Microsoft answers the AI revenue question
And: VCs for Kamala
📈 Trending Up: KOSA in the Senate … nerve … Lineaje … Jar’s ARR … inconvenient AI hallucinations … data center sales at AMD … AI memory sales at Samsung … Olympic ad revenue …
📉 Trending Down: German GDP … wage gains … Lina Khan’s job security … Intel’s staffing levels …
🤔 What Else?
VCs for Kamala: This morning a new group supporting the Vice President has formed, comprised of a host of venture investors. Dubbed VCs for Kamala — catchy, I know — the grouping includes names that have made lots of noise about their political views (Vinod Khosla, Reid Hoffman) and others, including Cowboy Ventures’s Aileen Lee and Union Square Ventures’s Rebecca Kaden. Hunter Walk from Homebrew is on the list as well.
Notably, no a16z investors are listed as far as I can tell; either there’s perfect political agreement over there, or investors at the giant investment manager know when to fall in line and avoid having public political views that contrast with the firms’ founders.
Why are falling birth rates such a big deal now? With global fertility falling for decades, why is there so much angst about the issue today? Partially because several countries with low birth rates (TFR, if you want) have seen their numbers fall even further in recent years, implying that there is no natural floor that forms under declining fertility levels.
But more importantly, economically critical countries are now shrinking. Sure, Japan’s population has been in decline for some time, but it’s only recently that China and South Korea began to see their total population fall. (China, South Korea.)
All this is to say that while some politicians want to make the challenge of a potentially depopulating world a partisan matter, we should not let them. Instead, we should find ways to make having kids more economically attractive and feasible.
Megarounds Rule Everything Around Me:
There’s a startup cluster forming that I call the ‘Boring But Important Crew.’ Recent evidence of its rise include osapiens’s ESG software €110.7 million round, and Altana’s supply chain software own $200 million investment.
Elsewhere, Flo raised $200 million. TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden calls the company a “fertility-focused period-tracking app,” writing that its new round pushed its valuation above the $1 billion mark.
Microsoft answers the AI revenue question
Microsoft is spending heavily building out more data center capacity, driven in large part by demand for AI-related computing power. The company’s recently reported earnings — calendar Q2 2024, fiscal Q4 2024 at the company — included a host of data regarding both AI-related spend at Redmond, and AI-related revenue growth.