Good morning. Don’t sleep on the latest edition of our Fortune 500: Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast, which features Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon talking about 6G mobile communications turning humans into “walking cameras,” among other things:
“We’re going to see devices—we call them personal AI devices. Glasses, for example,” he tells Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell. “It’s very natural, because if the AI understands what we say, what we hear, what we see—glasses are very close to our senses.”
He later adds: “So one of the features of 6G of course, is the need to have a network where everything that I see can get streamed to the cloud at a very high performance and high speed. So all of us are going to be walking cameras, right?”
To quote the meme of Marty Scorsese: It’ll be absolute cinema!
Today’s tech news below. —Andrew Nusca
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Apple just might address those Liquid Glass issues
If the extra navigation steps, weirdly overlapping windows, and inconsistently rounded corners of Apple’s “Liquid Glass” interface irritate you, well, there just might be hope for you yet.
Apple is reportedly working on a “slight redesign” of the translucent UI’s, um, quirks ahead of the rollout of macOS 27, expected to be announced in a month and released in September.
What’s that entail? Readability improvements, according to Bloomberg. Tweaked transparency effects so that icons and controls aren’t presumably fighting with what’s beneath them. And hopefully more polish so the “unified visual theme” is a bit more, well, unified.
The effort to clean up the operating system’s visuals parallels another to fix what’s under the hood in a reported attempt to address known issues, tighten up code, and unlock performance improvements (e.g. longer battery life).
It all comes mere months after the departure of Apple design executive Alan Dye, who led user interface design before jumping ship to Meta. His successor, Stephen Lemay, is known for his “attention to detail and craftsmanship,” per longtime Apple observer John Gruber—a very necessary attribute at this point in the development cycle.
Apple has long oscillated between “new stuff” updates and “clean up” updates and it’s very much looking like its next Mac operating system will be the latter. Cheers to that. —AN
Nvidia’s AI equity investments this year: $40 billion and counting
We’re all familiar with Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, Nvidia the gaming darling turned AI trailblazer, Nvidia the canary in an AI boom coalmine.
But what about Nvidia the AI investor?
Eagle-eyed readers surely have noticed that the Silicon Valley chipmaker has been dropping increasing sums of cash on companies “up and down the AI infrastructure stack,” as CNBC puts it, in an effort to bolster its own AI chip business.
A strategically sound move? No doubt. Given the general boom-times of AI, though, it’s also a highly lucrative one.
By the news channel’s count, Nvidia has made more than $40 billion in such investments this year alone. Last week, its deal with data center operator IREN gave it the right to invest more than $2 billion in the company. A day before that, a deal with Corning gave it the right to invest more than $3 billion in the historic glassmaker. Last month, it put $2 billion into chipmaker Marvell. And its $5 billion investment in Intel last September is now worth an estimated $25 billion.
Critics have called such moves “circular financing” because companies like Nvidia are investing in companies that buy its chips and lease its compute. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the notion was “ridiculous” in the wake of Nvidia’s $2 billion investment in CoreWeave earlier this year; others are less defensive about the tactic.
One surefire way to find out? Wait for the AI bubble to burst. —AN
Cerebras may now raise $4.8 billion for its IPO
Sunnyvale’s Cerebras Systems is reportedly planning to boost the price of its initial public offering.
Reuters reports that Cerebras is considering a new IPO price range of $150 to $160 per share, up from $115 to $125. It’s also reportedly considering selling another two million more shares—for a total of 30 million—than it originally planned.
Add it all up and the AI chipmaker would no longer be raising $3.5 billion, but $4.8 billion. (Calling Benjamin Braddock: I want to say just one word to you, one word: AI.)
For the unfamiliar, Cerebras makes high-performance AI processors. You can think of the company as a David to Nvidia’s Goliath alongside peers SambaNova (backed by Intel and others) and Groq (essentially acqui-hired by Nvidia). Cerebras’ wares are particularly suited to so-called inference, aligning well with the general industry shift from AI model training to AI model deployments.
In other words, its IPO is hot hot hot. Two years after its abandoned attempt to go public, Cerebras has “drawn orders for more than 20 times the number of shares available,” Reuters reports. Strap in for May 13. —AN
More tech
—Agentic AI will be the top cause of data breaches this year, Experian estimates.
—The IT sector unemployment rate rose two-tenths of a percentage point in a month. (The cause rhymes with “say why.”)
—Your AI-transcribed meeting notes may be discoverable in lawsuits.
—General Motors to pay $12.75 million to resolve a California investigation into claims that it illegally sold OnStar subscriber data to brokers.
—Microsoft and G42's billion-dollar geothermal data center in Kenya stalls.
—ByteDance will increase its 2026 capital expenditures to more than $30 billion thanks to AI competition and high memory costs.
—Iran's 72-days-and-counting internet blackout breaks records and businesses.
