$65 billion poured into Anthropic in five days. Nvidia signed 17 enterprise giants. A robot beat the human half-marathon record by six minutes.
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from Google and Amazon. Meta and Microsoft moved to cut
workers. In Beijing, a humanoid named Lightning ran a half-marathon faster than any human ever has.
The deals, the layoffs, and the robot are the same story told three ways. Frontier models are infrastructure, not products. Headcount is a capex line. The procurement question is closed; the companies still asking it are bidding against the ones that have already finished asking.
The Cloud Giants Just Bought the Model Layer
more contingent on performance milestones. Five days earlier, Amazon disclosed up to
in fresh investment alongside Anthropic's commitment to spend
on AWS over the next decade and consume
in April, up from $9 billion at year-end — the fastest revenue ramp in software history. Both hyperscalers now have direct cloud-and-equity exposure to the same model maker, while still selling shovels to its rivals. The frontier model is no longer the product. It is the infrastructure inside someone else's cloud bill.
— an open-source stack of NemoClaw runtime, the AI-Q deep-research blueprint, and the Nemotron family of open models — and named
: Adobe, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Siemens, CrowdStrike, Atlassian, Cadence, Synopsys, IQVIA, Palantir, Box, Cohesity, Dassault, Red Hat, Cisco, and Amdocs. Jensen Huang told the audience the era of agents will be larger than the era of models, and projected
in Blackwell-plus-Vera-Rubin order flow through 2027. Nvidia owns the silicon. It now wants to own the platform layer that sits on top of it.
announced an all-stock merger with Germany's
on Friday at a combined valuation of roughly
, with Schwarz Group — the German retail conglomerate behind Lidl — writing a
check into the new entity. The deal carries explicit endorsement from both the Canadian and German governments, and gives the merged company sovereign-AI footholds in Toronto, Berlin, and Heidelberg. Europe has spent two years mostly losing the AI fight. The Cohere–Aleph Alpha entity is the first credible non-U.S., non-Chinese frontier-AI bet at scale.
of headcount — will be cut on May 20, with another
closed simultaneously. Severance starts at sixteen weeks of base pay plus two weeks per year of service. The company spent
in 2026. Q1 was profitable. The reductions are not retrenchment; they are the cost of feeding an infrastructure budget larger than most countries' defense spending.