Power, Rights, and Reach
What Amazon, Anthropic, TikTok, YouTube, and the Sphere tell us about control
Not all the news this week is coming out of Amsterdam. While IBC sets the stage for demos and deals, the bigger signals are showing up elsewhere. Amazon is chasing scale at the chip level. Anthropic is paying for shortcuts in data. TikTok is seeing if likes can become transactions. YouTube is stepping into the harsh light of live sports. And Las Vegas is reminding us that even a film from 1939 can find new economics when the venue changes.
Amazon’s Trainium Bet and Anthropic’s Scale-Up
SemiAnalysis reports that Amazon is doubling down on AI infrastructure through its Trainium chips, with Anthropic as both anchor customer and partner. The numbers are eye-popping: multi-gigawatt expansions of compute capacity, the kind of scale usually reserved for national projects. AWS is betting that vertically integrated silicon and a close tie with a frontier model lab can reclaim ground from Nvidia, Microsoft, and Google.
Why it matters: This is infrastructure as foreign policy. Whoever controls effi…
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