‘Devil really is in the Details’ with AI. OpenAI, Jane Street & YouTube. ARD #143

‘The Devil is in the Details.’ The old proverb, and today it truly fits a number of things going on in AI land: three events where the story lives in the fine print, plus a sneak peek at Apple’s AirPods with ‘cameras’ that are likely not really cameras.

Today’s ARD is about those details, in this AI Tech Wave: the mega data center deal behind OpenAI’s mega-IPO run, the Leopold crash reaching Jane Street, and YouTube recalibrating for the AI content era. With my takes on each.

OpenAI signed a 20-year, 10-gigawatt data center lease in southern Ohio with SB Energy, SoftBank’s energy arm, on a former uranium-enrichment site owned by the Department of Energy, with a government gas plant funded by Japan under the recent trade deal. All in, the project could top half a trillion dollars.

July’s headline was a $250 billion Nvidia backstop, and Nvidia’s stock fell 5 percent on that report. The closed deal is a backstop of up to $105 billion, first phase only, and it kicks in only through a waterfall of mitigation steps: SB Energy would first re-lease the site at the same price, then sell it, and only then does Nvidia pay the difference in value, on completed data centers only. Nvidia is backing the asset, not OpenAI’s lease payments. In return: exclusive chips for half the site, potentially $600 billion of revenue through 2030, and $1.5 billion of equity in SB Energy ahead of its own IPO, as soon as next month. Japan recoups its $33 billion first; the US government then takes 90 percent of the power revenue.