Syz the moment

Data comes from PitchBook, as of May 1, 2025. PitchBook defines unicorns as venture-backed companies valued at $1 billion or more after a funding round, until it goes public, gets acquired, or drops below that valuation. Yangtze Memory, a Chinese flash memory chip developer, is 2025’s biggest unicorn so far with a $22.1 billion valuation. The company became a unicorn, by PitchBook’s definition, in April 2025 after it secured a $222 million investment from Quanhong Investment. Even if a company’s internal or market valuation exceeds $1 billion, PitchBook’s definition requires a qualifying funding event for official unicorn status. Abridge, an American healthcare AI startup that summarizes clinician-patient conversations into documentation, is the second-most valuable unicorn in the class of 2025. AI-driven companies dominate the list of the biggest unicorns of 2025—such as Synthesia (AI video generation), AnySphere (AI programming assistants), and The Bot Company (AI agents)—and have attracted significant investment in recent years. There have been 43 new unicorns created in 2025, as of May. The largest share (65%) of new unicorns in 2025 are from North America, followed by Europe (23%). Currently, the most valuable unicorns in the world are ByteDance, the creator of TikTok, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Source: Visual Capitalist

OpenAI will use Google Cloud to meet its growing compute needs, marking a move to diversify beyond Microsoft. The deal, finalized in May, also ties into its Stargate data center project. – Reuters

As the chart below shows, electricity used by data centers alone, already as much as that of Germany or France, would by 2030 be comparable to that of India, the world's third-largest electricity user. This would also leapfrog over the projected consumption by electric vehicles, using 1.5 times as much power than EVs by the decade’s end. Data center energy consumption is growing fastest in the United States, home to the world’s largest concentration of centers. Power needed for US server farms is likely to more than triple, exceeding 600 terawatt-hours by 2030, according to a medium-demand scenario projection by McKinsey & Co. The boom in building new warehouses for data stored in the cloud and answering AI queries underscores the urgency for policymakers, who need effective energy strategies to ensure adequate supplies can meet surging demands. Increasing electricity demand from the technology sector will stimulate overall supply, which, if responsive enough, will lead to only a small increase in power prices. More sluggish supply responses, however, will spur much steeper cost increases that hurt consumers and businesses and possibly curb growth of the AI industry itself. Source: IMF

Source: Spencer Hakimian, FT

"The question is not whether China will have AI. It already does. The question is whether one of the world's largest AI markets will run on American platforms. Shielding Chinese chipmakers from US competition only strengthens them abroad. Weakens America's position. Export restrictions have spurred China's innovation and scale. The AI race is not just about chips. It's about which stack the world runs on." "The US has based its policy on the assumption that China cannot make AI chips. That assumption was always questionable, and now it's clearly WRONG. China, has enormous manufacturing capability. In the end, the platform that wins the AI developers wins AI. Export controls should strengthen US platforms not drive half of the world's AI talent to rivals" Source: Evan on X

European makers of everything from switches to smart meters are providing the servers and infrastructure that power data centres for large language models and cloud computing, with traditional makers of electric equipment such as Legrand doubling their revenues thanks to data centres in recent years. Link to article 👉 https://lnkd.in/d8wsidBb Source: FT

• Massive 5 GW AI campus planned for Abu Dhabi • 200 MW AI cluster set to launch in 2026 • Oracle, SoftBank, and Cisco onboard to help build out the datacenter infrastructure Source: Stocktwits

TURNING AI SEARCH INTO A SHOPPING, TRAVEL & TICKETING PLATFORM Source: CNBC, Shay Boloor