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🗞️ In this edition
Anthropic Opened Its Books
Sponsored: Roku Ads Manager
Nvidia Put $10 Billion Into Europe
Salesforce Is Buying Braze For $5.66 Billion
🔌 MCP CORNER Three servers worth wiring up this week.
⚡ YOUR MOVE For people building the life they want, now.
📢 What else is happening
Anthropic handed regulators a number it has never had to show anyone. Nvidia spent its way across seven European countries in a single morning. And Salesforce paid billions for the software that decides which message lands in your inbox.
Keep reading.
Source: Mint
WHAT HAPPENED
Anthropic has filed a draft registration with American securities regulators ahead of a share sale planned for November. The paperwork shows a net loss of $80.7 billion for the first half of this year, most of it an accounting entry tied to how far the company's own shares have risen rather than money going out the door. It also shows revenue climbing steeply and a mountain of long term commitments to buy computing power, roughly four fifths of which cannot be cancelled. The Wall Street Journal reported the filing first.
WHY IT MATTERS
A private company can tell you its losses are an accounting artefact and you simply have to take its word for it. A public one has to show the working every quarter, to people who can sell. The number that decides whether this listing holds is not the loss at all, it is whether anyone will fund a decade of computing bills signed before the company knows what the output sells for.
OUR TAKE
The obvious read is that the loss is noise and the revenue line is the real story. We think the commitments are the story, and the giveaway is how little of them can be undone. You only sign a contract that unbreakable when you are more frightened of not having the machines than of paying for them.
Watch what the final prospectus says about those commitments. If the figure holds or grows when the real document lands, Anthropic has decided a shortage of computing power is the risk worth buying out. If it shrinks, or the listing slides past November, somebody in that room decided the bill was too big to show investors.
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Source: Storagenewsletter.com
Seven countries, one morning, and a number no European budget is going to match.
Nvidia told its Berlin conference it has now committed close to $10 billion to European technology, naming fresh investments in French, British and Swedish companies along the way. One of them is a shared supercomputer that a group of Swedish industrial names will run between them rather than each buying their own. The money is arriving while Europe is still writing the rules its own companies will have to work under.
When you do click a story in here, what makes you?
Source: Markatech APAC
All cash, and nobody expects it to close for two years.
Salesforce has agreed to buy Braze, the company whose software decides which message a customer gets and when, for about $5.66 billion in cash. The deal still needs Braze shareholders and the regulators to sign off, and Salesforce does not expect it to close for another two financial years. It says it wants live customer behaviour driving its marketing tools rather than a list somebody built last quarter.
🔌 MCP CORNER
THREE SERVERS WORTH WIRING UP THIS WEEK.
An MCP server plugs your assistant into another app, so it stops describing the work and starts doing it.
Sentry MCP Server: Hands your assistant the errors your users are actually hitting, so the triage is done before standup.
Grafana MCP Server: Opens your own dashboards to your assistant, so you ask what broke instead of hunting for the panel.
YouTube Transcript MCP: Turns any video into text your agent can read, so the hour long talk becomes the four lines you needed.
⚡️ YOUR MOVE
FOR PEOPLE BUILDING THE LIFE THEY WANT, NOW.
📒 Notion rebuilt the way its assistant picks a model and says the change makes your credits go about ten times further, while a single agent task can now run for more than a day instead of five minutes. Existing customers move onto the new credit system on November 2, and you can now point a personal agent at your own ChatGPT subscription instead of buying more credits. → Check your credits
📺 Developers have been aiming coding agents at their own televisions to tear out the advertising, the viewing trackers and the preinstalled apps. One handed over nothing but a model number and got back a set with twenty five packages removed and a new home screen written for it. Two projects on GitHub now package the method. → Take your TV back
📞 New York City has proposed fining companies whose automated support leaves a customer with no way to reach a person. If you run a support queue, the thing being outlawed is the loop with no exit, and it is worth finding yours before a regulator finds it for you. → Audit your own queue
OpenAI Bought A Drug Development Startup – OpenAI has acquired Orchestra Bio, whose software coordinates the many steps of getting a drug built and tested, and plans to fold it into the life sciences tools it already runs, with no price disclosed.
Nscale Is In Talks For Another $45 Billion From Anthropic – The computing provider is negotiating to sell Anthropic a second slab of capacity, this time a building on its West Virginia campus that would draw 460 megawatts, weeks before Nscale tries to list its own shares.
Gen-2 by Runway: Turns a line of text into footage you would otherwise have had to go and shoot.
Apify: Pulls the web data your agent needs into a shape it can actually work with.
BlandAI: Makes and answers the phone calls you have been putting off all week.
Chatfuel: Answers your customers in the app they already message you in.
Three stories about bills coming due in public. Anthropic has spent two years telling people the computing commitments are worth it, and this week it had to write them down where strangers can add them up. Nvidia is doing the same arithmetic from the other side of the table, buying a continent's goodwill before anyone can price it. And Salesforce decided the cheapest way to know what a customer wants next was to buy the company that already knew.
Work out whose bill you are on.
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