OpenAI unbound, Index raises billions, and TSMC impresses the street

Top News

• OpenAI ditches the observers: After the Sam Altman-OpenAI firing saga last year, Microsoft took a board observer seat at the AI concern it had invested billions into. Then, earlier this year, Apple tapped OpenAI for use in iOS and said that the consumer tech giant would also snag a board observer seat. Now that’s all kaput. Microsoft is dropping its own board slot, likely to create more space between it and the company that is very much not its subsidiary, creating a situation in which it would be weird for Apple to have a board presence and not it. So, no company gets that privilege anymore.

• Index reloads with $2.3B: With global venture fundraising struggling this year, Index’s latest funds underscore that for some big-name firms, it’s still hunting season. The venture outfit raised slightly less across its venture and growth funds than it did when it last assembled new funds, but Index also said that it raised the new capital “in a few weeks from existing LPs mainly, and [was] really oversubscribed.”

• TSMC revenue jumps: The Taiwanese semiconductor giant reported strong June results, providing investors with a look at its full second-quarter performance. Reuters reports that TSMC’s revenues rose about 32% in Q2 and 33% in June. The company’s $20.7 billion in revenue earned in the quarter topped TSMC’s own projections and street estimates.

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E1977: Jason and Alex kicked off the week digging into the news that a16z has built a GPU cluster that it then rents to portfolio companies. How far will VCs go to secure deal flow? That far, it turns out. The pair also dug into Q2 venture capital trends, and added a host of robotics companies to the TWiST500.

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