When you buy a TV, what motivates the purchase: Picture quality? Value? Screen size? Brand loyalty?

Is brightness in nits, dimming zones and Delta E colour accuracy among those ‘needs’. I’d hazard a guess and say ‘probably not’.

Which is not to say that these areas are not important, but I’d make an assumption that most of the TV buying audience is not au fait with these areas – some won’t know their nits from their candelas, and others just won’t care.

And that’s fine.

But the TV market seems to have developed a fixation with measurements and numbers, and it’s become a question of to what end?

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Playing the numbers game

For the most part, you’re unlikely to come across these technical terms during your TV buying experience. Browsing the likes of Currys, Amazon and Richer Sounds, you’ll be exposed to the marketing ramble, most of it words that look like they could be equations or formulas (NQ4 AI Gen3, a9 AI processor).

On our side, the reviewers’ side, we get this as well as insight on the technical side. Of course, we need to know how they work, but I won’t lie in saying that some of this stuff goes over my head and requires educating myself and asking questions.

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The more advanced TVs get, the more complex they become to understand. The use of AI has, in a way, accelerated this complexity faster. AI is often used as a blanket term for tech. For some TV manufacturers, as part of their brand story, it’s easier to say AI to get people interested and fit as part of the overall story in tech.

AI has helped TVs achieve a higher level of performance. But it’s also turned TVs into a numbers game – my number is bigger than yours.

But what does it really mean? If I have a TV from Samsung, LG, Sony, Hisense and TCL and they all hit 3000 nits of brightness, which is better? The one with more dimming zones? The one that covers the widest colour spectrum? The one with the best Delta E number?

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Focusing on these areas turns it into a specs battle, and for most people, none of these measurements will have much context in their living room. If the picture looks good, then it looks good. Things like Delta E, tone mapping, and colour gamut – they’ll end up just confusing the buyer or making decisions more complicated, not easier.

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Welcome to the real world

The TV that prompted this discussion was the Hisense UR9.

On paper, this TV has stonking specs. It’s an RGB Mini LED, brand new technology to the TV market that allows for purer colours, displaying a wider range of colours than more conventional LCD TVs and doing so with more accuracy. The number of dimming zones is nearly 1000, it claims to hit peak brightness levels of 4000 nits. All these specs suggest a Bona fide contender.

So why was I left underwhelmed by the UR9’s picture?

Colours weren’t that punchy or bright. The levels of sharpness and detail were less than those of an LG OLED65G6 sat next to it. The Dynamic mode, which should be the brightest, looked dull. Filmmaker mode, Cinema mode and IMAX Enhanced mode all looked identical to the point where I thought something must be wrong with the TV.

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Having reviewed the U8Q in 2025 and hailed that as the best Hisense TV I’d tested, the UR9 felt as if the balloon had popped, leaving me deflated.

Reasons? I don’t think the anti-reflection/anti-glare screen worked in Hisense’s favour, as it seemed to shave off levels of detail, sharpness, and reduce contrast, which I also noted on Hisense’s Canvas TV. Highlights and overall brightness weren’t as high as measurements suggested, black levels not as strong or as deep as I hoped.

Viewing angles weren’t great either, like down to the type of panel used, and colours were a bit off despite many reviews noting the accuracy the UR9 out of the box.

But something just wasn’t quite right with the TV’s picture performance.

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Personally, I wonder if this is down to Hisense’s PQ philosophy, or how it views colour. Every brand has a PQ philosophy; Sony wants to reflect the creator’s intent, as do LG and Panasonic, while Samsung wants to do that and offer the brightest, most colourful picture experience with any technology it gets its hands on.

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But I can’t quite discern what Hisense’s philosophy is. In the past I’ve found its TVs have relied heavily on Dolby Vision, which is not their PQ philosophy but Dolby’s.

Earlier this year, I witnessed a shootout between several TVs: OLED, Mini LED, RGB Mini LED, and SQD Mini LED. The model that fared the worst was the Hisense, with all the test patterns and demos causing some sort of issue.

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One pattern in particular showed Hisense’s lack of precision. The pattern was a white rectangle surrounded by green. The rest of the TVs showed the white rectangle as white – the Hisense showed the white rectangle to be a shade of green…

The gist of all this? What the specs say on paper doesn’t always translate to the real world.

Don’t be swayed by the specs, the charts, the stats. Not everything is always what it appears to be.

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UFC White House live streams will be an MMA event like no other, as the Octagon takes up residence on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC, to mark the upcoming 250th anniversary of the United States on July 4 — and, more specifically, President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday on Sunday. With headliners from the US, Georgia, Brazil and France, the event also known as UFC Freedom 250 is a surprisingly multinational affair.

While there will doubtlessly be no end of pomp and pageantry taking place over the weekend, there’s the serious matter of two UFC titles up for grabs in a co-main event. At the very top of the bill is Ilia Topuria vs Justin Gaethje, with the former defending his Lightweight title. The unbeaten champion is one of the most dominant fighters in the organization and is sure to be a mainstay for years to come, while for ‘The Highlight’ it’s surely the last opportunity to win the belt outright as Gaethje approaches his 38th birthday.

IQM Quantum Computers, the Finnish maker of superconducting quantum systems, has appointed Barbara Venneman to its board of directors as the company approaches what would be the first Nasdaq listing by a European quantum computing company. Venneman currently serves on the board of Vanguard, one of the world’s largest investment management firms, and previously led Deloitte Digital globally. The appointment signals that IQM is stacking its governance with public-markets experience ahead of a shareholder vote scheduled for June 25.

That vote will determine whether IQM completes its merger with Real Asset Acquisition Corp (Nasdaq: RAAQ), a special purpose acquisition company based in Princeton, New Jersey. The deal, announced in February at a pre-money valuation of $1.8 billion, would give IQM a primary listing on Nasdaq with a potential dual listing on the Helsinki Stock Exchange. The SEC declared the registration statement on Form F-4 effective on June 5.

The transaction has gained momentum since February. IQM and RAAQ announced an upsized PIPE of $146 million in early June, up from an initial $134 million commitment, after Finnish pension insurer Ilmarinen joined existing institutional investors. Combined with cash from RAAQ’s trust account, an earlier €50 million financing from BlackRock, and IQM’s existing balance sheet of $172 million, the company expects to hold more than $450 million in cash at closing.

IQM’s commercial profile sets it apart from the cloud-only quantum providers that have dominated the US public market so far. The company builds full-stack superconducting quantum computers for on-premises deployment, giving customers direct ownership of the hardware rather than API access to shared systems. It has sold 21 quantum systems to 13 customers, including four of the ten largest supercomputing centres in the world, and ships what it describes as 15% of all publicly disclosed quantum systems globally.

The company reported verified 2025 revenue of approximately €31 million ($36 million) and more than $100 million in cumulative bookings and order visibility. Founded in 2018 as a spinout from Aalto University and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, IQM now employs more than 400 people across Europe, Asia, and North America. Its technology partners include Nvidia, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and AWS, which made IQM’s Garnet processor the first quantum system available via AWS cloud in the European Union.

Venneman brings more than 30 years of experience in digital transformation and enterprise technology commercialisation. She also serves on the board of advisors at Decagon.AI, an enterprise AI software company, and holds an MBA from McGill University and a computer science degree from the Université de Montréal. IQM’s board chair Sierk Poetting said her background in “enterprise technology commercialization, AI, and governance” would be valuable as IQM scales its commercial presence in the US.

The board also reshuffled its founder representation. CEO and co-founder Jan Goetz will replace co-founder Juha Vartiainen as the founder representative on IQM’s board, consolidating the company’s executive and governance leadership under the same person as it transitions to public-company reporting requirements.

IQM is not the only quantum company taking the SPAC route to public markets. Infleqtion listed on the NYSE earlier this month, and Horizon Quantum Computing has pursued a similar path. The SPAC structure carries well-documented risks, with the 2021 wave of blank-cheque listings producing widespread underperformance. IQM’s deal will test whether a European hardware company with real revenue, institutional backing from BlackRock and Finnish pension capital, and a $1.8 billion valuation can break that pattern.

Apple’s iOS 27 developer beta contains underlying support for a feature the company never mentioned at its WWDC keynote on June 8: an Extensions framework that would allow iPhone users to swap between ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini directly inside Siri. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has reported that the system includes a settings panel and a dedicated App Store section, both built but toggled off on Apple’s backend. Apple has held discussions with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google about granting entitlements for the framework, according to Bloomberg.

The feature was widely expected. Gurman first reported in March that Apple was building Extensions to replace the bilateral ChatGPT deal with an open system any qualifying AI provider could join. TechCrunch described the approach in May as a “choose your own adventure of AI models.” By the time WWDC arrived, the question was not whether Extensions would launch, but how prominently Apple would position it.

The answer was: not at all. Apple devoted the WWDC keynote almost entirely to Siri AI, its rebuilt assistant powered by a custom 1.2-trillion-parameter Gemini model running on Nvidia Blackwell GPUs in Google Cloud. The company introduced a standalone Siri app, personal context features, and a three-tier privacy architecture.

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Extensions did not appear in any slide, demo, or press release. Three strategic pressures help explain why.

The first is regulatory. Apple confirmed during WWDC week that Siri AI will not launch in the European Union, citing unresolved negotiations with the European Commission over the Digital Markets Act. The EU rejected Apple’s proposal for a Trusted System Agent that would let rival virtual assistants access Siri AI’s capabilities without direct exposure to sensitive device data.

Announcing a framework that invites third-party AI into Siri while simultaneously telling EU regulators that third-party access poses unacceptable risks would have been difficult to reconcile.

The second is legal. OpenAI is preparing possible legal action against Apple over the ChatGPT partnership struck in June 2024. OpenAI’s lawyers are working with an outside firm on options including a breach-of-contract notice, according to Bloomberg.

OpenAI believed the deal would drive billions in subscription revenue, but says Apple buried the integration behind friction, with users required to explicitly invoke “ChatGPT” by name and responses appearing in constrained windows. Announcing Extensions, a system explicitly designed to demote ChatGPT from its exclusive position to one option among several, would have escalated those tensions at a sensitive moment.

The third is messaging. Apple spent two years rebuilding Siri from the ground up after its original AI plans fell short. Siri engineering chief Mike Rockwell said the team had a working version the previous year but scrapped it because it did not meet their vision.

Craig Federighi called Siri AI’s agent-like capabilities “experimental.” Introducing a model-picker at the same moment Apple was trying to convince users, developers, and investors that its own AI had finally arrived would have undercut the relaunch narrative.

Gurman’s hands-on review of the Siri AI beta, published today, suggests the concern is not unfounded. He described the assistant as functional but buggy, with slow responses, cancelled queries, and misunderstood requests. Siri AI is roughly competitive with where leading chatbots were approximately six months ago, according to his assessment.

The assistant still cannot handle advanced workloads like research, programming, or data analysis. Apple is rolling out access through a waitlist, and even the public beta in July will be limited.

The underlying architecture, however, is designed to accommodate Extensions whenever Apple decides to flip the switch. Google’s Gemini already powers Siri AI under the hood through a deal worth roughly $1 billion per year. Extensions would sit on top of that, giving users the ability to route specific tasks through whichever third-party model they prefer.

That means Writing Tools, Image Playground, and open-ended chat could each be powered by a different provider. Apple’s approach would effectively turn Siri into a platform layer rather than a single-provider assistant.

For Anthropic and Google, the stakes are significant. Extensions would give Claude and Gemini native access to more than 1.5 billion active Apple devices without requiring users to download separate apps or leave the Siri interface.

For OpenAI, the picture is more complicated. The Extensions system might actually benefit ChatGPT by giving it more prominent placement through a model-picker interface, but it would also end the exclusive position OpenAI believed it was paying for with the original partnership.

The iOS 27 beta code also contains references to a foldable device internally codenamed V68, expected to debut in September, and macOS 27 includes pull-to-refresh gestures and Sidecar touch input that point toward a touch-screen MacBook under codenames K114 and K116. These hardware signals suggest Apple is building the Extensions framework with new device form factors in mind, not just current iPhones.

Apple has not publicly confirmed or denied that Extensions will ship with iOS 27 this fall. The framework is built, the discussions with AI providers are underway, and the regulatory, legal, and strategic obstacles are all in motion simultaneously. The question is no longer whether Apple will open Siri to third-party AI. It is whether the EU, OpenAI’s lawyers, and Apple’s own messaging discipline will let it happen on the timeline Apple originally intended.

Trustap was founded in 2017 and has offices in Cork and Dublin, as well as the UK, the US, Spain and Croatia.

Irish payments and transactions start-up Trustap has raised $10m in funding to be used for product development and expansion of its team.

It will also facilitate the launch of Trustap Index, described by the Cork-based fintech company as “a solution designed to make marketplace or e-commerce listings fully transactable by AI agents”.

The service will “work with leading AI models to handle product discovery, negotiation and payment on a buyer’s behalf, with the human confirming each transaction before funds are released”, according to Trustap, to align with a growing shift towards delegation of online commerce from people to AI agents.

The index, which will launch in 2026 and has an open waitlist for early access, aims to close gaps in discoverability of products for shopping agents and help them make more informed buying decisions based on numerous shopping criteria across fragmented platforms through “structured data precision”.

“This funding gives us the runway to ensure that when an AI agent shops anywhere on the internet, it can find the listing, verify the seller and complete the payment securely through infrastructure it can rely on,” said Conor Lyden, Trustap’s founder and CEO.

“We’ve spent years building the transaction platform that make ecommerce, peer-to-peer and marketplace platforms safe, more profitable, and trustworthy for buyers and sellers. Trustap Index is the natural next step in that journey.”

The funding round was led by Aperture Capital, with participation from TX Ventures and other existing investors.

Ben Robinson, CEO of Aperture Capital, said: “The rise of agentic commerce is happening faster than many people realise. We believe that Trustap, which already works with hundreds of marketplaces providing secure end-to-end transaction management, is uniquely positioned to orchestrate agentic transactions.

“Trustap acts as a single, trusted aggregation point that indexes and transforms fragmented inventory data into consolidated machine-readable information.”

Trustap was founded in 2017 and has offices in Cork and Dublin, as well as the UK, the US, Spain and Croatia. It employs more than 40 people working with around 300 customers.

It raised $5.5m in a Series A funding round almost two years ago, and soon after became the first company invested in by the Digital Irish Venture Fund.

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What just happened? TP-Link continues to vehemently argue that it is a US, not Chinese, company. The Pentagon says otherwise, and so does US-based Netgear, which believes its rival makes false advertising claims and has cost it millions of dollars in lost sales because consumers wrongly think that it’s no longer associated with China.

Netgear has filed counterclaims against TP-Link in the US District Court for the District of Delaware, escalating a legal fight that TP-Link started last November.

The original lawsuit accused Netgear of running a smear campaign that connected TP-Link to Chinese cyberespionage fears and breached a 2024 settlement between the two router giants. Netgear’s response now says the real deception is TP-Link’s attempt to rebrand itself as an American company.

According to the counterclaim, TP-Link “remains, at its core, a Chinese company selling Chinese-made products.”

Netgear alleges that TP-Link’s 2024 reincorporation in California did not fundamentally separate the business from China-based TP-Link Technologies, which later changed its name to Lianzhou.

It claims much of the company’s R&D and manufacturing remains in China under the same cofounder, with more than 13,000 employees there through 2024, compared with around 350 in the US.

Netgear also takes aim at TP-Link’s “Made in Vietnam” labeling, alleging that the country is mostly used for final assembly and that 99.5% of components in US-bound products are imported from China.

It says those claims are important because customers are increasingly wary of Chinese-made networking hardware, especially after federal agencies began scrutinizing TP-Link over pricing, cybersecurity, and national security concerns.

Netgear’s filing arrived one day after the US Department of Defense added TP-Link Technologies to its list of Chinese military companies operating in the United States. The designation does not itself ban consumer sales, but it adds extra pressure as TP-Link tries to convince regulators that its US arm is independent.

TP-Link is already seeking an exemption from the FCC’s foreign-made router ban by arguing that TP-Link Systems Inc. is headquartered in Irvine, California, and should be treated as an American company.

The FCC rules block approval of new consumer routers made outside the US, though existing devices can keep receiving updates until 2029. Netgear and Amazon-owned Eero have already received exemptions.

This isn’t TP-Link’s only courtroom problem, either. Texas sued the company in February, accusing it of deceptive marketing and allowing China-linked hackers to access American consumers’ devices. TP-Link denied those allegations, insisting it is independent from the Chinese government and that US user data is stored in the United States.

Netgear is seeking damages and an injunction barring TP-Link from repeating the contested claims. TP-Link, meanwhile, maintains that Netgear’s China-focused attacks are false, defamatory, and commercially motivated.

Customers can order new joysticks, batteries, screens and more.

Apple barely talked about CarPlay at its WWDC 2026 keynote, giving most of the spotlight to Siri AI and the broader Apple Intelligence additions in iOS 27. But that doesn’t mean CarPlay is a no-show this year.

The Cupertino giant buried most of the CarPlay updates in a developer-only video, and, as it turns out, there’s genuinely more here than you would have expected. As a CarPlay user myself, I’d say some of these features are long overdue, while others tag along with the broader iOS 27 redesign.

So, without any further ado, let’s discuss everything new coming to your CarPlay dashboard this fall, with the stable iOS 27 release. 

Full video apps for when you’re parked

The most substantial update to CarPlay this year is support for video playback. Apple’s iOS 27 lets developers build video streaming apps for your car’s dashboard. CarPlay already got AirPlay video casting last year, but iOS 27 takes it a step further, letting you watch videos directly from supported apps.

Apple hasn’t confirmed the list of supported apps yet, but it might include names like YouTube and Netflix. The catch, however, is that you can only watch videos on your CarPlay screen when your car is parked. Further, the manufacturer has to specifically enable the feature, which is why I’m not expecting every car to get this on day one.

Audio scrubbing in Now Playing

This is the “how was this not already here” CarPlay update. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to jump to a specific part of a song using the horizontal audio bar on the CarPlay Now Playing screen, only to realize it doesn’t do anything.

With iOS 27, the Now Playing screen finally gets a real scrubber. Using the horizontal progress bar, you can drag and jump to any point in a song or podcast. If you’re the type who replays the same 10 seconds of a song on a loop, or skips podcast intros entirely, this one’s for you, no question.

A persistent audio MiniPlayer

Music and podcast apps will get a persistent MiniPlayer. It’s in the top-right corner of the CarPlay dashboard, offering basic playback controls along with the album art. 

You can simply glance over while checking the map for your exit, and you’ll actually know what’s playing and be able to skip it, without backing out of navigation first.

Better navigation heading and GPS accuracy

This is one of the quieter yet most important CarPlay updates Apple ships with iOS 27. The company is improving how the iPhone-mirroring system tracks your direction and position, refining both GPS accuracy and the heading detection (the direction your car is pointing in). 

I’ll admit that it’s not a flashy feature, but it should fix the occasional car icon spinning in circles at a stoplight glitch or navigation confidently rerouting you down a street you are not on. 

More reliable wireless CarPlay

Wireless CarPlay is all about convenience, and it works just fine, until it doesn’t, and that’s usually when I give up and switch to a wired connection. For anyone who’s dealt with mid-drive drops, unclear voice calls, or a dip in audio quality after hanging up, iOS 27 could be much-awaited fix.

Though Apple doesn’t explain the extent of the change, it says that wireless CarPlay connections are more reliable in iOS 27. 

New developer tools

iOS 27 adds new app templates across categories. It also gets support for Live Activities (introduced with iOS 16.1) and widgets from any app, so you could have a live sports score widget running on your CarPlay display without actually opening the app.

Developers also gain new APIs for building conversational voice apps, including AI chatbot integrations, into CarPlay. 

A subtle visual refresh

While the design language would remain the same, CarPlay gets a total of 14 new wallpapers in the same Celosia style, debuting across iOS 27 and macOS 27. Liquid Glass elements will reflect the transparency level you choose with the new iOS 27 slider, while app icons gain additional refractive layers that add depth and definition.

Siri AI finally comes to your car

On top of all that, CarPlay also gets Siri AI with iOS 27. For those catching up, it’s Apple’s long-delayed, Gemini-powered assistant that can handle natural follow-up questions the way Gemini does.

So, you should be able to ask for a restaurant, then ask what time it closes, without repeating the entire request. Siri AI also stores every conversation on your iPhone’s Siri app, with a small car icon indicating you asked the question while using CarPlay.

The catch, however, is that Siri AI for CarPlay requires an iPhone 15 Pro or newer. 

SpaceX went public this week in the largest IPO ever, making CEO Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire.

Despite its name, SpaceX has been emphasizing the potential of its costly AI business, and competitors OpenAI and Anthropic may soon follow with their own public market debuts. So on the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed what’s looking like a hot IPO summer.

“We have SpaceX not only sucking up just a huge chunk of the money that’s available on public markets, but also really stress testing the limits of what a public company can be and how much it can be controlled by one single person,” Sean said. “My eye is really on these other tech companies that will go public and how much they will try to emulate.”

Kirsten also noted that there are other startups trying to “ride that SpaceX IPO wave,” for example by raising money for orbital data centers after SpaceX helped to popularize the concept.

“So there’s a ripple effect that’s happening throughout the market that I think is probably even more interesting than just the headline, ‘SpaceX makes Elon a trillionaire,’” she said.

Keep reading for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Anthony Ha: I want to zoom out a little bit from just the SpaceX IPO, because beyond the Elon Musk of it all, it’s the beginning of what could be a [series] of different IPOs for different AI companies. We’ve talked about Anthropic confidentially filing to go public, and now OpenAI has done the same. How excited are either of you about this?

Kirsten Korosec: I want to start off by saying that I love Julie Bort’s story, which I think sums it up pretty nicely. It’s a great headline, so I’m gonna read it here: “It’s not FAANG anymore, it’s MANGOS.” FAANG being Facebook, which is now Meta; Amazon; Apple; Netflix; Google, now Alphabet. 

Now it’s shifted, and we’ve got Meta, Anthropic, NVIDIA, Google, OpenAI, SpaceX. [We’ve still got] massive tech companies, surely, but there is a shift here, right? First of all, we’ve got a bunch of AI labs in there, and that’s very different. Netflix gets booted out of there, a giant streaming service. And so to me, it’s an interesting shift in terms of public markets and the vast amount of money and capital available in the public markets shifting away from consumer [and] social networks and towards, specifically, AI labs and other, more innovative deeptech, such as SpaceX. 

So I think that’s the most interesting thing —  aside from the fact that this summer is going to keep us all very busy as reporters, more than probably any other summer in a while.

Sean O’Kane: You know, once upon a time I wanted to be a lawyer, and one of the reasons I didn’t was because I hated the paperwork that was going to be involved. And here I am looking forward to reading hundreds more pages of SEC filings this summer —  talk about a beach read.

It’s a moment we’ve been anticipating for a while. We’ve spent the last few years really wondering if the IPO market was going to quote-unquote “open back up” after a lot of consternation about private markets, and mockery about people reaching their like Series [whatever] fundraising round. This is a good stress test — I mean, “good,” take that word however you want — a good stress test of public markets in general. 

We have SpaceX not only sucking up just a huge chunk of the money that’s available on public markets, but also really stress testing the limits of what a public company can be and how much it can be controlled by one single person. My eye is really on these other tech companies that will go public and how much they will try to emulate.

A thing that I keep saying and thinking about with SpaceX is, they’re really trying to take some of the most extreme aspects of Google and Meta’s original IPOs back in the early 2000s and mashing it up with that “We’ll lose money forever” with Amazon. And I’m curious how much Anthropic and OpenAI will try to do the same. Will they remake themselves in the image of SpaceX? Or will they try to put themselves in a different light?

Anthony: One aspect that really got driven home as I was reading about the OpenAI IPO is also the extent to which some of this is also a bit of a race in terms of timing. I think we can confidently say at this point, SpaceX is first out the gate, which probably has some advantages and disadvantages. It’s also a bit of a different company because it’s billing itself as an AI company, but obviously has a bunch of other stuff going on, too. 

But there is a sense in which, at least according to some analysts, OpenAI and Anthropic may both want to go before the other one, because there’s only a finite amount of capital, a finite amount of interest. At some point some of these valuations have to start coming back down to Earth, and so they may both be scrambling to be first. 

Kirsten: I mean, there’s very much a race between Anthropic and OpenAI. You’re even seeing OpenAI talk about slashing prices, and they’re certainly going to be competing on the IPO calendar. But that is very short-term thinking. If they’re smart, they should be much more concerned about the long-term play here. 

To me, what’s really interesting is while Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX all prepare for these moments, there are a host of other companies out there that are raising money on the backs of the success of companies like SpaceX, or going into SPACs. Just today, for instance, or as we’re recording this, a company called Quantum Space is doing a SPAC and absolutely trying to ride that SpaceX IPO wave. 

We’ve got a host of other startups that our reporter Tim Ferholz has reported on that are clearly — they’re not going to go public, right? But if SpaceX is successful with space data centers, they’re raising money off of that potential and they’re building businesses on that potential. So there’s a ripple effect that’s happening throughout the market that I think is probably even more interesting than just the headline, “SpaceX makes Elon a trillionaire.”

Sean: The commonly accepted theory in Silicon Valley is that AI is remaking the economy, but because of its use. AI is actually already remaking the economy — just because of how people are trying to build it. We have everything that you just described, we have these other companies rushing to public markets. And I think that’s a really good point to think about: Will they ever regret rushing to public markets?

But we even have companies like Ford and General Motors who are pivoting their unused battery creation capacity to be energy providers for data centers. And Ford’s stock shot up when it announced what is honestly a pretty modest-looking energy storage business, in comparison to something like Tesla. And Tim De Chant had a really great series of stories this week about GM’s pivot, as well.

The economy’s already being remade. Whether that’s durable, again, that’s the question, but it’s happening right now.

Kirsten: That is actually a really good point, because to me, I want to say five, six, seven, eight years ago, there were all these headlines of “the next Tesla killer” and these automakers and other companies are still chasing trying to recreate all these various businesses, and specifically the strategies of Elon Musk-based businesses. They haven’t learned their lesson.

I wish I could communicate this to all the automaker CEOs out there: I get it that you have a lot of unused batteries and you want to pivot to something else, but trying to model your business after Tesla or SpaceX and others, it doesn’t always work. Perhaps look elsewhere.

Sean: So Ford shouldn’t get into space data centers. Is what you’re saying?

Kirsten: No, they shouldn’t. But just watch. This is going to happen.