Good morning. Will the latest crop of protectionist policies actually bring high-tech manufacturing back to the U.S.?
Glance at the news lately—if not below—and you could be convinced it might just happen. But the investor Ray Dalio, of Bridgewater Associates fame, isn’t buying it. “We’re not going to go back and be competitive in manufacturing with China in our lifetimes, I don’t believe,” he said in a recent interview.
Better for the U.S. to maintain its considerable lead in AI innovation and research, Dalio said, than get distracted by large-scale, low-cost chipmaking. Or, to paraphrase a pop star: You can’t turn back time. —Andrew Nusca
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TSMC plans to invest $100 billion in the U.S. over four years
TSMC, the world’s largest pure-play semiconductor foundry, plans to invest $100 billion in the U.S.
TSMC CEO C.C. Wei made the announcement Monday alongside President Trump, noting that the investment comes on top of the company’s existing $65 billion commitment it made last year in coordination with the Biden administration.
The original investment spanned three facilities in Arizona; the new one adds “three new fabs, two advanced packaging facilities, and an R&D center,” TSMC said. The company’s Phoenix fab currently employs more than 3,000 people on 1,100 acres of land; it also has a fab in Camas, Wash.
TSMC produces chips for Apple, Nvidia, Broadcom, Qualcomm, and AMD, among others. The Taiwanese company also competes with some of its customers, including MediaTek, Qualcomm, and Intel.
The deal is the latest effort by the U.S. to support stateside chipmaking, though for wildly different reasons. The Biden administration’s CHIPS and Science Act infused the category with $280 billion in funds in an attempt to reverse a post-pandemic slump; the Trump administration’s support, accompanied by stiff tariffs, is almost entirely the result of geopolitical competition with China.
“Powering everything from AI to automobiles to advanced manufacturing,” Trump said, “we must be able to build the chips and semiconductors that we need right here in American factories with American skill and American labor.” —AN
Anthropic is now worth $62 billion
Anthropic, the Silicon Valley startup whose new Claude 3.7 Sonnet “hybrid” model is now considered the gold standard in the global AI race, announced Monday that it has raised $3.5 billion.
That means the company’s “post-money” valuation is now $61.5 billion—a fraction of what rival OpenAI is apparently worth (a reported $260 billion), but substantially more than other notable AI companies like Perplexity ($9bn) and Mistral ($6bn) and about the same as hot, IPO-bound companies like Databricks ($62bn).
To put things in a broader economic perspective, Wall Street currently values General Motors at $47 billion, Kraft Heinz at $38 billion, and Target at $55 billion.
Anthropic’s latest funds come from an all-star list of investors that include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Cisco Investments, D1 Capital Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, General Catalyst, Jane Street, Menlo Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures.
The Dario and Daniela Amodei-founded company is backed heavily by Amazon—which has invested $8 billion through the end of last year, making it Anthropic’s largest investor—and Google.
Anthropic says it plans to use the new money to “advance its development of next-generation AI systems, expand its compute capacity, deepen its research in mechanistic interpretability and alignment, and accelerate its international expansion.”
According to a CNBC report published last month, the company’s annual revenue run rate was about $1 billion at the end of last year; that figure has since increased by 30%, according to a recent Bloomberg report. —AN
U.K. investigating how TikTok uses teens’ personal data for content suggestions
TikTok could be in trouble again, this time in the U.K.
The British privacy regulator said Monday that it was opening investigations into TikTok, Reddit and Imgur, to see if they’re protecting kids’ privacy like they’re supposed to.
The Imgur and Reddit probes are about the protection of young users’ personal information, and whether or not the platforms are verifying ages as they must under recent legislation. But the TikTok investigation cuts to the heart of its algorithm—the Information Commissioner’s Office wants to know how the platform uses 13-to-17-year-olds’ data to recommend videos to them.
This is TikTok’s second rodeo with the ICO, which fined it almost $16 million a couple years ago for failing to identify and remove under-13s. (Fun fact: TikTok had around 1.4 million users below the age limit, in the U.K. alone, in 2020.)
Information Commissioner John Edwards: “The responsibility to keep children safe online lies firmly at the door of the companies offering these services and my office is steadfast in its commitment to hold them to account.”
A Reddit spokesperson told Reuters that the firm has “plans to roll out changes this year that address updates to U.K. regulations around age assurance.” —David Meyer
More data
—CoreWeave files for IPO. The graphics processing cloud company will list on the Nasdaq under the symbol CRWV.
—Apple teases an Air-themed product launch, suggesting a new iPad is on deck.
—Nvidia shares fall 9% after U.S. president Trump says 25% tariffs for Canada and Mexico imports will take effect imminently.
—Car prices will jump $12,000 because of those tariffs, according to estimates.
—BYD, DJI partner on drone launching system. Called “Lingyuan,” the vehicle-mounted platform will retail for about $2,200.
—Nvidia, Broadcom, AMD are evaluating Intel’s 18A chip manufacturing process, which competes with TSMC’s offering.
—Deutsche Telekom, Perplexity announce an “AI Phone.” Priced at less than $1,000, it will launch in 2026 in Europe.
—YouTube readies a Netflix-like redesign of its TV app. Prepare for paid content from elsewhere, including Max and Paramount+.
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