AI chip wars, Anthropic to the Middle East & more (July 23, 2025)

Happy Wednesday!

We’ve got AI therapists, talent wars, and a $500B Stargate that may or may not exist. Let’s talk OpenAI’s mega Oracle deal, Meta raiding Google’s mathletes, and more.

Let’s get into it.

💼 Big Moves & Bigger Bets

🧠 OpenAI’s $30B Chip Grab with Oracle

OpenAI will pay Oracle $30B annually for data center services tied to the Stargate project, aiming to secure over 1M AI chips. This triples OpenAI’s current revenue and signals its push toward GPT-6 scale, but a WSJ scoop suggests the broader Stargate plan is unraveling, with internal disagreements and scaled-back 2025 goals.

🔁 DeepMind’s Math Champs Flip to Meta & Microsoft

Fresh off DeepMind’s gold medal win at the International Math Olympiad, three of its top researchers jumped ship to Meta. Meanwhile, Microsoft poached 20+ DeepMind staffers, including the head of Gemini Chatbot, highlighting a ruthless AI talent war among tech giants.

🌍 Ecosystem Shifts & Global Strategy

🌐 Anthropic Walks Back Middle East Investment Ban

In a leaked memo, Anthropic’s CEO said the company will now accept Gulf investments, despite earlier ethical concerns. He acknowledged it’s hard to operate under a “no bad person should benefit” rule, especially when OpenAI is already building data centers in the UAE. Ethics vs. competitiveness is the new boardroom dilemma.

💥 Qwen3-Coder Steps Up as Claude Rival

Alibaba’s new Qwen3-Coder, built with 480B parameters, delivers SOTA coding performance and even tool-use capabilities on par with Claude Sonnet 4. They also dropped a Gemini-inspired open-source command-line tool.

🧠 Brain-Inspired AI Crushes Benchmarks

Sapient Intelligence released a “System 1 + System 2” reasoning model that outperforms OpenAI’s o3-mini using just 1,000 examples. The 27M-parameter model proves that smarter architecture might beat bigger models.

🛠️ Tools of the Day

• Chronicle – Designer-grade presentations instantly

• Substrata – Real-time sales psychology analyzer

• Duetoday – Transcribes and quizzes your lectures

• Qwen Code – Open-source Gemini-style coding shell

💡 Prompt of the Day

⚡ Quick Hits

• Amazon acquires Bee, an AI wearable that records and summarizes your life

• Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite now GA at $0.10/1M input tokens

• Elon Musk says xAI targeting 50M H100 GPU equivalent compute

• Apple brings back AI summaries in iOS 26 beta

🧠 TLDR

OpenAI’s $30B Oracle deal signals a huge infrastructure leap, but Stargate’s vision may be fizzling amid partner tension. Meta and Microsoft are poaching AI stars at a breakneck pace, Claude and Qwen are reshaping coding workflows, and new AI models might be too good at imitating their teachers. The next frontier? Making AI not just smart, but strategic.

Until tomorrow,
David