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T H E U N C E R T A I N F U T U R E S
all the news that fits the context window
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No. 12 · Thu · 25 June 2026Happy Thursday. OpenAI put its name on its first piece of silicon, and the labs and Washington edged back toward a truce over the model Washington switched off. More than 300 American towns have now moved to ban the data centers the whole boom depends on. And the first company built entirely on humanoid robots is heading for the public market.
░░▒▒▓▓ TOP 5 ▓▓▒▒░░OpenAI reveals its first custom chip, Jalapeño, built with Broadcom to run its models cheaper and lean less on Nvidia
OpenAI said Wednesday it has begun testing Jalapeño, a custom processor built with Broadcom and aimed squarely at inference — running finished models against user queries — rather than training. The pitch is cost and independence: OpenAI did the core design, Broadcom supplied the connectivity, and the company says early samples deliver better performance per watt than off-the-shelf GPUs, with initial deployment at Microsoft and other partners by year-end, a full production ramp in 2027, and 10 gigawatts of the chips planned by 2029. It joins Google, Amazon, and Microsoft in building its own silicon to cut a dependence on Nvidia that every frontier lab is now trying to loosen. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan, on OpenAI's own telling, said a company that wants to lead in AI cannot rely on a third-party GPU to do it. Covered by Axios, StrictlyVC, Reuters, and TechCrunch. (Axios · TechCrunch)
The White House and Anthropic edge toward a thaw, with the CEO benched and Fable 5 already creeping back online (update)
Two weeks after Washington pulled Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 offline, the talks are warming — partly because Anthropic stopped sending Dario Amodei to them. WIRED reports cofounder Tom Brown and policy chief Sarah Heck now lead the outreach, with one person on the calls saying Brown, unlike Amodei, can actually engage. The model itself is leaking back: anonymous trackers say Fable 5 has reappeared in Amazon Bedrock for some users, and prediction markets put restoration to US customers above even odds by July 1. The pressure is now legal and legislative — a bipartisan group of House members has demanded Commerce answer by June 26 what Anthropic must do to requalify, and a legal-tech firm has filed the first court challenge to the export order. Covered by WIRED, POLITICO, and MTS. (WIRED · Gizmodo · The Next Web)
More than 300 US towns and counties have banned new data centers — the buildout's bottleneck is now the neighbors
The Information counted more than 300 temporary or permanent bans on data center development passed by US state and local governments since 2023, with over 75 more under consideration — and more than 275 of them passed this year alone. It is a constraint that power and chips never were: the warehouses that the entire AI buildout depends on are increasingly unwelcome where they would be built, over fears about electricity bills, water, and noise. Most of the bans are temporary, so their bite is unproven, but they mark a public-opinion problem the industry has answered mostly with snarky posts rather than persuasion — even as a single Meta facility in Richland Parish, Louisiana, is funding $50,000 teacher bonuses. Covered by The Information. (The Information · Tom's Hardware)
Micron posts a record quarter on AI memory — two days after the same stock led a "chip wreck"
Micron reported fiscal third-quarter revenue of $41.46 billion on Wednesday, more than quadruple a year earlier and well past the $35.25 billion analysts expected, with net income of $28.24 billion and a record gross margin near 85 percent on the memory shortage feeding the AI buildout. The shares jumped about 14 percent in extended trading — nearly the mirror image of Tuesday, when Micron fell 13 percent in the "chip wreck" selloff this brief covered previously, the rout that wiped out the year's best performers. The split screen captures the market's whole AI trade in one stock: the demand is plainly real, and so is the worry that the debt-funded spending behind it never earns out. Covered by Reuters, StrictlyVC, and CNBC. (CNBC · StockTitan)
Agility Robotics will go public through a $2.5 billion SPAC merger — the first pure-play humanoid maker to test the public market
Agility Robotics agreed to merge with Churchill Capital in a deal valuing the company near $2.5 billion, making it the first U.S.-listed company devoted entirely to humanoid robots. Its Digit machine is already one of the field's most widely deployed — across nine customer sites including Schaeffler, GXO, Toyota, and Mercado Libre, with more than 100,000 totes moved at a single GXO warehouse — which is exactly the pitch to public investors: that the labor story is real revenue, not a demo reel. The deal tests whether the market will pay for a humanoid business still mostly in pilots, at a moment when physical AI is drawing capital and skepticism in equal measure. Covered by TechCrunch and GeekWire. (TechCrunch · GeekWire)
░░▒▒▓▓ STATS OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░░░▒▒▓▓ AI ▓▓▒▒░░░░▒▒▓▓ TECH ▓▓▒▒░░░░▒▒▓▓ POLICY ▓▓▒▒░░░░▒▒▓▓ GEOPOLITICS ▓▓▒▒░░░░▒▒▓▓ ALPS ▓▓▒▒░░░░▒▒▓▓ ROBOTICS ▓▓▒▒░░░░▒▒▓▓ COMMS DESK ▓▓▒▒░░AWS chief executive Matt Garman, in the season finale of Casey Newton's Platformer podcast, argued this week that AI will change jobs rather than erase them — noting Amazon is hiring 11,000 interns and new grads this year — even as the same company has cut roughly 30,000 corporate jobs since October, plans to replace half a million roles with robots, and sells an AI recruiter that interviews candidates with no human in the loop (Platformer). The dissent came from Ed Zitron, who read the industry's sudden enthusiasm for token-hungry agent "loops" — endorsed within a day of each other by Nvidia's Jensen Huang and Claude Code's Boris Cherny — as a push to get users burning more tokens, not a genuine advance (Where's Your Ed At). Takeaway: when an executive talks up the value of human labor while shipping the tools that thin it, quote the optimism and report the headcount in the same breath — the gap between them is what a comms team has to own rather than paper over.
░░▒▒▓▓ ONE MORE THING ▓▓▒▒░░The Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool — freshly repainted and fitted with an algae-filtration system for more than $16 million — has bloomed over with algae and peeling blue sealant anyway, and the White House response has been to guard the water. National Guard members stationed at the pool have been told to detain anyone who so much as touches it so Park Police can pursue vandalism charges, and at least one man has already been arrested. The surest way to protect a reflecting pool is to stop anyone from getting near enough to see their reflection. (Newsweek)
░░▒▒▓▓ TRACK OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░🎵 Refraction — Answer Code Request
Schöns Tägli — and onward, the Uncertain Futures desk