The Verge’s latest insights into the ideas shaping the future of work, finance, and innovation. Here you’ll find scoops, analysis, and reporting across some of the most influential companies in the world. Our coverage also includes interviews with innovators and policy makers at the frontiers of business and technology on Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel’s Decoder; a behind-the-curtain look at Silicon Valley with Alex Heath’s Command Line; and exclusive reporting on Microsoft’s strategy in Tom Warren’s Notepad.
Fourth-quarter profit was up 35 percent for the advanced chipmaker that boasts Nvidia, AMD, and Apple as clients. It has now posted year-over-year growth in every quarter for the last two years, hitting a new record in Q4.
Here’s yet another manufacturing pressure we have the AI chip boom to thank for: glass cloth. It’s a key component in the chip substrates for printed circuit boards, and the industry is mostly reliant on a single manufacturer in Japan, which can no longer keep up with demand.
We’ve got something special for you today. It’s my friend Hank Green, longtime internet creator, science educator, and viral TikTok star, interviewing Dropout CEO Sam Reich, now in full video on our Decoder YouTube channel.
Hank did this episode as a guest host last summer while I was out with our new baby, and it’s a fan favorite, bringing together two internet personalities that’ve known each other for a very long time and who have a lot of inside knowledge about how the internet, Hollywood, and entertainment all intertwine. We think it’s one of the best episodes of Decoder we put out last year, and it’s honestly just a really fun conversation. Here’s the full transcript in case you want to read, rather than watch, the interview.
Powell’s statement says the Fed received grand jury subpoenas “threatening a criminal indictment related to my testimony before the Senate Banking Committee last June,” about historic building renovations. But, he said, it’s actually retaliation for setting interest rates based on “what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President.”
The chip shortage created by our desire to watch AI-generated videos of Trump and Maduro dance in matching Nike sweatsuits, has nearly tripled Samsung’s profits for the quarter, as memory prices surged 40-50 percent.
Real people died while Trump treated war like a meme stock.
The WBD board of directors said on Wednesday that Paramount’s amended bid from last month “remains inferior” to Netflix’s offer, adding that Paramount “continues to provide insufficient value.”
Apparently, even a personal guarantee from Larry Ellison wasn’t enough to top Netflix’s bid, which Netflix doubled down on today.
While trying to find vacation info, the chatbot told a WSJ reporter that “Tripadvisor is being a little useless.” They tested several chatbot AI apps, and apparently, Instacart is one of the better ones -- having your former CEO become OpenAI’s “CEO of Applications” must have helped.
Other apps were slow, buggy, and complicated, and, at this stage, still slower than traditional iPhone apps.
Zuckerberg’s 2025 AI spending spree now includes snagging Manus and autonomous bots that turn “advanced AI capabilities into scalable, reliable systems that can carry out end-to-end work in real-world settings.”
As we wait for agent reality to match agent hype, Manus says it plans to expand on its existing subscriptions via Meta’s platforms in the future.
[Facebook Business]
CNBC reports Nvidia isn’t buying all of Groq, which has inference AI tech that IBM’s CEO recently told us “looks like it’ll be 10x cheaper” than GPUs.
Nvidia’s getting a non-exclusive license, and members of the team, like Google TPU creator and Groq CEO Jonathan Ross, and former Autonomic CEO Sunny Madra.
I don’t know what “AX, the financial industry’s first centralized exchange for perpetual futures on traditional asset classes,” is, but I do recognize Harrison.
He was once touting FTX Stocks, and later mentioned by the FDIC for statements about the insurance status of customers’ accounts that it considered “false and misleading,” before everything went boom.
The new offer has a personal guarantee from Larry Ellison. WBD says it will now review it.
Last week, we talked about how Warner Bros. — quite reasonably! — had some agita about David Ellison’s bid for the company. Well, what do you know, David’s daddy is going to personally guarantee the offer. Also, since the last time we talked, Jared Kushner backed out of the nepo baby bid.
Nvidia has built an empire on circular deals for chips. Can anything knock it down?
The administration’s top AI adviser championed Trump’s executive order preempting states from regulating the industry, but alienated everyone from kids’ safety groups to Marjorie Taylor Greene. Insiders worry that the Musk-aligned investor doesn’t understand how Washington works.
Bari Weiss killed a 60 Minutes story on CECOT, the El Salvador prison where the Trump administration has been deporting people. A senior correspondent noted that the story had been cleared by Standards and Practices, as well as the company’s lawyers, calling the decision “political.”
Why does this seem familiar? I feel like maybe someone predicted this?
Good grief, is the Peanuts franchise really worth $457 million in 2025?
The year AI exploded — and everybody has thoughts about it.
He’s withdrawn financial backing from the bid, which may leave it floundering, and the Warner Bros. board has recommended shareholders reject the hostile offer. It looks like everyone involved is beginning to realize what The Verge’s own Liz Lopatto pointed out yesterday: “What Paramount is doing doesn’t make any fucking sense.”
Update: The Warner Bros. board has recommended rejecting the Paramount bid.
Bloomberg reports the Luxembourg office will fire 370 employees, around 8.5 percent of the 4,370 staff. Amazon announced 14,000 global layoffs in October.
The tiny European tax haven only has a population of 680,000, and these are its biggest layoffs in two decades — but still leave Amazon the fifth largest employer in the country.
CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar on how ChatGPT became an “existential moment” for Stack Overflow.
Netflix may be the frontrunner now, but the war for Warner Bros. could end in a number of different ways.
SpaceX is planning to go public at a valuation that would make it the biggest listing of all time, Bloomberg reports. “The Elon Musk-led company is targeting a valuation of about $1.5 trillion for the entire company” and while they’re saying they plan for next year, it’s a Musk company so you know what that means: “the timing could slip until 2027.” SpaceX expects $15 billion in 2025 revenue, and $22 billion to $24 billion in 2026, mostly due to Starlink.
As Ted Sarandos and David Ellison play out a public spat over whose turn it is to play with Warner Bros., while trying to impress Trump and the regulators along the way, just remember that the real winners at the end will be HBO Max subscribers.
sam flynn:
It’s really fun how we all get to sit around and watch these idiots toss gold bars back and forth across Trump’s desk while waiting to see if an HBO Max subscription will be $80 or $100 a month this time next year.
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Since Netflix announced that it was the frontrunner to buy Warner Bros., David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance has been getting more hostile in its bids to own the legacy studio. But Semafor reports that Paramount’s tactics have raised eyes in Washington, where some think Ellison is banking on favoritism from Trump’s Justice Department.
After a string of exec departures from Apple, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported a few days ago that Srouji, who oversees the chips that have helped iPhones, Macs, and other devices lead their categories, had discussed leaving for another company.
Today, Gurman reports the exec sought to calm employees, sending a message to his division that said “I love my team, and I love my job at Apple, and I don’t plan on leaving anytime soon.”
In the story I wrote about CoreWeave, analyst Gil Luria told me the company has “to keep borrowing more and more because they spend more money than they can get, structurally. They have to continue to borrow to pay interest on the last loan.” Aren’t you glad Nvidia helped them go public?
After launching a hostile bid for the entertainment giant, Paramount’s Ellison told CNBC that Netflix’s deal to buy part of WBD would create a company with “unprecedented market power:”
When you combine the number one streamer with the number three streamer, that creates a company that has unprecedented market power, north of 400 million subscribers. The next largest competitor is Disney, with just under 200 million. That’s bad for Hollywood, that’s bad for the creative community, that’s bad for consumers.
Square’s Willem Avé on AI automation, investing in crypto, and what it’s like working for Jack Dorsey.
