Zombie nuclear reactors

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Alex Wilhelm & Corinne Walker
January 22, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

Top News

  • Another $1B for Anthropic: AI model maker Anthropic has raised more money. No, not the $2 billion it’s locking down from venture backers. In this case, the makers of the Claude model family are raising another $1,000 million from Google. Recall that Google previously put $1 billion into the company, and Amazon has also written checks. Given yesterday’s Project Stargate news, OpenAI rivals will need all the capital they can get.

  • Zombie nuclear reactors: Market demand for stable, green energy is running so hot today that even nuclear projects infamous for cost overruns are getting a new lease on life. The WSJ reports that South Carolina utility Santee Cooper has “tapped financial advisers to look for buyers that can restart construction on a pair of nuclear reactors that were mothballed years ago. TechCrunch points out that there are ”potentially thorny politics” to sort out, but it seems that splitting the atom’s resurgence is not slowing down.

  • Vertice snags $50M: While there’s optimism that current progress in advancing AI models and AI-powered software will grow overall tech spend — some startups are pushing in the opposite direction. Vertice is one such company, using AI as it does to help its customers spend less on their SaaS subscriptions. Recall that Ramp rode a money-saving focus all the way to the stratosphere, so it’s not a shock that with quick revenue growth, Vertice was able to raise a huge round. 2025 is already cooking.

TWiST500

Yesterday, Maddie highlighted a number of funding rounds from TWiST500 companies. Today, the funding round for a TWiST500 company that isn’t named OpenAI is worth our time. Here’s the headline:

Yep, though not all the cash is equity investment. There’s $5.25 billion worth of debt in there as well. The company also intends to use some of its Series J — the J stands for Just Go Public Already — to “provid[e] liquidity for current and former employees and paying related taxes,” it said in a release. That doesn’t sound like an IPO is imminent, sadly.

What’s fun is that Databricks and Anthropic now sport roughly the same valuation. Databricks’ own comes with a greater revenue base but slower growth. That both companies in the AI space have wound up at a moment in time sharing a price tag is more coincidence than datapoint, apart from the fact that it is now considered normal to have this much corporate value locked up on the private markets.

As a final note on the Databricks story, Temasek joined its investor list along with Meta. Temasek joining the cap table gives Databricks more wallets to peek into if it wants to stay private, while Meta has, well, everything that a Mag7 company is expected to: AI models, huge infra spend, huge AI demand, the works. Not a bad new part-owner for the mega-unicorn. — Alex


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