Good morning. Extremely lean and mean (er, merry!) for the rest of this week as we head into our annual winter break.
We’ll hang things up for the year on Dec. 24 and pick things back up on Jan. 5.
Happy holidays. (Keep the change, ya filthy animal.) —AN
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Alphabet will acquire Intersect Power for $4.75 billion
Vertical integration? Been around since the Industrial Revolution.
Carnegie and Rockefeller did it with steel and oil, respectively; a half-century later, RCA and IBM did it with consumer electronics and mainframes. (Even the venerable publisher of Fortune magazine couldn’t resist buying paper mills—and the timber itself—in the middle of the 20th century.)
On Monday, Google’s parent company renewed its membership in the V.I. club with one of its largest-ever deals, behind only Wiz, Motorola Mobility, and Mandiant. Alphabet said it would pay $4.75 billion cash for TPG-backed Intersect Power, which sells utility-scale renewable energy and infrastructure.
Intersect—which was founded by CEO Sheldon Kimber in 2016 and earlier this year moved HQ from Beaverton, Ore. to San Francisco—partnered with Google last year to build energy facilities next to data centers in exchange for a minority stake in the smaller firm.
Now Alphabet will own the whole kit and kaboodle (well, almost: it’s not buying assets contracted to other customers) in a bid to keep electricity flowing to its fast-growing network of data centers as the AI boom threatens to overwhelm U.S. energy infrastructure.
As part of the deal, Kimber will remain in place; Intersect will retain its brand.
Alphabet’s not the only Big Tech firm mulling vertical integration in an Age of Intelligence. SoftBank, which owns multiple chipmakers, has reportedly looked at buying data center operator Switch. A consortium including Microsoft and Nvidia agreed to buy Aligned Data Centers in October. And though Amazon doesn’t own a stake in Talen Energy, it was more than happy to take a data center campus off its hands in June for $650 million. —AN
More tech
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—Coinbase acquires The Clearing Company. An undisclosed sum for the prediction markets startup founded earlier this year.
—‘Call of Duty’ co-creator dies at 55. R.I.P. Vince Zampella, head of EA’s Respawn Entertainment and the former CEO of Infinity Ward.
—Pentagon partners with xAI. Grok joins Google’s Gemini on the department’s frontier AI platform.
—ByteDance to increase AI capex in 2026 to a reported ¥160 billion, or about $23 billion.
—Erebor raises $350 million at a $4.4 billion valuation. Palmer Luckey's Tolkien-inspired digital bank secured FDIC approval last week.
—Instacart customers fight back. Charging different prices for the same items bought from the same store at the same time? No bueno.
—FCC bans foreign-made drones and components. Off the table: Imports, marketing, and sales of Autel and DJI gear in the U.S.
—Larry Ellison to Paramount Skydance’s rescue. The Oracle co-founder “agreed to provide an irrevocable personal guarantee of $40.4 billion” for its hostile Warner Bros. Discovery bid.
