$50 billion worth of chips, two lawsuits, and one late newsletter

Yes, I know. It's Thursday. The newsletter that says "See you next Wednesday" is arriving on a Thursday. In my defense, this week had so much news that I needed an extra day just to process it all. That's my story. I'm sticking with it.

NVIDIA's GTC kicked off. Anthropic took the Pentagon to court. Microsoft picked a side. Mira Murati's startup just locked in a gigawatt-scale chip deal. And in 11 days, 4,000 people descend on Durham for All Things AI. Let's get into it.

🟢 NVIDIA GTC 2026: Jensen's Week-Long Flex

NVIDIA's annual developer conference started in San Jose, stretched to nine days of rolling announcements (March 11-20). Jensen Huang keynotes on March 16 at 11am PT from SAP Center. 30,000+ attendees from 190 countries.

The Mira Murati deal. NVIDIA and Thinking Machines Lab (founded by the former OpenAI CTO) announced a multi-year partnership to deploy at least one gigawatt of next-gen Vera Rubin systems. For context: one gigawatt of AI data center capacity costs up to $50 billion. Thinking Machines has now raised over $2 billion since Murati founded it in February 2025.

The two companies will jointly design training and serving systems and work to broaden access to open frontier models. Vera Rubin deployment targeted for early 2027.

My take: The Thinking Machines deal tells you where NVIDIA sees the AI landscape going. They're not just selling chips to incumbents - they're investing in and partnering with the next generation of labs that might challenge OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic for the frontier.

⚖️ Anthropic v. Pentagon: Microsoft Picks a Side

Timeline: - March 6: Dario Amodei published a blog post saying Anthropic would challenge the supply-chain risk designation in court - March 9: Anthropic filed two federal lawsuits - one in San Francisco, one in D.C. Circuit Court - alleging Pentagon violated First Amendment rights - March 10: Microsoft filed an amicus brief in support of Anthropic. Microsoft warned tech companies would need to "act immediately to alter existing product and contract configurations" without a restraining order - March 11: Dozens of scientists from OpenAI and Google DeepMind filed their own amicus brief supporting Anthropic

Anthropic's CFO stated the government's actions could reduce 2026 revenue by "multiple billions of dollars." The hearing has been moved up to March 24.

My take: Microsoft backing Anthropic is the headline. When Microsoft tells a federal judge that the Pentagon's action is "vague and ill-defined," that's a company calculating that if the government can blacklist an AI provider over a policy disagreement, no tech company is safe.

⚡ Quick Hits

• OpenAI raised $110 billion from Amazon ($50B), NVIDIA ($30B), and SoftBank ($30B), valuing the company at $730B pre-money. Amazon's investment will partially fund an expanded AWS partnership worth $100B over eight years.
• Seven tech CEOs signed Trump's "Ratepayer Protection Pledge" at the White House, promising to cover energy costs of their AI data centers. Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI all signed.
• Apple's Gemini-powered Siri hitting delays - Some features being pushed to iOS 26.5 (May) or iOS 27 (September). Assistant reportedly struggles with reliability during internal testing.
• Eli Lilly launched "LillyPod" - Most powerful AI factory owned by a pharma company: 1,016 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs delivering 9,000+ petaflops. Assembled in four months.

🧠 One Thing I'm Thinking About

NVIDIA is becoming the central bank of AI compute. This week alone: NVIDIA invested $30B in OpenAI, made a "significant investment" in Thinking Machines Lab while committing a gigawatt of Vera Rubin chips, has similar partnerships with Meta, a co-innovation lab with Eli Lilly, and compute deals with virtually every major AI company.

NVIDIA is becoming the entity that decides which AI companies get access to the compute they need to compete, when they get it, and on what terms. They're funding the startups that buy their chips, then using those deals to lock in multi-year commitments on hardware that doesn't exist yet.

If you're building frontier AI right now, your relationship with Jensen Huang matters more than almost any other business relationship you have.

📅 All Things AI Conference — 11 Days Out

March 23-24, Durham, NC. Carolina Theatre + Durham Convention Center. 4,000+ expected attendees. 80+ speakers across 6 tracks. IBM Platinum sponsor. Speakers from Netflix, Red Hat, SAS, Fidelity, and U.S. Bank.

March 24: Also the date of the Anthropic v. Pentagon hearing.