So long and thanks for all the chips

Author

Alex Wilhelm
May 23, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

Top News

  • Oracle to buy Nvidia chips for OpenAI that it will rent with SoftBank dollars: While it plans a huge datacenter buildout in the UAE and opens an office in Germany, OpenAI is hard at work here in the United States building out its domestic Stargate project. It’s a big datacenter. So large, in fact, that Oracle will buy $40 billion worth of Nvidia GPUs for the effort, which it will then lease to OpenAI. OpenAI, in turn, has raised a pile of money from SoftBank that it intends to use, in part, on the US Stargate facility. Confused? That’s just the start. Crusoe and Blue Owl Capital own the site in question, and borrowed from JPMorgan to build it out. The end result should be one of the most powerful computing systems ever put together. Until someone builds a BIGGER AI project…

  • Bluesky’s verification scheme expands: Miss the old Blue Check era of Twitter? Bluesky has you covered. The social media company is switching from a system that allowed users to verify themselves by domain, to a new system that will knight ‘trusted verifiers’ and offer Blue Checks from Bluesky itself. Recall that Bluesky was initially incubated at Twitter — now X — as an experiment in decentralization. So it’s not surprising that the social service is aping its erstwhile parent, but with its own distributed twist on verification.

  • OnlyFans is for sale, could fetch $8B: One of the internet’s best-known services is potentially for sale, Reuters reports. OnlyFans, a subscription creator service famous for its adult content business, could fetch as much as $8 billion in a sale. Today on the show we took a look at its numbers, and if you think paying three-figure multiples for AI startups is rich, how about paying 6x 2023 revenue in 2025 for a company that kicks off an insane amount of cash on the regular? OnlyFans will suffer from a shallower buyer pool due to its content, and the appetite of certain investors to buy into digital sex work.

TWiST500

Instead of our normal TWiST500 fare today, we’re highlighting two companies with founders active in our Founder Friday groups. After a bracket challenge and several segments on the show, Lon, Jason and I whittled the competitors down to OSPREY, MEDSimple, Tactun, MomSub, and Arcana.

From there, the Launch investment team weighed in, cutting our list of leaders to just two finalists: Tactun and Arcana.

  • Tactun: Helps companies design their own hardware controllers and control software using no-code tools and AI.

  • Arcana: Built a system to add contextually-pertinent advertisements into AI outputs. You can think of it as an AI version of Google’s own in-flow advertisements, but with a modern twist.

The final votes were 2-1, with Arcana securing the support of both Lon and Jason, while I held up Tactun as my favorite. Congrats Arcana, and hugs to Tactun for coming in second.

I want to stress that the competition was international. Tactun comes from Armenia. MEDSimple hails from Brazil. The rest of the finalists were from the United States — various cities and states — but the exercise of putting Founder Friday groups head-to-head-to-head allowed us to shine a little light on non-American markets that are building impressive companies.

We’re back to TWiST500 work next week. In the meantime, happy Friday and may your long weekend be restful! — Alex

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This Week in Startups

E2129: On a new TWiST, Jason and Alex are talking OpenAI’s collaboration with Jony Ive and predicting what this will mean for the future of AI hardware. PLUS Tesla and Waymo are battling it out for robotaxi market share, Microsoft partners with xAI, and Congress debates the stablecoin GENIUS Act. All that and Jason’s shoutout to influential online broadcaster (and “Dilbert” creator) Scott Adams.

E2128: On a rare Alex-free episode of TWiST, Lon and Jason update viewers on the latest in the Rippling vs. Deel corporate espionage saga, which now has more chapters than the Jason Bourne franchise. Plus are Firecrawl’s AI agent job postings just a marketing stunt(?), Jason’s thoughts on spotting “world class design,” and a chat with Prandtl Dynamics CEO Parth Mahendru about his innovative sonic anti-drone systems.

E2127: Jason, Lon and Alex reflect on Microsoft’s cutthroat move of laying off 6,000 staffers even as it rakes in record profits, in a demonstration of just how series tech companies are about austerity and leaning on advancements in AI. Plus, they wonder aloud if AI startup Windsurf is selling itself too early and greet Jeremy Redman of Airfive to talk about his bold new prepaid SaaS model.

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