Cassidy: Eight hundred and eleven billion dollars in AI infrastructure — and it just met a governor with a stop sign.
Cassidy: If you're just joining us, New York's gone from local skirmishes over AI campuses to a statewide pause.
Cassidy: Any new or expanded data center that would pull 50 megawatts or more is temporarily blocked while state agencies study the environmental
Cassidy: utility water noise and community impact.
Cassidy: The fight also includes Hochul's push to repeal the sales-tax exemptions that massive existing data centers have enjoyed.
Bill: This is the AI Daily Briefing.
Bill: Today, Alphabet's future spending commitments jumped by half a trillion dollars in a single quarter.
Bill: New York hits pause on big data centers, and Etched lands a ten-billion-dollar valuation.
Bill: Cassidy, let's start with that Alphabet tab.
Cassidy: The Next Web writes:
Quote: Alphabet had $811 billion in contracted future spending commitments at the end of June
Quote: up nearly $500 billion from just three months earlier.
Quote: The figure disclosed separately from capital expenditure in a quarterly filing
Quote: represents purchases Google has already committed to under supply agreements and open purchase orders.
Quote: Roughly $200.7 billion of the total is short-term.
Cassidy: Alphabet's contracted future spending hit $811 billion at the end of June.
Cassidy: Everyone's chasing the capex line — $195 to $205 billion for 2026 — but the commitments are the number that really moved: up $500 billion in
Cassidy: one quarter.
Bill: Yeah, and that's the part that's reframed my whole week.
Bill: I'd been treating these compute deals as press-release theater — this is a filing
Bill: disclosed separately from capex
Bill: and it covers chips power
Bill: data centers content licenses.
Bill: The demand's contracted, not projected.
Cassidy: That settles it for me.
Cassidy: The infrastructure behind the model launches has been the main story all along.
Bill: But $500 billion in ninety days?
Bill: I want the counterparty structure.
Bill: Because “contracted” spans everything from take-or-pay deals you can't walk away from to letters of intent with escape hatches all over them
Bill: — and the filing sure isn't telling you which.
Cassidy: Exactly. At $811 billion
Cassidy: whoever's on the other side of those supply agreements has enormous leverage — and we still don't know who most of them are.
Bill: At the current rate, that's four years of spending locked in.
Bill: If the demand curve so much as flinches, it's far too big to unwind quietly.
Cassidy: NBC News, with Allan Smith:
Quote: New York Gov.
Quote: Kathy Hochul said she felt the need to sign the nation’s first statewide moratorium on data center development because tech giants “are
Quote: flooding the zone” with construction efforts faster than states and localities can keep up.
Bill: So right after Alphabet locks in $811 billion
Bill: Hochul signs the first statewide freeze on new or expanded data centers pulling 50 megawatts or more.
Bill: That's where an $811 billion balance sheet runs into the physical world.
Cassidy: And what jumps out in her NBC interview is this: New York doesn't need the data centers to support the AI boom.
Cassidy: She's the first governor to draw a hard line between the buildout and what her state's grid actually needs.
Cassidy: She's also calling this a response to tech giants flooding the zone.
Cassidy: Strip away that demand framing, and you're looking at a permitting fight.
Bill: And 50 megawatts lands squarely in hyperscale territory — the exact tier of sites Alphabet's supply agreements assume will get built.
Bill: If three more states copy this, the $195 billion to $205 billion in 2026 capex guidance hits a wall it can't buy its way around.
Cassidy: That's why I stopped treating the model launches as the headline.
Cassidy: Now the regulatory clock is running against the investment clock, and this is the week you can watch them collide.
Cassidy: The Economic Times writes:
Quote: Etched secured three hundred million dollars in a Series C funding round.
Quote: This investment values the artificial intelligence chip company at ten point three billion dollars.
Quote: Sequoia led the funding round with several other prominent investors participating.
Quote: The company plans to use these funds to expand production and customer deployments.
Bill: Etched just raised $300 million in a Series C led by Sequoia, at a $10.3 billion valuation.
Bill: And here's what they're actually building: a chip that runs only Transformers.
Bill: They're baking that one architecture straight into silicon.
Bill: So you're staking ten billion dollars on the bet that the Transformer remains the architecture to build around for the next several years.
Bill: If the architecture shifts, that chip becomes a very expensive paperweight.
Cassidy: Sequoia says it's the highest valuation ever for a Series C they've led.
Cassidy: Great press-release line.
Cassidy: But at that valuation
Cassidy: I still don't see a benchmark against Nvidia's inference stack that anyone outside the cap table has actually checked.
Cassidy: The investor list has a16z and Jane Street, with SK Hynix coming in on the memory side.
Cassidy: Now put that next to the Alphabet story we just covered.
Cassidy: That $811 billion in supply commitments presumably still leans on Nvidia and AMD
Cassidy: so a pure-Transformer ASIC is a very narrow lane for a ten-billion-dollar valuation.
Bill: But I'll give them this: they're going after inference, not training.
Bill: That's where the cost curve actually bites.
Bill: A chip that's cheaper per token wins the enterprise deal, full stop.
Bill: Can they ship it before the design assumption expires?
Cassidy: This one's from The Jerusalem Post:
Quote: Israeli cybersecurity startup Glow emerged from stealth on Wednesday with $180 million in funding at a $1.2 billion valuation
Quote: launching an AI-powered platform designed to prevent security threats from reaching corporate devices.
Quote: Glow focuses on endpoint security
Quote: which protects the laptops
Quote: desktop computers and other devices through which employees connect to corporate systems.
Bill: Glow comes out of stealth with $180 million in funding at a $1.2 billion valuation.
Bill: The pitch is that AI agents will continuously map every laptop in your company and rip out risky software automatically.
Bill: Automatically. On endpoints.
Bill: That's the layer where one false positive bricks the CFO's machine mid-quarter-close.
Cassidy: The founding team has real credentials, though.
Cassidy: The CEO came out of Meta, the CTO ran cybersecurity strategy at Snowflake, and the R&D lead came from Claroty.
Cassidy: That team has seen enterprise security at scale.
Bill: Pedigree, I'll grant them.
Bill: But the product depends on agents making unsupervised enforcement decisions: which software stays and which gets removed.
Bill: I want the error rate on those removal calls before I let it touch a single production fleet.
Cassidy: And that's a launch-day valuation.
Cassidy: The company was founded in 2025, so we're at $1.2 billion before we've seen it survive a real breach attempt.
Bill: Right, and this lands the same morning we're staring at Alphabet's $811 billion.
Bill: Endpoint security is a real market, but agents haven't proved they can handle it well.
Bill: That $180 million is a bet on the founders to solve the failure modes.
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Cassidy: You'll find links to every story in today's show notes if you want to dig deeper.
Cassidy: That's it for AI Daily Briefing this Friday.
Cassidy: This is a Lantern Podcast.