{"slug": "help-someone-broke-the-vibes", "title": "Help, someone broke the vibes", "summary": "SpaceX closed a $150 million per month AI compute deal with open-source startup Reflection AI, converting itself into a neocloud provider. Meanwhile, AI infrastructure startup Baseten raised a $1.5 billion Series F at a $13 billion valuation, led by IVP and CapitalG. The deals highlight surging demand for AI compute and the rise of neoclouds as a new market force.", "body_md": "# Help, someone broke the vibes\n\n* Welcome to *.\n\n[Cautious Optimism](https://www.cautiousoptimism.news/), a newsletter on tech, business, and power. Modestly upbeat\n\n**Tuesday.** I’m hosting [This Week in AI](https://www.youtube.com/@ThisWeekinAIPodcast) later today. Look for it in your podcast feeds this evening. Today, we’re looking at the latest neocloud news, investing early, public ownership of technology, and why market vibes feel so nasty this week. To work! — Alex\n\n## 📈 Trending Up\n\n[Me, pretending to be shocked](https://www.wired.com/story/meta-accidentally-let-employees-access-each-others-keystroke-data/)…[loops](https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/22/the-ai-world-is-getting-loopy/)…[AI job cuts](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-22/oracle-layoffs-fueled-by-ai-reduces-workforce-by-21-000)…[Meta’s hardware ambitions](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-23/meta-launches-299-in-house-adventure-fury-kylie-jenner-starfire-glasses)…[pumping your (our) bags](https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-seeks-to-boost-quantum-computing-with-new-executive-orders-b2200634)…[Pax Silica](https://www.reuters.com/world/china/netherlands-join-us-led-pax-silica-ai-initiative-despite-asml-dispute-2026-06-23/)…[buying smaller companies](https://thenewstack.io/cursor-acquires-continue-coding/)…[cybersecurity](https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/22/openai-launches-new-initiative-to-help-find-and-patch-open-source-bugs/)? …[going the mattresses](https://deadline.com/2026/06/abc-the-view-fcc-trump-1236963832/)…\n\n**Neoclouds?** **SpaceX** has closed yet another AI compute deal, this time with American open-source AI startup **Reflection AI**. Per [ CNBC](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/22/spacex-ai-colossus-data-center-reflection.html), the contract is worth $150 million per month, starting in July of this year and continuing through 2029. As with SpaceX deals with\n\n**Anthropic** and\n\nJust how much spare compute was **xAI** sitting on before it merged with SpaceX and went public? Did it spend all those tens of billions on gear it didn’t need? (Odd use of equity capital, but what do I know.) What matters is that SpaceX appears to have so much compute that it is able (at present) to convert itself from a space connectivity business with space launch capabilities to a space connectivity business with space launch capabilities *and *a neocloud.\n\n- The good news for SpaceX is that the stock market likes neoclouds.\n**CoreWeave** is worth $60 billion,**Nebius** is worth $72 billion, and[token demand](https://openrouter.ai/rankings)is reaching new heights each week.\n\nThe bad news for SpaceX is that it will run up against the same problems that other major compute players with their own AI businesses must contend with: How to balance compute. SpaceX appears to be aggressively renting out its GPUs, while also bringing **Cursor **and its model training (and inference-serving) business in-house.\n\nPerhaps Cursor didn’t need all the compute that SpaceX had on offer, but I’d be a bit cheesed off if I thought I was going to get free rein over two massive compute clusters, only to discover that some of my arch-rivals (Anthropic’s Claude Code competes with Cursor; Google’s Antigravity is similar; both companies compete with Cursor’s Composer line of AI models) were getting access to the same.\n\n- I thought I was special!\n\n**Speaking of neoclouds: Baseten **just [announced ](https://www.baseten.co/blog/announcing-our-series-f/)a $1.5 billion Series F at a $13 billion valuation (its Series E worth $300 million was raised in January at a $5 billion valuation), led by **IVP **and **CapitalG **(** Alphabet**), along with a host of other investors, including **BOND **and **Nvidia**** ** Altimeter, Conviction, and Spark, alongisde IVP and others ([Australasian venture concern Blackbird made its largest-ever bet on the company](https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/ai-startup-baseten-hits-13-billion-valuation-australias-blackbird-makes-record-2026-06-23/?taid=6a3a233d9cbd970001f376ba&utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter)). How did Baseten raise so much more, so quickly? That’s easy. In its funding announcement, Baseten reported that in the last year its “revenue has grown 20x, and inference volume has grown 40x.”\n\n*That’ll do it.*\n\n**[Updated post-publication.]*** Baseten is not merely a neocloud; it helps companies train models and deploy them. Please don’t email me asking for a correction.*\n\n**Investing early:** Everyone wants to invest early; seeing multi-stage funds invest in ever-younger startups has been a trend for ages now. Why? As early-stage startup prices rise, the juicest returns may require embryonic check-writing.\n\nAnd it’s not merely the VCs who want to fête baby startups. Sure, **a16z **runs Speedrun ([$500,000 for 10% + $500,000 later](https://speedrun.a16z.com/faq)), **Pear **runs [PearX](https://pear.vc/pearx/), there’s the [ South Park Commons Founder Fellowship](https://www.southparkcommons.com/founder-fellowship/), and so on. The majors are getting in on the fun, too. Deciding that its several venture arms and internal skunkworks team and existing startup programs are not enough,\n\n[Google’s AI Futures Fund has built a 12-week program](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-23/google-taps-employee-alumni-network-with-ai-startup-incubator)for founders that will provide up to $100,000 in capital and another $350,000 worth of cloud and AI credits; the program intends to invite up to 20 companies to participate.\n\n- Hell, even the AI labs are having fun. OpenAI offered tokens for equity to entire batches of\n**Y Combinator** startups. Simple agreements for future tokens matter (Speedrun offers $5 million worth of software and cloud credits) as startups spend more on AI.\n\nSuch moves are cheap for Google and potentially very lucrative if they can hook a host of future breakout startups onto their technology. It’s the same game that OpenAI is playing. Put another way, relative compute abundance is something you can alchemise into a *startup early warning system* that gives you insight into which early-stage tech companies are breaking out. Which the AI labs very much want to platform, thank you very much.\n\n**Bending Spoons:** The Italian startup holding company’s IPO [set a price range of $26 to $28 per share](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2004711/000110465926076487/tm2613674-10_f1.htm). On a fully diluted basis, **Bending Spoons** is worth as much as $19 billion, depending on how you count shares. For a company previously valued at $11 billion, the figure is a coup.\n\n- At the top end of its range, Bending Spoons is worth around 7.5 its Q1 2026 run rate. Not bad, frankly, given how SaaS itself has traded this year.\n- Our notes on the Bending Spoons IPO are available\n[here](https://www.cautiousoptimism.news/bending-spoons-is-the-anti-ai-play/).\n\n[📉](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/servicenow-pledges-1-5bn-investment-110000403.html) Trending Down\n\n[📉](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/servicenow-pledges-1-5bn-investment-110000403.html)\n\n**Private ownership of AI?** POTUS wants a stake in American AI labs. Senator Bernie Sanders wants a stake in American AI labs. We have yet to get a figure from Trump, but Sanders wants to enact a “[one-time 50% tax on the stock of the largest AI companies](https://apnews.com/article/bernie-sanders-ai-public-ownership-57b9f20d96490083e2749adba0f13977),” which he reckons could be worth $7 trillion.\n\n- The tax would apply to AI companies that cross the $200 million threshold.\n- The fund would pay out 5% each year to Americans, or about $1,000 per. (I wonder if the $7 trillion number was sourced to work out to the flat, four-figure payment.)\n\nThis won’t happen, but it’s a marker in the ground. If POTUS, who [expressed dismay](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-tells-fortune-intel-stake-should-have-asked-more-2026-05-18/) that he only took 10% of Intel, wants 20%, that (insane) number will sound reasonable. Alas.\n\n**The vibes are bad**\n\nGoogle is getting clocked by the market for [losing famous researchers](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/22/alphabet-goog-stock-ai-departures.html) while struggling to return to the forefront of the AI industry. Seeing Alphabet lose altitude would be a story in and of itself, but the decline in a single company’s valuation is merely a component of a larger trend.\n\nTech stocks are set to open 3% lower today after South Korean stocks [took a mallet to the dome](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlgiWBCbCJk). What happened? After weeks of chaotic trading, investors [decided to pull back from their bets](https://www.businessinsider.com/south-korea-kospi-plunges-ai-tech-hyperscaler-stock-market-selloff-2026-6) on domestic memory companies, which have appreciated mightily in recent months. (It’s bad news for American memory companies, too.) The [recent SaaS boomlet has faded](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/WCLD/).\n\nThere’s more. **Bank of America** [forecasts ](https://investinglive.com/news/bofa-now-expects-fed-to-hike-interest-rates-three-times-this-year-20260622/)three upcoming 2026 rate hikes, which would greatly increase the cost of money and, therefore, the cost of doing business. As many tech companies are taking on debt to fund their infrastructure projects, higher rates don’t help. Tech stocks tend to trade inversely to interest rates, so seeing them trade lower in the wake of the news is not a shock.\n\nWhat else? SpaceX’s rapid ascent is reversing. After a stellar first few trading days as a public company, the AI-pilled company (see our note above) has shed hundreds of billions of dollars in value in recent days. It’s a pretty non-bullish signal for other companies that may want to list later this year (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc).\n\nEven more, regulation has arrived in the AI game. Now that AI models have become *obvious *cybersecurity threats and the United States government has forced the removal of several Anthropic models over concerns of their (mis)use, we may see a slower pace of AI progress as labs sort out what they are allowed to build and what they are not.\n\nAnd finally, the latest **Z.ai** model, GLM-5.2, is stonkingly good, undercutting the value (in theory) of American AI models generally; if Chinese models continue to improve while American AI progress stalls, quite a lot of illiquid wealth could be deleted here at home.\n\nHell, even crypto can’t find its footing. All told, the vibes could be flipping. I don’t think we’re heading for a subprime-style meltdown in the AI industry, but a reset wouldn’t be amiss. The question that has not been answered to date is what would trigger such an event. I reckon that no one thing could stop the current train (inertia is a hell of a drug). But a number of middle-sized cuts? In aggregate, the blood loss adds up.\n\nStocks may rally tomorrow. Investors may regain their optimism. But after a red-hot few years, mere drag could prove sufficient to put the market on a new trajectory sans a single, jarring shock.\n\n- Even a reset won’t stop companies from investing in AI or AI labs from building new, better models. But we could see a slowdown in AI deployment, a focus on model efficiency over raw performance, and a targeted use of expensive AI technologies rather than trying to fit machine intelligence into every nook and cranny.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/help-someone-broke-the-vibes", "canonical_source": "https://www.cautiousoptimism.news/help-someone-broke-the-vibes/", "published_at": "2026-06-23 13:29:20+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-24 00:42:32.311739+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-infrastructure", "ai-startups", "ai-products", "ai-research", "ai-chips"], "entities": ["SpaceX", "Reflection AI", "Baseten", "IVP", "CapitalG", "Alphabet", "Nvidia", "CoreWeave"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/help-someone-broke-the-vibes", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/help-someone-broke-the-vibes.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/help-someone-broke-the-vibes.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/help-someone-broke-the-vibes.jsonld"}}