Good morning. Is there a tech company more intriguing than Palantir?
Part defense contractor, part private sector whisperer—and 100% Tolkien mystique—the Denver company has always straddled the Silicon Valley-Beltway spheres of influence without fully inhabiting either.
Longtime Fortune colleague (and Brainstorm O.G.) Michal Lev-Ram recently sat down with Palantir’s elusive CEO, Alex Karp, to learn how he feels about his company embodying the present moment in the U.S.
“You don’t win your argument by convincing people you’re right, not in Silicon Valley, that’s the wrong axis,” Karp told her. “The axis that matters is: Does the business work? Does it perform? What is the quality of the engineers? How valuable will it be in the future? If you win on that axis, you will actually be very convincing.”
I urge you to give it a read. Today’s news below. —Andrew Nusca
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Mark Zuckerberg’s first day in court highlights an inconvenient truth in tech
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stand Monday to defend his company’s past—and fight for its future.
The FTC has sued Meta, arguing that the social media giant’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp more than a decade ago were anti-competitive tactics to eliminate rivals. If Meta loses the case, it could be forced to divest the two apps.
In court, FTC lawyer Daniel Matheson argued that “consumers do not have reasonable alternatives” to Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
But Zuckerberg made the case that Meta’s market is far bigger (and more competitive) than the government suggests.
On the stand, he dismissed the idea that Facebook was centered on friends, and said that the company had become “more of a broad discovery and entertainment space.”
On one level, this case is existential for the tech industry as a whole. The underlying business practice under scrutiny—a giant swallowing an innovative startup—is the way the tech ecosystem has been structured to function, and to reward its various participants, over the past several decades.
Some in Meta’s camp are no doubt holding out hope that Trump will step in and pressure the FTC to settle the case with Zuckerberg. But the reality is this: If Meta loses this trial, the Big Tech dealmaking that was beginning to thaw is very likely to freeze back over.
Zuckerberg is expected to take the stand again on Tuesday. When he does, he won’t just be making the case for his company, but for Big Tech M&A being allowed to return to its longstanding modus operandi—for better, or for worse. —Allie Garfinkle
Nvidia to invest in $500 billion of U.S. AI infrastructure
The world’s leading AI chipmaker said Monday that it will build as much as half a trillion dollars’ worth of AI infrastructure in the U.S. over the next four years.
“Adding American manufacturing helps us better meet the incredible and growing demand for AI chips and supercomputers, strengthens our supply chain and boosts our resiliency,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in a statement that surely caters to the current administration’s priorities and trade policies.
Nvidia plans to accomplish its goal through manufacturing partnerships.
Production of the Santa Clara, Calif. company’s latest generation AI chip, dubbed Blackwell, has already begun at a new TSMC plant in Phoenix. Nvidia is working with Amkor and SPIL to package and test the Blackwell chips, also in Arizona.
And Nvidia is working with Foxconn and Wistron in Texas to “design and build factories that, for the first time, will produce NVIDIA AI supercomputers entirely in the U.S.” Production at the two plants—one in Houston, one in Dallas—is expected to “ramp up in the next 12-15 months,” Nvidia says.
The $500 billion figure, by the way? That comes in large part thanks to the spending by cloud computing companies (e.g. Amazon, Meta, Microsoft) to upgrade their facilities with Nvidia’s latest AI products. —AN
Hugging Face buys humanoid robot company Pollen Robotics
AI company Hugging Face is taking a big leap into robotics with the acquisition of humanoid robotics startup Pollen Robotics.
The financial terms were not disclosed, but Pollen’s co-founders, Matthieu Lapeyre and Pierre Rouanet, and approximately 20 Pollen employees will be joining Hugging Face.
Pollen, which was founded in 2016 and is based in the French city of Bordeaux, had raised €2.5 million (about $2.8 million) in venture capital funding to date.
The move will see Hugging Face selling Pollen’s $70,000 humanoid robot Reachy 2, which is designed for academic research, education, and testing “embodied AI” applications.
The robot is currently used by robotics researchers at Cornell University and Carnegie Mellon University, among others. Hugging Face had previously collaborated with Pollen on open source for Reachy 2.
Pollen’s robots are designed to run open-source software, including freely-available AI models, as well as to allow users to potentially modify the physical design of the robot.
Hugging Face, which is best known for running a large repository of open-source and “open-weight” AI models, has increasingly moved into robotics in the past year.
“Robotics is going to be the next frontier that AI will unlock,” Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face’s co-founder and chief scientist, told Fortune.
He added that new AI “world models” were contributing to rapid progress in robotics and that having AI embodied in devices like robots might also help solve remaining challenges to achieving human-like artificial general intelligence. —Jeremy Kahn
More tech
—Intel to sell a 51% Altera stake to Silver Lake. The programmable chip unit is valued at $8.75 billion, half of what Intel bought it for in 2015.
—Kodiak Robotics to go public. Autonomous trucking startup is valued at $2.5 billion.
—Apple taps user data to improve AI. Tired: synthetic data. Wired: customer data.
—Missile-maker MBDA ramps up. Furiously filling orders as geopolitical tensions escalate.
—Europe issues burner phones, laptops to U.S. staff to mitigate espionage.
—OpenAI releases GPT‑4.1 AI model family. Great for coding, following instructions, and deepening confusion about the distinctions between all these new AI models.
—AMD announces first 2nm chip. Its 6th-gen “Venice” chip will launch next year.
—A Google AI model to understand dolphins. What’s that, Flipper? It’s called DolphinGemma?
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