Google Closes Historic $32B Deal & Nvidia Drops Hot New AI Chip
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Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Pryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, Google eased on down the road with a record-breaking acquisition of Wiz. Then pro tennis players are not happy with their working conditions and are suing to do something about it. It's Wednesday, March 19th. Let's ride. Let's ride.

Home at last. Yesterday evening, NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore splashed down off the coast of Florida, ending a space saga that captivated the world. Originally intended to be an eight-day mission, their stay on the International Space Station lasted 286 days due to technical problems with a Boeing Starliner spacecraft that carried them up to the ISS. During their nine-month journey, Wilmore and Williams collided

covered some distance. They orbited the Earth 4,576 times, traveled 121 million miles, and played over 142,000 rounds of Never Have I Ever. Toby, gravity has never felt so good. Gravity is undefeated.

One of the coolest parts of a splashdown off the Gulf Coast of Florida is civilians generally know where it will happen. So some boaters kind of get out there and try to watch it. But SpaceX and the Coast Guard, they work to keep them away so they can do the retrieval safely. But you can't control what happens under the water, which is why it was very funny that this huge pot of dolphins swam up while the retrieval was happening. They're curious animals. They just wanted to see what was going on, but not a bad idea.

unplanned welcome crew after 280 days up in space. I hope Suni and Butch just kick back, watch some NCAA tournament games, and just do nothing for the next days. They've been working a long time.

Now a word from our sponsor, Sophos. Neil, the NCAA tournament is kicking off in earnest tomorrow, and I, for one, know exactly who I am picking. Florida, Duke, or Cinderella? No, I am simply picking the team with the best offense and the best defense. That is not how it works, Toby. You can't just have the best of both worlds. Well, you can in cybersecurity. With Sophos, your business gets both elite defense and expert offense. With 500-plus cybersecurity analysts, Sophos provides managed detection and

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That's Duke, Toby. Let's go, Blue Devils, and let's go to Sophos.com to learn more. That's S-O-P-H-O-S dot com.

Kenny Rogers may have coined know when to hold them, know when to fold them, but cybersecurity startup Wiz just perfected the strategy. After rejecting an acquisition offer from Google for $23 billion last summer, Wiz now says you've got a deal. Google will buy it for $32 billion, a big bump from the previous bid.

That's not all that's big about this deal. It's Google's biggest acquisition in history, far outstripping No. 2, a $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility in 2012. It's also the biggest acquisition announced this year, a hopeful sign for dealmaking activity that's as frozen as Lake Erie in the winter. And finally, it's the biggest deal ever in the fast-consolidating cybersecurity industry.

In Wiz, Google is acquiring one of the fastest growing startups of all time. Founded just five years ago by CEO Asaf Rapoport and several colleagues, it is on track to double last year's annual recurring revenue to $1 billion, and its sale would mark the largest exit for any tech startup ever.

since Rivian's $77 billion IPO all the way back in November 2021. Toby, Google just revealed its Philly cheesesteak order, WizWit, and it's a landmark deal. It is a landmark deal. It does show a potential sign of hope for the merger and acquisition.

acquisition market because this new Lena Conlis FTC might be exactly why this deal got done and why it didn't get done at that $23 billion valuation last year. This is its biggest deal ever. So it's definitely going to test the appetite of Trump's administration's antitrust efforts because when Trump originally joined office, they thought it was going to be a boon for M&A deals. That has been maybe not the case so far early in the year so far. So

putting one of the biggest tech deals of all time up for antitrust scrutiny. That will really show what the kind of purview of this new administration will be. So that's one big reason why this was a big deal. And the other is that Wiz offers a lot in the terms of the cloud computing race that's going on between big tech right now. Obviously, Amazon and Microsoft dominate the space right now, but Google Cloud is trying to

claw back some market share. So this acquisition is definitely going to help boost its efforts in cloud computing, which is obviously a huge growth sector for a lot of these big tech companies. And Wiz brings with it not just growth potential, but an already existing massive list of business. Its client base includes over 45% of Fortune 100 companies. It's going to do $1 billion in revenue this year. It is just such a massive player in the space that they built recently.

in just the past five years. So in its race to compete against Microsoft and Amazon, Google thinks that tacking on Wiz will be a huge tailwind to compete in this cloud computing race. Right, and if you are a business that needs cloud computing, one of the things that you're looking at, one, obviously there's price, and so you look at AWS, you look at Microsoft's Azure cloud, you look at Google cloud, but now if Google can come to you and say, hey, we're going to provide the most secure cloud, that is a huge leg up in this race.

race for supremacy in cloud computing. And it's also actually one of Wiz's big factors is that they work with a bunch of different cloud providers. And so the flexibility that Wiz allows is something that enterprise customers like to see. And so even though Google is buying this, they're still allowing Wiz to work with Azure. They're still allowing Wiz to work with AWS because that flexibility is a selling point. So they're not just

hoarding whiz for themselves. They're still letting it work with other customers. But I think that's a smart way to get a bigger piece of this much, you know, this very lucrative pie. And meanwhile, so many people are going to get so rich from this deal. Obviously, Asaf Rapaport, the CEO, and these co-founders are going to be billionaires if they weren't already, because guess what? They already sold

a company to Microsoft in 2015 for $320 million. So they've done this rodeo before. Obviously, $32 billion is way more than $320 million. And it's also a huge exit for VC firms that plowed money into Wiz when they were a much smaller company. Some of the biggest VC names in Silicon Valley were involved in Wiz. Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Lightspeed, all of these venture firms are.

Their offices are probably a very fun place to be this week. Somehow Bernard Arnault, the founder or the patriarch of LVMH, also got on the cap table. So people were kind of ironically saying, oh, thank goodness Bernard got on this one. But you're right. It is finally this liquidity moment for an industry that's been very stuck up and very clogged for the last few months and years or so.

There is a crisis developing in HR, but don't worry, it has nothing to do with what happened at your holiday Christmas party. Rippling, an HR startup, is suing Deal, also an HR startup, over a bout of corporate espionage. Rippling is accusing Deal of installing a

mole inside its company and sending him digging around for trade secrets. The so-called spy is an Ireland-based employee who is snooping through Slack channels way outside his job description, according to the suit. One of the more egregious examples was the frequency in which he was searching for deal in internal channels as many as 23 times a day, in addition to downloading strategy decks and allegedly passing that info over to deal.

When Rippling noticed the abnormal Slack activity, they set up what's known as a honeypot to attract and ensnare the alleged spy. Execs created a fake Slack channel pretending it was a secret space where employees could trash talk deal. Then they baited the potential mole with an email hinting at this juicy conspiracy.

channel. Just hours later, their suspect went looking for it, proving at least to Rippling that deal was up to something dodgy. Deal, for its part, fired back against the allegations, saying weeks after Rippling is accused of violating sanctions law in Russia, inciting falsehoods about deal, Rippling is trying to shift the narrative with these sensationalized claims. Yes, there are Russian sanction violation involved too somehow. This isn't two minnows duking it out either. Rippling is worth $13 billion while deal sits at

$12 billion valuation. Neil, with a spy on the loose too, apparently. Yeah, this is a heated rivalry that just escalated in a big way this week. The HR tech space has been, is extremely competitive. You have

these legacy players like ADP, Workday, SAP, and then newer players like Rippling and Deal, which are raising rounds of funding each one after the other in order to gain customers. And they're also competing over the same number of customers. A lot of their employees also switch back and forth. So they've had a lot of beef with each other for years that has spilled into the public eye. And this is just the climax of that with accusations of fraud.

deal implanting a spy into Rippling. Corporate warfare doesn't get more juicy than this. Right. It really doesn't. I mean, this honeypot operation is crazy. Imagine the rush that these Rippling execs must have gone through. You set up this fake Slack channel and you see them immediately lurking around that. You can see the activity of this employee within Slack. And so they've made a literal honeypot to ensnare and

uh, basically just catch the person in the act. And I do think that this tensions between deal and rippling, they've been playing out publicly way before this lawsuit last year, rippling launched this marketing campaign. That was a direct shot at deal. It was a, a,

custom-built snake game where it portrays Deal as this greedy snake and accuses them of charging higher fees. They also saw a Deal's sales director visited the site to check out the game, and then later the CEO of Rippling posted that he had visited the site. Everyone kind of said, ah, you're kind of doxing this guy now. So this is not

down, drag out battle because you are right. The HR space is so competitive because of all these legacy players. When times are good, there's enough HR to go around. But when times start to get a little tighter, you start to see some of these more aggressive tactics because people just don't splurge on HR tech like they might when times are better. So I do think that there's so many layers to this feud. And the fact that there's a spy involved now is just one of the juiciest corporate espionage cases that we've ever talked about.

Yesterday, 25,000 people crammed into the San Jose Sharks Arena and cheered wildly as a superstar put on a show. No, it wasn't because Conor McDavid was in town. It was because Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, was giving the keynote speech of the Tech Giants' annual GTC conference.

What was essentially a science fair for computer geeks in 2009 has blossomed to become what has been called the Super Bowl for AI, a week-long extravaganza whose growth mirrors the meteoric rise of NVIDIA to the top of the tech food chain.

Clad in his signature leather jacket, Huang defended his company's role in the AI revolution and hyped up new families of chips that NVIDIA would roll out in the coming years. NVIDIA dominates the market for these chips, known as GPUs or graphics processing units, which have become a hotter commodity than a Trader Joe's tote as tech companies hoover them up to train ever-powerful large language models. He

He also announced a partnership with GM for self-driving cars and touted personal AI supercomputers that will allow developers and scientists to build AI models on desktop. But Toby, we need to start with the biggest announcement of them all, a partnership with Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut to roll out AI order taking.

I don't know if that was the biggest announcement as much as a cheesy gordita crunch sounds delicious right now. Probably the biggest takeaways from yesterday's meandering two hour speech for one, the next generation of chips are, are here. Jensen unveiled the Blackwell ultra AI chip, which is just a step up from its existing Blackwell trip. He then unveiled the next generation of AI chips called Ruben, uh,

That's actually named after the astronomer who discovered dark matter, which is pretty cool. That Ruben chip will sport 3.3 times the computing performance of Blackwell Ultra chips. So it's just a continual wave of upping performance, upping the capacity of these AI chips. And then, yeah, also a big theme was the physical arena that NVIDIA is stepping into. We talked...

about GM partnership to develop self-driving cars, but also Jensen says that the age of robotics is here and they brought robots on stage. There's a partnership with Disney involved as well. So he's trying to lay out a vision of a future of...

of AI interacting with the physical world. And yesterday was a big unveiling of that vision. We do need to talk about the deep seek in the room, though. Remember, this Chinese AI startup revealed this model deep seek, which could compete with the chat GPTs of the world at the highest level of AI models with just a fraction amount of the computing powder required. That knocked off

$600 billion of Nvidia's market cap sent it into a big slump because you had investors thinking, oh, well, maybe AI companies don't need to spend so much money on Nvidia's chips, which they had been, which had propelled Nvidia to become the most valuable company in the world. What was Jensen's response to this? He said, hey, I think DeepSeek is actually good for us because the type of inference and reasoning that, uh,

that powers the deep seek model and all these models going forward actually requires more computation than we ever thought possible. He said the amount of computation we need as a result of agentic AI, which is this AI that powers agents, which we've talked about in the show. It's like they can do the, all these things autonomously for you is easily 100 times more than we thought we needed this time last year. So he's,

bullish, obviously, because he is the CEO of NVIDIA, that companies will continue to spend and up their and even up their spending on NVIDIA chips to power this new type of AI model. Yeah, if we had to break down that speech into two things, one, he was reassuring people that AI will deliver on its potential stuff like how AI systems are providing value to people right now. But then also he dwelled on some of those futuristic uses of AI, too, which is

stuff like the human-sized robots that can walk, pick up things, and the self-driving cars. So yeah, part of it was like therapy session for the whole industry saying we're fine, we're still gonna need, these chips are still very much necessary to train models, even if they are cheaper, like Deep Sea kind of revealed. But then also, look at the future, like a lot of cool stuff coming down the pipeline. Up next, why tennis players are not happy with the current state of the tour.

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If you were to guess what the most common complaint of professional tennis players was, you might think it would be bogus line calls or how challengers portrayed the sport. But more than likely, you'll hear something along the lines of, we play way too dang much. The tennis schedule runs 11 months of the year and has been a huge source of headaches for top players for years, among other working condition complaints.

Enter professional tennis's live golf moment. Remember live the Saudi backed breakaway golf tour that lured top players with the promise of bigger prize pools and smaller schedules. While a group of pro tennis players led by Novak Djokovic is escalating the fight against the existing men's and women's professional tours, advocating for similar demands.

Yesterday, the Professional Tennis Players Association, PTPA, brought legal action against the men's and women's tours, along with the International Tennis Federation, alleging that they were colluding to restrict players' earnings and were engaging in anti-competitive behavior.

The PTPA is chasing player empowerment initiatives like reducing the grueling number of tournaments played, bringing consistency to tennis balls across tours, and fixing the insane scheduling that often leaves them playing well into the middle of the night. To add insult to injury, tennis also gets minuscule prize payouts compared to

Yeah, let's break down the money earned by tennis players. At the top

of the line, you can make a lot of money, but in the middle and near the bottom of the order, you are just not making that much money at all. Let's go back to the top. The $10 million earned by number one tennis player at the time in 2022, Carlos Alcaraz was equal to the 202nd player in the NFL and the 146th highest played player in the National Basketball League.

Novak Djokovic, who is probably the goat of men's tennis. He's won 24 Grand Slam titles. His career prize money in tennis is $186 million. Last year alone, last year alone, the number one golf player, Scotty Scheffler, earned more than $62 million playing golf. That's about a third of Novak Djokovic, the best of all times,

career winnings. So these are just a few of the data points that these players are bringing to the table when they're accusing the ATP and the WTA suppress wages at the highest level of tennis. And I do think a difference between tennis and a lot of other North American sports league is that

Those North American sports leagues have very powerful players unions. In tennis, it's very splintered across many different tours. International Tennis Federation is involved as well. The Grand Slam tournaments are another thing altogether. So prize money isn't very standardized and players kind of operate as these independent contractors. And as such, they get pretty backstabbed

bad working conditions. And again, I mean, take it all with a grain of salt. These are still professional athletes at the top of their field. But one of the co-founders of the PTPA was this Canadian tennis pro. And he said, early on in my career, I've been very fortunate in my career, but I still had to sleep in my car while traveling to matches regularly.

early on, and he goes, imagine... We saw that in Challengers. Right, imagine an NFL player at the top of their league sleeping in their car at an away game. It would just never happen. So they're trying to draw these parallels to other sports and saying, like, hey, our working conditions are not nearly what they should be given the demands put on our bodies and our, you know, travel schedule. And one of the accusations lobbed against these tours is that they suppressed the prize money. And one example that the players cited was that in 2012...

Billion billionaire Larry Ellison, who owns the P B and P Perry bus open, which more people know as Indian Wells, which duck, which just took place. He tried to increase the total prize money on that tournament that he owns by $1.6 million. He said the ATP and WTA rejected that proposal saying it would put pressure on other tour sponsored tournaments to boost payouts. So that is just one glaring example of, uh,

of these tours, you know, setting a price ceiling, which the players say violates antitrust action. You talked about a lot of the other North American leagues having more rights and more strength with collective bargaining and free agency and things like that. Well, many of those things happened as a result of antitrust action, which is exactly what the players in tennis are trying to do. Should say that the ATP and WTA came out with a few statements. They said they would vigorously defend the case. They talked...

about measures they had taken to increase payments to players, and they called the allegations baseless. Let's sprint to the finish with a few headlines. The UK has updated its basket of goods that are used to measure inflation, and yoga mats are in, and newspaper advertisements are out.

Every year, the UK's Office of National Statistics makes tweaks to the 752 items it uses to calculate inflation, which provides a snapshot into changing consumer trends. For example, Wild Rabbit was on the first list in 1947, but

No one really buys that anymore. So that's gone. So what are people buying now? This year, the ONS added yoga mats, virtual reality headsets, men's pool flip-flops, mango, and pulled pork to the cost of living basket. The stuff they cut is from a bygone era, such as newspaper advertisements and

or oven-ready gammon, which is a type of cured ham that has dwindled in popularity. Toby, did they get it right? I think so, although now I want to try an oven-ready gammon joint because we had never heard of that before this, but it looks delicious. I do think it kind of presents a snapshot of where the nation is heading, and right now it seems like a very time-impressed nation, a very tech-forward nation. The reason why they got rid of oven-ready gammon joints is

is because they take a lot longer to prepare. Pulled pork is something that is quicker. By the way, all the things they added sound like a heck of a party. I mean, we're talking yoga mats, pool sliders. Virtual reality headsets. Virtual reality headsets, some pulled pork, toss a mango in there too. That sounds like a good time to me. So yes, this isn't a big deal. Only 3% of the total basket of goods was actually affected by this. But every time these very niche, very specific goods came,

come and go. It's fun to talk about. It's a time capsule. It is a time capsule. Up next, Sherpas in Nepal are getting some Sherpas of their own as they lug goods up Mount Everest. Ahead of the main climbing season that begins in April, some expedition companies have been testing out drones that can carry loads of up to 35 pounds even in the thin air of Everest. The use cases are attractive including bringing back

ladders used on climbing routes, and waste disposal, which has become a huge issue as Everest has grown more popular. Being a Sherpa is a dangerous job as is, so having drones step up to help shoulder the load makes a lot of sense, especially for things like emergency supplies that can be transported from Base Camp 1 in 15 minutes rather than 7 hours on foot. Seems smart, especially if they can make Sherpas jobs safer.

It seems like a no-brainer, and you might be wondering, why weren't they doing this before? Well, a drone from DJI, which is this Chinese company, the world leader in drones, it can cost more than $70,000. That is just a lot of money in a lower-income country like Nepal. So they're trying to work out deals to make these things cheaper for Sherpas. But overall, this seems like a

a great solution in part to make this, this mountain safer as the, as the climbing season gets underway next month on Monday, West Virginia governor Patrick Morrissey held a press conference to make a statement about one of the biggest injustices in recent memory. Take a listen. Of the 111 brackets that were projected pertaining to North Carolina, UNC was only in 27 of them.

This stinks at the highest level. Yes, that's right. The West Virginia governor used a press conference to make the case that his Mountaineers deserved an NCAA tournament bid over the University of North Carolina, who controversially received a bid to March Madness while WVU was snubbed.

Calling the NCAA the National Corrupt Athletic Association, Morrissey said he's asked his attorney general to investigate the organization to ensure the selection process is transparent and fair. Toby, does he have a point? I think he does. First of all, it was a little shocking to hear a governor talking ball like this. He was going through quad one wins, just running down the resumes of athletes

both teams, but he has a point because there's real monetary stakes on the line. Teams earn units for each game they play in in the NCAA tournament, and each unit is worth approximately $2 million that gets paid out. So it's depriving West Virginia of a game. You're depriving them of resources

revenue as well. So yes, I would be very mad as well. And then yeah, UNC's AD is the chair of the selection committee. And even though the selection committee came out and said, hey, he was not in the room during any deliberations involving UNC. A lot of people are saying, well, he was in the room for deliberations involving UNC.

WVU. So there's potentially a conflict of interest there. So yeah, to add insult to injury to Indiana, just poached West Virginia's coach as well. So the hits keep coming for the Mountaineers. Well, one thing we should mention is UNC played last night and, you know, the round of four to get into the actual bracket of 64 and they crushed. They dominated.

Okay, let's wrap it up there. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Wednesday. For any questions, comments, or feedback, send an email to morningbrewdailyatmorningbrew.com. And if you're enjoying the show, share it with a friend, family member, or coworker, or anyone else. Toby, who should everyone listening share it with today? I want you to share the pod with a West Virginia fan. I am on your side, guys. You may have missed out on the NCAA tournament.

But you got this pod instead. Seems like a fair consolation prize. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Liu is our producer. Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake are our associate producers. Eugenia Waogu is our technical director. Scoops Dardaris is on audio. Is hair and makeup a spy from The Daily? Hmm. Devin Emery is our chief content officer and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow.