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Here's what's been trending:
SpaceX filed its S-1 on Nasdaq (SPCX): $18.7B in 2025 revenue, $4.9B loss, Starlink at 10.3M subscribers.
Anthropic expects $10.9B in Q2 revenue, its first-ever profit: $559M operating profit projected; Andrej Karpathy hired.
Nvidia posted $81.62B in Q1 revenue, up 85% YoY: Net income hit $58.3B; announced an $80B buyback.
Google I/O: 900M+ Gemini MAUs, 3.2 quadrillion tokens per month: Gemini 3.5 Flash, Omni, and Spark all shipped.
xAI burned $6.4B on $3.2B in revenue: Buying $2.8B more turbines for data centers.
GitHub breached via malicious VS Code extension: 3,800 internal repos compromised; TeamPCP claims responsibility.
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🚀 SpaceX Goes Public; xAI Burns $6.4B
📊 The S-1 Numbers
SpaceX filed publicly for its IPO on Nasdaq under the symbol SPCX, giving outsiders their first real look at the Musk empire's finances. The company reported 2025 revenue of $18.7B, up 33% YoY, but swung to a $4.9B loss from a $791M profit in 2024. Capital expenditures nearly doubled, from $ 11.2B to $ 20.7B. Musk's shares give him 85.1% of the voting power. Valor Equity Partners founder Antonio Gracias, a longtime Musk ally, controls a 7.3% stake, making him the second-largest holder after Musk.
📡 Starlink's Scale
The "Connectivity" business, primarily Starlink, generated $11.3B in 2025 revenue. Starlink had 10.3M subscribers in Q1 2026, a 105% increase YoY. That subscriber base makes Starlink one of the fastest-growing subscription businesses on the planet, rivaling the early trajectory of Netflix and Spotify.
🔥 xAI's $6.4B Hole
Buried in the S-1 are the financials of xAI, Musk's AI lab. xAI posted a $6.4B operating loss on $3.2B in revenue in 2025. Grok and X had 550M MAUs combined as of March 2026, with 117M using Grok's AI features. The filing reveals xAI plans to buy another $2.8B worth of turbines for its data centers, including a $2B deal for mobile gas turbines, the same type it's being sued over.
SpaceX set aside $530M for potential litigation losses, including lawsuits involving Grok's "Spicy" mode, which it described as a "heightened risk." One legal overhang did clear: a jury unanimously rejected Musk's claims against OpenAI and Sam Altman, ruling he filed outside a three-year statute of limitations. Musk says he will appeal, but the verdict removes a cloud from OpenAI's IPO path just as SpaceX opens its own.
Translation: SpaceX just showed the world that building the future costs $20.7B a year in capex and produces a $4.9B loss. xAI is burning $6.4B to get 117M Grok users. If even Musk needs a profitable subscription business to fund his moonshots, what's subsidizing yours?
🔍 Google I/O: 3.2 Quadrillion Tokens Per Month
🧠 Gemini 3.5 Flash + Omni
Google I/O 2026 was less a developer conference and more a scale flex. The company launched Gemini 3.5 Flash, its "strongest agentic and coding model yet," in the Gemini app and Search's AI Mode. It also debuted Gemini Omni, a multimodal model that can "create anything from any input," starting with video generation. Gemini 3.5 Pro was teased for next month; the audience audibly groaned at it not being available immediately. Pricing: Gemini 3.5 Flash costs $1.50 per 1M input tokens and $9 per 1M output tokens, 3x the price of Gemini 3 Flash Preview.
🤖 Gemini Spark & the Agent Stack
Gemini Spark is a "24/7 personal AI agent" powered by Gemini 3.5 that integrates across Gmail, Docs, and Slides. Google also launched Antigravity 2.0, featuring a desktop app for orchestrating agents, a CLI tool, and an SDK for custom workflows. AI Studio now lets users build native Android apps from the web, with publishing on the roadmap. And Android Halo will make an AI agent's status visible at the top of the phone screen, coming later this year.
📈 The Platform Scale
Sundar Pichai revealed Google is now processing 3.2 quadrillion tokens per month, up from 480T a year ago and 9.7T two years ago. That's a 567% YoY increase. The Gemini app has 900M+ MAUs across 230 countries, up from 400M at I/O 2025. Google overhauled its search box to accept longer queries with photos and videos, powered by Gemini 3.5 Flash-based agents. New pricing tiers include a $100/month AI Ultra plan for devs while the top Ultra subscription dropped from $250 to $200/month.
Translation: Google just revealed it processes more tokens in a month than most AI labs have processed in their entire existence. When your platform partner processes 3.2 quadrillion tokens per month, are you building on their ecosystem or just renting space in it?
🧠 Anthropic's $10.9B Quarter
📈 The Revenue Explosion
Five weeks after closing at $900B, Anthropic disclosed the numbers that justify it. The company told investors it expects $10.9B in Q2 revenue, up from $4.8B in Q1, and a $559M operating profit, its first ever. That's a 127% quarter-over-quarter jump. For context, 34 top AI startups are generating nearly $80B in annualized revenue, with Anthropic and OpenAI capturing roughly 89% of that combined.
🧑💻 The Karpathy Signal
Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic to help launch a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pretraining research. Karpathy co-founded OpenAI, led Tesla's Autopilot team, and most recently ran Eureka Labs. His announcement said he thinks "the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative." When the person who helped build GPT-1 through GPT-4 picks a side, the signal is loud.
🏗️ The M&A and Infrastructure Push
Anthropic went on a buying spree. It acquired Stainless, the SDK generation startup used by OpenAI, Google, and Cloudflare, and plans to wind down its hosted products. A joint venture with Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman bought Fractional AI as its first deal; sources say Fractional ended its OpenAI deal as part of the transaction. On the compute side, Anthropic is in talks to rent servers powered by Microsoft-designed chips, having steadily increased its Azure usage since November 2025. And KPMG partnered with Anthropic to embed Claude into its global tax and advisory platforms.
Translation: Anthropic just went from "most promising AI lab" to "profitable AI company" in a single quarter. But $10.9B in quarterly revenue while paying SpaceX $1.25B per month raises a question: at what point does your biggest supplier become your biggest dependency?
💻 Nvidia's $81.6B Quarter and the Chip Cold War
📊 The Numbers
Nvidia obliterated estimates and revealed a geopolitical chess game in the same week. The company reported Q1 revenue of $81.62B, up 85% YoY, beating the $78.86B consensus. Data Center revenue hit $75.2B, up 92%. Net income surged 211% YoY to $58.3B, crushing analyst estimates of $42.9B. The company announced an $80B share repurchase program and raised its Q2 revenue forecast to $91B.
🇨🇳 Jensen Concedes China
Jensen Huang said Nvidia has "largely conceded" China's AI chip market to Huawei and should "expect nothing" regarding chip sale approvals. The statement landed during a week where China banned Nvidia's RTX 5090D V2 chip, aimed at gamers and animators, while Jensen was visiting China with Donald Trump. Taiwan is seeking to detain three people for forging documents to export Super Micro servers with Nvidia chips to China, Hong Kong, and Macau.
Translation: Nvidia just posted the most profitable quarter in semiconductor history while publicly conceding the world's second-largest economy to a competitor. If you depend on GPU access, the question isn't price anymore; it's which side of the geopolitical line your data center sits on?
🚀 Product Launch Quick Hits
Spotify Reserved: Partners with Live Nation to set aside concert tickets for the most dedicated fans, starting with Premium users in the US.
Spotify Labs Studio: NotebookLM-like desktop app that generates private, AI-powered podcasts, in research preview across 20+ markets.
Spotify Audiobook+ Self-Publishing: 1M+ Audiobook+ subscriptions on track for $100M ARR; new ElevenLabs-powered tool lets authors self-publish audiobooks.
Cohere Command A+: Sparse MoE open model with 218B total and 25B active parameters, Cohere's first under the Apache 2.0 license.
Flipper One: Pocketable open-arm Linux computer with Raspberry Pi 5-class performance; Flipper is seeking community feedback before mass production.
Stability Audio 3.0: New family of audio models trained on licensed data; the top model can generate six-minute songs.
AMD Ryzen AI Halo PC: Mac Mini-sized PC starting at $3,999 with Ryzen AI Max 300 chips, pre-orders in June; AI Max 400 chips arrive Q3.
Higgsfield AI "Hell Grind": 95-minute fully AI-generated film premieres at Cannes; took two weeks and $500K to make, of which $400K was on AI compute.
Google Universal Cart: Shopping assistant that works across merchants, built on an open-standard Universal Commerce Protocol, rolling out in the US.
Discord E2E Encryption: Voice and video calls outside stage channels are now end-to-end encrypted by default, two years after launching the protocol.
Cursor Composer 2.5: Built on Kimi K2.5, better at sustained work on long-running tasks and following complex instructions.
OpenAI Math Breakthrough: An internal reasoning model disproved the Erdos unit distance conjecture, a central problem in discrete geometry posed in 1946.
GitHub breached via malicious VS Code extension: 3,800 internal repositories compromised; TeamPCP claims responsibility. Attack linked to TanStack npm supply-chain compromise.
👔 Personnel Quick Hits
Meta lays off 8,000, reassigns 7,000 to AI: 10% of staff cut in the company's push to become AI-first; Zuckerberg later told employees he doesn't expect more company-wide layoffs this year.
Intuit cuts 17% of global workforce: Roughly 3,000 employees worldwide to "streamline operations and sharpen focus on key bets, like AI."
Google DeepMind acqui-hires Contextual AI: ~$100M deal to hire 20+ researchers including CEO Douwe Kiela and license Contextual's technology.
Xbox hires Matthew Ball as CSO: The game industry analyst becomes chief strategy officer; Scott Van Vliet, who led Azure AI infrastructure, named Xbox CTO.
Standard Chartered cutting 8,000 by 2030: 15%+ reduction in back-office positions in hubs like Bengaluru amid growing AI usage.
Peter Neumann dies at 93: The security researcher who spent decades criticizing the industry's lax attitudes toward computer security and digital privacy.
S. "Soma" Somasegar dies at 59: Led Microsoft's Developer Division for 12 years as part of a 27-year tenure before becoming a prominent startup investor.
🌟 Editor's Note
At Startup Intros, our mission is to bring the latest founder-investor news straight to your inbox, keeping you ahead in the fast-paced world of Silicon Valley.
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💭 Parting Thoughts
SpaceX just showed us $18.7B in revenue and a $4.9B loss. Nvidia posted $58.3B in net income in a single quarter. Anthropic expects to more than double revenue Q/Q to $10.9B. Google is processing 3.2 quadrillion tokens per month. xAI burned $6.4B and is buying $2.8B more in turbines.
Every number this week is absurd. The scale of compute, capital, losses, and ambition is breaking records simultaneously. We're watching an industry that is both the most profitable and the most loss-generating in history, sometimes inside the same company.
Till next time!
 | Dev Chandra |
Startup Intros Trending Thursday: Your trusted source for founder-investor insights, delivered with clarity and focus.