OpenAI Linked Stocks Fall on Report It Missed Targets

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You can find new episodes of the Bloomberg Daybreak Europe podcast by 7am in Dublin or 8am in Brussels, Berlin and Paris. on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news. Bloomberg Tech is live from coast to coast with Caroline Hyde in New York and Ed Ludlow in San Francisco. This is Bloomberg Tech. Coming up, OpenAI links stocks slump after the Wall Street Journal reported that the company failed to meet its own sales and user targets. Plus, a jury has been selected for the trial between some altman and Elon Musk who claims OpenAI abandoned its founding mission. Arguments begin today. And late night host Jimmy Kimmel has defended comments he made that prompted President Trump to call for him to be fired. We head to Hollywood for the latest. First, we head to these markets, Ed, and they are under pressure. Yes, geopolitical tensions still loom large. We think a lot about Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. But we also think about what's currently happening in the sell-off related to tech names. We're up by one and a quarter percent on the Nasdaq 100. Worst day in a month. Why? You're going to get to those details. It's all OpenAI related. Yep. Look at this board. These are the soft bank U.S.-listed shares that have tens of billions of dollars of exposure to OpenAI. Core Weave, clear neocloud exposure to OpenAI. Oracle, the primary infrastructure partner for OpenAI. The journal reporting that OpenAI missed its own metrics, financial ones for 2025. And contemporaneously, Caro, the user number is not where they want it to be. It's not. And this is all reporting from The Wall Street Journal. We want to dig into that with Bloomberg Tech editor Seth Figerman. What is the biggest anxiety for investors? Is it that they're not yet at a billion users and have been hoped by investors thus far? Is it more the revenues that aren't hitting internal targets? What is it about this reporting? You know, I'd say probably more the revenue side of things. Ultimately, this company is still growing pretty fast. But if they fall short of their own expectations, even by a modest amount, it might affect the wider AI ecosystem. As a reminder, as we've reported, OpenAI has increasingly set itself up at the center of this complex web of investments from chip suppliers and cloud providers. and if it has to reduce in any form its commitment to infrastructure spending, it could have ripple effects for the wider AI landscape. I'm just going to go through what the journal reported. Chat GPT missed its annual revenue target in 25. It missed its internal full-year revenue goal. And then for 26, monthly revenue targets are behind. And the big one probably is the billion figure for Chat GPT users. Again, all Wall Street Journal reporting, and I note that in that story, there is a pretty strong statement from both Sarah Fry, the CFO, and CEO Sam Altman. What's the logic here of why we see all these stocks react? It's just their partners or what? Yeah, I think that they're partners. And ultimately, if OpenAI has to rethink the hundreds of billions of dollars that it plans to spend in the next five to 10 years on data centers and chips, that could have ripple effects for a lot of these partners. Now, I will say, Ed, you alluded to some pushback here. We're also hearing directly from OpenAI in a statement that they're saying Their business is firing on all cylinders, quote, end quote, right now with strong growth in their nascent advertising efforts on the consumer side, as well as with their enterprise product. Now, they're not spelling out their financial details. Neither is The Wall Street Journal. All of this, though, puts the question of the IPO in the balance as well and just the rush to be able to raise more funds publicly. Does that matter in this context, particularly if we are seeing that it questions whether they're going to be able to finance that going forward for more compute? I think it certainly matters in probably a couple different ways. One, if their business is not where they want it to be, that's going to add pressure for them to maybe delay a little bit longer before going public. But two, if the question here is why are they not where they want to be, it seems likely that it's because of the pressure they're facing from Google and Anthropic, the latter of which also wants to go public as soon as this year. So if it's facing off against a possibly ascendant rival that's going to make it even that much harder to pitch Wall Street. So for part of the OpenAI story and in the Wall Street Journal's reporting and others reporting is this concern that Sarah Fryer has. Revenues aren't growing at the same pace that justifies all the spending. And when you're going to IPO, that's a bit worrying if you're going to put that in front of investors. What do we know in that standpoint? Yeah, I mean, look, what this company has publicly said is I think last year they were around $13 billion in revenue as of February after they announced the mammoth funding round. They said that they were generating $2 billion in revenue a month. So you can do the math there. It's still a fast-growing company, but in order to justify $600 billion in infraspending, which is what they've said, you need to be growing a bit faster than that. And Sam Allman has previously sounded quite bullish on the prospects to grow this business quite fast, up to $100 billion in revenue in the coming years. If that's going to happen at a slower pace, they might need to rethink some of their data center build-out plans. Bloomberg, Seth Figgerman. Thank you. Bloomberg Intelligence out with the React. Senior tech analyst Anurag Rana writing that if open AI sales were to miss, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, it could have an impact across the entire AI infrastructure ecosystem. Anurag joins us now. What's so interesting about this, like the market's response is, oh, we actually now do need evidence of demand. Right. We know about the infrastructure spend, that data we've got. What we don't have is what's coming out the other side. How are you computing that? So when we look at the entire cloud infrastructure demand, I mean, that still remains very solid. Whether that's transferred from OpenAI to Anthropic, that is the big story that we are discussing here, is whether this promise that OpenAI has made to Oracle, to Amazon, to Microsoft, to Goldbeed, you know, how good is that promise over the long term? And I think that's the contention point. But frankly, if you were to put that aside, the demand for cloud infrastructure remains extremely strong right now. and partially driven by Anthropic and all the coding tools that we have seen over the last six months. What's so interesting is Corweave have come out with a statement from a spokesperson saying, all we see is more demand than there is supply when it comes to compute right now. That exactly leans into where you see Anurag. So if there was one player pulling back, there's immediately enough demand to fill that supply? See, for somebody like Corweave, absolutely. They can backfill it because they have agreements with Meta. They have agreements with Microsoft. So, I mean, given their scale, it's not a big deal. And I would say the same thing for both Amazon and Microsoft, because they have enough backlog coming from other places. The thing is, over here, Oracle is the one where OpenAI has the largest commitment, which was $300 billion plus. Now, this is where you would see that how will that number shape up in the coming years. I would argue that even if things were really fine with OpenAI and there were no changes, there could be some transfer of that demand from Oracle to potentially Amazon's web services. Because when OpenAI and Oracle signed that deal, Amazon was not in the picture. Amazon recently got included in the pie, and OpenAI made $100 billion plus commitment with them. So, you know, if they're going to cut back somewhere, I think my gut instinct is it's going to come more from Oracle than anybody else. And we see the share price reaction in Oracle today, of course, along with everyone else, Anurag. Can I just go back to one area that has been reported? Is that OpenAI had turned to its own investors saying the reason we can stay ahead and perhaps fend off competition like an anthropic is we've got more compute. Is that a winning formula for these LLMs right now? So that is the traditional mindset that the more compute that you have, the better your model is going to be. So far, that trick has been working in a sense. That concept of, you know, you could say scaling laws have been working. I just don't know how that shapes up in the next iteration of model and how big of a clusters do you need to train them. Anurag Rana, out with the React, out with the Bloomberg Intelligence. We so appreciate it. Let's get broader market perspective now. Tiffany Wade's here with us. Columbia Threadneedle, investment senior portfolio manager. It's interesting how much the market reacts to this particular reporting. Is there reason to have anxiety that companies are good for the compute demand right now? I think we're going to see that the compute demand continues to persist. There's so much demand, and it's not just from Anthropik and OpenAI. It's really across the economy that we're seeing demand for more processing power. So I expect the spending is going to continue. But I get why we're seeing some of the stock reactions on a news report like this, especially across the tech and the semi-space where these stocks have been up almost 40% over the last month. So it kind of makes sense that we're seeing them take a breather on a bit of a negative news report. But I don't think that we're going to see that the story for infrastructure spaying demand has cracked. Tiffany, I'm right in saying that Alphabet, parent of Google is one of your top holdings, one of your top names, right? Yes. What we've looked at is obviously the chaos in the moment. There's a big move in the session, but this is a longer term chart. And it shows that Alphabet exposed stocks have massively outperformed open AI exposed stocks. We can get into the definition of each, but what does that chart tell you about your own thesis and conviction on Google? Yeah, I think we're seeing the divergence here in the charts really happen according to the competitiveness of the models that have been released by both companies, right? So Google for a while was being perceived as a bit of a loser because their models were maybe not as good as what we were seeing come out of OpenAI and Anthropic, and that changed last year when they released some of their newer Gemini models, and then they were seen as more of a winner. And I think that caused some of that divergence in the performance between those baskets of stocks that are linked to Google and that are linked to OpenAI. And certainly this continues to sort of push that narrative around how competitive are OpenAI models versus the competitors. Let's bring it back to today's top story. Stocks that have an association with OpenAI are selling off pretty hard on the basis that the journal reported it missed prior year financial targets internal and it's still not where it wants to be on ChatGPT users. It seems like now we do need some more evidence of demand on a longer term basis. We're not just focused on the CapEx input. Is that where your head's at, Tiffany? I think that's right. I don't think the demand overall is slowing. We're seeing amazing numbers coming out of Anthropic. They've taken up their revenue targets significantly over the course of the year. There could be a couple things that are causing OpenAI to grow a little bit slower. And part of it could be that they're losing a bit of market share to Anthropic. Anthropic with their Cloud Code product has been a massive hit so far this year. OpenAI was a couple months behind in releasing their Codex product. Their exclusivity agreement with Microsoft may also have been a bit of a headwind to enterprise adoption. But yesterday that agreement was renegotiated. So we might see some more opportunity for OpenAI on some of the other cloud providers as more models become available elsewhere. So I think we might see some of those proof points around the growth, given just having the ability to sell this Codex product across more platforms and also the ability to sell their models across a wider array of models across AWS and then also across the Google Cloud platform And that proof point comes in earnings I mean, we're all just holding our breath for this week to really see how much capital expenditure continues to come from these mega players. Yeah, well, I don't think we'll know the answer for OpenAI specifically this week, but we'll certainly see if the demand continues to hold up. I think we'll be watching very closely to see the revenue growth and potentially continued sort of acceleration in revenue growth for the cloud services providers. And then also what they have to say about CapEx plans. It's likely that we'll continue to hear the companies say that they're capacity constrained, which may lead to increased CapEx expenditures for the year. Tiffany, let's put the academic side of this to one side. AI is developing. AI is potentially good for the world. This is Bloomberg. We do business. So what's the metric by which we set the world order of who is leading in the field? OpenAI, Anthropic, Alphabet, Meta, XAI. How do you establish a rank? I think some of the things we're looking for is certainly user growth when we're thinking about the model providers. So at the moment, it seems like Anthropic is leading. Also, their focus on enterprise demand has clearly been a benefit for them versus OpenAI shifting demand towards enterprise or their focus towards enterprise later on. And then for the cloud providers are really looking for that acceleration in the revenue for the cloud businesses as an indicator that demand continues to grow and that they're starting to generate some good returns off of the spending that they are committed to. From your perspective, the hardware, you opened this up by saying, no wonder we perhaps get a pullback because the market has run so high. But is it for 2026, hardware wins, infrastructure wins, software is still at play and still an anxiety-ridden space right now? I think we're going to see that continue to be the playbook for the year. I wouldn't be surprised if we took a little bit of a breather on some of the semiconductor stocks. I mentioned they're up almost 40% over the last month, so potentially quite crowded here going into the rest of earnings. But I think that that narrative probably continues for the rest of the year where we're seeing very good demand, very good backlog for all of the hardware companies. And these questions continue to linger about sort of the business model for software and SaaS companies. tiffany wade of columbia fred needle it's been a robust timely and very useful conversation thank you very much now coming up president trump is once again criticizing late night host jimmy kimmel and calling for him to be fired we can have the details of that next in the meantime president trump is speaking in washington where he's welcoming king charles iii at the white house let's listen in where the two great leaders met was called the prince of wales the very title that his majesty the king held longer than any other individual in British history and he held it with great pride and respect. It's said that when Prime Minister Churchill first met this future king many decades ago he was so impressed he made the statement he is so young to think so much and so well and the bust of your great prime minister rests proudly again in the Oval Office. We're very proud to bring it back. We brought it back throughout his majesty's life. The world has witnessed that same thoughtfulness which first struck Britain's greatest prime minister, his majesty's intellect passion and devotion have been a long really a long a blessing blessing to the british people but not only to his own country but to the cherished bond between the united states and the united kingdom and i am very certain that it will continue that way long into the future In a few hours, His Majesty will stand in the heart of the United States Capitol as the very first British king ever to address a joint session of the United States Congress. So he's going to be addressing Congress and I'm going to be watching. I was thinking of going, but they said, I don't know. That might be a step too far. I would love to go. It's not supposed to be protocol, but I would love to be with you. But there, the direct descendant of King George III will speak to the direct successor of the very body that gathered in Independence Hall on July 4th, 1776. If John Adams and George Washington or the king's fifth great-grandfather could see that sight, they might be absolutely shocked, but probably only for a moment. Surely they would be delighted that the wounds of war healed into the most cherished friendship. Think of that very, very long ago difficult war. And yet those wounds did indeed heal into the most cherished of friendships, most cherished. They would be moved beyond words to know that the soldiers who once called each other redcoats and Yankees became the Tommies and the GIs who together saved the free world as brothers in arms and brothers in eternity. and nobody fought better together than us. If they could see us today... I agree that hateful and violent rhetoric is something we should reject. I do, and I think a great place to start, to dial that back, would be to have a conversation with your husband about it, because I'm... By the way, I also should point out, Donald Trump isn't allowed to say whatever he wants to say, as are you and as am I, as are all of us, because under the First Amendment, we have, as Americans, a right to free speech. Jimmy Kimmel there, defending a joke he made last week that prompted President Donald Trump to call for ABC to fire the late-night host. Let's get the details on this latest fight between Kimmel and the president with Lucas Shaw, who leads our screen time team out of L.A. and Hollywood. Where do we start, Lucas? I mean, there is a chronology to what happened over the last seven days, but the net result is that the president has called for Jimmy Kimmel to be fired. Yeah, I mean, it feels a little bit like deja vu, which Kimmel talked about on television last night. It was six months ago, give or take, I think it was maybe seven, where the chairman of the FCC, Brendan Carr, President Trump, were calling for Kimmel to be fired by Disney and ABC or calling on stations to come after Kimmel. But that's one of the big differences this time versus last time is Disney reacted very swiftly in part because some of the biggest local station owners which carry the ABC on their local networks were asking for Kimmel to be fired or asking for him to be off the air because of comments he'd made at the time regarding Charlie Kirk. This time, they aren't doing that. They've been pretty silent. Lucas, in October, after that first dispute, you had an extended conversation with Kimmel on stage in Los Angeles at our screen time event. For the Bloomberg tech audience around the world that may not understand this, right, they don't necessarily know Jimmy Kimmel. They may. They don't understand why the president is so engaged over what Jimmy Kimmel has to say. Just give us the basics of his show, its reach, why this is happening. Look, Jimmy Kimmel hosts one of the three main late night talk shows on American broadcast TV. You've got the show on CBS by Stephen Colbert, which is about to go away. You've got the show on NBC hosted by Jimmy Fallon and then Kimmel on ABC. You know, he is not known, or at least for most of his career, was not known as a political comedian, but over the last several years has gotten far more outspoken on politics and has been a really frequent thorn in the side of President Trump. Trump does not like to get made fun of and is someone who still cares about late-night television. And so they've had sort of public jousting again and again. And I think this time, you know, Disney didn't take Kimmel off the air. Kimmel was not, you know, he is finding a way to consistently tweak the president while also trying to, you know, not cross the line as he has done in the past. Kimmel did say he was sorry for what Trump, the first lady, and everyone at the dinner, this is a White House correspondence dinner, went through. But question whether really the joke was in any way relationship to them what occurred over the weekend. That is the context here, Lucas. How do we see, therefore, maybe any friend and car comments coming further? Do you anticipate, are you bracing yourself for any further reaction? Look, you made a crucial point, which is that Jimmy Kimmel made a joke that we can debate whether or not it was in good taste or not, but it was made prior to the incident at the White House Correspondents Dinner over the weekend. So it's not like he was making light of that situation. Because the comments were edgy, they have been weaponized by the Trump administration, once again, to show that Kimmel is a bad guy. Is it possible that the FCC and Brendan Carr come after Kimmel or more specifically come after Disney and those ABC station licenses? Anything is possible. Brendan Carr has behaved in a manner that is unlike any FCC chair before. But we don't know yet what they're planning to do. Lucas Shaw, as always, across it, we appreciate you. China is moving from regulation to intervention in an unprecedented geopolitical power play. Xi Jinping is attempting to block a meta deal that has already closed. Bloomberg's Peter Elstrom has more on Beijing's move to exert extraterritorial influence over Silicon Valley. Is that how it's being seen, Peter? I'm really interested in, we understand how Meta and Manus, yesterday we covered why that deal might be getting pushback from China, but how does it affect other companies that have been born in China and moved elsewhere? Well, China for a long time has been able to exercise these regulatory powers that are far beyond what you would see in other countries. We know, of course, about their crackdown on Jack Ma and Alibaba and the Ant Group, for example. Probably the closest thing to what we're seeing right now with Manus is when Didi, the ride-hailing company, they're listed on the New York Stock Exchange and then actually had to reverse course and pull its listing. And so what they're trying to do here is quite similar in a lot of ways. They're trying to go to Meta, even though it's already closed this deal, and get them to undo the acquisition of Manus. It's not clear how that would happen. As we talked about yesterday, the money has already been distributed to the shareholders of Manus. It's not clear whether they can get those checks back and actually return them. And it's also not clear how they're going to undo some of the technology sharing that we've already seen. Manus has already shared a bunch of their technology with Meta at this point. So it's not clear that you can actually undo this and what it would mean to actually undo it at this stage of the process. There is a case study, MiroMind. Peter, correct me if I haven't said that right. But this is a business that has a U.S. component and a Chinese component. And we've reported that the founder has looked at the MANA situation and said, OK, I'm taking action in light of the latest policy position from China. That's right. Yeah. And this is a sign of how Chinese entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs with their roots in China are now being very careful about this geopolitical divide between China and the United States in particular. So in this case, you said it exactly right. It's MiroMind. This is a founder, Chen, who was famous for starting a games company called Shanda. He decided that he needs to quarantine the Chinese business and the U business from each other They set up strict restrictions between those operations to make sure that they don share data they don't share code between the two operations. They can run them separately at this point. And I think that's a sign more broadly for these Chinese entrepreneurs who are starting up a bunch of very, very interesting companies within the country at this point. Some of them in the past have looked to move to Singapore to perhaps distance themselves. That's actually what MANA has tried to do. But it's not clear that that's going to work unless you go to Singapore separately, start up your company separately there, and then don't leave anything behind in China. So it's a tricky situation overall for these entrepreneurs. Bloomberg's Peter Elstrom, who's the executive editor leading our coverage of Asia Tech. Thank you very much. Welcome back to Bloomberg Tech. We check in on these markets which are under pressure, NASDAQ 100, having the worst day in a month at the moment as big tech pulls back. And we'll get into the reasoning around that. But one key stock that's on the downside, of course, European born but U.S. traded Spotify off by 12 percent, having its worst day since 2023. This after earnings come in lackluster, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. Second quarter gross margin forecast implies a very modest expansion from the fiscal first quarter. and they say it's going to fuel concerns that AI music is taking market share. Let's talk more about AI because that is what's seeing tech under pressure today. Not the geopolitical overhang, but what's happening with OpenAI. Reporting from the Wall Street Journal that it's missing internal targets for growth on user base, for growth on revenues, and it tugs down the ecosystem that surrounds OpenAI. Oracle, its infrastructure player, down by 4%. Arm Holdings, with its relationship with SoftBank, up by more than 8%. GE Vinova, even the electricity infrastructure that's meant to be going into future compute, it's down by 5%. Ed, this is a broad reaction. Okay, Bloomberg Exec Equities reporter Carmen Reinecke is with us. I mean, how broad, right? You know, we've looked very closely at Oracle and its exposure to open AI, the NeoCloud's core weave, an obvious example. Karish touched on power. Does it go beyond that in the market this morning? Yeah, I mean, I think we're seeing kind of any stock that's really linked to open AI. under pressure this morning. And really the reason behind that is that there's concerns if they're not meeting these targets, are they going to be able to meet the sort of myriad of commitments that they've made with other companies through all the deals that they have? It's really bringing back those fears around circular financing that we saw kind of at the beginning of the year and investors have maybe started to overlook a little bit as maybe they've shifted to looking at CapEx and return on investment for some of this AI spending. So we're seeing really broad-based pressure here. It's also important to note, I think, that open AI linked stocks have underperformed those linked to Alphabet. So that's the other thing here. There's just more competition in this space overall that's putting pressure on open AI. And investors are really taking note of that. Carmen, it's interesting that open AI have come back forcefully in own statements to Bloomberg saying they're firing on all cylinders. What's interesting is are cylinders going to be firing in earnings coming up later this week that just show where the capital expenditure is there, where they're more broadly, the compute story is there, even if it's being reshuffled around some of the LLMs. Yeah, definitely. I think investors were already looking at these reports coming up, especially all the hyperscalers on Wednesday with a high level of scrutiny. And I think this raises the bar, right? We're looking at CapEx. We want to see, I think that spending is still happening, but any pullback would be an issue. And then on the flip side, the return on investment, like what these companies are seeing from all this spending is just going to be paramount. What next, Carbon? I mean, it's weird, but for the first 32 minutes and 30 seconds of the show, we haven't mentioned that there are trillions and trillions of dollars of market cap reporting earnings imminently, and that could turn the entire tech market on its head. Exactly. I mean, we have a huge slate of reports that are coming up later this week. I mean, Wednesday, again, we get the four biggest hyperscalers. We get Apple on Thursday, Qualcomm's in the mix as well. So there's so much money in the market coming from AI that's tied to AI. And we're going to get results from these companies this week. And investors have been reacting very strongly, sort of pricing in either the very best case scenario or the very worst case scenario, I think, as we can see today with how the market, these tech stocks are moving. So these reports coming up are going to be so important and they're going to swing the entire market. so we're really just waiting to see what happens. I think it's an 80-second spread on Wednesday that we get four of the biggest companies in the AI story reporting, so it's going to be a really fun day. Brace, brace. Bloomberg's Carmen Reinecke. Thank you very much indeed. Let's turn to other OpenAI news right now making headlines. Today, a jury has been selected for the trial between the AI firm and Elon Musk, who claims that the company, OpenAI, abandoned its founding mission as a non-profit. Arguments begin today, but regardless of the outcome, Bloomberg opinion reporter Dave Lee says it's a win for Musk. Dave, you're with us now. And in many ways, is it the distraction that ends up winning for XAI and Elon Musk here? Right. I think if you're Elon Musk, you're looking at OpenAI and thinking there's a competitor that reduces Musk's own chances of capturing more of the AI market. We know SpaceX is looking to go public very, very soon. And XAI, the AI company, is part of that. And what this case is doing, at the very, very least, is putting a cloud over OpenAI's own efforts to go public themselves. As this is overhanging them, there's a chance, if it really goes against OpenAI, that they'll have to unwind their for-profit business and go back to the non-profit structure that they originally set up in, which Elon Musk says he's seeking to create. OpenAI, of course, say Elon Musk is being disingenuous. He wants to be rich from AI as well. he was behind a for-profit restructuring for OpenAI, and that this is just a ploy to slow them down. Well, it's a ploy that is already working and could get more effective depending on how the court ends up seeing it. Okay. The title of your column is OpenAI is Shedding Baggage. Now it needs a jury's help. Dave Lee. What baggage? Just be a bit more specific. Where do you begin? I mean, look, we've seen today this issue of having user and revenue growth issues. But one of the things that's been affecting OpenAI recently is this idea that it's doing too many things and that some of this deal making has tied it in knots. So, for example, on Monday, we saw that OpenAI had renegotiated an already renegotiated deal with Microsoft over compute, over access to frontier models. that's a good bit of baggage to get out of the way because it brings some clarity to their deal with Microsoft, which has kind of gone sour over the last couple of years. Other baggage includes what the company was calling SideQuest. So we saw it close down Sora, the video app that was kind of popular but was really expensive to run, didn't really seem to have much in the way of generating enough revenue to make it worth it for OpenAI. These are all little things that Sam Altman, I think, in his sheer enthusiasm to try and do everything, And now, as the company prepares for an IPO, seen as distractions, seen as strains on the balance sheet, this is a company that's going to show that even though it's going to be losing money for quite some time, up until at least 2030 is the projection, they've got to be shown to be reining in some of those costs to at least be heading in the right direction. The biggest bit of baggage, or one of the largest bits of baggage, I should say, is this trial, though, which is why, as I said, they need a jury's help with some of this. Well, they've got the jury. They have opening statements. In fact, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman were at the court yesterday, which was a surprise to some. We are expecting a lot of other previous and current OpenAI executives to take the stand, right? Yeah, I mean, OpenAI has been a soap opera in Silicon Valley. You had Sam Altman forced out briefly back after a weekend. You've had staff leaving, starting their own companies. Anthropic, of course, is one of those. Mira Marathi has started her own company. She was formerly at OpenAI. having some of this laid out on the stand is going to be wonderful for people like us. I feel it's going to be very uncomfortable for some of those really sort of at the center of this. There's a lot of egos here. There's a lot of, you know, bad blood, I think, between some of these former colleagues. But that's what happens, you know, when you're at the center of what for the last couple of years, I think we can say is one of the most exciting and talked about companies in the world. So plenty to enjoy. We've got a couple of weeks, a few weeks of it to enjoy starting today. That is Bloomberg opinion columnist Dave Lee. We haven't worn him out just yet. Now, coming up on the show, space startup True Anomaly raises a new funding round, a big one, as it aims to speed up production of its orbital defense tech. We're going to talk to the CEO next. This is Bloomberg Tech. true anomaly it's close to 650 million dollar series d funding round valuing the company at 2.2 billion now the space startup is among a dozen companies recently named to work on interceptors for the golden dome missile defense shield as well true anomaly ceo evan rogers joins us it's been a busy few days it's been very busy let's focus on the funding round first Where do you deploy that capital? What really injects the growth for the business? We're really stepping up alongside Guardians in the Space Force. The Space Force budget in FY27 is expected to be $72 billion. That tells you a lot about the kinds of capabilities the United States Space Force needs to build to counter China and Russia. We are investing in the staff and the products and the infrastructure that's necessary to come alongside Guardians to build combat capability for space warfare. Let's talk about your products. What makes you unique, distinct, and additive to the others? because it's ferocious out there in the world of defense tech. It's a really hot space. So I served 10 years in the Air Force and then transitioned into the United States Space Force. And what I saw from the defense industrial base is a focus on dual-use technologies. And there's good reason for that. But because space is now a warfighting domain, it's very clear that the operational concepts for space warfare necessitate dedicated space warfighting systems. They have a completely different performance envelope than commercial capabilities. They're quite literally going to get shot at. And so our focus is on clean sheet design to deploy operational concepts into the domain. So Jackal, for example, our first product is a clean sheet space-to-space engagement platform. It's not designed to do anything else other than protection and surveillance of the domain. Evan, we're very excited about this domain, right? Space is a warfighting domain, the technology you're doing, but I'm going to try and bring it back down to Earth a little bit for the Bloomberg Tech audience. So Jackal, you mentioned, it's a highly maneuverable vehicle. It moves around other satellites in orbit. it. Explain the basics of that, right? Our audience are tuning in and going, okay, so space is a war fighting domain. You make vehicles that are in space and it moves around other satellites. Take it from there. That's right. Our adversaries deploy into orbits that we don't necessarily have capabilities in. For example, geosynchronous orbit, which is 22,000 miles from the surface of the earth, is a long way for a ground-based telescope to be able to really characterize what our adversaries are doing. So we need systems that have the maneuverability, the fuel, the acceleration to be able to chase those targets down and take pictures of them. The foundation of combat capability is intelligence. And so the first order of business is to really understand what our adversaries are up to in space. And Jackal is purpose-built to go after highly maneuverable targets. Evan, who's the counterpart to True Anomaly? Does China have a company or a competence in the same domain that you think about? China doesn't have necessarily a company that's focused on space warfighting, but their entire military industrial complex is blended with their commercial manufacturing infrastructure. So everything that China does really for civil or for commercial has military applications. And we're starting to see that, particularly in their intelligence platforms. China over the last several years has deployed about 1 spacecraft into low orbit about 500 of those are intelligence platforms Those intelligence platforms are designed to track terrestrial forces so maritime forces, aviation systems, and ground capabilities. So there's really, it's very difficult for the United States to maneuver globally without China seeing where we're going. Let's talk about the United States a bit, because you build exclusively, from what I understand, for the United States government. Will that expand? Will there be others that you want to serve here? Right now, we focus on the United States because that's where the problem is. And also where there are substantial budgets focused on space superiority. But we're starting to see our allies build the rhetoric and build the policy to support space warfighting. The UK, France, Japan in particular, are really leaning forward into space warfighting. They have their own dependencies on space capabilities. But the budgets need to follow. We are happy to partner with our allies, but the budgets are really not following, and there's a focus on nationalized capabilities. The budgets have been there, but some would still say perhaps the spending on smaller companies by the Pentagon still somehow needs to be shown a little bit more. Are you really confident that the spending will be there for you? I mean, already you've been announced on Friday to be part of Golden Dome. There is a shift in the way that the Defense Department, or rather the Department of War, is acquiring systems. and it really biases and creates an opening towards new companies like True Anomaly. They're focused on firm fixed price contracts, capital partnerships, long-term contracts that allow for a rational ROI, and that's an opening for True Anomaly to step into that gap and deliver capabilities. And we're truly unique in the marketplace. I mean, space warfighting is one of the most rapidly growing areas of investment for the Department of War. $40 billion this year in spending, $72 billion this year, $20 billion of which is in space control. It's the highest growth market, and we're stepping in. Evan Rogers, CEO of True Anomaly, $650 million Series D, $2.2 billion valuation. Thank you very much. All right, Caro, some news headlines. It's time for Talking Tech, Ed. First up, Hong Kong is betting on light. Shares of Light Intelligence skyrocketed 384% in their trading debut today, giving the company a market value of over $10 billion. With heavy backing from Alibaba and Temasek, the firm is aiming to revolutionize AI inference by using light instead of electricity to process data. Plus, Eli Lilly is turning to artificial intelligence to design the next generation of medicine. The pharma giant has inked a deal worth up to $2.25 billion with AI startup ProFluent to find new ways to edit DNA. The deal is part of Lilly's growing investment in AI, and the company has struck at least 15 AI-related deals in the last five years, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. And Manifest OS, the quote AI-native law firm, just closed a $60 million Series A at a $750 million valuation. The platform aims to help small firm lawyers automate the grunt work and shift towards outcome-based pricing. Look, their mission is to make legal services, immigration, tax, for example, accessible to all through AI. Investors include Menlo Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and First Round Capital. Shell is entering what CEO Yael Sawan calls an inflection point. The company agreed to buy Canadian oil and gas producer Arc Resources for $13.6 billion, its biggest deal in more than a decade, as it seeks to sustain output in the long term. Joining us now from London is Shell CEO Yael Sawan. The obvious question is why Canada and why now? But the way that a lot of people are looking at this, Yael, is the geopolitical bet on safe, safe energy supply. How much were you thinking about that? I'd start off by saying, actually, this is just an important point on the journey that we have been on, a journey that started over three years ago, where we said we want to methodically transform the company. And that's what we've been doing. And so the inflection point came that as we continue to deliver performance discipline simplification in Shell, we felt that it was time to look at more and more capital reallocation. And we felt that we had earned the right to be able to grow. And so the announcement yesterday for ARC was essentially just a step in that journey that we have been on. We had been looking at ARC for over two years. And so that, of course, predated the Middle East crisis. I've particularly been attracted to multiple elements of ARC. I mean, first and foremost, this is a liquid-rich play, high-quality resource, low-cost, long duration, in a terrific basin like the Montigny Basin with low carbon intensity molecules. And so we like that piece of it. We like the synergies, the adjacency to our own assets and the integration into LNG Canada, our LNG project in Canada there. And then thirdly, we really like the people. We like the culture that they had developed over 30 years. And so this well predated the crisis. But of course, always helpful to be able to have a diverse source of supply to meet the growing energy demands around the world. So a growing demand, does that mean you have a growing production, a growing supply into the 2030s with this additive deal, Wael? Absolutely. So we had in the past guided to a 1% CAGR growth between now and 2030 for our oil and gas production. On the back of this deal, we have guided to a 4% per annum CAGR, so a significant growth uptick between 2025 and 2030. But importantly as well, it gives a long-duration growth platform. It allows us to add 150,000 barrels per day of liquids out in 2035. And the inventory we're talking about is well above 15 years of inventory into up to 25 years in certain areas. And so this is just an exciting growth platform that is underpinned, in my mind, with the liquids opportunity, but also with significant optionality for the gas through our existing plant and possibly through a second phase of that development that we have in LNG Canada. We will talk more about this deal, but it's been about 10 years since I last attended an OPEC meeting. And this is a massive story. The UAE leaving OPEC. What's your reaction to that? But I think more importantly, what do you think it will do to global oil markets? Yeah, difficult to call. I mean, very, very early days. And of course, I'll leave it to the UAE leaders and to OPEC to opine on it. What I would say is, you know, OPEC is roughly a third of the overall liquids production of the world. And undoubtedly, demand for liquids continues to grow. And I mean by that oil, condensate and so on and so forth. The most important influence of OPEC has typically been in who has the spare capacity and how do they choose to deploy that spare capacity. And so that will be, I think, the calculus that will have to be made in the coming weeks, months and years. For a company like ours, of course, our focus has been on, indeed, diversifying production. We have production in OPEC countries and non-OPEC countries, but also importantly, continuing to make sure that we look at new horizons to be able to grow our production. And that, of course, we do through both exploration and M&A deals like what we've done, for example, here in Canada. And so I think at the end of the day, what will be important will be supply-demand balances. We know that those are going to be tight for at least the coming months, if not at least the next year plus, given the closure in the straits. The question will be longer term, how does all that pan out? And I think that's too soon to call at the moment. What is the environment that you close this deal in? How tight are global energy markets right now? We're thinking a lot on this program, Bloomberg Tech, about energy security. But Asia and Europe, it's hard to gauge the severity of how real a supply crunch is. The markets are tight. I won't play down at all. We're talking about 900 million barrels that have not been produced in the last couple of months, and that's been replaced by essentially stock drawdown. We're now sort of starting to reach some relatively low levels. We're talking about demand curtailment in certain areas. We're talking about fuel switching. So this is profound. And not just for oil, by the way. It also plays in, of course, for LNG. 20% of the global LNG production comes from the Middle East. And all this is happening with the backdrop of sustained growth in energy demand, of which, to your point, Ed, some of it is being, of course, contributed to by the growth in AI and technology demands. Exactly. And so it is indeed a tight situation. And this is why it's incumbent upon us, the energy sector, to continue to invest in all forms of energy, to make sure that we are able to provide that energy to support multiple countries as they're looking to both grow in their own consumption of energy, but also those that are looking to underpin their AI and technology journeys ahead. So, Iles, should investors expect more M&A coming from you? Look, we've always talked about the bar for M&A being a high bar, and I absolutely hold on to that. This deal crossed that high threshold that we had. We didn't need to do this deal, by the way, for avoidance of that. We were very comfortable being able to meet our commitments out to 2030 and potentially to continue to methodically add resources to our overall funnel. This deal worked out perfectly because of the arbitrage in where share prices were. We got the bumps because of our outperformance recently. And, of course, some of the tailwinds from the Middle East. ARK didn't have the same simply because of the nature of their portfolio. So this worked because of that. The timing was excellent. And I think we got a good deal for both sides. But that high bar is going to be held high again. and we will only deploy capital to M&A if we really find excellent deals like this. And that was in that methodical context. What isn't methodical is geopolitics and what's happening in the Strait of Hormuz. Have you managed to get any of your ships through the strait? What is your exposure right now, Wael? Now, we continue to have multiple ships there. Actually, I have a call scheduled tomorrow with one of the crews on the ships just to check in on them. It's a tough time. It's a tough time for our people. Our number one priority is the safety of our people. And we await the appropriate signals to be able to move those ships out. As I said, we're trying to focus on keeping morale high. And many here in headquarters and well beyond across the Shell family are looking at everything they can do to be able to meet our customer demands, which, of course, those demand levels continue to be high. but we're running at roughly 15% to 20% less molecules than we were just two months ago. And so, you know, I just continue to be incredibly proud of what everyone in the company has been doing to be able to contribute. Wael Sawan, Shell CEO, really grateful for your time here on Bloomberg Tech. Thank you very much. Cara? Yeah, that does it for this edition of Bloomberg Tech, really folding in there. What is a need for electricity, a need for energy, because the key story is one of compute. Now, today's story is all about open AI and questioning from the Wall Street Journal whether they're living up to their own growth aims and targets. Yeah, the journal reported that they missed their own internal metrics. And it was interesting, you pointed out earlier, some of the electricity stocks literally fell as well. That's part of the calculus. A lot to recap from this show. You know where to do it on the podcast, online, Apple, Spotify, iHeart, on all the Bloomberg platforms as well. Two days into a massive week. Stay with us. This is Bloomberg Tech.