A (0:04)

Welcome to the Techboo Ride Home for Tuesday, December 16th, 2025. I'm Brad McCullough. Today, tech continues to be a major geopolitical stumbling block, this time with the uk. Are we currently in the midst of the second bear market for tech of the year? If Ford can pivot from EVs to servicing data centers, maybe you can too. And the Civil War lining up in Hollywood over AI. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. You might have noticed that your CRM system has become crazy with bots and agents at the Tech Brew Ride Home. We love AI, but not when it's used to commit fraud or launch ransomware. Fortunately, Mimoto, the creator of continuous verification, now offers the next generation of Continuous Captcha Momoto. Continuous Captcha diverts only the agents and bots attempting to gain access to your CRM through registration forms. With Momoto, good agents can do what agents do enable your customers to have more productive experiences on your website or app while stopping bad agents from defrauding you and your customers. It's a win for everyone except the cybercriminals. Right now our listeners can purchase a year of Momoto continuous captcha for $5,000, a 20% discount on their lowest price plan. To learn more, head to Memoto AI Ride Home. That's Mimoto. Sources say the US has paused a tech trade deal with the UK signed in September over disagreements about the UK's online safety rules and digital services taxes. Quoting the Times, the United States informed the British government this month that it would pause fulfilling a technology related agreement between the two countries, which included more collaboration on artificial intelligence and nuclear energy, according to two people familiar with the decision who were not authorized to speak publicly. The move came because American officials felt that Britain wasn't making sufficient progress in lowering trade barriers as promised in the May trade agreement, the people said. Earlier this year, when Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain was courting Mr. Trump to avoid punitive trade tariffs, he delivered an invitation from King Charles for a state visit. When Mr. Trump arrived for the visit in September, British officials were keen to show that it wasn't just about banquets and pageantry. At the time, the two countries vowed to deepen their partnership and sign the so called Tech Prosperity deal, which extended research collaborations and encourage deeper commercial partnerships. America's biggest tech companies announced more than $40 billion in investments in Britain for AI, data centers and other technologies. But the language in the tech deal between Britain and the United States said it only quote, becomes operative alongside substantive progress being made to formalize and implement the May trade agreement, which was called the Economic Prosperity Deal. Now, the Trump administration has argued that Britain has made insufficient efforts. It shows how the administration is continuing to leverage trade policy to push foreign governments to make more concess on trade and other policies. The White House has kept negotiations with countries open months after the president has proclaimed that deals were done. Some of the terms in Britain's agreement were particularly loose. While there were firm commitments to lower tariffs on British cars exported to the United States up to a quota, and to increase American beef exports to Britain, other issues were left unresolved. Those included the United States desire to increase agricultural exports and for Britain to loosen its food safety standards. American officials have also expressed frustration with Britain's online safety rules and digital services taxes. The agreement said the two countries would plan to work constructively in an effort to enhance agricultural market access and negotiate an ambitious set of digital trade provisions in the subsequent months. Britain hasn't made changes to its digital services tax, which raises most of its money from big American firms like Amazon and Google. There also hasn't been a new agreement on food exports, end quote. The what would this be? Second mini tech recession of 2025 continues this week. Apparently shares of Broadcom, Coreweave and Oracle, all companies tied to the AI infrastructure buildout, have extended last week's declines. Oracle is now down more than 46% just from September 10, quoting CNBC. While the three stocks are still all solidly up for the year, Core Weave held its market debut in March. The most recent trend suggests that investors are concerned about whether the returns on investment will ever justify the level of spending taking place. It definitely requires the ROI to be there to keep funding this AI investment, matt Wilt Hyler, head of late stage growth at Wellington Management, told CNBC's Money Movers on Monday. From what we've seen so far, that ROI is there, witteiler said. The bullish side of the story is that every single AI company on the planet is saying if you give me more compute, I can make more revenue. Still, the market was displeased last week with quarterly earnings reports from chipmaker Broadcom and cloud infrastructure supplier Orac, even though both companies beat on revenue and issued forecasts showing that AI demand is soaring. Oracle, which is now heavily reliant on the debt markets to fund its data center development, provided scant details about how it will continue to finance its commitments. The company said it would ramp up capital expenditures in the current fiscal year to $50 billion from an earlier forecast of $35 billion because of new contracts from the likes of Meta and Nvidia. It's also ratcheting up leases. As of November 30, Oracle had $248 billion in lease commitments for data centers and cloud commitments that will run for 15 to 19 years. That's up 148% from the end of August. Meanwhile, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said he expects AI chip sales this quarter to double from a year earlier to $8.2 billion, driven by both custom chips as well as semiconductors for AI networking. However, as the company spends heavily on more parts to produce server racks, investors are going to have to stomach a hit to profits. CFO Kristen Spears said on Broadcom's earnings call that gross margins will be lower for some of the company's AI chip systems. Venture capitalist Thomas Tunguz, who focuses on enterprise software and AI, wrote in a Monday blog post that Oracle's recent fundraising binge has left it with a debt to equity ratio of 500%, dwarfing its cloud computing peers. Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Google all have ratios between 7 and 23%, he wrote. Tunguz, founder of Theory Ventures, said the other company with a no notable high ratio at 120% is CoreWeave, which provides cloud computing services built largely around Nvidia's graphics processing units. End quote yeah, on that last one. CoreWeave's market value has fallen $33 billion in just the past six weeks amid construction delays, especially at its Denton, Texas AI data center, and criticism from short seller Jim Chanos, quoting the Journal. Over the summer, heavy rains and winds caused a roughly 60 day delay at the construction site in Denton, a small city north of Dallas, preventing contractors from pouring concrete for a major AI data center complex, according to people familiar with the matter. As a result, the completion date for the huge data center cluster, consisting of about 260 megawatts of computing power that CoreWeave plans to lease to OpenAI, has been pushed back several months. There were additional delays caused by revisions to design plans for some of the data centers a partner is building for coreweave in Texas and elsewhere, according to filings. The slowdown was compounded by mixed messaging from Corey's chief executive officer, Michael Entratter, which spooked investors and accelerated the company's share price decline at a particularly vulnerable moment for the AI trade. Corey's business model involves using high interest debt to buy thousands of advanced AI chips from Nvidia, installing them in server racks inside data centers that it leases from third party landlords, then renting access to the chips to AI companies as capital spending on AI infrastructure has intensified. Core Weave, which is 7% owned by Nvidia and backed by hedge funds such as Magnetar Capital and CO2 Management, has become the standard bearer for both the promise and the risk of the AI boom. Some critics point to the high levels of debt it has taken on to finance its data center build out, while others worry that the company depends on just a handful of large customers such as OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta for the bulk of its revenue. Core Weave saw sales more than double in the most recent quarter to nearly $1.4 billion from $583 million a year earlier. But the company is unprof profitable and lost $110 million at its most recent quarter. In early November, before the construction delays were widely discussed, Intrater played down fears of an AI bubble at a Wall Street Journal event in Northern California. If you're building something that accelerates the economy and has fundamental value to the world, the world will find ways to finance an enormous amount of business, he said, adding that the high number of buyers of data center computing services had convinced him that there is not a bubble inflating. On November 10, Intratter spoke to investors during a quarterly earnings call and delivered a confusing, contradictory message about the construction problems. At one point in the call, he attempted to quash a string of questions about the delays and their impact. There was a problem at one data center that's impacting us, but there are 32 data centers in our portfolio. All of them are progressing to one extent or another, he said. He said that this one data center will catch up and then we will move forward from there. That statement was inaccurate, however, and Intrater's chief financial officer, Nitin Agrawal, quickly corrected the CEO and said that the delays were concentrated at one data center provider rather than just one singular data center, suggesting a more widespread problem. At another point, Intrater described construction delays as systemic challenges that are very frustrating for our clients and said the company was trying to diversify its supplier base of data center builders to soften the impact of inevitable delays. End quote. If you're a small business owner, you probably assume that your biz is flying under the radar with hackers and cybercriminals. That, folks, is where you'd unfortunately be wrong. Teams of any size can be a target, but the good news is even the smallest teams can foil cybercrime. 1Password provides simple security solutions to help small teams manage the number one risk that bad actors exploit and that's weak passwords. However complex your security needs, Get1Password provides centralized management to make sure your company's login are secure. Whether you have dedicated IT staff or not. Take the first step to better security by securing your team's credentials. Find out more@1Password.com Ride and start securing every login. That's the number one Password.com Ride. To say compliance is complicated is an understatement. Constantly worrying about SOC2, ISO, HIPAA, CMMC, FedRamp and more can leave your head spinning. Even worse, a misstep can get pretty costly for your startup. That's why Delve is designed as an AI native compliance platform. Delve uses AI agents to handle headaches like taking repetitive screenshots for you, monitoring your tech stack for security gaps in real time, auto filling security questionnaires in your browser or in CSV, and creating secure data rooms to send to prospects and auditors. Their team can personally work with you in Slack to get you 100% compliant and manage your whole audit for you. Over 1000 of the fastest growing companies get compliance done in Delve, including lovable, bland, micro one instantly and 11x for listeners. They're offering an exclusive $1,000 discount on any compliance framework. Check out Delve Co Morning Brew and start using AI for compliance. That's Delve Co Morning Brew. Well, despite all that, if your business is struggling, it still seems to be a play to pivot to supporting data centers. Sort of outside our scope. But you may have heard that Ford is essentially exiting the EV business again, canceling the electric F150, et cetera. But what does Ford plan to do? Repurpose its U.S. battery manufacturing capacity to launch a battery energy storage business for, you guessed it, Data Centers? Quoting TechCrunch amid Ford's shift away from making large electric vehicles, the automaker is adding a new product line to find a home for its batteries. Ford said Monday that instead of scuttling plans to build the batteries for those vehicles, it will pivot that capacity to a new battery storage business. Those storage systems, which will use cheaper lithium iron phosphate batteries, will be used to power data centers and help buffer demand on the electric grid. Ford says the battery storage systems will start shipping in 2027 and that the company plans to build 20 gigawatt of annual capacity. Ford will invest about $2 billion into the new business over the next two years. Under the plan, Ford will repurpose the existing manufacturing capacity at its Kentucky factory. Ford plans to produce LFP batteries using technology licensed from China's CATL, as well as battery energy storage system modules and 20 foot DC container systems. At this facility, Ford will join a number of automakers that are operating in or planning to enter the battery storage space. Tesla has spent the last decade selling battery stor products and deploys around 10 gigawatts every quarter. General Motors also has a set of home and commercial battery storage products. Lisa Drake, vice president of technology platform programs and EV systems at Ford, said the predominant opportunity for the new business will be commercial grid customers, but data centers will be secondary. And then Ford expects to offer some home storage products as well, Drake said. End quote. Finally today, BusinessWeek has a deep dive look at how the rise of AI has divided Hollywood. Some in Hollywood oppose all AI use, while others say they are exploring ways to utilize new AI tools. Some of you know, I went to film school and college, and it's kind of one of those things. Twenty years later, the people you went to school with, some of them are actually successful in the industry, and this article tracked with what I hear from a lot of my friends. While development executives use ChatGPT to analyze scripts and marketers use it to assist with creative campaigns, many of those same people are worried their companies will use AI to eliminate their jobs. A growing chorus of filmmakers has come out against generative AI, including director Guillermo del Toro, who said on October that he'd rather die than use the technology in his films. This tension could well boil over in the coming year. December saw the industry's biggest move yet with with Walt Disney entering a licensing agreement for OpenAI's Sora and investing $1 billion in the company. Until now, studios have been eager to tout the potential benefits of AI to investors, but afraid to divulge their biggest experiments lest they antagonize talent and alienate labor unions. Writers and actors went on strike for months in 2023, animated in no small part by concerns over AI. Those contracts expire again in 2026, and Hollywood is bracing for another potential labor stoppage. Most of the studio timid, says Amit Jain, CEO of Luma AI, a leading video generator. They're scared to talk to their filmmakers or to bring AI to them. They have also been wary of AI's potential impact on their most valuable assets, their film and TV catalogs. There is a recognition that you can't put the genie back in the bottle, says Aaron Moss, a partner at Mitchell Silberberg and Nup and author of the blog Copyright Lately. These lawsuits take a long time to resolve, he said of many lawsuits that the industry has filed AI startups. The most effective tactic is to impose limits through negotiations and find ways to utilize the technology. AI could produce useful tools that make films look even better. It could also reduce the cost of production, which has ballooned in recent years. Actors, writers and directors are worried AI will devalue human work and jeopardize their livelihoods, and they are sounding the alarm. At the same time, studios have started to talk about their AI moves. Knives Out Director Rian Johnson told the Hollywood Reporter that the technology is making everything worse in every single way. At a recent film festival in Marrakesh, actress Jenna Ortega and filmmakers Bong Joon Ho and Celine Song all spoke out against the use of AI, with Ho joking that he would organize a military squad to destroy the technology. While the Hollywood workers at immediate risk are those in less glamorous jobs like animation, visual effects and makeup, the implementation of AI could be stickiest when it comes to on screen talent. A studio owns the rights to a movie, but it doesn't own the rights to Tom Hanks face or Lady Gaga's voice. And while there is an established legal framework for copyright, the rights publicity, name, image and likeness are much fuzzier. Talent representatives at major agencies, management companies and law firms are studying the potential implications for their clients. Kevin Yorn, a prominent entertainment lawyer, demands clauses in every client's contract to govern the use of digital replicas and synthetic likenesses, ensuring that a studio can't keep using a digitized version of them for future projects without permission. He's even filed with the copyright office to secure the voice of one of his clients. In uncertain legal maneuvers, however, AI means someone can recreate your voice, your face, your movement, your cadence, your entire Persona from past performances, or scrape media without you, says Joran, whose clients include Scarlett Johansson. That star, who played an AI love interest in the movie her claimed OpenAI mimicked her voice in that film for its voice assistant after she declined to participate in the project. As Jorn sees it, AI poses an existential threat that collapses the boundary between a person and a file. Despite his reservations, Joran is also urging his clients to experiment. Matthew McConaughey, another client, recently teamed up with the startup Elevenlabs so it can clone his voice. McConaughey also invested an undisclosed amount of money in the company, which could help big stars make even more money than they do today by introducing a new revenue stream. The actor has already served as a spokesperson for Uber Eats and Salesforce, and a voice actor in Singh. But what if his voice could be licensed by any advertising company or studio. Go AI isn't a theoretical thing. Joran says it's already embedded in how Hollywood is operating now. End quoting more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.