Good morning, Meta just signed a $21 billion compute deal that gives it early access to Nvidia’s next-generation chips, Amazon disclosed for the first time that its AI business is pulling in $15 billion a year, and Elon Musk dropped his $134 billion claim against OpenAI and offered to give everything to the nonprofit instead. Here’s what happened 👇
1. Meta Signs $21 Billion CoreWeave Deal, Gets Early Access to Nvidia’s Next-Gen Chips
Meta deepened its partnership with CoreWeave on Thursday with a fresh $21 billion cloud computing deal that extends through 2032. This comes on top of the $14.2 billion agreement the two companies signed in September. As part of the deal, Meta gets early access to Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin chips, which are reportedly twice as fast as the current Blackwell platform. Meta plans to spend up to $135 billion on its AI buildout this year, the largest capital commitment of any tech company in history. CoreWeave, which went public last year and counts Microsoft as its biggest customer, said Meta is now among its largest clients. The deal landed one day after Meta unveiled Muse Spark, the first model from Meta Superintelligence Labs, an expensive team it assembled last year after the poor performance of its Llama 4 model.
Why it matters: The total value of Meta’s CoreWeave commitments is now north of $35 billion, locked in through the end of the decade. These are not research budgets. This is a company that makes its money from ads committing more capital to AI compute than most countries spend on their militaries. The Vera Rubin access is the strategic prize: it means Meta will be training on chips that competitors cannot buy yet. When a social media company is spending more on chips than Boeing spends on planes, the AI arms race is no longer a metaphor.
2. Amazon Reveals AWS AI Revenue Is $15 Billion a Year, Custom Chips Hit $20 Billion
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy disclosed for the first time that AWS AI services are generating annualized revenue of more than $15 billion, roughly 10 percent of AWS’s total $142 billion revenue run rate. In his annual shareholder letter, Jassy also revealed that Amazon’s custom chip business, including Graviton processors, Trainium AI chips, and Nitro networking cards, has doubled its annualized revenue to over $20 billion, up from $10 billion just one quarter earlier. Jassy hinted that demand for Amazon’s custom chips is so strong the company may start selling them directly to outside customers. “There’s so much demand for our chips that it’s quite possible we’ll sell racks of them to third parties in the future,” he wrote. Amazon is planning $200 billion in capital spending this year, mostly on AI.
Why it matters: This is the first time Amazon has put a dollar figure on its AI revenue, and it answers the question investors have been asking for two years: is this spending paying off? At $15 billion and growing, the answer is clearly yes. But the custom chip number is the more interesting signal. At $20 billion in annualized revenue, Amazon’s homegrown chip business is already larger than many standalone semiconductor companies. If Amazon starts selling those chips to third parties, it becomes a direct competitor to Nvidia in the data center, not just a customer.
3. Musk Drops $134 Billion Claim, Offers to Give All OpenAI Damages to the Nonprofit
Elon Musk amended his lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman on Tuesday, dropping his demand for up to $134 billion in personal damages and instead asking the court to return all recovered funds to OpenAI’s original nonprofit charity. Musk’s lawyer said he is “not seeking a single dollar for himself.” The pivot came after US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers denied Musk’s request for punitive damages and ruled that his expert’s calculations did not support his arguments for pocketing the money. Musk is still suing to unseat Altman from the board, unwind OpenAI’s for-profit conversion, and permanently restore the company to its original nonprofit structure. OpenAI called the filing “nothing more than a harassment campaign driven by ego, jealousy, and a desire to slow down a competitor.” The trial is expected to begin later this month.
Why it matters: This is not a change of heart. It is a legal strategy forced by a judge who was about to gut his case. Musk had been trying to pocket the damages himself, and the judge said no. Now he is reframing the entire suit as a public interest case, not a financial one. The question the jury will face is whether OpenAI’s pivot from nonprofit to for-profit was a breach of charitable trust. If Musk wins on that argument, it would not just cost Altman the company. It could set a precedent that constrains every future AI lab that starts as a nonprofit and converts.
Quick Hits
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Florida’s Attorney General launched an investigation into OpenAI and ChatGPT on Thursday. The state joins a growing list of regulators taking a closer look at the company’s practices ahead of its planned IPO. Source: Reuters
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OpenAI paused its UK data center project over concerns about regulation and costs, according to Reuters. The company had been planning a major buildout in Britain but is now reconsidering. Source: Reuters
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OpenAI projects $2.5 billion in advertising revenue this year and $100 billion by 2030, according to Axios. The company is betting that ads inside ChatGPT and its other products will become a major revenue stream alongside subscriptions. Source: Reuters
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Meta’s Superintelligence Lab unveiled its first public model, Muse Spark, with strong benchmarks but admitted “performance gaps” in agentic and coding tasks. The model is the first output from the costly team Meta built after Llama 4 underperformed. Source: Ars Technica
That’s it for today. Meta is writing $35 billion in checks to one cloud company. Amazon is revealing that its homegrown chips are a $20 billion business. And the trial that could decide whether OpenAI stays a for-profit company is about to begin. The money flowing into AI infrastructure is now so large it is reshaping the companies that spend it as much as the technology they are building.
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