I have been building software with AI tools all year, and the thing I did not expect is how quickly the conversation moved from "what can this do" to "who is paying for it". The tools that let AI write code on its own have genuinely taken off, and the demand behind them has pushed the big tech companies to spend more on data centres than they actually earn. So they are going to investors and lenders to keep building. Some of those lenders are comfortable because the chips can be sold on if things go wrong. Fine, as long as the chips are still worth something at that point.
Anthropic is a good case study. The company reportedly brought in $16.8bn last quarter, up from $11.6bn the quarter before, and says it is profitable on a day-to-day basis. I have never seen a company grow at that pace. And yet the expected value at its stock market listing has already been cut from $2 trillion to about $1.5 trillion, because the growth is slowing. Nobody really knows what the right number is, including the people writing the cheques.
What bothers me more than the valuations is the physical side. Microsoft dropped a UK data centre because it could not get enough electricity. ASML, which makes the machines used to make chips, says it cannot keep up with orders for the next two years. And the scramble for AI hardware has pushed memory prices up so far that phone and PC sales have fallen by around a fifth. You cannot raise money to fix a power grid by next quarter.
Security was the other thread I could not ignore. Someone hacked the fridges in hundreds of French supermarkets and turned the temperature up, which ruined the food. Tampered hardware crypto wallets were sold through normal shops and stole more than $100m. OpenAI found a bug, the listening kind, in one of its meeting rooms. On the other side of that ledger, Microsoft patched a record 570 flaws in a single month this winter, roughly double last year's pace, because AI finds them faster, and Bank of America hired a thousand people just to work through what its AI checks turned up. I also understand why so many websites are now blocking AI assistants. If I ran a shop, I would not want a bot standing between me and my customers either.
The gadgets this week were mostly entertainment. Tesla is taking $250,000 deposits for a sports car that will not go into production before 2028, which is roughly what it also said in 2017. Apple put out a $300 kitchen screen, a category that has failed every few years since the nineties. Amazon has a little device that records your meetings, which my phone does already. The one piece of hardware news I actually cared about was delivery robots in China. They did over five million deliveries last year and one maker is on its way to a hundred thousand vehicles. No stage show, no deposits, just vans driving around doing the job.