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T H E U N C E R T A I N F U T U R E S
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No. 30 · Thursday, 23 July 2026Pull up a chair. On Wednesday the market news and the power-grid news turned out to be the same news: Alphabet and Tesla opened their books and both showed the AI buildout eating into their cash, Washington's fight over China's cheap open models turned personal, and OpenAI pushed the running tab for compute past three-quarters of a trillion dollars. Let's get into it.
░░▒▒▓▓ TOP 5 ▓▓▒▒░░Alphabet's revenue jumps 24% to $119.8 billion, but shares fall as it lifts 2026 capital spending toward $205 billion
Alphabet, Google's parent, reported second-quarter revenue of $119.8 billion after Wednesday's close, up 24% from a year earlier and past analysts' roughly $117 billion estimate, with Google Cloud sales rising 82% to about $24.8 billion and the Gemini app now at 950 million monthly users. Shares still fell nearly 5% after hours, because the company raised its 2026 capital-spending guidance to $195–205 billion from $180–190 billion, and second-quarter capex of roughly $45 billion already outran the cash the business generated. The revenue was the beat; the buildout was the worry. Covered by Bloomberg, NZZ and The Information (9to5Google · CNBC).
The White House accuses China's Moonshot of copying Claude to build Kimi K3, as 200 US startups petition against a ban
The White House escalated its fight over China's cut-price open models on Wednesday when Michael Kratsios, director of its Office of Science and Technology Policy, accused Beijing's Moonshot AI of building its Kimi K3 model by covertly distilling Anthropic's Claude — copying a US model's outputs at scale to train a cheaper rival — a charge Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said could draw sanctions, extending the sanctions threat we covered Wednesday (update). The other side organized the same day: nearly 200 venture-backed startups, banded together as the Little Tech Association with backing from Y Combinator, urged the administration not to ban Chinese open-weight models, warning a cutoff would raise costs and entrench a handful of large US labs. Nearly half of Y Combinator's companies already run most of their AI work on open models. Covered by SCMP, WIRED, Reuters and TechCrunch (TechCrunch · SCMP).
Travis Kalanick's robotics company Atoms raises $1.7 billion led by a16z
Travis Kalanick, the Uber co-founder pushed out as chief executive in 2017, raised $1.7 billion on Wednesday for Atoms, the robotics company he brought out of eight years of stealth in March, in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz, whose Ben Horowitz joins the board. Atoms builds specialized robots across three units — food service, mining and transport — and grew out of the CloudKitchens business Kalanick has run since leaving Uber. Uber itself joined the round, backing the founder it once ousted. Covered by TechCrunch and a16z (TechCrunch).
OpenAI raises its projected compute spending through 2030 to $750 billion and unveils plans for its first self-built data center
OpenAI raised its projected spending on computing through 2030 to about $750 billion, up from roughly $600 billion earlier this year, and detailed Project Camellia, a $20 billion campus near Savannah, Georgia that will be the first data center it designs and builds itself. The site has contracted for 3.2 gigawatts of power from Georgia Power, to be delivered in phases between 2028 and 2032, with total costs likely to top $30 billion. Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar has privately warned the company may struggle to honor its compute commitments if revenue does not keep pace. Covered by TechCrunch, Axios and MTS (TechCrunch).
Samsung opens talks to invest up to €1 billion in France's Mistral at a €20 billion valuation
Samsung is in talks to invest up to €1 billion in Mistral, the French AI lab, as part of a round that would value it at about €20 billion ($22.8 billion), the Financial Times reported — roughly two-thirds above the €12 billion Mistral reached last September. The stake would give the South Korean giant a foothold in Europe's leading independent model-maker, and it follows Microsoft's separate move this week to fund Mistral's European data-center expansion. Mistral declined to comment, and neither Samsung nor the round is confirmed. Covered by Axios, Reuters and MTS (Axios).
░░▒▒▓▓ STATS OF THE DAY ▓▓▒▒░░░░▒▒▓▓ EARNINGS ▓▓▒▒░░New this issue: a standing earnings desk — what just printed, what's next — now that the market's reaction to Big Tech's AI spending swings share prices as much as any product launch.
Just in: Alphabet and Tesla (both covered above), where investors looked past solid revenue to the cost of the buildout. Reporting next:
░░▒▒▓▓ AI ▓▓▒▒░░Meta is building an OpenRouter-style router to cut its own coding bills. An incubator inside Meta's Applied AI Engineering group, called AAI Labs, is developing a tool named Switchboard that scores each request's difficulty and sends the easy ones to cheaper models — a copy of the approach that made the startup OpenRouter, valued at $1.3 billion, a fixture of the model market. Meta says the project is early and may never ship as a product, The Information reported (The Information).
Deezer says more than half its daily uploads are now AI-generated. The French streaming service reported on July 21 that AI tracks make up over 50% of the songs uploaded to it each day yet only 1–3% of the songs people actually play — machine-made music that platforms are moving to label rather than block (TechCrunch).
░░▒▒▓▓ TECH ▓▓▒▒░░Samsung's new top-end foldable is its priciest yet, even as it cuts the base model. At its Unpacked event in London on Wednesday, Samsung unveiled a wider Galaxy Z Fold 8 at $1,899, a Z Fold 8 Ultra at $2,099 and a Z Flip 8 at $1,199 — trimming the base Fold about $100 from last year while pushing the Ultra and Flip roughly $100 higher, with the maker blaming rising component costs even as it braces for Apple's first foldable iPhone (CNBC).
░░▒▒▓▓ POLICY ▓▓▒▒░░Trump picks a big-tech critic to run the Justice Department's antitrust division. On July 21 the president nominated Adam Candeub, the Federal Communications Commission's general counsel and a longtime critic of Section 230's liability shield, to lead antitrust enforcement; if confirmed, he would inherit the government's demand that Google sell its Chrome browser and its monopoly case against Apple (Bloomberg).
Britain gives AI its first cabinet seat. New Prime Minister Andy Burnham brought Kanishka Narayan, who already held the AI brief, into the cabinet he formed on taking office on July 20 — the first time a UK government has seated an AI minister at the cabinet table, a sign of how fast the technology climbed (Bloomberg).
░░▒▒▓▓ INFRA ▓▓▒▒░░Musk's SpaceXAI is scouting a major data-center expansion in Texas. The Information reported this week that SpaceXAI, the AI arm of Elon Musk's rocket company, is planning a Texas campus that could rival its existing Colossus complex near Memphis, roughly a gigawatt of capacity — another sign the compute buildout is scaling faster than the grid can comfortably supply (The Information).
░░▒▒▓▓ BUSINESS ▓▓▒▒░░AMD will invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic and sell it 2 gigawatts of AI chips. Under a partnership announced Wednesday, Anthropic, the maker of Claude, will deploy up to 2 gigawatts of AMD's Instinct MI450 GPUs starting in 2027, housed in the Helios racks AMD showcased this week, while AMD takes an equity stake of up to $5 billion in the lab tied to deployment milestones. It mirrors the chipmaker's 2025 pact with OpenAI, AMD once again funding the customer buying its chips, and gives Anthropic a second hardware supplier alongside the Google and Amazon silicon it leans on (CNBC · AMD).
Tesla's revenue hits a record but its free cash flow turns negative on robot and robotaxi spending. Tesla reported record second-quarter revenue of $28.2 billion on Wednesday, up 26%, but operating profit fell 57% and capital spending jumped 142% to $5.79 billion, leaving free cash flow at negative $1.09 billion. Chief Executive Elon Musk called it a heavy investment year as the company ramps its Optimus robots and extended its robotaxi service to Miami, Orlando and Tampa (Electrek · CNBC).
A tech critic argues the data-center debt boom is starting to look subprime. Ed Zitron, whose newsletter Where's Your Ed At tracks AI's finances, argues in a July 22 essay that the hundreds of billions in loans funding AI data centers — routed through special-purpose vehicles, private credit and lightly regulated lenders — carry systemic risk closer to 2008 than the industry admits, driven not by exotic derivatives but by the sheer scale of the bets and the assumption that the revenue will show up. It is a deliberate counterpoint to a week of ever-larger buildout numbers (Where's Your Ed At).
░░▒▒▓▓ GEOPOLITICS ▓▓▒▒░░The United States and Saudi Arabia signed a civil-nuclear agreement on Wednesday that opens a path for the kingdom to enrich uranium on its own soil, with US firms building the facilities and a decade-long bar on Riyadh acquiring its own enrichment technology; the deal skips the IAEA's tighter inspection protocol and heads to a skeptical Congress (Washington Post · CNN).
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told a Senate committee on July 21 that the US war against Iran has cost about $37.5 billion so far and asked for $67 billion more, though NBC reported the Pentagon's own internal estimate runs closer to $80–100 billion (update) (Bloomberg).
President Trump hosted Lebanese President Joseph Aoun at the White House on July 21 — the first Lebanese leader there since 2009 — as Lebanese troops moved into a southern border town under a US plan for a phased Israeli withdrawal through local pilot zones (Haaretz).
░░▒▒▓▓ ALPS ▓▓▒▒░░Cyberattackers hit Swiss train maker Stadler and demand CHF 10 million. The Everest ransomware group breached a platform Stadler Rail uses to swap technical data with a supplier, using stolen login credentials, and demanded a roughly CHF 10 million ($12.3 million) ransom in mid-July; Stadler refused to pay, filed a complaint with the Thurgau cantonal police, and said its production lines and trains were unaffected (swissinfo).
░░▒▒▓▓ RESEARCH ▓▓▒▒░░A Chinese agent tops Anthropic's Claude Code on an autonomous-research benchmark. The Qiushi Engine, built by a Zhejiang University-led team, took first place on ResearchClawBench — a test from the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory that grades whether AI agents can independently run scientific research and match human papers — ahead of Open Science Desktop in second and Claude Code in third, the South China Morning Post reported (SCMP).
Interlune extracts 99% pure helium-3, the isotope quantum computers crave. The Seattle startup said on July 20 that its Cold Capture process pulled 99% pure helium-3 out of ordinary industrial helium at temperatures near absolute zero, a step it says could triple the US supply of an isotope used to cool quantum machines — and a dress rehearsal for the lunar mining it ultimately wants to do (GeekWire).
░░▒▒▓▓ COMMS DESK ▓▓▒▒░░An AI-generated campaign video from Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party drew broad condemnation this week over a figure that resembled the fallen son of Gadi Eisenkot, a former military chief and Netanyahu's leading rival, whose son Gal was killed in Gaza in 2023; after the backlash the party re-cut the ad, replacing the young man with a woman, and denied any resemblance was intended. Takeaway: AI makes attack content cheap to produce and ruinous to misjudge, and a synthetic image that reads as mocking a bereaved family is a reputational wound no re-edit fully closes (Haaretz · Times of Israel).
░░▒▒▓▓ ONE MORE THING ▓▓▒▒░░Adobe added a feature to its experimental Project Indigo camera app on July 20 that critiques your photos with AI, delivering a professional-style verdict on framing, lighting, color and emotional impact and suggesting you move the subject or fix the light before shooting again. It is led by Marc Levoy, the engineer behind Google's Pixel camera, and it promises the one thing no travel companion ever quite delivers on demand: an honest note on your composition (TechCrunch).
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