trade around the Hong Kong dollar equivalent of US$50 on March 31, the last day of Berkshire’s final quarter as a shareholder. Adjusted for a three-for-one stock split in July, BYD shares have fallen 16% since then. Berkshire’s BYD position was worth US$9 billion at its peak in June 2022. Buffett and his team foreshadowed their exit by listing their entire stake on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange’s clearing system in July 2022. They hadn’t touched the position in nearly 14 years, reflecting Buffett’s commitment to long-term, buy-and-hold investing. However, Berkshire began cutting the holding in August 2022 and pared it by 76% by July 2024, at which point its ownership fell below 5% and it no longer had to disclose further sales. Berkshire has only disclosed the details of some of its transactions. A Business Insider analysis based on those and BYD’s average stock price during the selling period found that Berkshire likely made around US$7 billion, or 30 times its original investment. Buffett was asked why Berkshire was paring its stake in April 2023. He pointed to the massive surge in BYD stock and the prospect of earning a higher return elsewhere. https://tinyurl.com/ywnm8eu3

Altman says data center project will produce ‘Gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week’.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a blog post on Tuesday that the company aims to create a “factory that can produce a gigawatt of new AI infrastructure every week.” The comments come a day after OpenAI announced a partnership with Nvidia, under which the chip designer plans to invest up to US$100 billion in OpenAI to help finance the development of new AI data centers. Altman also said that OpenAI would be disclosing later this year “interesting new ideas” it has about financing its AI infrastructure ambitions, hinting that it might turn to less traditional methods to raise capital to build the data centers. In the past, companies building data centers have turned to more creative structures to raise money, like using their AI chips as collateral for loans. Altman said that with 10 gigawatts of computing capacity, AI could possibly cure cancer. His optimistic stance on the potential for AI technology stands in stark contrast to companies selling that AI tech, who have struggled to find enterprise buyers in some cases. https://tinyurl.com/45ybmb62

OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank plan five new U.S. data center sites.

OpenAI said Tuesday an agreement with Oracle and SoftBank to supply computing power for artificial intelligence would expand to five new data centers built under the Stargate branding, an update to the US$500 billion project it announced at the White House in January. The five additional sites–two in Texas, one in New Mexico, one in Ohio, and another in an unnamed Midwestern state–will give OpenAI access to almost 7 gigawatts of total computing capacity through Stargate over the next three years, OpenAI said Tuesday. OpenAI and SoftBank will jointly develop data centers in Lordstown, Ohio, and Milam County, Tex. OpenAI said the Stargate companies would continue evaluating other U.S. sites and planned to spend more than their initial US$500 billion commitment. The announcement comes a day after Altman and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced that the chip designer would invest up to US$100 billion in OpenAI over an unspecified time to help the startup develop its own data centers, separately from the servers it is renting from cloud providers such as Oracle and Microsoft. Spokespeople for OpenAI and Oracle did not respond to a request for comment. https://tinyurl.com/bp7hruc3

Microsoft partners with OpenAI rival Anthropic on AI copilot.

Microsoft Corp. will start using artificial intelligence models from Anthropic to help power its workplace AI assistant, adding a significant partner to a product that has so far been predominantly driven by OpenAI. Starting on Wednesday, business users of Microsoft’s Copilot-branded AI assistant will be able to toggle between OpenAI and Anthropic models for certain functions, including digital research assistance and help building customized AI tools. Microsoft has staked out a leading position in commercializing artificial intelligence for the workplace, largely thanks to its partnership with OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT. In exchange for a massive investment and data center power, Microsoft won the right to incorporate OpenAI’s tools into its products. OpenAI models back Microsoft’s line of Copilot-branded tools, which include a software coding assistant, a personal assistant and the workplace chatbot Microsoft 365 Copilot. https://tinyurl.com/3reb7xrk

Apple builds a ChatGPT-like app to help test the revamped Siri.

Apple Inc. has developed a ChatGPT-like iPhone app, code-named Veritas, to help test and prepare for a long-anticipated overhaul of Siri coming next year. The app is meant for internal use and is being used by the company’s AI division to quickly evaluate new features for Siri, including testing the ability to search through personal data and perform in-app actions. The new Siri is now slated to debut as early as March after multiple delays, and its success could help propel Apple toward an AI comeback or risk slipping further behind smartphone rivals. https://tinyurl.com/2s74eaty

DeepMind releases new robot AI models.

Google DeepMind released the latest version of its flagship language model designed for powering robots, touting the model’s ability to detect nearby objects, plan motions such as how to grab a mug and search the internet for information, such as local recycling laws. The unit of Alphabet’s Google also made the model, Gemini Robotics-ER 1.5, available for developers to use. ‘ER’ stands for embodied reasoning, indicating the model’s ability to understand the physical world. Those skills also allow a second model, Gemini Robotics 1.5, to control a robot to complete tasks, such as cleaning a table or sorting trash. Users can instruct ER 1.5 to “think” for longer to improve a robot’s accuracy on more complex tasks. DeepMind announced earlier robotics models in March, but those were not made broadly available to developers. https://tinyurl.com/bdhsnwpf

Humanoid robots are Meta’s next ‘AR-size bet’.

Building humanoid robots is Meta’s next “AR size bet,” a top executive told me recently. That suggests the company plans to spend billions of dollars on the effort. During a recent conversation at Meta’s headquarters, CTO Andrew Bosworth said he stood up a robotics “research effort” earlier this year at the direction of CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The team’s existence has been reported on before, but Bosworth hadn’t discussed its strategy in-depth until our interview. “I don’t think the hardware is the hard part,” he told me ahead of Meta’s recent Connect conference. “I’m not saying the hardware isn’t also hard, but it’s not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the software.” To demonstrate, Bosworth picked up my glass of water from a table between us. “If you know robotics, one of the biggest problems that you have is dexterous manipulation,” he said. “These robots, they can stand, they can run, they can do a flip, because the ground is a super stable thing.” By contrast, a robot trying to pick up the glass of water would likely “immediately crush it or spill all the water.” “I’m not saying the hardware isn’t also hard, but it’s not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the software.”While Meta is currently building its own humanoid, or “Metabot” as it’s called internally, Bosworth envisions the company licensing its software platform to other robot manufacturers. “I don’t care about us being the hardware manufacturers,” he explained. https://tinyurl.com/3rxhfjru

Trump signs TikTok Executive Order, values company at US$14 billion.

Vice President JD Vance said Thursday that a new company poised to take over TikTok’s U.S. operations will be valued at about US$14 billion, well below what was expected. Vance made the comments at the Oval Office, where Trump was signing an executive order approving the proposed deal. ByteDance, which owns TikTok, was valued at US$330 billion in a recent employee share sale. Earlier Thursday, Bloomberg reported that MGX, the United Arab Emirates-backed investment fund, was in talks to join the consortium of non-Chinese investors involved in the deal, which also includes Oracle. The administration has not yet disclosed the complete lineup of investors but Vance said they intend to announce more details in the coming days. Addressing a question from a reporter about whether he hoped to see TikTok’s algorithm show more MAGA-related content on the U.S. app, Trump responded: “If I could make it 100% MAGA I would, but it’s not gonna work out that way unfortunately.” https://tinyurl.com/yc4yv7js

Amazon will pay out US$2.5 billion for ‘misleading’ Prime subscribers.

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced back in 2023 that it was investigating Amazon over “enrolling consumers in Amazon Prime without consent and sabotaging their attempts to cancel.” Two years later, the FTC and Amazon have just reached a “historic” US$2.5 billion settlement as a penalty for Amazon “knowingly misleading” millions of consumers. The historic monetary judgment contained in the settlement is only the third ROSCA case in which the FTC has obtained a civil penalty. It includes: a US$1 billion civil penalty, which is the largest ever in a case involving an FTC rule violation; US$1.5 billion in consumer redress, providing full relief for the estimated 35 million consumers impacted by unwanted Prime enrollment or deferred cancellation. This is the second-highest restitution award ever obtained by FTC action. https://tinyurl.com/27jzevyu

Arguments begin for remedies in Google’s advertising technology anti-trust case.

The second phase of Google’s second antitrust case—this one around its ad tech operations—opened in a Virginia courthouse on Monday. In April, a district judge found Google monopolized the market for technology that helps websites sell ads, and the trial that is on this week will help decide how Google should address these findings. The Department of Justice is arguing that Google should be forced to sell its suite of technology that helps web publishers manage and sell ad space, today known as Google Ad Manager. Google, for its part, says the judge’s findings can be addressed by removing some of the ties between Google’s various advertising technology products. Google has also said they plan to appeal the judge’s ruling. Google’s ad tech operations are facing anti-trust scrutiny from many angles. Earlier this month, European regulators fined Google €2.95 billion for anti-competitive behavior in ad tech, in a case similar to the one brought by the Department of Justice. Separately, several of Google’s competitors in publisher advertising technology—including Magnite, PubMatic and OpenX—have sued Google, alleging that Google’s anti-competitive behavior in advertising technology harmed their businesses. Publishers including People Inc., Business Insider and Slate also recently sued Google for harms related to advertising technology. https://tinyurl.com/3w8meunj

FTC consumer protection lawsuit against amazon heads to trial this week.

A Federal Trade Commission lawsuit against Amazon’s alleged use of deceptive practices to lock consumers into its Prime subscription goes to trial this week in a Seattle court. In the lawsuit, which the FTC filed in 2023, the commission alleges that Amazon violated consumer protection laws by tricking shoppers into signing up for Prime memberships without their knowledge, including by making it difficult to understand billing terms and to cancel subscriptions. Amazon has denied the allegations. The lawsuit is separate to the FTC’s antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, alleging that it uses illegal monopolization tactics to control online commerce, which isn’t due to go to trial until 2027. Several Amazon executives are also named as individual defendants. https://tinyurl.com/c9473hkh

Instagram hits 3 billion users with focus on video, messaging.

Instagram has reached 3 billion monthly users, cementing the network as one of the most popular consumer apps of all time and leading parent Meta Platforms Inc. to put even more emphasis on the tools that keep driving growth: short-form video and private messaging. The app is changing its home screen navigation bar to highlight private messaging and Reels, Instagram’s video rival to ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok, which will make those features easier for users to find. It’s also running a test in India where the app will open directly into Reels instead of the traditional feed, a design the company also employed for a newly released iPad app. Another test will let Instagram users more directly influence their content algorithm by selecting or hiding topics depending on their interests, according to Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram. The changes are part of a broader effort to leverage Instagram’s most popular features — even if it means moving further away from the traditional photo feed that first made the app a global hit. While Instagram was once known primarily as a place for posting and scrolling through personal life highlights, that type of sharing has been declining for years, Mosseri said. https://tinyurl.com/3j6sjh77

Tech giant Cloudflare to launch a stablecoin.

Cloudflare, a US$76 billion company that powers major websites, said it plans to launch a U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin that will be used in AI-powered transactions. The stablecoin is the first by a major tech firm after the passage of stablecoin legislation in July. The stablecoin, called NET Dollar, will enable instant, automated transactions by AI to take actions on behalf of humans, such as paying for cheapest flight, ordering an item that goes on sale, or paying suppliers upon delivery, the company said. It can also be used by creators to get paid for content. Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies that are typically pegged to the dollar and backed by reserves. Cloudflare is a publicly traded company that manages web traffic and cybersecurity for around 20% of the internet. There have been concerns among banks and crypto companies that a tech firm would issue a stablecoin to compete against their products. The stablecoin legislation over the summer banned public companies that are not financial firms from issuing stablecoins without government approval. A Cloudflare representative said the company will announce more details later. https://tinyurl.com/23249ryz

U.S. considers chip production rule to curb imports.

The Trump administration is considering requiring companies to produce the same number of chips domestically as they import from overseas, with non-compliant companies facing tariffs, according to The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter. The policy would create substantial operational challenges for major technology companies like Apple and Nvidia, which rely on products containing chips from multiple global suppliers. It would be challenging for companies to quickly match domestically produced chips with overseas ones, as expanding U.S. production capacity requires significant investments and time. However, the proposal could benefit companies already expanding their U.S. operations, including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Micron Technology, and GlobalFoundries. These manufacturers could gain increased leverage in customer negotiations as demand for domestic production grows. The proposal stems from President Trump’s previous statements that tech companies need greater investments in the U.S. to avoid the roughly 100% semiconductor tariffs. Under the proposed rule, companies pledging to build chips domestically would receive credits over time, allowing continued imports without tariffs until their U.S. facilities become operational, according to the Journal. https://tinyurl.com/2rn8227b

Sophic Client Plurilock Security (PLUR-TSXV, PLCKF-OTCQB) CEO Ian L. Paterson quoted in National Post article: More than 880,000 phone numbers linked to government accounts stolen in data breach.

In an interview, cybersecurity expert Ian L. Paterson from Plurilock Security said that breaches like this one occur nearly daily across the world. The most important thing for 2Keys now is to ensure that the hackers have been cut off from accessing the system. https://tinyurl.com/3rmm43fr