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Anthropic is in talks to raise $50 billion at a 900 billion dollar valuation and this would push it past OpenAI for the first time ever in its valuation. And I think in some of like the private markets where you know, employees or other people are trading shares on the secondaries market, Anthropic is already ahead and technically the revenue is already ahead, although OpenAI says that that's a technicality due to some one time deals. Regardless, this would be the first time if it actually is executed. The Anthropic raises above what OpenAI was able to raise. In addition, AWS launched OpenAI's Frontier models, Codex and their managed agents on Bedrock today. This is also the same day that Microsoft's exclusivity deal expired. So there's some drama going on with Microsoft and OpenAI and actually I think this is going to get well, a lot of people are going to be using OpenAI that weren't before because of a couple of things happening here. Also we have tech layoffs. We've just cleared 40,000 people laid off in April. We have year to date layoffs of over 96,000, all primarily being attributed to AI. Whether AI is the, you know, the official cause or not I think isn't as clear. This is what everyone's kind of pointing towards and there's a couple different reasons and a couple things that I think people should be doing if you were just laid off or if you're at a company that's doing these types of layoffs. There's a couple things that I will highlight that I think are actionable items. Okay. In addition to all of that on the April 29, earnings night, Alphabet shares rose 6%. Meta fell more than 6%. Microsoft and Amazon both fell 3%. We're going to get into why, and there's some pretty wild reasons. First things first, let's talk about the AWS and OpenAI deal. What actually happened is that OpenAI is GPT 5.5 and also GPT 5.4. Both of them are alive on Bedrock, in addition to their Codex platform and some of their other interesting things they have with their agent Harness. All this is going to be put onto Bedrock. Now, the reason why this is kind of big news, because it's like, okay, great. It's like on another cloud platform. I think a lot of people don't understand that Microsoft Azure had an exclusive deal where OpenAI could only be on Microsoft Azure because, you know, Microsoft put $10 billion in and kicked off this whole, you know, wild AI feeding frenzy when ChatGPT first launched. And so OpenAI has been stuck over there. I actually think a lot of the problems that OpenAI has faced, including the fact that Anthropic kind of soared past it with a lot of people using Anthropic and developers in particular and enterprises in particular using Anthropic and Anthropic kind of beating them in revenue. I think a lot of this is the fact that OpenAI was stuck on a platform that was just not the default for a lot of enterprises. I for one, know that, you know, my startup AI Box, we, we use AWS for everything. We can't, I mean, of course we could just get an API. And so it's not the end of the world. We, we have OpenAI models on our platform, but we're built into AWS and we couldn't switch to Azure if we wanted to without having to pay a big bill and doing a whole bunch of extra work. And so it just wasn't a big enough Dr. For us. And if a lot of the tools inside of OpenAI were exclusively over there, it just makes it so less people will use it. Moving it over to and creating this partnership with aws, I think we're going to see a massive jump in usage. And it's actually interesting because I was recently talking to some people over at AWS who manage our account for AI Box, some of our sales reps and whatnot, and they specifically have different deals and discounts that they were offering me to, to switch our usage off of our API onto. Just like they're like getting the Anthropic credits directly through them. And I think they'll now do the same thing with OpenAI. So it's interesting for Amazon, I think this is a great deal for aws. I think this is a great deal because they're kind of working this and I'm sure they'll have, you know, they give you like a hundred thousand dollars in free tokens, but then they'll go and maybe slightly mark it up or maybe they get a discount as a bulk rate from Anthropic or OpenAI. There's a bunch of deals that they can swing there. So it's good for startups, but it's also probably really good for their business model and it keeps people embedded into their system and I think they want to. They really want it to be, you know, coming through them. It makes them feel like a bigger customer. To OpenAI and Anthropic, the reason why this is a big news deal is because the timing on it was pretty, pretty insane. The launch occurred one day after Microsoft and OpenAI's exclusivity deal officially ended. So the second it ended, they immediately were launched on aws. There was even kind of this wild interview from Ben Thompson at Stratchbury where he, he basically did like a joint interview with Sam Altman and AWS CEO Matt Garmin about the announcement. In that interview, Garmin said enterprise customers want OpenAI on the infrastructure that they already trust, which is basically, you know, AWS alluding to the fact that, you know, their customers don't trust Azure. I wouldn't go so far as to say that, but I do think it's a. It's a funny jab from a competitor over at Microsoft. Okay, let's talk about the tech layoffs that have happened so far. In April, we closed out with about 40,000 tech layoffs in this single month. According to Business Today's tally that they've done the year to date, tech layoffs are now over 96,000. There's a whole bunch of companies that have rolled them out. Oracle, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Disney, Snap. According to Yahoo Tech, all of them have laid people off. Oracle laid off at least 10,000 employees on April 1st. That's about 6% of their 162,000 workforce. With the. There's some reports as well that the total could go up to 30,000 before they do some restructuring. And it's all kind of completed. Oracle leadership tied the cuts to AI data center investments. I mean, we know Oracle right now they have their. They. I think they have like a $40 billion SoftBank joint venture that they announced earlier this year and they have to spend so much money on that. And so, yeah, it seems like they're just trying to cut it from the workforce. Medicut. 8,000 jobs, that's about 10% of their workforce. Um, they also killed 6,000 open job listings on their website. So if you kind of put those two together, the people they would have hired and the people that they did fire, they're at, you know, 14,000 job cuts. Meta's company wide memo, specifically Zuckerberg said that, you know, they, they needed to ensure efficiency as they were scaling and spending in other areas of the business, AKA Meta, is also spending very heavily on infrastructure for their AI models. And then Microsoft offered a buyout to about 6, 7% of its U.S. workers. And I think this is the first time in Microsoft's history that they've done a buyout. So it's, it's different than kind of like severance. They're actually buying people out of their career entirely if they've been at the company long enough. So very, very interesting. Microsoft's Chief People Officer, Janelle Gale wrote a memo and basically cited the need to drive efficiencies and offset the company's other investments. Everyone keeps saying, look, we gotta, like we're doing this because we gotta offset our other investments. What are the other investments? In all of their earnings calls, it is spend for AI. Compute. Snapchat cut 16% of its workforce was about a thousand employees. They also closed 300 open positions. Their CEO, Even Spiegel, cited AI driven efficiencies in his letter to the staff on why they were doing this. So there is a lot happening right now with these layoffs. What I will just say on all of this is if you're someone that's been recently laid off or your company is in the process of doing layoffs, I just think no matter what happens, we're at kind of a painful point in the market, if I'm being honest, where it feels like a lot of the capital expenditures that these big companies are planning, they're going into compute, they're going into AI. Some of these things though, you know, when you're talking about building a data center, this is something that you, you spend money on and you can, that data center's got value for many, many years into the future. So it feels like a lot of the costs are being front loaded today for benefits that the companies will get in the future. But, but in order to pay for those costs, they're, you know, they're coming from a painful place of the workforce and they're getting these new efficiencies from AI that makes it possible. But it's interesting because the company less than focusing on just like pure, you know, well, we have all this extra capability. Why don't we just give, you know, everyone more access to AI or, and then hire more people and do more and make more. It feels like they're kind of like, look, we have this extra efficiency so we're going to keep going in our current trajectory, we're going to cut people and continue growing and, and then put that money into something else. So it is a painful point on the market. I think, to be honest, there's gonna be a lot of positive things that come out of this. There's gonna be a lot of entrepreneurship, there's gonna be a lot of interesting businesses and ideas that will happen as people kind of go out on their own. And I think that you'll have a lot of the talent that was previously at Microsoft and Meta, trickle down to other smaller software companies, other smaller businesses, more niche areas. And I think that's not necessarily a bad thing. So I know a lot of people probably won't like that opinion because typically when you move from like a Meta or a Google to something less well known, your salary isn't as high. I think overall though, we're going to solve more problems as a global economy and globally it will probably have a net positive economic impact and a lot of these companies will grow. So I don't know, that's, maybe that sounds like a crazy take on it, but that's what I, what I believe and I also believe that the people that are investing heavily in learning and understanding the AI tools that, that go along with their expertise, learning how to use cloud cowork for your specific job function, those are the people that are the most hireable for their next role. And they're also the people that if you are using all of the AI efficiencies inside of your current role, the most likely to stick around and get promoted inside of your organization. So really becoming an AI advocate and someone that's pushing the efficiency inside of your organization is what's going to, is what's going to help you personally and is going to be what helps your company. Okay, let's talk about what's going on with CapEx because we had a lot of earnings reports from some of the big companies. Last night was earnings night for Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon, kind of the big ones. They all hit at the same time and they collectively are expecting to spend about $600 billion on AI CapEx this year. So a wild number, the stock of Google or Alphabet, right. It went up 6% in after hours trading. And Google is the only company that I think is really convincing Wall street that the extra money they're spending is bringing in more revenue. So Google has done that where a lot of these other companies I'll talk about weren't unable to Google cloud. Their quarterly revenue was $20 billion. That's up 63% year over year. Cloud operating income rose 6.6 billion from 2.2 billion in the prior year period, which is phenomenal. Sundar Pichai, the CEO said on the call, quote, we are compute constrained in the near term. And he also said that the cloud revenue would have been higher if Google could meet demand. Basically there's so much demand. Google just couldn't, you know, service it all because they didn't have enough compute. And they're like, oh, we'd have more money if we had more compute. So now, so basically that's kind of the perfect setup for them saying and look, we're going to spend a bunch of money on compute and you know, if we have this, we'll be able to make more money. Like there's more demand. So Google is a company that is, I think they have that, that order. Correct. Google cloud backlog is about 460 billion. And their CFO Anna Ashkenazi raised the 2026 CAPEX guidance to 180 billion to 190 billion somewhere in that range, which is up from the previous range of 175 to 185 billion. So they have moved their capex guidance up, they're going to be spending more. But they're obviously, you know, very clearly saying if we had more compute we'd be making more money. They said also that the 2027 capex will be quote, significant, will be quote a significant increase from what they're doing this year. So if this year they're doing 180 to 190 billion, next year is going to be a significant increase. And I think they're also just kind of setting everyone's expectations. Their spending is going to continue. They're, they're, you know, able to make a lot of money from this. Okay, so how did the other big tech players fare in all of these earnings reports? Meta's stock fell more than 6% in after hours trading. Even though they had a 33% revenue beat. Their Q1 revenue was $56.3 billion. The net income was 26.7 billion for the quarter. This was boosted by an $8 billion tax benefit. Their 2026 capex guidance raised. They raised it from 125 billion to 145 billion. Before this, it was 115 to 135. So, you know, on the, on the lower end, they're pushing it up 10 billion. On the higher end, it's up 10 billion as well. So they kind of moved their, they moved their CapEx, you know, expectations up $10 billion. Mark Zuckerberg said that the spending is going to strengthen the ad business by making recommendations more relevant and improving targeting for, you know, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook. I mean, this is kind of an interesting. This is, this is definitely an interesting spot because Zuckerberg is like, look, if we spend all this money on AI and, and all our CapEx, like, we'll be able to optimize our ad business and we'll be able to make more relevant, you know, ads, and then technically will be able to make more money. And that, that's his kind of justification for this. Whereas Google obviously is, you know, saying, look, we have, like, they have a cloud. They have a cloud platform that people are paying them to run models off of. And so if they build more compute, they can host more, you know, they can, they can service more customers on their cloud platform. Meta doesn't really have that same pitch. Their pitch is just like, oh, look, we can serve better ads. But it kind of asks, you know, begs the question, like, how much more optimized can their ads get? How much more money would that make if they were, you know, slightly some percentage more optimized? It doesn't feel like Wall street really believes that line from Zuckerberg. And so in an article on Fortune, there is a pretty good framing on this where they said only Google convinced investors that spending more is paying off. It doesn't feel like Meta being like, hey, look, we're in. Spend another $10 billion. And Wall Street's like, okay, you guys have plenty of money. And yeah, and I don't know if it's going to make that big of an impact. Okay, what happened to Microsoft? Their stock fell 3%. Although I don't think it's just for their earnings. It's kind of interesting, too, because a lot of these companies are posting earnings. They're like, look, we beat expectations, and sometimes it's by a lot. And yet investors are like, well, you beat expectations. But, you know, they're like, worried about what's going on in the future and where the where the ball is going in the future. So for Microsoft, their stock fell 3%. Their Q3 earnings per share was $4.27 cents. That was, that was adjusted versus the $4 and 6 cent expectation. Right. So, I mean, they're over. They're like 21 cents above the expectation earnings per share, which is, should be great. The revenue was 82.89 billion. I mean, they're, you know, getting close to 83 billion there. Azure and their other cloud Service revenue grew 40% in constant currency, which is ahead of the 38% which Wall street, which Wall street was kind of guessing. So, I mean, you know, it's two points higher than the expectation, which was great. And you know, on the one hand you'd be like, okay, amazing. You know, their AI annualized revenue hit 37 billion. It's up 123 year over year. But they also bumped their CapEx guidance to 190 billion. That's up 61% year over year, including a $25 billion impact from some higher component pricing. So they're like, look, a lot of the components we need, they've increased in price. We're going to spend an extra 25 billion on that. When they bumped their, when they bumped their capex up, Wall street did not like that. And I think there's a couple of reasons. We talked about one of them, but when they had OpenAI move off of being exclusively on Azure, I think people are kind of worried about that. And it came right before the earnings report. Their CapEx came in at 31 billion in Q3, which was below the $34 billion analyst consensus. So they actually spent a little bit less than people were expecting in Q3. Their gross margin compressed to 67%. That's the narrowest it's been since 2022, by the way, as you know. I think it's because there's a bunch of depreciation costs from data center build outs. All of that's getting accelerated right now. What's really interesting to me is on the one hand, I think a lot of people are saying, look, Microsoft kind of lost this exclusive deal with OpenAI. And Microsoft is, is, by the way, talking quite publicly about the fact that they're like, look, we still have, we don't have to pay royalties on having OpenAI on our platform, and because of that, we don't have to pay royalties till 2032. Satya Nadella, the CEO, literally said that they're going to, quote, exploit not having to pay royalties on that. So I Think they're trying to say, look like that deal broke up, but we have some other like, good terms that were in that deal and it's going to be beneficial for us. So they're trying to kind of like, you know, tell people not to worry about it. What's interesting though is that Microsoft's share fell on all of this news and at the same time Amazon did their earnings and their stock also fell 3%, which is interesting because you would think Amazon's the one benefiting from the fact that OpenAI is now moving over to be on AWS as well. Like, that should be a big boom for them. It doesn't feel like that's, you know, really priced into anything or making big impact. And of course the stock price has a lot more to do probably with the capex plans of Amazon than just kind of these headliner like, oh yay, OpenAI is going to AWS. Speaking of having a bunch of different models on one platform, if you are already paying for ChatGPT or Cloud or Gemini or Grok or 11 Labs for audio or any other AI tools, I would love for you to check out my startup, which is AI Box AI. We have over 80 different AI models in one place. Everything from all of the top, you know, AI labs. We have 11 labs for audio. We have tons of cool audio, tons of cool video platforms as well. We've added video in there. So you can actually use OpenAI Sora model. You can use Google Voila. Um, it's 8.99amonth and you get access to over 80 different models, you know, all types of models and you use them all in the same chat. I love it because, you know, I, I use Claude a lot because it has awesome tone for everything. So I'll have it help me write things, but then it doesn't generate images. And so I'll say, okay, now use OpenAI's image generator. And then I can say, okay, now use Google VO to create a video with this kind of concept. And I'll, you know, then be like, okay, I need a, you know, like an audio overview for this. Give me it. With 11 labs. All of that is in one chat on one platform. It is incredibly useful and also saves you a ton of money not having to have subscriptions to every single platform. If you want to check it out, it is AI Box AI. It's linked in the description. I hope this saves you a ton of money and is incredibly useful for you. We even have it 20% off if you get the annual plan. You get a 20% discount. So really this is a, this is a no brainer. It should help you a ton. Links in the description. Okay, let's talk about what's going on with Anthropic. This is kind of the wildest story coming out today. Bloomberg, CNBC, TechCrunch, all of them are writing about this. And basically what's happening is that anthropic has a 50 billion dollar round they're putting together at a valuation which, which I think there's like the headline is 900 billion, but apparently it's kind of a range between 850 billion and 900 billion. The reason why that's important is because OpenAI's last round closed at 852 billion. So you know, I think they definitely want to get over that 850 billion mark. They want to, they want to put themselves as valued at more than OpenAI. And also to be fair, this was in February. So we, we are, you know, I mean it's, it seems like, it might seem like only two months ago, but that's basically a lifetime ago in February. Right? So 852 billion for OpenAI. Anthropic. Their last round that they did, which was also in February was 380 billion. Guys, we're moving. Anthropic moved from 380 billion to potentially 900 billion in two months. That is insane. And I think a lot of people are saying, well, this is super overhyped. The market currently is supporting it though, which is what's wild. And I think this is being driven by multiple preemptive offers. So Anthropic, I mean, I'm sure Anthropic is happy to go talk to everyone, but Anthropic isn't necessarily going out and begging everyone for money. People are coming to Anthropic begging to put money in. I've seen tons of news articles about this. You know, people offering, you know, they're like, hey, I'll sell my, my, you know, my mansion and I'm only going to do it for Anthropic shares. So if anyone's got Anthropic shares, let me know. There's a bunch of people saying stuff like that. Anthropic hasn't accepted any of these offers yet from people that are trying to put the money in. The board is reportedly going to make a definitive call on this round in their final valuation in May. So it's not going to be happening immediately, but it looks like at the board meeting in May they're going to decide if they Want to pick up that $50 billion or not? The revenue trajectory for Anthropic is really wild and this is why they're able to get so much money. And even OpenAI is kind of struggling in this. At the end of 2024, Anthropic had $1 billion in annualized revenue. At the end of 2025, they were at 9 billion in annualized revenue. At the end of February 2026, they were at $14 billion in annualized revenue. March 19 billion. April 30 billion. And reports that right now they're at close to 40 billion. It's like $10 billion every month this year that it feels like we're just going up since, since March, which is absolutely wild. That equates to about 1400% year over year growth. So if anyone's wondering why is, you know, why are people offering to get in to anthropic at a $900 billion valuation? Their growth rate is absolutely insane right now. They're hitting enterprise and they're hitting developers who just are spending heavily compared to OpenAI, who has close to a billion weekly active users. But most of them are free and a lot of them are just paying $20 a month. So if you're Anthropic and you're charging people $1,000 a month, it's a lot easier to make much higher multiples. So on April 28, the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI missed their internal goal of reaching a billion weekly active users for ChatGPT by the end of 2025. I guess that was what they were trying to get to. The same Wall Street Journal report said that OpenAI missed multiple monthly revenue targets in Q1 2026 after Anthropic gained a lot of traction. So Anthropic was surging, people were putting money over there and OpenAI was getting less. I actually know a lot of people that canceled their OpenAI subscriptions. Maybe they'll bring it back with some of their new features. The CFO over at OpenAI, Sarah Fryer, she reportedly warned people inside the company that if the revenue growth doesn't accelerate, the company is going to face a lot of difficult funding situations in its future, especially for all of their compute commitments. Right. So they have all of these big deals with Oracle and with SoftBank. We where they're spending like, you know, there's a $500 billion deal or whatever for Stargate and it's going to be hard for them to fund all of that if they can't grow their revenue. So it seems like OpenAI and Anthropic are in completely different places. OpenAI's board directly reportedly scrutinized the company's recent data center deals. They also questioned Sam Altman's effort to secure even more computing power. Even though like the revenue is basically going down and Sam Altman's out there trying to get like tons more computing power. SoftBank Group, their shares dropped about 10% in Asia after this Wall Street Journal report came out. So I think a lot of people actually believed it. Oracle, which has a 300 billion dollar five year compute partnership with OpenAI, they dropped 4%. Their stock dropped 4% as well. On the news, OpenAI publicly has kind of went and pushed back on this. Leadership over there have said that this, you know, that all of the, all the leaders are quote, totally aligned on computing investments. Like no, Sam Altman and Sarah Fryer, they're totally besties. They totally agree on all of this. And of course they kind of have to come out there because all of their like partners, share prices are tanking due to this. Only time will tell if OpenAI is going to be able to catch up to Anthropic. As far as revenue goes, I would definitely say don't count them out. They got a lot of, they got a lot of tricks to play and things to pull and I mean as you can see, they could cut an entire product line like Sora, Video Editor or Video Generator. They save a ton of money there so they could really refocus and try to get their revenue up. Okay, that's it for the show today guys. I am trying to crack 200 reviews on Apple. If you are listening on Apple, you haven't left a review yet. It would be insanely helpful to me and for the show, just for the algorithm if you could leave a review over on Apple, drop some stars. It helps us show a ton. Thank you so much and I'll catch you guys all in the next episode.