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Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride home for Wednesday, May 6, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, even 175 year old companies can join the AI boom. Morgan Stanley launched crypto trading on E Trade, Google tests a personal agent called Remy and Meta builds an open claw inspired agent called Hatch. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Today's episode is brought to you by Doppl. Disguises are getting pretty good these days, and I'm not just talking about when you throw on a pair of glasses and a hoodie and hope you won't be recognized. We're talking about the kind of disguises that end up in your inbox, on your phone or on the web, blending in as your everyday internal emails, casual text messages, or just a normal website. Doppel strengthens team resilience by giving employees the tools and defenses they need to protect themselves from increasingly sophisticated social engineering threats. Their digital risk protection takes it one step further by keeping an eye on every channel to connect patterns and shut them down fast. From deep fakes to bad links to impersonation attempts, Doppel helps you stay ahead of these threats with their AI native social engineering defense platform. Learn more at D O P E l dot com that's dot P P E l dot com hey, here's some build out capex news that ain't about a data center for once. Although of course it is still about AI in the end. Corning and Nvidia have partnered to open three advanced manufacturing plants in North Carolina and Texas dedicated to optical tech for Nvidia, creating more than 3,000 jobs. Quoting CNBC, the deal gives Nvidia the right to invest up to $2.7 billion in Corning. Nvidia is getting warrants to buy up to 15 million shares of Corning common stock at an exercise price $180 per share above Tuesday's closing price of $162.10 but below the price after the pop. In addition, Nvidia has a pre funded warrant to buy up to 3 million shares of Corning common stock for an aggregate purchase price of $500 million. The multi year deal brings together two infrastructure players that have seen their fortune skyrocket since the launch in 2022 of OpenAI's ChatGPT, which sparked an explosion of investments into new processors and systems for powering cutting edge AI models and workloads. While the two companies didn't provide about what's being developed, Nvidia is likely gearing up to replace copper with Corning's optical glass fibers in its AI rack scale systems, an integration known as CO packaged optics. At Nvidia's GTC conference in 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called CO packaged optics essential for the AI buildout. What Nvidia is doing is nothing short of extraordinary, not just for the future of AI, but for the American advanced manufacturing workforce, corning CEO Wendell Weeks said in a press release. Corning's stock is up more than 250% in past year as of Tuesday's close, driven by the 175-year-old company's rapid pivot into the new economy. In January, Meta announced it would spend up to $6 billion as the flagship customer, helping Corning build out its optical cable plant in Hickory, N.C. an expansion that's expected to create around 1,000 jobs. Analysts have long awaited Nvidia's large scale deployment of CO packaged optics because the technology promises to vastly increase the speed of data transfers and lower the energy needs for AI workloads. Corning is well known for making a display glass for Apple's iPhone, but optical communications remains its largest and fastest growing business since inventing optical fiber for long Range Communications in 1970. Corning has provided millions of miles of cables to connect racks together in AI data centers from all the major players. By partnering with Nvidia, Corning could be bringing glass fiber between the chips themselves, eventually replacing the 5,000 copper cables inside the chip Company's rack scale systems like Vera Rubin, fiber optic cables are tiny, bendable strands of glass that allow data to pass through as photons at far higher speeds with less energy than what's used by traditional copper wires. Moving photons is between 5 and 20 times lower power usage than moving electrons, weeks told CNBC in an interview in January. You're bringing the light conversion process right next to the computer chip, said Vlad Galobov, who covers enterprise infrastructure at research firm Omdia. Less power is wasted because now you're traveling a few millimeters, which requires far less energy than traveling across the circuit board. Galobov added that Nvidia has pushed the entire ecosystem to innovate faster. Optical fiber also allows for less signal loss than copper, speeding up reliable communication and shortening the distance needed between the hundreds of thousands of GPUs and a data center. AI is driving the largest infrastructure buildout of our time and a once in a generation opportunity to reinvigorate American manufacturing and supply chains, Nvidia's Huang said in the press release. Together with Corning, we are inventing the future of computing with advanced optical technologies, building the foundation for AI infrastructure where intelligence moves at the speed of light while advancing the proud tradition of Made in America. End quote. Morgan Stanley has rolled out a crypto trading pilot on E Trade, charging less than Coinbase, Robinhood and Charles Schwab for your crypto trading ahead of a wider launch later in 2026. Quoting Bloomberg Morgan Stanley's 50 basis point pricing is about half of Robinhood's, which starts at 95 basis points. CoinB basis fees start at 60 basis points and Schwab said last month it will charge 75 basis points. Spot trading on E Trade is just one of the inroads Morgan Stanley has made into the crypto space over the last year or so. It debuted a bitcoin exchange traded fund last month, the first Wall street bank to do so, and it made it the cheapest fund in the category. It also has ether and Solana ETFs on the way, and in February it applied for a National Trust bank charter to allow Morgan Stanley to custody digital assets as well. Executives are readying and offering for CL to convert crypto into shares of exchange traded products without having to sell the assets first, according to people familiar with the matter who ask not to be named discussing non public information. On the institutional side, Morgan Stanley plans to add the ability to trade tokenized equities in the second half of this year. After the financial crisis, executives reshaped Morgan Stanley into a wealth management powerhouse less reliant on the traditional Wall street business of trading and Investment Banking. Its $13 billion purchase of E Trade in 2020 was a major push into the retail market, which came with a of rivals in the digital brokerage space. One of them, Robinhood, was a financial technology startup able to move faster into crypto than federally regulated banks. It began offering crypto trading in 2018 and last year made $901 million in crypto transaction based revenue, 20% of its annual net revenue, and that was just a fraction of Coinbase's haul. That Firm pulled in 3.32 billion in consumer transaction revenue in 2025. Bitcoin and Ether transactions made up 45% of Coinbase's total trading volume last year. Coin survived industry upheaval a few years ago, including the collapse of rival FTX to become the biggest crypto exchange in the US now its roster of competitors has swelled to include traditional banks and other financial firms previously unable to do much in the space. It's going to be very competitive in the next couple of years, particularly given the regulatory moats are drying up, one analyst said. End quote. I mean, this would be one of those things that they are probably uniquely qualified to attempt. Google is apparently testing a personal agent codenamed Remy in the Gemini app that integrates with Google's services to take actions for users. So an agent that works across your Gmail, your Google Drive, et cetera, et cetera. Quoting Business Insider, Employees at the company have been testing the new AI agent internally named Remy, which runs in a staff only version of Google's Gemini app and can integrate with a range of Google's other services, according to an internal document seen by Business Insider and two people familiar with the matter. Remy is your 247 personal agent for work, school and daily life powered by Gemini, reads a description of the agent. It elevates the Gemini app into a true assistant that can take actions on your behalf, not just answer questions or generate content to people familiar with Remy said. It is currently being tested by employees. A Google spokesperson declined to comment. Agents are a big focus for AI labs right now. As the underlying models have improved, they are now better and more reliable at powering autonomous tools. Google doesn't yet have a widely available, fully autonomous AI agent product, however, it has been rolling out Agent Mode and other related features that can perform multi step tasks with access varying by subscription tier and region. Remy sounds more advanced than those other tools. In some ways it sounds similar to OpenClaw, an AI agent that became a viral sensation earlier this year and can perform tasks such as responding to messages or conducting research on behalf of users. In February, Sam Altman announced OpenAI was hiring Open Claws creator. An internal description of Remy states, deeply integrated across Google, Remy can monitor for things that matter to you, handle complex tasks proactively, and learn your preferences over time. It could not be learned whether there is a timeline for launching Remy to the public. However, the document describes Remy as a dogfooding project, which is a common practice at tech companies in which employees test products before launching them to users. The company will hold its IO event later this month where it's expected to demonstrate its next wave of AI products, agents will likely be a big Focus then Google DeepMind CEO Demas Hassibas has long talked about his vision to build a digital assistant. It could not immediately be learned why Google named the agent Remy. It has origins in the Latin word remigius, meaning oarsman or rower, which would be fitting for an agent that's doing a lot of work, end quote. Sure, AI is everywhere, but that doesn't mean enterprise value is a given. In a recent survey, PwC found the amount of CEOs who reported revenue gains or cost reductions from AI is nearly equal to the amount who say they're still stuck. So what's causing the issues? PwC boiled it down to clarity. Leaders aren't clear about what's hype, what's reality, or where AI can actually create measurable impact. To help change that, PwC is offering their AI expertise and data. They explore how to tune out noise around AI and get clarity on what successful adoption looks like. Learn from the experts by heading to pwc.com US Brewai that's pwc.com US BrewAI.