May 22nd Newsletter

Author

Da Yu
May 22, 2026

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As of close on May 21st, 2026

This week’s news showed AI continuing to reshape capital allocation, labor markets, and corporate strategy. NextEra’s planned $66.8B all-stock Dominion deal targets AI-driven power demand, Data Center Alley growth, and regulated utility scale. Labor signals stayed uneven: AI is slowing entry-level hiring as AT&T commits $250B, including $38B for frontline roles, while Meta is cutting roughly 8,000 employees after shifting 7,000 to AI teams, and Intuit is cutting 17% while refocusing on AI. California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a first-of-its-kind executive order to prepare workers and businesses for potential AI disruption. In consumer and media, James Murdoch will buy roughly half of Vox Media for over $300M, while Oura confidentially filed for an IPO after rapid growth and an $11B valuation. NVIDIA capped the week with Q1 FY27 revenue of $81.6B, up 85% YoY, Data Center revenue of $75.2B, up 92% YoY, and an authorized $80B share buyback.

Top 5 AI Highlights

[1] ⚖️ The California jury found Sam Altman and Greg Brockman not liable in Elon Musk’s OpenAI lawsuit, citing the statute of limitations, though Musk plans to appeal to the Ninth Circuit over claims valued between $78.8B and $135B. In parallel, SpaceX has filed a $1.75T IPO prospectus with Goldman Sachs, eclipsing Michael Grimes of Morgan Stanley, while OpenAI may confidentially file its own IPO papers as soon as Friday with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, positioning the company for a potentially historic public market debut at a valuation above $850B. More from TechCrunch and CNBC.

[2] 🧠 Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic, choosing frontier LLM research over OpenAI return after roles at OpenAI, Tesla Autopilot and Eureka Labs education startup. See his X post on this announcement. In addition, Anthropic committed nearly $45 billion to SpaceX for Claude compute capacity, adding Colossus data center supply as revenue reportedly tops $10.9 billion and operating profit emerges. More from Bloomberg on the $45B.

[3] ⚡Blackstone will invest $5B in a Google-backed AI infrastructure venture to bring 500MW TPU compute online by 2027, while Google’s broader TPU boom is tightening DeepMind access as Anthropic secures up to $40B, 5GW, and one million Ironwood chips, with Meta also buying capacity. More details on CNBC.

[4] 💰 AI acquisitions this week: Anthropic acquired Stainless, reportedly for more than $300 million, securing SDK generation infrastructure previously used by OpenAI, Google, and Cloudflare. Mistral AI acquired Austria’s Emmi AI for an undisclosed amount to deepen industrial AI capabilities through physics simulation models for aerospace, automotive, and semiconductor clients. See more on TechCrunch and Reuters 

[5] 🤖 Google held its 2026 I/O event with Gemini Omni for prompt-based video editing, Spark as a 24/7 personal agent across Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Android, and iPhone, plus Gemini 3.5 Flash, replacing legacy Search with a multi-modal, AI-powered experience, Universal Cart, Pics, and Samsung smart glasses. Details on PCMag. 

✨Open Source AI Development

[1] 🐧 Linux kernel boss Linus Torvald says AI bug reports made Linux security mailing list nearly unmanageable, urging researchers to submit patches, not duplicate drive-by findings. See more on The Register.

[2] 🚀  AI startup Zyphra is raising $500 million at a $5 billion valuation, backed by AMD, positioning itself as an AMD-powered challenger to Nvidia in open-weight AI models and cloud infrastructure. More from Forbes.

[3] 🏠 Airbnb’s CEO Brian Chesky defended using Chinese open source AI models, saying lawmakers misunderstand the tech and no customer data is shared with Chinese firms. Read more on Bloomberg.

[4] 🌍 AI2 released OlmoEarth v1.1, cutting Earth observation model compute costs up to 3x while maintaining performance, improving scalable satellite mapping for climate and agriculture. More on Hugging Face. 

[5] 🔒GitLab 19.0 expands Duo Agent Platform Self-Hosted with more open-source models, enabling air gapped teams to run agentic AI locally for regulated code workflows. See details on GitLab.

Founder’s Corner

Valuation in the Bay Area is Still Leading the Pack

Source: X

What We Read This Week

  • Salesforce will spend $300 million on Anthropic tokens in 2026, mainly for coding agents, as Benioff touts AI productivity gains despite an engineer hiring pause. Separately, Salesforce hired J.P. Morgan Software Equity Analyst Mark Murphy as its new Head of Investor Relations (Yahoo Finance, X)

  • Microsoft and Anthropic are discussing Maia AI chip use, potentially easing Anthropic’s compute shortages after Microsoft’s $5 billion investment and Anthropic’s $30 billion Azure commitment. (CNBC)

  • OpenAI offered each current YC startup $2 million in AI tokens for equity via an uncapped SAFE, boosting adoption while raising dilution and platform risk. (TechCrunch)

  • Radar raised $170 million at an over $1 billion valuation, backed by American Eagle CEO Jay Schottenstein, serving American Eagle, Old Navy, and 1,400 stores with 99% RFID accuracy. (CNBC) 

  • Amazon launches Alexa Podcasts for U.S. Alexa+ users, using AI host voices and partnerships with Reuters, AP, and 200 local papers to create on-demand episodes. (TechCrunch) 

  • Apple’s revamped Siri may auto-delete chats by default, add privacy-focused retention controls, use Google AI models, and launch beta across iOS 27. (Thurrott) 

  • xAI reportedly promised employees $420 for tax return data to train Grok, but unpaid incentives raise privacy and control concerns after SpaceX merger (TNW)

  • Equity Residential and AvalonBay agreed to a $52 billion all-stock merger, creating a 180,000-unit apartment REIT with a $69 billion enterprise value (ConnectCRE)

AI Fundraising news (May 15 — May 21)

  • Arkeus: AI sensing systems company, raised an $18M Series A

  • Armada: AI data center infrastructure company, raised a $230M Series B

  • bunch: AI fund lifecycle management company, raised a $35M Series B

  • Catena Labs: AI agent financial guardrails company, raised a $30M Series A

  • Chromie Health: AI hospital staffing company, raised a $2M pre-seed

  • Ciridae: AI back-office automation company, raised a $20M seed

  • Commure: AI healthcare workflow automation company, raised $70M

  • Contrario: AI recruiting automation company, raised a $2.3M seed

  • Cosmico: AI talent marketplace company, raised $13.9M

  • Decart: AI generative video company, raised a $300M

  • Dust: AI enterprise agent company, raised a $40M Series B

  • Exa: AI agent search company, raised a $250M Series C

  • Farther: AI financial advisor platform company, raised a $150M Series D

  • Flick: AI film creation company, raised a $6M seed

  • GGWP: AI community moderation company, raised a $15M Series A

  • GovWell: AI government workflow automation company, raised a $25M Series A

  • Gridcare: AI grid capacity company, raised a $64M Series A

  • Hark: AI universal interface company, raised a $700M Series A

  • Hellbender: AI edge camera systems company, raised a $12.5M seed

  • Leadbay: AI sales prospecting company, raised a $4.3M seed

  • Lexroom: AI legal research company, raised a $50M Series B

  • Modal: AI compute infrastructure company, raised a $355M Series C

  • Monaco: AI sales automation company, raised a $50M Series B

  • Multiverse: AI workforce training company, raised $70M

  • Nof1: AI financial trading model company, raised $15M

  • Nourish: AI metabolic health clinic company, raised a $100M Series C

  • Novella: AI insurance workflow company, raised $21M

  • Ocean: AI email security company, raised a $20M Series A

  • Pivot: AI procurement workflows company, raised a $40M Series B

  • Resurrect Bio: AI crop resistance company, raised a $2.3M Series A

  • Scope: AI industrial documentation company, raised $20M

  • Searchable: AI performance marketing company, raised $14M

  • Shatterdome Energy: AI energy trading software company, raised a $3.5M pre-seed

  • Sigma: AI agentic analytics company, raised an $80M Series E

  • SiMa: AI chip company, raised more than $100M

  • Status AI: AI social role-playing company, raised $17M

  • The Path: AI therapy platform company, raised a $14.3M seed

  • Tokaido Health: AI healthcare navigation company, raised $25M

  • Twin Prime: AI defense intelligence company, raised a $10M pre-seed

  • Unframe: AI enterprise deployment platform company, raised a $50M Series B

  • Vi: AI healthcare agents company, raised $145M

  • Viktor: AI workplace automation company, raised a $75M Series A

  • WIRobotics: AI wearable robotics company, raised a $68M Series B

  • Xpanner: AI construction automation company, raised an $18M Series B bridge

  • Zyphra: AI model infrastructure company, raised a $500M Series B