Cassidy: Four billion dollars in compute contracts signed before lunch, and neither company signing them is one you've heard of.
Cassidy: This is AI Daily Briefing.
Cassidy: Today: the week compute-deal numbers stopped being theoretical and started showing up as receipts — plus Netflix spends half a billion on an
Cassidy: Affleck AI startup with nothing on record about what it actually does.
Cassidy: Bill, start me on IREN.
Bill: Tap follow so the next episode finds you.
Cassidy: William Foxley, writing in Blockspace:
Quote: IREN (NASDAQ: IREN) said Monday that it had signed $2.8 billion of new multi-year AI cloud services contracts with leading AI developers.
Quote: The data center and bitcoin mining operator lifted its year-end 2026 AI cloud annualized run-rate revenue target from $3.7 billion to more
Quote: than $4 billion.
Cassidy: IREN — $2.8 billion in new multi-year AI cloud contracts, ARR target bumped from $3.7 to over $4 billion, stock up 15% Monday.
Cassidy: Two months ago most of our listeners couldn't have picked this company out of a lineup.
Bill: And here's the number I actually like — customer prepayments covering about 45% of the GPU capex.
Bill: Somebody's putting cash down before the racks are lit.
Bill: Cash up front says a lot more than a press release.
Cassidy: This is a bitcoin miner.
Cassidy: Danny Roberts says IREN went from roughly 3 megawatts of self-built AI cloud to 480 in twelve months.
Cassidy: Capacity New York and other tight markets couldn't take is landing with companies you've never heard of.
Bill: But watch that word 'annualized' — run-rate isn't cash in the door.
Bill: They're at 85% of a target that's a projection of a projection.
Bill: Four-year weighted terms means most of this dollar figure lands slowly, not this quarter.
Cassidy: IT Brief New Zealand, with Sean Mitchell:
Quote: Sharon AI has signed a five-year cloud computing services agreement worth USD $1.32 billion with an unnamed global artificial intelligence
Quote: laboratory. Services will be delivered from data centre infrastructure in New Zealand.
Quote: Revenue is expected to begin progressively during the first and second quarters of 2027.
Cassidy: Right after IREN's $2.8 billion, here's another one: Sharon AI, five-year deal, $1.32 billion, landing in New Zealand.
Cassidy: Not where anyone was drawing the compute map six months ago.
Bill: And it's one customer.
Bill: An unnamed global AI lab, the whole $1.32 billion, single counterparty.
Bill: So the risk is all in one place — one very large egg in one basket.
Cassidy: The anonymity matters.
Cassidy: If you're a frontier lab or a hyperscaler, you usually want your logo on this.
Cassidy: Staying quiet costs you the PR win — so whatever the reason is, they value it more than the headline.
Bill: Revenue doesn't even start trickling in until Q1 or Q2 of 2027.
Bill: So the headline number is real, but the cash starts months from now and is back-loaded across five years.
Bill: Announce now, collect later.
Cassidy: And New Zealand is hosting frontier-scale AI for the first time — 62,000 Nvidia GPUs by mid-2027, up from 55,000 in June.
Cassidy: The demand New York and other markets turned away has to go somewhere, and today somewhere is Auckland-adjacent.
Cassidy: ChosunBiz, with Jeong Du-yong:
Quote: The negotiations are in the early stages, and there is a possibility they may not lead to a final contract.
Quote: The fact that Meta has not previously operated a business selling computing resources to external parties is another variable in the
Quote: negotiations. Meta did not respond to related inquiries, and Anthropic declined to comment.
Bill: So after IREN's $2.8 billion and Sharon AI's $1.32 billion
Bill: here comes a $10 billion Meta-Anthropic number — except read the first line of the article.
Bill: Early stage, may not lead to a contract.
Cassidy: Right, that's the fine print sitting right next to a ten-billion-dollar headline.
Cassidy: But Anthropic even being in the room asking Meta for capacity tells you how bad the GPU crunch has gotten.
Cassidy: This is a lab with its own campus and a services arm, and it still needs to rent from Meta of all people.
Cassidy: Anthropic and OpenAI love to talk about how different they are.
Cassidy: They're scrambling for the same GPUs.
Bill: And Meta's never sold compute to outsiders.
Bill: Zuckerberg floated this at the May shareholder meeting — companies calling every week to buy surplus capacity.
Bill: Now Meta wants a CoreWeave-like business to loosen the ad-revenue dependence.
Cassidy: Which means Meta could end up underwriting a competitor's frontier models with its spare racks.
Cassidy: Everybody's a landlord now.
Bill: A $10 billion lease that may never close is the disclaimer I want stapled to every announcement this week.
Bill: Announcing a number and stress-testing the contract are different sports.
Cassidy: Here's Anthony Ha at TechCrunch:
Quote: In a new regulatory filing
Quote: Netflix revealed that it paid $587 million in cash for InterPositive
Quote: a startup co-founded by actor and director Ben Affleck.
Quote: The streaming company announced the acquisition in March
Quote: with a statement from Affleck saying he wanted to “protect the power of human creativity.”
Bill: Okay after the billion-dollar compute parade
Bill: here's the rounding error by comparison — Netflix paid $587 million in cash for Ben Affleck's InterPositive.
Bill: And the number matters, because that's more than a lot of infra companies raised all year for a creative-workflow tool.
Cassidy: And the $587 million only shows up now because a regulatory filing forced it out — back in March
Cassidy: when they announced the deal
Cassidy: they kept the terms quiet.
Cassidy: Bloomberg had guessed up to $600 million.
Bill: Affleck's pitch was he wanted to "protect the power of human creativity."
Bill: Half a billion dollars to protect creativity by automating the reshoots. Sure.
Cassidy: What I don't have is any technical report on what InterPositive actually does at production scale.
Cassidy: Fixing missing shots, background replacement, lighting — those are demo-reel bullets.
Cassidy: They don't tell me the spec sheet.
Cassidy: Netflix says 300 titles already used generative AI, but not which ones or how much.
Bill: And here's why this one is hard for me — this is the one AI category where I can't hide behind step-seven-of-ten failure rates.
Bill: The stress test is box office.
Bill: Does the finished film survive an audience, not a benchmark.
Cassidy: TechTimes, with Scott McCain:
Quote: The result is 96.7% accuracy on MNIST and 61.7% on CIFAR-10 — without backpropagation
Quote: without random feedback matrices
Quote: and without violating the biological constraint that individual neurons can only excite or only inhibit
Quote: never both. The gap to the nearest competing backpropagation-free method is 7.4 percentage points on CIFAR-10.
Bill: Okay let's downshift from ten-billion-dollar leases to a paper that cost nobody ten billion dollars and I actually find it more interesting.
Bill: Sakana AI, in Tokyo, posted this to arXiv on the 17th — training a neural net without backpropagation.
Cassidy: The honest part is right there in the framing.
Cassidy: They call it the biology tax.
Cassidy: 96.7% on MNIST, 61.7% on CIFAR-10 — and they give you the gap to the nearest backprop-free method: 7.4 points.
Bill: Right — they published the number that makes them look worse.
Bill: That's what makes me take it seriously.
Bill: The whole point is measuring, in accuracy, what biologically plausible learning costs you today.
Cassidy: And there's actually a paper attached — Diffusing Blame, on arXiv.
Cassidy: After the week we've had, a release where the technical report is the release feels almost quaint.
Cassidy: The backprop problem matters because neuroscientists have said since 1989 that the brain can't do the math backprop needs — Crick himself
Cassidy: said it. Nearly forty years later, somebody's finally putting a price tag on the alternative.
Bill: Before I get too excited: CIFAR-10 is still a toy by 2026 standards.
Bill: 61.7% is a lab curiosity, not a phone camera.
Bill: But they got it working with convolutional nets and reinforcement learning, and that's the first time anyone's shown that.
Bill: So, real step — just a small one on a very long ladder.
Cassidy: If you're following the AI power players we cover here
Cassidy: try Musk v Altman Daily — a daily court-watch on Elon Musk’s trial against Sam Altman
Cassidy: OpenAI and Microsoft
Cassidy: tracking testimony exhibits
Cassidy: and the AGI governance fight.
Cassidy: Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
Cassidy: What we’re watching next: IREN says it’s scheduled to deliver 480 megawatts of AI cloud capacity in 2026
Cassidy: with 1.2 gigawatts targeted for 2027.
Cassidy: Sharon AI expects revenue from its New Zealand cloud agreement to start coming in during the first and second quarters of 2027.
Cassidy: Links to every story we mentioned are in the show notes, so if one caught your ear, you can dig in there.
Cassidy: That’s AI Daily Briefing for today.
Cassidy: This is a Lantern Podcast.