Ed Ludlow
Ed Ludlow is the San Francisco-based host of Bloomberg Tech and a Bloomberg News correspondent covering technology, supply chains, deals, and finance. ([bloombergmedia.com](https://www.bloombergmedia.com/talent/people/ed-ludlow/?utm_source=openai))
Google Turns TPU Capacity Into a Blackstone-Backed Neocloud
Bloomberg Technology’s Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow frame Google’s new venture with Blackstone as an attempt to turn Google’s TPU capacity into an AI cloud business outside Google Cloud. Bloomberg Intelligence’s Mandeep Singh argues the structure could help Google meet external demand for its chips by shifting more of the data-center burden to Blackstone, creating a TPU-based rival to Nvidia-centered neocloud providers.
Parallel Launches Marketplace to Pay Publishers for AI Agent Work
Parallel founder and former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal argues that AI agents are breaking the web’s existing content economics by using publisher and creator material to perform valuable work without tying compensation to that value. In a Bloomberg Technology interview, Agrawal said Parallel’s new Index marketplace is meant to pay publishers, data providers, and independent creators according to their content’s measured contribution to an agent’s completed task, rather than through ads, subscriptions, citations, or flat licensing deals.
AI Infrastructure Demand Is Still Outrunning Dell and Nvidia’s Supply Chain
Dell Technologies chief executive Michael Dell and Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang told Bloomberg’s Ed Ludlow that enterprise demand for local AI factories is outpacing supply even as the AI infrastructure supply chain expands rapidly. Dell argued that companies are seeking on-premises systems because AI can produce order-of-magnitude workflow gains, while Huang said the build-out is only beginning and could strain supply for at least a decade, with memory remaining a live constraint.
AI Demand Pushes Beyond Nvidia Into Power, Memory, and Compute Markets
Bloomberg Technology framed Nvidia’s earnings as a test of the wider AI infrastructure trade rather than a simple chip-demand story. Caroline Hyde, Ed Ludlow and Bloomberg Intelligence’s Mandeep Singh said investors were looking past headline growth to constraints around China access, margins, memory prices, inference workloads and supply, while a $67 billion NextEra-Dominion deal showed how the data-center boom is already reshaping power markets. The program’s broader argument was that AI demand remains strong, but the bottlenecks have moved across the physical and financial stack.
AI Competition Shifts From Models to Chips, Power, and Supply Chains
Bloomberg Technology framed the latest AI race less as a contest over individual products than as a fight over infrastructure constraints, from Nvidia chip export politics and U.S. semiconductor labor to cloud spending, energy, memory and data-center capacity. Ed Ludlow, Caroline Hyde and Bloomberg reporters treated Donald Trump’s discussion of Nvidia’s H200 chips with Xi Jinping as emblematic of that shift: significant for markets, but short of any clear export deal. The program’s interviews with Goldman Sachs’ Eric Sheridan, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar and Figma CEO Dylan Field similarly argued that compute, distribution and ownership of the stack are becoming the decisive limits on AI growth.
Figure Claims 50-Hour Autonomous Humanoid Test Was Not Teleoperated
Figure chief executive Brett Adcock told Bloomberg that the company’s livestreamed humanoid package-sorting test is fully autonomous and not remotely operated, rejecting viewer claims that repeated hand motions suggested teleoperation. Adcock said the robots were running on Figure’s onboard Helix 2 neural network, had operated for close to 50 hours with little downtime, and had pushed nearly 60,000 packages through the line. He framed the demonstration as evidence that Figure is moving toward commercially useful, human-speed humanoid robots built through a vertically integrated hardware, manufacturing, data and AI stack.
U.S. Chip Expansion Needs 150,000 More Workers
SEMI’s Shari Liss told Bloomberg Technology that the main constraint on US semiconductor expansion is no longer just fab construction, but the workforce needed to operate it. She said CHIPS Act investments are creating rapid domestic growth that will require about 150,000 additional workers, from fab technicians and engineers to researchers and business roles, and that the US must build regional training pipelines and student awareness fast enough to support the manufacturing capacity it wants to bring home.
Figma Says AI Makes Design More Valuable as Code Gets Easier
Figma CEO Dylan Field told Bloomberg that the company’s stronger-than-expected quarter shows AI is expanding rather than undermining its market. He argued that as large language models make code easier to generate, design becomes the more valuable layer above it — while acknowledging that AI features carry real inference costs that Figma is now trying to monetize through usage credits.
Cerebras Raises $5.55 Billion as AI Infrastructure Demand Lifts Tech Markets
Cerebras raised $5.55bn in the year’s largest US IPO while Cisco shares jumped on a higher hyperscaler-orders forecast, putting both a new AI compute listing and an incumbent networking supplier in the market’s AI infrastructure trade. Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman argued that the company’s wafer-scale systems, OpenAI deal and AWS engagement show it can become a major compute supplier; Bloomberg reporters pressed the harder question of how much of today’s AI infrastructure demand will turn into broad, durable revenue.
Xi’s Taiwan Warning Leaves U.S.-China Positions Unchanged but Raises Tech Stakes
Michelle Giuda, chief executive of Purdue’s Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy, told Bloomberg Technology that Xi Jinping’s warning to Donald Trump over Taiwan was serious but did not mark a new position from Beijing or Washington. She argued that Taiwan remains the central pressure point in U.S.-China relations because of both security commitments and semiconductor dependence, while Iran and an unusual tech CEO delegation showed the summit’s mix of incremental diplomacy and improvisation.
Cerebras Raises $5.55 Billion in Year’s Biggest IPO
Cerebras chief executive Andrew Feldman used the AI chipmaker’s $5.55 billion IPO to argue that public investors are valuing the company as a fast-inference infrastructure supplier, not merely another semiconductor listing. In a Bloomberg Technology interview before trading began, Feldman said demand is concentrated around speed, claimed Cerebras is about 15 times faster than its nearest competitor, and pointed to large relationships with OpenAI and AWS as evidence of commercial traction, while acknowledging that the AWS agreement is still being finalized.
Anthropic Seeks $30 Billion at More Than $900 Billion Valuation
Bloomberg’s technology program framed the day’s AI trade around access to scarce capacity: Nvidia chips for China, private capital for Anthropic, and manufacturing scale for Anduril. Its central report was that Anthropic is in early talks to raise at least $30 billion at a valuation above $900 billion, a deal Bloomberg’s Natasha Mascarenhas said would mark a major shift in the private AI hierarchy if completed. The program also treated Jensen Huang’s last-minute role in Trump’s China trip as a test of whether chip access can become a diplomatic deliverable without undermining Beijing’s domestic semiconductor strategy.
Varda Plans Orbital Drugmaking Flights for United Therapeutics Within a Year
Varda Space Industries CEO Will Bruey argues that the company’s deal with United Therapeutics is an early test of whether microgravity can become a practical input in pharmaceutical formulation rather than a space-research novelty. Speaking to Bloomberg Technology, Bruey said Varda is already working with United on the ground and plans to send drugs into orbit in the next year, using low Earth orbit as a manufacturing step that could improve dosage form, stability or bioavailability before returning the material to Earth.
Affirm Targets $100 Billion in Volume as Profitability Floor Rises
Affirm chief executive Max Levchin told Bloomberg that the company’s new $100 billion gross merchandise volume target is a waypoint rather than a ceiling, arguing that the business can grow faster while improving its profitability floor. His case rests on Affirm becoming more than a checkout financing option: consumers are coming directly to the company, merchants are seeking incremental sales through its network, and AI-mediated shopping could put Affirm earlier in the purchase process.
Anduril Raises $5 Billion to Scale High-Volume Weapons Production
Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf told Bloomberg that the company’s $5bn funding round, valuing it at $61bn, is intended to accelerate production rather than complete a single factory project. He argued that demand in defense is shifting toward high-volume, lower-cost systems that can be manufactured quickly, making production capacity, replenishment and private capital central to Anduril’s strategy.
Korean AI Dividend Proposal Triggers Semiconductor Stock Selloff
A South Korean policy chief’s proposal to return part of AI-related gains to citizens jolted the country’s chip market, with Samsung and SK Hynix closing down around 5% after Kim Yong-beom argued that profits from the AI infrastructure era should be shared more broadly. Bloomberg reported that the presidential office later described Kim’s post as personal opinion, while the same program pointed to related pressure points in the AI boom: CME’s plan with Silicon Data for compute futures and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s absence from Trump’s China delegation as approval for Blackwell sales looked unlikely.
CME Plans Futures Contracts for GPU Computing Power
CME Group and Silicon Data are trying to make computing power tradable as a futures product, Bloomberg’s Katherine Doherty says, using an index of compute prices as the basis for contracts that would let companies and investors hedge future price moves. Doherty frames the plan as an effort to treat GPU processing capacity less as a procurement cost and more as a commodity exposure, though the market still needs regulatory approval and enough liquidity to function.
SAP Says ERP Context Will Make AI Agents Reliable for Business
SAP chief executive Christian Klein used Bloomberg Technology to frame the company’s new autonomous enterprise platform as a bet that AI agents need business context more than proprietary models. He argued that SAP’s advantage is its access to ERP data and process knowledge, which can make agents reliable enough to coordinate work across finance, commerce, inventory, procurement and supply chains. Pressed on competition from partners such as AWS, Klein said SAP’s role is to provide the enterprise context layer while working with hyperscalers and data platforms to harmonize data beyond SAP systems.
Small Seed Checks Still Drive Venture-Scale Returns
A-Star co-founder and general partner Bennett Siegel argues that venture-style outperformance still depends on small, early checks rather than joining the largest AI financings. In a Bloomberg Tech interview, Siegel said A-Star’s new $450 million fund is designed to preserve its seed-stage discipline: backing a limited number of companies before products, markets and consensus are fully formed, then following on selectively as winners emerge. He frames billion-dollar formation rounds as a separate market, not proof that traditional seed investing has lost its relevance.
Cerebras Seeks $4.8 Billion as AI Compute Demand Lifts IPO Market
Bloomberg Technology’s Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow framed Cerebras’ upsized IPO as part of a wider shift in which AI infrastructure is drawing capital across chips, data centers, power, payments and security. Bloomberg’s Rebecca Torrence said the Cerebras offering was more than 20 times oversubscribed, while other guests argued that investor demand is being supported by earnings growth, capacity constraints and expanding use cases rather than chips alone. The broadcast’s through-line was that the AI buildout is becoming a market-wide infrastructure trade, with financing, energy supply, stablecoins, cybersecurity and local hardware all pulled into the same investment case.
Rezolve Frames Hostile Commerce.com Bid Around Stagnant Growth and Merchant Scale
Rezolve AI chief executive Dan Wagner used a Bloomberg Technology interview to defend his hostile bid for Commerce.com as an effort to accelerate Rezolve’s push for leadership in commerce and retail AI. Wagner argued that Commerce.com’s 60,000 merchants are an underused asset held back by weak growth and limited innovation, while Rezolve’s own revenue momentum and anti-hallucination technology could make that customer base more valuable under its control.
Rising Productivity Has Not Settled AI’s Role in the Labor Market
Bloomberg’s Stacey Vanek Smith describes a $400 wager between Stanford’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Northwestern’s Robert Gordon over whether US productivity growth will average 1.8% from 2020 to 2030. Smith says recent data, including 2.9% year-over-year growth in early 2026, suggest productivity is improving, but she cautions that the figures do not show how much is due to AI. The central dispute is whether AI is making workers more productive, or whether layoffs are raising output per hour by reducing labor hours.
Circle Says USDC Utility Can Offset Lower Reserve Yields
Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire told Bloomberg Technology that falling interest rates are not the defining constraint on the stablecoin issuer’s growth, arguing that USDC’s utility, transaction volume and network effects matter more than reserve yield alone. Pressed on Circle’s exposure to lower returns on the assets backing USDC, Allaire pointed to nearly $30 trillion of first-quarter on-chain USDC transactions, ARC’s planned launch and rising payments-network volume as evidence that Circle is trying to build a broader platform business around stablecoin activity.
AI Infrastructure Buildout Is Broadening the Stock Rally Beyond Tech
Carol Schleif, chief market strategist for Bank of Montreal, argues that the AI-driven equity rally is broader than the familiar mega-cap technology trade. In a Bloomberg Technology interview, she says earnings and revenue growth across much of the market, along with a multi-year infrastructure buildout in power, chips, materials and supply chains, are giving the rally fundamental support even as investors worry about geopolitical and energy bottlenecks.