Cerebras just had one of the biggest tech IPO debuts in years. The AI chip company listed at $185, opened at $350, and closed up 68% at $311 — giving it a roughly $95 billion valuation and making it the largest U.S. tech IPO since Uber. The AI hardware window is officially open, and the market is now treating non-NVIDIA AI infrastructure as a real public-market category. Anthropic is now sitting at the center of the AI compute economy. After locking in massive infrastructure deals with Google, AWS, and SpaceX-linked compute, the company is also expanding Claude access, rate limits, and deployment through partnerships like its new $200 million Gates Foundation deal across global health, education, and agriculture. The model lab is no longer just competing on chatbot quality — it is becoming an infrastructure-scale AI institution. Cisco shocked the market with a major AI infrastructure guide. Revenue hit $15.84 billion, AI infrastructure orders were lifted from $5 billion to $9 billion for fiscal 2026, and the stock jumped 15%. The same day, Cisco cut 4,000 jobs to fund the pivot. The AI capex boom is no longer just NVIDIA — it is spreading into networking, optics, security, and the second layer of the infrastructure stack. The Trump-Xi Beijing summit ended without a formal AI deal. The U.S. cleared major Chinese companies including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, JD, and Lenovo to buy up to 75,000 NVIDIA H200 chips each, but Beijing paused the orders almost immediately. AI infrastructure is no longer just a company-level decision — it is now a geopolitical bargaining chip. Google disclosed the first confirmed AI-built zero-day exploit used in the wild. The attack targeted a two-factor authentication flow in a widely used open-source system administration tool, and Google says the planned mass exploitation event was stopped before it scaled. The cybersecurity impact of AI is no longer theoretical — AI is now accelerating both offense and defense. Inflation came in hot again. April CPI rose 0.6% month over month, the Fed held rates at 3.50%–3.75%, and markets are now pricing a higher chance of a rate hike than a cut. And yet the S&P 500 still closed above 7,500, while the Nasdaq and Dow also hit major levels. The AI trade is overpowering the macro signal — for now. Runner-up: VoltaGrid raised $1 billion from Blackstone and Halliburton at a $10 billion-plus valuation to build behind-the-meter power systems for AI data centers. Power, not just chips, is becoming one of the biggest constraints in the AI boom. Runner-up: Amazon is reportedly preparing another 14,000 corporate layoffs, which would bring 2026 reductions to roughly 30,000 jobs if confirmed. The AI labor reduction cycle is widening across Big Tech. Runner-up: A former Google engineer was convicted of stealing TPU trade secrets after transferring more than 500 confidential files tied to Google’s AI chip architecture and software stack. It is one of the clearest legal templates yet for AI-era intellectual property enforcement. Ricker and Bon #431If you want a prize, send us a DM: http://instagram.com/rickerandbonhttps://www.tiktok.com/@rickerandbonhttps://www.youtube.com/@rickerandbon

Anthropic is making the AI infrastructure race look less like software and more like an industrial arms race. The company reportedly committed $200 billion to Google Cloud over five years, stacked on top of its existing Amazon compute arrangement, while also striking a separate agreement tied to SpaceX and xAI’s Colossus supercomputer infrastructure.

Cerebras is blowing past expectations in what could become the largest tech IPO of 2026. The wafer-scale AI chip company is reportedly oversubscribed more than 20x, with a potential valuation up to $26.6 billion. After years of NVIDIA dominating the AI hardware story, public markets are now showing real appetite for the next layer of AI infrastructure.

Meta is cutting roughly 8,000 jobs and canceling another 6,000 open roles as it redirects up to $135 billion toward AI infrastructure in 2026. The AI labor transition is no longer theoretical.

The Cleveland Fed’s inflation nowcast is projecting May headline CPI at 3.89%, while the S&P 500’s Shiller P/E ratio reached 41.83, the second-highest reading in more than a century of market history. Stocks are expensive, inflation is reaccelerating, and rate cuts are moving further out of reach. Stagflation risk is back in the market conversation.

Runner-up: The Trump-Xi summit is reportedly adding AI to the agenda for the first formal U.S.-China bilateral AI dialogue. The talks are expected to focus on autonomous weapons, frontier model behavior, and risks from open-source models in the hands of nonstate actors.

Runner-up: OpenAI released GPT-5.5 Instant as the new default ChatGPT model, with a focus on reducing hallucinations in legal, medical, and financial use cases. The model wars are increasingly being fought on reliability, latency, and enterprise trust rather than raw benchmark dominance.

Runner-up: Google, Microsoft, and xAI joined OpenAI and Anthropic in giving the U.S. Commerce Department’s AI standards office pre-release access to frontier models for evaluation. Government review is becoming part of the frontier AI release process.

Runner-up: AMD and Arista both posted blowout Q1 results, showing that the AI capex boom is spreading beyond NVIDIA into accelerators, networking, optics, power, and cooling. The picks-and-shovels trade is broadening.

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