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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This week on Ricker and Bon:Apple' fiscal Q2 2206 shattered every record in the books —112.1 revenue, services at an allt-ime quarterly high of $.0398B, EPS of .2$01. OpenAI missed revenue and user growth targets, pushing its IPO to mid-to-late 202.7 The Musk v .Altman trial kicked off in Oakland i,h Musk seeking $13B0in damages. The S&P 50 l0sed above 7,200 for the first time in history, marking the best April for equities since 0202 ...Q 1GDP came in at .2%0 but inflation hit 4%—5t.gflation is back in the conversation .And the four hyperscalers are set to spend $527 billion on AI infrastructure in 02

.62unneru-s: Google's classified Pentagon AI deal and 95-0employee revolt. Medtronic's M9rc-rd cyberattack ua.oid robots hit factory floors at Hannover Messe .pirit Airlines shuts down — first major U.S. carrier failure since 1002.$

This week on Ricker and Bon: Tim Cook exits Apple, Tesla raises its 2026 capex to $25B, OpenAI ships GPT-5.5 "Spud," SpaceX eyes a $60B acquisition of Cursor, and consumer sentiment hits a 74-year low.

The 6 biggest stories in tech, business, and macro — week of April 12, 2026.

Anthropic's Mythos Preview autonomously found high-severity zero-day vulnerabilities across every major operating system and browser. The offensive/defensive asymmetry in cybersecurity just shifted. Attackers with frontier AI can now run continuous, low-cost vulnerability scans that no human security team can match. Cyber insurance premiums, enterprise security budgets, and the entire defensive tooling stack are mispriced for this.

The Strait of Hormuz has been closed for five weeks with 20% of global oil supply blocked, and equity markets are near highs. Trump issued an ultimatum to Iran with a Tuesday 8 PM deadline. Amazon is already rolling out a 3.5% fuel surcharge and airlines are hiking bag fees. The market is betting on a deal. History says those bets don't always pay.

The Supreme Court invalidated Trump's IEEPA tariff authority, and a May US-China leaders' summit in Beijing is now the only real mechanism for trade stabilization. China enters that room with more leverage than it had in 2025. For multinationals, the summit outcome is a genuine binary.

AWS AI services crossed a $15 billion annualized run rate, the first time Amazon has broken that figure out publicly. Amazon has committed $200B in 2026 capex directed at AI infrastructure, and Jassy says demand is outpacing supply. The custom chip business sits at a $20B run rate. This is AI moving from narrative to line item.

Coachella 2026 Weekend 1 is being called one of the most stacked in recent memory. Sabrina Carpenter closed Friday after seven months of production. The Strokes played their first Coachella set in 15 years. Justin Bieber headlined his first major festival in years. Bini made history as the first Filipino group on that stage.

Jeff Bezos's stealth AI lab Project Prometheus just hired the co-founder of xAI and former OpenAI infrastructure lead to build its compute architecture. Backed by $6.2B and recruiting from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Meta, Prometheus is targeting engineering, manufacturing, and aerospace, not chat. Physical-world AI with proprietary operational data is a structurally different bet than anything currently valued at frontier multiples.

A $122 billion funding round just valued OpenAI at $852 billion, with $2 billion in monthly revenue and nearly 1 billion weekly users, marking the moment AI stopped being a startup category and became global infrastructure.Five weeks into an Iran-linked oil disruption, the Strait of Hormuz remains constrained, crude markets are tightening, and companies like Amazon are already passing through a 3.5% fuel surcharge, while equities continue to hover near highs.Inside the enterprise, 2026 is shaping up as the year AI gets audited. Experimentation budgets are being replaced with ROI mandates, and vendors that cannot prove real productivity gains are already on the chopping block.At the same time, new research suggests quantum machines may be closer than expected to breaking modern encryption, forcing governments and corporations to accelerate post-quantum migration years ahead of schedule.And in a sign of what AI is enabling at the edge, a single founder in Los Angeles has built a company approaching a $1.8 billion run rate using AI across coding, marketing, and customer support, compressing what used to require entire teams into one operator.Meanwhile, NASA just sent humans around the Moon for the first time in over 50 years with Artemis II, restarting a space race now defined as much by private capital and infrastructure as national prestige.Ricker and Bon. Let’s get into it.⸻OpenAI raises $122B at $852B valuation; $2B monthly revenue; ~1B weekly users, AI shifts to infrastructure scaleStrait of Hormuz disruption drives oil pressure; Amazon adds 3.5% fuel surcharge; markets remain resilientEnterprise AI enters ROI phase; budgets shift from experimentation to measurable productivityQuantum computing timeline compresses; encryption risk moves from decades to yearsSolo founder builds ~$1.8B run rate company using AI for full stack operationsNASA Artemis II completes first crewed lunar flyby in 50 plus years, space economy reactivatesIf you want a prize, send us a DM on Instagram:http://instagram.com/rickerandbonhttps://www.tiktok.com/@rickerandbon

A federal judge used the word "Orwellian" this week to describe the U.S. government's attempt to blacklist one of its own AI companies for refusing to build autonomous weapons. Week four of the Iran war brought missiles into Saudi Arabia, oil past $100 a barrel, and a White House deadline that could take out Iran's power grid by April 6. Back home, TSA workers are six weeks into working without pay while ICE agents fill their posts at airports.In tech, SoftBank borrowed $40 billion — with no collateral, due back in 12 months to double down on OpenAI, now valued at $730 billion. The loan structure is Wall Street's clearest signal yet that an OpenAI IPO is coming before year's end. Meanwhile Meta took two jury verdicts on the same day — $375 million in New Mexico, $6 million in California — for what those juries said the platforms did to kids. Over 1,500 more cases are waiting in line.And Apple, the company that spent 20 years telling you its ecosystem was the best on earth, just licensed Google's AI to fix Siri.Ricker and Bon. Let's get into it.U.S. soldiers wounded in Iranian missile strike on Saudi air base; oil hits $103; April 6 Hormuz deadline setSoftBank borrows $40B unsecured to fund OpenAI at $730B valuation — IPO signalFederal judge blocks Pentagon from blacklisting Anthropic after it refused to build autonomous weaponsMeta hit with $375M and $6M jury verdicts in same week over harm to children; 1,500 cases pendingNetflix raises prices across all tiers same week it closed $600M AI acquisitionApple licenses Google's Gemini to fix Siri🤔 What are your thoughts?👨‍💻❗We wanna know, comment below!If you want a prize, send us a DM of your rating on Instagram http://instagram.com/rickerandbon

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