Walter Schulze

Walter Schulze · Jun 19, 2026 · 12:32 PM

Yann LeCun calls xAI a failure as Elon Musk's lab pivots from frontier AI to renting out servers

Yann LeCun called xAI 'kind of a failure' on CNBC, pointing to the departure of all 11 co-founders and the lab's pivot to renting its Colossus data centers to Google and Anthropic. The critique is well-sourced but not disinterested: LeCun raised $1.03 billion for his own AI startup in March 2026.

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Walter Schulze · Jun 19, 2026 · 8:44 AM

Texas just rewrote the rules for connecting AI data centers to its power grid

Texas's Public Utility Commission approved ERCOT's Batch Zero framework on June 18, grouping AI and data center power requests above 75 MW into coordinated feasibility studies rather than processing them individually. The move addresses a 438 GW interconnection backlog, five times the state's all-time peak demand, by requiring applicants to demonstrate site control and financing before receiving a study slot. Notifications go out in August 2026, with a final transmission plan targeted for fall 2

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Walter Schulze · Jun 18, 2026 · 8:26 PM

The AI spending arms race is quietly ending the era of Big Tech buybacks

The four biggest hyperscalers are set to spend $755 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026, an 83% surge from the year before, and shareholders are absorbing the cost directly. Buybacks fell 64% year over year in Q1, Amazon's free cash flow has collapsed to $1.2 billion, and Meta is on track to go cash flow negative. The era of reliable Big Tech capital returns is being traded for an AI infrastructure bet that has not yet proven out on the revenue side.

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Walter Schulze · Jun 18, 2026 · 6:00 PM

A DeFi Portfolio Strategy Built to Survive the Next Bear Market

DeFi portfolio strategy isn't just about finding the best yields, it's about building a framework that holds up when markets turn. From risk-tiered allocations across Aave and Curve to liquidity risk and drawdown reserves, here's how to invest in DeFi without getting wiped out in a bear market.

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Walter Schulze · Jun 18, 2026 · 4:38 PM

Swiss AI startup Prem is raising $100 million as Anthropic's export ban makes on-premise infrastructure look essential

Swiss AI startup Prem is raising a $100 million Series A, Bloomberg reports, building on a platform that keeps enterprise AI entirely on private infrastructure. The raise comes days after US export controls on Anthropic's models went into force and JPMorgan blocked Claude access for Hong Kong staff, turning sovereign AI from a policy debate into an operational necessity for regulated industries.

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Walter Schulze · Jun 18, 2026 · 12:12 PM

Tesco is suing Broadcom for over £100 million and it may be the lawsuit that breaks VMware's stranglehold on enterprise IT

Tesco is suing Broadcom for over £100 million in the UK High Court, alleging that Broadcom voided perpetual VMware licenses the retailer bought in 2021 and forced it into expensive subscriptions after the $61 billion acquisition. The case is the sharpest legal challenge yet to Broadcom's post-acquisition licensing overhaul, and it's driving one of the largest enterprise infrastructure migrations in UK retail history, with 40,000 server workloads moving off VMware by end of 2027.

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Walter Schulze · Jun 18, 2026 · 8:24 AM

Noam Shazeer, the man who invented the transformer, is now working for OpenAI

Noam Shazeer, co-author of the 2017 'Attention Is All You Need' transformer paper and co-lead of Google's Gemini models, announced on June 17 he is joining OpenAI. Google spent a reported $2.7 billion in 2024 to bring him back from Character.AI; he stayed less than two years. Sam Altman beat out Elon Musk's xAI in what became a direct bidding contest for one of the most consequential researchers in AI history.

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Walter Schulze · Jun 18, 2026 · 4:35 AM

Microsoft is running geopolitical arbitrage on AI and Washington has not yet decided what to do about it

ByteDance is on track to spend more than $1 billion annually on Microsoft Azure AI services, including OpenAI models that remain available to Chinese customers through a 21Vianet joint venture despite escalating US export controls. Microsoft is simultaneously cutting 200-400 Azure jobs in China and exploring DeepSeek models to slash Copilot costs domestically, a position that puts the world's largest software company on both sides of the US-China AI divide.

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Walter Schulze · Jun 18, 2026 · 12:10 AM

Kevin Warsh's first Fed meeting ends with rates held but a clear signal that hikes are coming

Kevin Warsh held rates steady at 3.5 to 3.75 percent at his first FOMC meeting on June 17, 2026, but stripped the easing bias from the policy statement and watched nine of 18 officials project a rate hike before year-end. For founders and VC funds that built their H2 plans around a rate-cut tailwind, those plans need revision now.

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Walter Schulze · Jun 17, 2026 · 6:27 PM

DeepL buys Mixhalo's voice technology and cuts 250 jobs on the same day

DeepL announced on June 17, 2026 that it is acquiring the team and technology behind Mixhalo, a San Francisco platform built for ultra-low-latency live audio, to push its DeepL Voice product into stadiums and large-scale enterprise environments. The move came the same day the German AI company confirmed roughly 250 layoffs, about a quarter of its workforce, as CEO Jarek Kutylowski restructures around smaller, AI-native teams.

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Walter Schulze · Jun 17, 2026 · 10:07 AM

Huawei's chip breakthrough makes the case that US export controls built the rival they were meant to stop

Huawei's Tau Scaling Law and LogicFolding chip architecture, unveiled in Shanghai last month, claim 55% higher transistor density without TSMC or ASML access. Rotating chairman Xu Zhijun has publicly credited US sanctions with forcing China to build a fully domestic semiconductor stack that now competes directly with Nvidia's AI chips. The strategic implication for Western chip stocks is harder to ignore than ever.

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Walter Schulze · Jun 17, 2026 · 4:26 AM

Brookfield's Csquare files for a US IPO and bets that AI demand can redeem a data center business built on troubled foundations

Csquare, the colocation operator Brookfield assembled from Cyxtera's 2023 bankruptcy and Evoque's AT&T-derived assets, has publicly filed its S-1 with the SEC targeting a NYSE listing under CSQR. With 80-plus data centers, 500 megawatts of capacity, and proceeds earmarked partly for debt repayment, the IPO is a direct test of whether public markets will pay AI-infrastructure multiples for a business that failed once before in a different rate environment.

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Walter Schulze · Jun 16, 2026 · 11:59 PM

ChatGPT's majority is gone and OpenAI's IPO story just got harder to tell

ChatGPT's global audience share fell to 46.4% as of end-May 2026, the first time it has dropped below 50%, per Sensor Tower's State of AI Report. Gemini now holds 27.7% and Claude 10.3%, with OpenAI's Pentagon deal in February triggering a 295% uninstall spike that accelerated the shift. The decline lands at the worst possible moment, just as OpenAI files a confidential IPO application targeting a valuation above $852 billion.

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Walter Schulze · Jun 16, 2026 · 10:53 PM

How to Write a Cold Email to an Investor That Actually Gets a Reply

Cold email investor outreach remains one of the hardest parts of early-stage fundraising, not because investors ignore cold mail, but because most founders pitch when they should be asking for a conversation. This guide covers the subject lines, email structure, and follow-up timing that actually get replies, anchored in what investors like Mark Suster at Upfront Ventures say they actually respond to.

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Walter Schulze · Jun 16, 2026 · 8:15 PM

Mobileye bets its sensor stack can make the leap from supplier to robotaxi operator

Mobileye announced on June 16, 2026 that it will build and operate its own US robotaxi fleet, shifting from autonomous-driving supplier to full-stack consumer mobility business. Starting with roughly 100 driverless vehicles in a major US city in 2027 and targeting 17,000 over five years, the company puts itself in direct competition with Waymo at a moment when GM's Cruise has exited the market. The move tests whether Mobileye's sensor and software stack can translate B2B credibility into consume

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Walter Schulze · Jun 16, 2026 · 4:25 PM

Asia's chip stocks are beating Nvidia because the real AI bottleneck was never the GPU

High Bandwidth Memory has emerged as the defining bottleneck in AI infrastructure, and South Korean and Taiwanese chip suppliers are capitalizing. SK Hynix crossed a trillion-dollar market cap this year, the KOSPI has roughly doubled, and the entire global HBM supply for 2026 is already sold out. The rally may be real, but so is the crowding risk.

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