Hello there.

Happy Friday! AI is still the hottest trade on Earth… but there’s enough strain to start seeing some cracks.

In this issue:

Between power grids, geopolitics, trillion-dollar infrastructure builds, and AI companies suddenly beefing with each other, the “line goes up” story is starting to look a lot more complicated. Let’s get into it.

In partnership with Alts.co

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Trump promised to cut electricity prices in half during his first year… but prices jumped 6% in 2025. Oops. Now people are (understandably) upset that tech companies are building massive AI facilities that suck up enough power to light up entire cities, and we're the ones paying for it. The largest electric grid in the US, covering 13 states, saw electricity costs explode by over $23 billion just from data center demand.

So Trump did what Trump does: he hauled all the big tech CEOs to the White House and made them sign a pledge saying they'll pay for their own electricity. Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, xAI, Oracle, and OpenAI all signed. But here's the catch: it's basically just a handshake deal with no real enforcement behind it. Like when your roommate promises to do the dishes this time, “for real this time”. States still have to actually make this happen, and experts are skeptical it'll work.

If you're looking for investment angles here, it might not be the obvious AI plays. Think utilities that can expand capacity, nuclear and natural gas developers, grid infrastructure companies, and even water treatment firms. AI is quickly becoming less of a software story and more of a "who can actually keep the lights on" story.

When the hottest trade on Wall Street starts depending on transformers and transmission lines, something has shifted.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang just basically announced his company is done investing in OpenAI and Anthropic, the two biggest AI startups in the world. His official reason? They're going public soon, so the investment window is closing. But like most breakup explanations, there's way more drama beneath the surface.

Let's back up. Last September, Nvidia said they'd invest $100 billion in OpenAI. That number got everyone hyped. Then last week, they actually invested $30 billion instead. That's a pretty massive downgrade. Huang says this "$30 billion investment might be the last time" they put money into OpenAI, and the same goes for their $10 billion stake in Anthropic.

The original $100 billion concept looked kind of circular. Nvidia invests billions into OpenAI… and OpenAI uses that money to buy Nvidia’s chips. To be clear, Nvidia is still absolutely winning: It sells the GPUs that power AI training and inference, and it’s invested in two of the biggest AI companies in the world either way. But the investment frenzy around private AI startups may be cooling slightly as sky-high valuations get, shall we say, ambitious.

Then there's the Anthropic situation, which got messy fast. Two months after Nvidia invested $10 billion, Anthropic's CEO basically compared selling chips to Chinese customers to "selling nuclear weapons to North Korea." Not exactly subtle. Then, Trump's team blacklisted Anthropic from government contracts because they refused to let their AI be used for autonomous weapons. Within hours, OpenAI swooped in and signed a deal with the Pentagon instead.

So now Nvidia is holding stakes in two AI companies that are publicly beefing with each other over military contracts, while users are literally switching from ChatGPT to Claude in protest. ChatGPT uninstalls surged 295% after their Pentagon deal. That's not the kind of drama you want when you're invested in both sides. No wonder Huang is tapping out.

In this episode of This Week in Tech, the panel unpacks the escalating standoff between Anthropic and the United States Department of Defense. Meanwhile, Big Tech layoffs pile up, smartphones battle for attention, and governments keep pushing deeper into digital surveillance.

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That’s all for today. Write us and let us know your thoughts on the market, the newsletter, or the weather—we’d just love to hear from you.

Till next time,
— Brandon and Blake