The AI complex roars on

Happy Friday, friends. We close out a week in which the AI complex spent money at a scale that makes our regional deal flow look positively restrained, Xi Jinping landed in Cairo for the first time in a decade, and Riyadh had full conference halls nearly the entire week.

Let’s start with the money. Nvidia is paying roughly USD 13 bn for Hugging Face, the open-source platform at the center of a recent OpenAI-linked security breach and a company it had already backed. Nvidia is selling the deal as protection for open-source developers. OpenAI shipped GPT-6 Astra, which it says leads on software engineering, science and cybersecurity, and which president Greg Brockman called a “generational leap in capability.” And Anthropic is finalizing a USD 15 bn credit facility ahead of an IPO set to eclipse SpaceX’s as the largest in history, on annualised revenue already north of USD 65 bn. Three balance-sheet events in three days, each of them underwritten on the assumption that demand keeps compounding.

This morning’s Lede asks the same underwriting question of our side of the world. We look at the bankability of GCC infrastructure projects when volume assumptions can no longer be a reliable guarantee of project success due to the war.

And the number we can’t stop thinking about: 900%. That’s the salary premium China is now paying Taiwanese talent specializing in chips design and production, with many engineers moving to mainland China, Taiwanese industry veterans told tech news outlet Rest of World. The talent poaching appears to be part of a wider campaign to secure critical insights into Taiwan’s revered chips industry, with China setting up front tech companies on the self-governed island to embed themselves in microchips supply chains and talent. Every capital in our region is building data centers and courting fabs. The scarcest input in that industry is a person who knows how to run one, and someone has now put a nine-fold price on them. –Salma