Compute, Combat, & Criticality

📈 Portfolio Pulse

🤖 Anthropic: Compute, Capital, & Combat

Three big moves this week. First, a compute deal with SpaceX: Anthropic is taking the entire Colossus 1 data center, more than 300MW and 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs online within the month, and flagged interest in multi-gigawatt orbital compute on top. Second, the launch of Claude finance agents and Microsoft 365 integration: 10 ready-to-run agent templates for banks, asset managers, and insurers, plus Moody's, Verisk, and S&P platforms embedded as native apps. Third, the Pentagon snub. The DoD signed classified-network AI deals with eight providers including SpaceX, OpenAI, and Reflection AI. Anthropic was not among them. Three LFG portfolio names on the inside, the fourth fighting it out in court. Anthropic | CNBC | Fortune | AP News

🎯 Kalshi: From $11B to $22B in Five Months

Kalshi confirmed a $1B Series F at a $22B valuation, led by Coatue with Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, and Paradigm participating. That is double the $11B mark from five months ago, the company's third round in seven months, each one roughly doubling the prior valuation. The growth shows up in the numbers: institutional trading volume jumped 800% in the last six months, and annualized trading volume tripled to $178B. Kalshi now hosts 90% of US prediction market activity. The headwind to watch: cease-and-desist orders from Nevada, New Jersey, Illinois, and others arguing certain event contracts resemble unlicensed sports betting. The category is winning. The state-by-state fight is where it gets tested. TechCrunch | Kalshi News

🛰️ Anduril: Anchoring the Golden Dome

Anduril announced the team for its Golden Dome space-based missile interceptor work. Anduril is leading a coalition that includes K2 Space, Voyager Technologies, Impulse Space, Inversion Space, and Sandia National Laboratories. The DoD has awarded 12 companies up to $3.2B combined to develop space-based interceptors, with SpaceX, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and RTX/Raytheon also on the list. The goal is an integrated demonstration by 2028. The program puts weapons in orbit so the US can engage threats earlier in their flight path, before they ever leave the launch arc. Reuters | Bloomberg

 ⚛️ Aalo Atomics: Cleared for Criticality

The DOE-Idaho Operations Office approved Aalo's Documented Safety Analysis for the Aalo-X Critical Test Reactor on April 30. Translation: the most rigorous regulatory gate before a US nuclear facility can operate. Aalo is now in the final pre-operations phase, the Operational Readiness Review. The Critical Test Reactor will validate the full-scale 10MWe core before sodium coolant is added. The bigger story underneath this: Aalo is one of the rare private companies designing, licensing, AND independently operating its own nuclear facilities. That combination is the actual unlock for powering AI data centers on customer sites. Onwards to criticality. Aalo Updates

🦑 Kraken: Crypto Meets Equities

Kraken launched Crypto + xStocks Bundles, pre-built portfolios that combine tokenized US stocks and ETFs with digital assets, automatically rebalanced inside one app. Examples: S&P 500 + Bitcoin, Big Tech + Crypto (Apple, Meta, NVIDIA, Tesla on-chain alongside ETH and SOL). xStocks have already cleared $25B in volume over the past year. Kraken+ members get zero trading fees. Not yet available in the US. The setup matters: tokenized equities are no longer a side experiment. They are becoming a core component of the modern multi-asset wallet, and Kraken is making the bundle the default surface area. Kraken Blog

🔮 Perplexity: The $400M Snap Deal Is Off

Snap and Perplexity amicably ended their announced integration. The plan, signed last November, would have made Perplexity the default AI inside Snapchat for 943M monthly users, with Perplexity paying Snap $400M over a year. Q1 closed and the rollout never happened. Snap's investor letter confirmed the cancellation, citing no agreement on a path to broader rollout. Perplexity remains active on Snap as an advertiser. The takeaway: distribution deals at this scale are hard, and not every AI partnership the tape gets excited about actually ships. PYMNTS 

👀 Watch List

🧠 Cerebras: IPO on Deck

Cerebras filed and priced its long-awaited IPO. Targeting up to $3.5B at $115-125 per share, 28M shares offered, valuing the AI chipmaker at up to $26.6B. That is up from $23B in February and lands against a backdrop of OpenAI committing to spend significant capital on Cerebras hardware. The OpenAI trial added a wrinkle this week: president Greg Brockman disclosed a personal stake in Cerebras during the same period the two companies were discussing an acquisition. Whatever you think of the governance picture, the IPO is the strongest signal yet that the AI infrastructure layer is entering the public market window. TechCrunch | CNBC

🌊 Panthalassa: Data Centers at Sea

Oregon-based Panthalassa raised $140M led by Peter Thiel to build floating, wave-powered AI data centers. The bet: 85-meter steel orbs that bob in the open ocean, converting wave motion into electricity for onboard AI chips, cooled naturally by seawater, with data transmitted via low-earth-orbit satellites. Other backers include John Doerr, Marc Benioff's TIME Ventures, Max Levchin's SciFi Ventures, Hanwha, Susquehanna Sustainable Investments, Super Micro Computer, and Figma's Dylan Field. The capital funds a pilot manufacturing facility near Portland, with Ocean-3 nodes scheduled for the northern Pacific later in 2026 and commercial deployment in 2027. The thesis: AI inference is going where the energy is, not where the office is. Wild. GeekWire 

💬 Prompt

What can I help you with?

What would the five people who know me best say is my biggest blind spot? Not the version they'd tell me to my face. The version they'd tell each other when I'm not in the room.

📚 Content

🤠 Proto-Town: The Texas Manufacturing Experiment

Ashlee Vance gets inside a quiet Central Texas town that has spent the last few years trying to rebuild American manufacturing from first principles. Less press conference, more dirt and steel. If you want to know what the reindustrialization story actually looks like at the ground level, this is the field report. TEXAS!

🤖 The Best Open Models Are Coming Out of China

Reflection AI's Misha Laskin sat down with CNBC's Squawk on the Street to talk valuation, the global AI race, and the uncomfortable thesis that the leading open-source AI models are increasingly shipping from China, not California. A frontier-lab CEO's view from inside the race. As investors, this was a great interview to watch.

📊 Charts & Crafts

We love visuals. Tech illustrator and explainer extraordinaire Natalie Fratto just dropped her most-requested hand-drawn video yet: a clear, compelling breakdown of Anduril.

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