Shenanigans

33 years ago Nokia, which was to become the dominant phone manufacturer of the early mobile industry, chose Arm as its processor. It did so because Nokia’s CEO Jorma Ollila believed that a single manufacturer should not dominate the mobile industry in the same way as Intel’s x86 processors at that time dominated the PC industry. ARM’s IP licensing model, ...

Blue Owl, a New York shadow bank which helped finance the Meta and Coreweave datacentres, has told its investors they can no longer take money out of one of their funds. Blue Owl’s suspension of investor redemptions has caused a fluster in the financial system because many of the datacentre construction projects have been financed by shadow bankers. Shadow banks ...

OpenAI’s average stock-based compensation for its 4000 employees is about $1.5 million, says the Wall Street Journal. The company is expected to burn $9 billion after generating $13 billion in sales this year The stock awards, costing about $6 billion, dilute the value of shareholders’ stock and add to OpenAI’s big operating losses. Employees no longer have to wait six ...

Spare a tear for the billionaires of California.  A California healthcare union has put up a ballot proposal to tax the state’s billionaires 5% of their assets. The proposal will be voted on in November and, if it passes, will apply retroactively to anyone resident in California on January 1st 2026. The union says there are 200 Californian billionaires with ...

It looks as though Rishi Sunak became an advisor to  the AI developer Anthropic  just in time to sort a spot of bother. The Wall Street Journal reports that in November it was offered an Anthropic AI model called Claudius, to run the WSJ newsroom vending machine. “The model, would run the machine: ordering inventory, setting prices and responding to ...

Government press announcements are constantly claiming that the UK is a super-power at this or that activity but has not yet announced that it is the world’s pre-eminent super-power at enabling corporate tax dodging, according to analysis from the Tax Justice Network (TJN). British overseas territories and crown dependencies dominate the top eight roundup of places allowing multinationals to avoid ...

There were a couple of queasy looking canaries in the AI mine this week – Microsoft cutting back sales expectations for its AI products sale team, and Snowflake, which sells Anthropic’s Claude AI models, announcing numbers which were unexpectedly light on profitability. Additionally the Governor of the Bank of England – admittedly more like a turkey than an canary – ...

Last week Nvidia became the first company to get a stock market valuation of $5 trillion though yesterday it dipped to $4.83 trillion. Its shares have gone up 1,300% percent since January 2023. The company is now worth more than Microsoft and Apple, the only other companies to ever reach a valuation above $4 trillion. Its market cap exceeds the ...

Jensen Huang and Sam Altman are the two most enthusiastic and energetic cheer-leaders for AI. Probably because Jensen has made more money out of AI than anyone else and Altman is spending more money on AI than anyone else. Both rely on the energy and deal-making driving  AI to fuel the alliance between the finance industry and  the tech industry ...

OpenAI is to pay $38 billion over seven years to AWS for computing power. The deal raises concerns over how OpenAI will meet the commitments it has made to pay for computing resources which include: $250 billion to Microsoft, $300 billion to Oracle, $22.4 billion to Coreweave and an unknown commitment to Google Cloud. According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, ...