4 min read

Happy Wednesday!

Google has sold so many of its AI chips that its own researchers are queuing for them. Washington is lending $5 billion to get more power out of old nuclear reactors, and a man who sat through more than 10,000 meetings has turned the jargon he heard into an app.

Google has sold so much of its AI chip capacity that its own researchers have had to wait for access, and OpenAI is now lining up as a buyer. The ChatGPT maker plans to buy Google's tensor processing units, or TPUs, according to a person familiar with the matter.

OpenAI has used Google's chips before, having started to rent them in June 2025. Soon afterwards it said it had no active plans to use them in its products. Since then Google has started selling TPU hardware directly to a small group of customers, with Anthropic among the buyers driving demand. On Tuesday Oracle said it would offer TPUs through its cloud as well.

At the same time, OpenAI is building a chip of its own, called Jalapeno, with Broadcom, and plans to put it into use by the end of this year. The team behind it is run by Richard Ho, who previously worked on Google's TPUs. Alphabet's finance chief has said most TPU sales revenue will come in 2027.

OpenAI hired a Google TPU veteran to build its own chip, and last week it put its models on Google Cloud. Buying Google's chips on top of that leaves a company that competes with Google in search with a growing share of its future running on a rival's hardware.

Lucas

Seven of the eight nuclear plants getting a new $5 billion government loan have already sold most or all of their extra power to Google, Meta or Amazon. The US Department of Energy is lending the money to Constellation Energy to add 1.1 gigawatts across the eight sites.

The money will pay to “uprate” 11 existing reactors, the industry term for expanding a reactor's capacity, often by using more highly enriched uranium and upgrading equipment. Google has signed up for the extra output from Limerick in Pennsylvania and four plants in Illinois. Amazon is taking Calvert Cliffs in Maryland, and Meta is effectively buying the entire Clinton plant in Illinois.

Constellation had already committed more than $7 billion to the work, and says the loan “could lower financing costs”. On Tuesday the Department of Energy said the loan supports “affordable, reliable power to American homes and businesses”, though there is no evidence the new capacity will lower prices for residential customers. Constellation's announcement doesn't say whether rates will hold or fall, and the company would not confirm the government's claim when asked.

A cheaper loan helps the companies best able to pay for the work, while the households named in the government's statement get no promise about their bills.

Lucas

“We must dashboard the outputs to enable us to focus on operational directives and break the paradigm” is one of the sentences an app called Executive Eightball can write for you. Its creator, Dave Doty, is an executive who says he has sat through more than 10,000 meetings and wrote down the buzzwords and business clichés from every one of them.

Doty says he has been collecting them for decades, and the database he built now powers the app, which is out on iPhone and Android. He claims it can produce about 270 million unique sentences in 15 languages. The listing promises you will “Speak fluent corporate nonsense instantly” and suggests uses such as presentation icebreakers and “Fake CEO energy”.

Doty calls it “sort of what would happen if Dilbert and George Costanza had a love child”. In his latest email, he described it as “a paradigm shift for corporate leadership and my greatest lifetime contribution to society”.

I’ll circle back on this take…

Lucas