Thursday! While many in the market bet on AI and its constituent inputs, others are pushing the value of gold (now over $4,000 per ounce) and silver (around $50 per ounce) to new heights. You normally see investors flock to precious metals when they are very nervous about the economy. Meanwhile, tech companies on the S&P500 are forecasting strong Q3 results. Gird thy wallet for the upcoming earnings season; it could puncture or sustain current investor enthusiasm for tech shares (and, thus, the stock market).
📈 Trending Up: The government shutdown … Atlassian … bubble fears … rare earth diplomacy … support for self-driving cars … Intel’s chip-making chops? … tiny AI models … consumer privacy … European AI … POTUS-aligned media empires …
Round of the Day: Reflection AI wants to build open-source AI here in the States. It just raised $2 billion per the Times, with Nvidia writing the largerst check. I agree that having home-grown, open-source alternatives to domestic closed-source models from OpenAI, Anthropic and others is a good idea. How to monetize the resulting product, however, will prove interesting. What’s the value of support and hosting a free model, compared to one with locked-up IP?
📉 Trending Down: App Stores … free speech … free speech … free speech … free speech … tax collection … press freedom … the future human birthrate … Chrome …
Things That Matter
The newsletter has been a bummer lately, chock full of worry about tech capex, trade tensions, economic indicators, and signs of rising authoritarianism at home. But CO is not about holding onto a pillow in the dark. So, for the rest of today, let’s spin up some positive vibes.
Base Power is freaking cool: Base Power is a neat startup. It wants to put a battery next to your house. Then, it fills the battery when power costs are low, and unloads it when they are high. Even more, if power goes out, your house has a battery sitting there ready to keep the lights on.
What’s fun is that Base offers its consumer customers a flat, low rate for power, making its margin by abritraging peak, and off-peak power prices. The company raised $1 billion, it announced yesterday. Jason and I had its CEO Zach Dell (of Dell family fame) on the podcast yesterday, if you want a deeper dive.
What’s great about Base is that it takes current generation and effectively allows for greater peak power availability while also lowering consumer power costs. More grid capacity, more grid resiliency, and lower end-customer electricity customers are just what the doctor ordered as we see AI data centers suck up more and more juice. If I could throw my lunch budget at the company, I would. (A power-focused startup with an AI angle? Want another? Check out ExoWatt’s homepage. I had them in for an interview last November.)
The space economy is cooking: This week, recently public Firefly Space (our IPO coverage) snapped up SciTech for $855 million. The deal, executed through a mix of cash ($300 million) and shares ($555 million) brings the 45 year-old SciTec into the arms of a far younger space upstart with dreams of defense contracts.
Firefly brings launch vehicles and in-orbit technology to the table, while SciTec adds “software and big data processing capabilities.” The combination is therefore something like a space-based Anduril? We’ll see, but it’s fun to see a recent IPO put those proceeds to work in a hurry.
Meanwhile, Stoke Space raised $510 million this week, more than doubling its capital raised to date in a single round. The launch vehicle company also snapped up a $100 million debt facility (thank you, Silicon Valley Bank). Its new capital will provide Stoke with “runway to complete development and demonstrate Nova through its first flights.” Nova, the company’s launch vehicle (pointy rocket) is designed to be fully reusable, with quick turnaround times to allow for more trips to orbit and back.
Stoke is also a software company, offering its Boltline cloud software to other companies that are want to execute rapid, complex hardware engineering projects. Spun up from its own needs, Stoke is therefore a brilliant hybrid of rocket shop and software slinger. The company name-checked Boltline for more investment in the wake of its latest funding round.
Why do we need Stoke Space’s Nova launch solution if we already have SpaceX’s proven Falcon9 in the market? Redundancy, in part, but also because more launch competition will lead to better products and lower prices. And as Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston told me earlier this year, the further you can lower launch costs, the greater the breadth of tasks you can execute in space on a commercially-viable basis. If we’re going to build space-based data centers, we need companies like Rocket Lab to land another multi-launch contract. Which it just did.
OpenAI opens new revenue tap: Back in August, OpenAI launched a new subscription plan in India. Called ChatGPT Go, for $5 per month, customers of the service in India were given access to higher usage limits and greater in-AI memory. The service was later expanded to Indonesia. This week, OpenAI brought ChatGPT Go to sixteen more countries.
TechCrunch reports that “paid subscribers in India have doubled since the launch” of ChatGPT Go, giving OpenAI a healthy new slug of revenue. Even more, TechCrunch also wrote that OpenAI’s Southeast Asian userbase has recently quadrupled. By bringing its Go paid service to a host of countries in that area, the American AI giant could quickly see its revenue from the region scale rapidly.
That’s pretty darn good news, given that a large chunk of the domestic stock market appears to rest on OpenAI scaling without hiccup through 2147 (roughly). I kid, but it’s pretty darn bullish that OpenAI is seeing early success with its Go product in India, the world’s most populous nation and one with deep technical chops to boot. There’s gold in them hills.
Legal AI could be the next coding-like hit
Devin. Codex. Claude Code. Cursor. Kiro. Poolside. GitHub Copilot. Grok Code Fast 1.
The list of AI startups and AI models and products that developers can bring to bear on their work is incredible. Why? Because 84% of developers in the most recent StackOverflow 2025 survey reported using such tools “ in their development process,” up from 76% in 2024. Even more, some 47% of respondents reported using AI tools daily, while just 16% said that they had no plan to use them at all. That’s down from just over 24% in 2024.
The Information’s Natasha Mascarenhas reports that Cursor could see its valuation rise to $30 billion in a coming funding round.
While AI tools for writing software have their critics — concerns include overreliance by junior developers, more hype than substance, and management fiat to use them that irks some more senior devs — they have plainly wormed their way deep into the software creation process. And that’s big business. Could AI hve a similar impact on the legal world?