Good morning. I hosted a delightful dinner with a diversity of AI executives—many by title, all by mandate—in rainy Manhattan last night to discuss how they’re rethinking their workforces given their new technological capabilities.
What does success mean to them in their industry? Where is the best place to apply it? What barriers do they face? How much can they spend? We touched on it all in a lively, wide-ranging conversation.
For those who missed it, a haiku:
Find the advocates
Remember your special sauce
Humans are the key
Many thanks to AMD for helping make it happen. Today’s tech news below. —Andrew Nusca
Want to send thoughts or suggestions to Fortune Tech? Drop a line here.
Anthropic plows toward an IPO
Hot on the heels of a Fortune cover story, Anthropic is reportedly beginning work on an IPO.
The San Francisco company has tapped law firm Wilson Sonsini—which worked on IPOs for Google, LinkedIn, and Lyft—to work on an IPO that “could come as soon as 2026,” according to a Financial Times report.
That puts it in a dead heat with even more highly funded rival OpenAI, in a race to the public markets. (The company told the FT that it hasn’t “made any decisions about when or even whether to go public.”)
Anthropic is one of the most highly funded startups on the planet—AI or otherwise—with a valuation approaching $300 billion. It hired Airbnb veteran Krishna Rao as chief financial officer last year.
There’s a lot to be learned if an IPO comes to pass. First: Is the AI boom still booming? Second: Will investors pile into a company that has yet to record a profit in this economy? Third: Will a public offering help the company steal momentum from OpenAI as both companies face stiff competition from the likes of Google, Meta, Microsoft, and others?
We’ll soon find out. —AN
Amazon debuts new AI training chip
Finally, some AI news that isn’t about a new model.
At its annual AWS re:Invent confab in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Amazon took the wraps off its latest home-grown AI chip, the Trainium3 UltraServer.
The new, 3-nanometer silicon promises a more than 4X boost to compute, 4X jump in energy efficiency, and nearly 4X more memory bandwidth than its predecessor.
In short: Faster AI for less money.
The company also shared that Trainium4 chips were already in development, though it didn’t share when we might see them. The company has previously made chips available about a year after announcing them.
One thing Amazon didn’t say: Who makes the chips. AWS has tapped TSMC, Marvell, and Intel to make silicon for its data centers in the past.
Amazon joins fellow hyperscalers Google and Microsoft in building custom AI chips to hedge against Nvidia’s dominance in the category. Microsoft said last month that it planned to rely more on its own, Broadcom-made silicon moving forward; Google has long relied on its own TSMC-made Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs. —AN
The Kalshi train keeps on chuggin’
The cofounders of prediction market Kalshi are now officially billionaires—on paper, at least!—as the company announces that it has raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation.
Investors in the round included a number of notable Silicon Valley venture firms, from Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz to IVP and CapitalG.
Kalshi most recently raised $300 million at a $5 billion valuation. That was in—checks calendar—October. Phew.
Why is Kalshi so hot, you ask? Founded in 2018, the New York City startup allows people to trade on real-world events.
Who will win the next election? Which Serie A team will claim the scudetto this season? How much rain will Los Angeles receive this month? Kalshi lets you put your money on virtually anything.
One difference with rival Polymarket, though, is that Kalshi is federally regulated and prefers fiat currency. Its chief competitor was, until recently, banned in the U.S. and prefers blockchain-based currencies.
The unanswered question is whether lawsuits will bring down the category before it ever gets off the ground. A proposed class action lawsuit in New York alleges that “prediction market” is another word for “unlicensed sports gambling operation.” Kalshi faces similar trouble in Nevada, home to Las Vegas casinos. —AN
More tech
—Trump’s push to ban state AI regulation is reportedly short on political support.
—Marvell will buy Celestial AI. A $3.25 billion-plus deal focused on cloud data centers.
—Arizona sues Temu with allegations of unlawful data collection, privacy violations, and the sale of counterfeit goods.
—YouTube launches Recap, its take on Spotify’s popular Wrapped year-in-review feature.
—ServiceNow will acquire Veza, an identity security startup, for a reported $1 billion or so.
—JD.com unit readies Hong Kong IPO. Jingdong Industrials, focused on supply chain tech, hopes to raise approximately $412 million.
—Michael and Susan Dell commit $6.25 billion for 25 million children’s federal investment accounts.
