Key Highlights
- Anthropic in talks for ~$50B round at up to $900B valuation ahead of a possible IPO; board decision expected in May.
- AWS posts 28% YoY growth to $37.6B — its fastest in 15 quarters — with AI revenue run rate already over $15B in three years.
- Meta’s business AI hits 10M weekly conversations, up 10x since January, powered by the new Muse Spark LLM.
- SoftBank spins up “Roze AI” to build data centers with autonomous robots, eyeing a ~$100B IPO in 2H 2026.
- Zig doubles down on its no-LLM contribution policy, even as Bun (acquired by Anthropic) forks the language to ship AI-assisted compiler gains.
Analysis & Opinion
Sources: Anthropic could raise a new $50B round at a valuation of $900B — TechCrunch
Investor demand is reportedly running well ahead of Anthropic’s own pace — preemptive bids cluster between $850B and $900B, after earlier Bloomberg/BI reports of an $800B preliminary valuation. Sources say the company is “finding it difficult to resist the pressure” to raise pre-IPO and will likely settle the round at the May board meeting.
Amazon’s cloud business is surging — and so is its capital spending — TechCrunch
AWS’s Q1 numbers — 28% YoY growth to $37.6B — are notable less for the headline than for the scale at which they’re occurring. Andy Jassy’s comparison is the line to remember: AWS’s first three years cleared $58M in run-rate; the AI wave’s first three years have already cleared $15B. Capex is climbing in lockstep, which is the actual story of the quarter.
The Zig project’s rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy — Hacker News
Simon Willison surfaces ZSF’s Loris Cro explaining why Zig refuses LLM-generated issues, PRs, and bug-tracker comments — the project optimizes for relationships with contributors, not for merging code. The irony hangs heavy: Bun, written in Zig and now owned by Anthropic, just shipped major compiler perf wins it won’t upstream because of this exact policy.
How we’re protecting energy affordability in Oklahoma — Google
Google’s deal with OG&E is a template worth watching: long-term capacity payments and dedicated solar PPAs in Stephens and Muskogee Counties, structured so household rates don’t absorb the cost of hyperscale build-out. The subtext is that “data center vs. ratepayer” is becoming a politically load-bearing problem, and hyperscalers now have to show their work.
New Products & Tools
Meta says its business AI now facilitates 10 million conversations a week — TechCrunch
Meta’s business AI assistant is in open beta across the US, EMEA, APAC, and LatAm, free for small businesses, and now running 10M conversations weekly (up from 1M in January). The stack runs on Meta Superintelligence Labs’ new Muse Spark model, with monetization explicitly on Zuckerberg’s roadmap.
SoftBank is creating a robotics company that builds data centers — and already eyeing a $100B IPO — TechCrunch
“Roze AI” will deploy autonomous robots to build US server farms, with a possible IPO in 2H 2026 at a ~$100B valuation. The reflexivity is the point — using automation to build the infrastructure that makes more automation possible.
Research
Zuckerberg’s $500M AI biology swing — Rundown
The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub’s five-year Virtual Biology Initiative puts $400M into data generation and imaging and $100M into external labs, with NVIDIA, the Allen Institute, and Arc as collaborators. The bet is that current cell-scale datasets (~1B cells) are an order of magnitude too small to train models that can simulate disease onset, and brute-forcing the data layer is the unlock.
References
- TechCrunch, “Sources: Anthropic could raise a new $50B round at a valuation of $900B,” 2026-04-30.
- TechCrunch, “Amazon’s cloud business is surging — and so is its capital spending,” 2026-04-30.
- Simon Willison, “The Zig project’s rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy,” Hacker News, 2026-04-30.
- Google, “How we’re protecting energy affordability in Oklahoma,” The Keyword, 2026-04-30.
- TechCrunch, “Meta says its business AI now facilitates 10 million conversations a week,” 2026-04-30.
- TechCrunch, “SoftBank is creating a robotics company that builds data centers — and already eyeing a $100B IPO,” 2026-04-30.
- The Rundown, “Zuckerberg’s $500M AI biology swing,” 2026-04-30.