Lead story: Nvidia’s $4 trillion cliffhanger?

Nvidia became the first company in history to surpass a $4 trillion market valuation, but it may not be the most valuable of the AI era. Its position as the indispensable supplier of AI infrastructure is secure. But history shows that the first giant of every general-purpose technology boom sees its dominance fade as innovation spreads. In each previous wave, the early choke-point – be it steel, gasoline, operating systems or now AI accelerators – saw its margins migrate downstream as complementary layers matured. In the electricity era, U.S. Steel and AT&T scaled with the grid before profits migrated downstream to appliance makers. Mass production and the interstate-highway system lifted GM and the oil majors. That was until oil shocks, emissions rules and global rivals eventually rebalanced the field. Likewise, Microsoft saw its core OS margins plateau as value shifted to cloud infrastructure and SaaS.

But this market might be different. Unlike steel and oil, Nvidia has a massive software ecosystem. We’re in the early stages of AI innovation, Nvidia may have enough runway to innovate into new markets or move vertically up the stack. And finally, unlike steel and oil, there is no chance someone will happen upon a cache of high-end AI accelerators buried in the wilderness. Capital requirements to be at the cutting edge are real barriers to entry. (Bloomberg) #Hardware

Key signals, quick scan

A 30-second scan of four secondary signals that hint at where the curve is bending.

• Cloudflare’s new anti-scraping tool blocks most data crawlers but can’t block Google’s, since its crawler is essential for search indexing. That loophole gives Google privileged access to the open web while locking out rivals, deepening a data asymmetry that tilts the AI race in its favor. (The Information) #AI

• Helsing joins Anduril to adapt its AI software for unmanned fighter jets but remains years from deployment. Anduril’s in-house design, built from scratch, leads the race to market. Drone warfare has revolutionized ground combat and is making inroads in naval operations. How soon before the sky becomes no-man’s land? (FT, CBS News) #Defense

• Amazon Web Services will launch an AI agent marketplace next week, with Anthropic as a key partner. We’re seeing a shift toward agents, not just models, as the next commercial platform layer. Unlike the GPT Store, whose prompt-based tools saw limited uptake, these modular agents require orchestration, context engineering, and API integration, raising the potential for monetization. (TechCrunch) #AIApplications #Agents

• The US is borrowing from China’s own playbook as it takes a 15% stake in MP Materials, its largest rare-earth miner, to rebuild a domestic supply chain for critical magnets. The move comes after China curbed rare-earth exports, exposing a vulnerability the US can’t ignore. Alongside AI chips, critical minerals have become one of the two defining economic levers in 21st-century power politics. (WSJ) #Politics

Future focus

A pulse-check on the ideas shaping our long-term trajectory.

• MIT researchers boosted the CO₂-capturing efficiency of a bacterial variant of Rubisco, Earth’s most abundant but sluggish enzyme, by up to 25% using directed evolution. If applied in crops, this could unlock major gains in photosynthesis, increasing yields and easing pressure on arable land in a warming world. (ScienceDaily)

• Autonomous AI system SPARKS has independently discovered two novel protein-design principles. Unlike typical models, SPARKS completes the full scientific loop (hypothesis generation, simulation, critique, and manuscript drafting) without prompts or human oversight. (LinkedIn)

• Meta’s new SecAlign model is the first LLM with openly available model weights to include built-in defences against prompt-injection attacks—a common security vulnerability in AI systems. The model achieves state-of-the-art security performance comparable to commercial, closed-source rivals. (arXiv)

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