May Tech Round-Up: The $725 Billion Bet: Big Tech Calls All-In on the AI Infrastructure Era
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Dear reader,
Welcome to the May edition of Tech Round-Up. The AI buildout has crossed from ambition into obligation. The models still matter, of course. But they increasingly resemble interchangeable turbines bolted onto a much larger industrial machine. Competitive advantage is migrating from intelligence to infrastructure, and the industry is behaving less like software and more like a utility: debt-funded, asset-heavy, and locked in a gripping arms race where nobody can afford to slow down first.
Original Thinking From North Ridge Partners
As the contest shifts from models to compute, distribution and economics, the $725 billion bet behind the AI infrastructure era is becoming impossible to ignore. When the world’s biggest companies simultaneously slash headcount and double their capital budgets, something structural is happening. This month we unpack what it means - definitely worth seven minutes of your time!
Short on Time? Listen to our AI Podcast
This month our AI podcasters, Claude Compute and Ann Thropic, debate whether the AI era is best understood as a software revolution or a power station construction programme, and what it means for investors and operators caught in between.
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Techtonic Shifts
Australia's tax trifecta: Self-inflicted wounds for the startup ecosystem. Proposed CGT discount and indexation changes could hit low-cost-base startup equity hardest. Investors have friendlier markets to choose from.
Three clouds walk into Q1 and split $92bn: AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure combined for $92bn in cloud revenue in Q1 2026. AI demand is doing most of the heavy lifting.
It is a two-horse race and Intel is watching from the paddock: Agentic AI is powering a CPU renaissance that favours AMD. Intel is left contemplating its existential options from a respectful distance.
Asia Pacific Tech News
TikTok puts $25bn into Thailand and calls it infrastructure: A record investment turns Thailand into a strategic hub in Asia's AI and data-centre arms race. Neighbours are taking notes.
Taocheche files for a Hong Kong IPO with Tencent and JD.com in its corner: China's leading second-hand car trading platform is heading to market. The Hong Kong IPO pipeline is finally looking like a pipeline again.
Canva to Wall Street: “are we there yet?” Australia's $5.5bn ARR design giant defers IPO to 2027 as it transitions to an AI business model.
Software & AI
Earnings & Yearnings: The hyperscalers deliver their strongest quarter in years. Azure grows 40%, Google Cloud surges 63% to $20bn, AWS grows 28% to $37.6bn. Meta posts revenue of $56.3bn, up 33%. ServiceNow grows 22% to $3.77bn, stock falls 18% on margin and AI fears. Shopify hits $3.17bn, up 34%, GMV crosses $100bn. Datadog crosses $1bn for the first time, up 32%, stock jumps 31%. Palantir posts $1.63bn, up 85%, Rule of 40 hits 145%. AppLovin delivers $1.84bn, up 59%, EBITDA margin 85%. Nvidia reports next week.
Shopify is building the operating system for agentic commerce: ARK Invest argues Shopify is positioning itself as the infrastructure layer for AI-native commerce. If agents do the buying, whoever owns the rails wins.
OpenMythos tries to model Anthropic's most powerful AI. What could possibly go wrong? The reconstruction is theoretical and based on public clues, but AI safety, IP and threat-model implications are significant.
Clash of the AI super-egos: Musk v Altman goes to trial in Oakland and it is not a small case. OpenAI's shift to a for-profit structure is at the centre of a courtroom battle that will define governance norms for every major AI lab. Popcorn: mandatory.
Aerospace & Defence Tech
Earnings & Yearnings: The defence primes deliver broadly strong results. Boeing posts $22.2bn, up 14%. General Dynamics smashes forecasts: up 10%, 2:1 book-to-bill. RTX grows 9%, raises guidance. L3Harris posts $5.7bn, up 12%, backlog a record $40.7bn. Huntington Ingalls grows 13% to $3.1bn, backlog $54bn. Northrop surges 82% on net income. Airbus falls 7% to EUR 12.7bn; deliveries drop to 114. Rheinmetall grows 8%, operating profit up 17%. Lockheed misses on revenue and EPS.
SpaceX files for a $1.75 trillion IPO. The largest in US history. By a very wide margin. A confidential S-1 was filed last month, targeting a $75bn raise at a $1.75 trillion valuation. Roadshow launches June 8. Starlink alone could be worth $150bn-plus.
True Anomaly raises $600m to shoot things down in orbit. Space defence is funded like a prime contractor now. The Colorado-based in-orbit defence startup's Series D brings total funding to $1.1 billion. Defence tech globally raised a record $7.7bn last year.
Europe's rearmament bill hits EUR 800bn by 2030. The bottleneck is factories, not funding. McKinsey projects European defence spending rising to 2.9% of GDP by 2030. Certified production capacity and interoperable systems integration are the real constraints.
Travel Tech
Earnings & Yearnings: Booking Holdings, Airbnb, Expedia, HBX Group, Web Travel Group and SiteMinder results are pending. The hotel chains post strong Q1 RevPAR growth.
Expedia's best quarter in 15 years. Stock drops >7%. Go figure. Over 30% of self-serve customer support is now AI-handled, with live booking integrations across ChatGPT and Claude. Investors wanted guidance upgraded. They didn't get it.
The curse of Hormuz: 13,000 flights cut, jet fuel still above $150. Carriers pull nearly 2m seats from May schedules as jet fuel stays above $150 per barrel. It’s ugly out there - for travellers, less choice and flexibility; and for the industry, a reminder that oil is a tax on everything.
OTA mark two is coming. The incumbents won't disappear, but the floor is absolutely moving (paywall). Panelists at Skift Forum Asia in Bangkok argue AI will rewire travel distribution as decisively as OTAs did in the early 2000s. Consumer trust and data remain the blockers.
Fintech
Earnings & Yearnings: The payments rails hold firm. Visa fiscal Q2 revenue hits $11.2bn, up 17%, cross-border volume up 12%. Mastercard delivers $8.4bn, up 16%, EPS up 23%. PayPal beats estimates at $8.35bn, up 7%, but guides Q2 EPS down 9%, sending shares down 10%. Adyen hits EUR 620.8m in net revenue, up 16% reported and 20% in constant currency; volume up 21%.
PayPal separates Venmo and gives Wall Street the breakup story it wanted. The payments giant is reorganising around separate operating units as investors demand clearer monetisation and sharper strategic accountability. Scale alone no longer earns fintech a premium if nobody can explain the story in one slide.
Australia's big tech levy drops the theatre of negotiation for the logic of a $250m threshold. Australia's attempt to make digital platforms pay for journalism skips the negotiating table. Social and search giants above $250m in local revenue will simply be charged.
Bullish buys Equiniti for $4.2bn. Tokenization needs old-world plumbing after all. The exchange’s biggest acquisition is less about trading tokens and more about owning the shareholder registry and settlement plumbing for tokenized securities. Capital markets infrastructure is quietly moving on-chain, one back-office function at a time.
Stuff We Found Interesting
37 new unicorns last month, the highest count in four years. Most are under three years old. Robotics led with six, frontier labs added four. The Crunchbase Unicorn Board added $900bn in Q1 alone. The vintage risk is quietly accumulating.
Google kills Project Mariner and folds agentic AI into core products. The demo era is officially over. The experimental browser agent is retired into Gemini and AI Mode. Unresolved questions about user trust, permissions, and autonomy come along for the ride.
AI agents browsing the web use 45x more tokens than API agents. Looking human is expensive. A Reflex benchmark finds visual browser automation dramatically pricier than structured API integration. The architectural choice between impressive demo and cost-effective production is no longer academic.
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