There's always money in the data center

OpenAI released hundreds of math proofs this week, including a proof of the quasi-Riemann hypothesis and a solution to Erdős's short Egyptian-fraction conjecture, drawing a mix of praise and complaints from mathematicians and PhD students who say the model ran over their work. Anthropic separately expanded its cybersecurity verification program while warning about the offensive cyber capabilities of open AI models from China, prompting critics to ask where the predicted attacks from those models are. The newsletter also flagged Meta's heavy advertising push for its Muse personal agent in New York City and a data center IPO.

There's always money in the data center And: Maths Crunchbase Muse Wednesday. I'm in NYC for a few events, and I am gobsmacked at how many Meta Muse ads I have seen. Sure, Carta blanketed some subway stations, but of all the tech ads I have seen, Muse has recurred most frequently. While it is well and good that Meta's AI team is enjoying a win, keep in mind that the company is working hard to help its Muse personal agent scale now . My take? It wants to win this particular market. Its rivals won't go down without a fight see: Trending Up . Today we're talking math, Crunchbase, and a fascinating data center IPO. To work — Your friend, Alex . - 📈 Trending Up: Raising $10B for a venture fund https://www.wsj.com/finance/venture-firm-behind-chip-startup-groq-targets-10-billion-megafund-030ce4a0?st=MjELQf&reflink=desktopwebshare permalink ... government borrowing costs https://x.com/TheStalwart/status/2107821116383232317 ... Google annoying Finland https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/07/google-finland-data-center-halt.html .... MiniMax's Space Bunny Alpha model https://openrouter.ai/stealth/space-bunny-alpha ... AI agents as spouses https://x.com/SoniaBaschez/status/2107267198091997211 ... public corruption https://abcnews.com/Politics/trump-sons-investments-won-billions-pentagon-contracts-election/story?id=137049598&cid=social twitter abcn ... Hermes agent's parent company https://www.wsj.com/pro/venture-capital/nous-research-scores-90-million-to-bring-open-source-ai-assistant-to-enterprises-516f9208 ... - 📉 Trending Down: Ties to China https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/07/webull-china-national-security-risk-congress.html ... Grok 4.7, last seen crying in the corner https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/musk-says-spacex-will-sometimes-use-rival-models-power-grok-bot ... Microsoft's willingness to fund Anthropic https://www.theinformation.com/articles/meta-microsoft-work-wean-staff-anthropics-claude ... buying someone else's video games https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20261007399251/en/Google-and-Unity-Partner-on-New-AI-Gaming-Platform-for-the-Next-Era-of-Interactive-Entertainment ? ... Maths, sorted: To no one's surprise, OpenAI dropped hundreds of math proofs this week https://openai.com/index/sharing-ai-progress-in-mathematics/ , many of which were formalized. The math world has received it with joy, awe, annoyance, and even downright disgust . PhD students are reporting https://www.reddit.com/r/mathematics/comments/1wzg35m/comment/pebzhr8/ that their work was just run over by an AI model. - You can't put the genie back into the toothpaste tube, and neither can you put the toothpaste back into the lamp. The only question I have is how long until we can make similar progress in other fields that are less legible to AI. Amongst the myriad mathematical papers OpenAI has released, its proof https://github.com/openai/math/blob/main/preprints/The-Quasi-Riemann-Hypothesis-October-5-2026/paper2.pdf of the quasi-Riemann hypothesis and its solution https://github.com/openai/math/blob/main/preprints/Short-Egyptian-fractions-September-25-2026/Short-Egyptian-fractions-September-25-2026.pdf of Erdos's short Egyptian-fraction conjecture are earning the most conditional plaudits from industry denizens. I will ask my math professor bestie how he's feeling and report back. AI risk? As Anthropic expands its cybersecurity programs https://www.anthropic.com/news/cyber-verification-program and shouts about the rising offensive cyber capabilities of open AI models from China, some folks are asking: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/the-cyber-risk-discourse-is-broken Where are all the hacks from people using these supposedly dangerous open models? Is Anthropic crying wolf? I've wondered about that, too. The most interesting response I've received from security folks is that the world is so compute-constrained, it's hard to cobble together the chips and power needed to do real damage with open models. Is the AI race hoovering up all spare compute, leaving the good guys with FLOPs and the bad guys with none? - I don't know, but I will say that we've had open-weight AI models in the market now for months that are theoretically cyber-dangerous and the lights are still on. What are we missing? Hey, look, Crunchbase Crunchbase, a well-known database of private-market information, released new AI-related products this week. Disclosures up front: I am a Crunchbase shareholder from my time at the company building Crunchbase News https://news.crunchbase.com/ , and I have friends there hey Gené https://news.crunchbase.com/author/gene/ . Still, Crunchbase in the AI era is worth considering. When I joined Crunchbase in early 2017, the company had recently launched Crunchbase Pro https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/12/crunchbase-pro-brings-new-search-and-analysis-features-for-power-users/ , a SaaS service with tools that let you comb through its startup-heavy dataset. The company soon after raised an $18 million Series B. Enterprise products followed, and Crunchbase raised even more capital over the years. Fast forward to February 2025 https://about.crunchbase.com/press/press-releases/crunchbase-declares-historical-data-dead-relaunches-as-an-ai-powered-predictions-engine-with-up-to-95-accuracy , Crunchbase "relaunch ed as an AI-powered solution offering live, predictive intelligence, providing a dynamic and forward-looking view of the market," and I soon after spoke to the CEO on This Week in Startups about the predictions product https://www.linkedin.com/posts/our-ceo-jager-mcconnell-shared-more-about-ugcPost-7300286797140369408-KHtc/ . The company later reported https://about.crunchbase.com/press/press-releases/crunchbase-introduces-market-insights-as-enterprise-demand-for-private-market-predictive-intelligence-drives-acv-growth that it saw 900% average contract value growth in Q1 2026 "driven by surging enterprise demand ... for trusted private market data to fuel AI transformation." Don't worry, we're going somewhere with all this. Trust me. This summer, Crunchbase started dropping new AI features, including an MCP server https://about.crunchbase.com/press/press-releases/crunchbase-launches-mcp-to-bring-private-market-intelligence-into-ai-workflows and a deal with OpenAI https://about.crunchbase.com/press/press-releases/crunchbase-private-market-data-is-available-in-chatgpt-for-financial-services to make its data "available within ChatGPT for Financial Services." Nice. This week, Crunchbase announced Crunchbase AI https://about.crunchbase.com/press/press-releases/crunchbase-launches-private-market-intelligence-layer-for-ai-agents-llms-and-the-applications-they-power , a product that ties together its MCP server, access to its data via LLMs, and use of its data for "training or grounding a proprietary model . " So we've so far seen: - Crunchbase the wiki during the Web 2.0 era. - Crunchbase as SaaS during the SaaS explosion Crunchbase Pro . - Crunchbase as AI product offering predictions . - Crunchbase as product offering for AI MCP, integration into well-known LLMs, etc . Notably, Crunchbase kept its prior versions under the hood when it built new stuff. Crunchbase was a wiki, which you can still help edit. You can still use its SaaS service as well as its more recent AI products. And now it's offering its blood as AI grist. I suspect it will do so from here on out. - Maxim: Once you go headless, can you ever regain your head? Is Crunchbase bobbing and weaving its way through a changing market, or meandering? That's a value judgment, and one I am too biased to make. But it is interesting to watch a company tack its way through several technology cycles. May this version of Crunchbase grow explosively and go public. I have 529 accounts to fill Can you make money on data centers without buying chips? Subscribe to keep reading Everything below is for paid subscribers