OpenAI, Oracle Expand Stargate Project
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This is Bloomberg Tech coming up. OpenAI ramps up with more computing capacity from Oracle, expanding the Stargate initiative. Plus, the U.S. House of Representatives is on track to vote on Donald Trump's tax and spending bill. What does that mean for tech?

and the Trump administration lift some export license controls requirements for chip design software sales specifically for China. Let's get right to financial markets. The NASDAQ 100 is pushing once again to fresh record highs. Strong jobs data for the month of June. Halfway through the show, we're going to go really deep on jobs, and then we're going to look at the labor market when it comes to the technology sector. But there are other things happening that are pushing the tech sector and equity markets higher.

A lot of it is related to compute capacity. Bloomberg broke a really big story last night, and I want to get right to it. The story is Oracle. So on a two-day basis, we saw a 5% jump in Oracle yesterday. We're pushing a little bit higher again this Thursday, but the deal is OpenAI expanding the Stargate project.

getting more compute capacity in new states and new sites beyond what they've already got in Texas. The person that broke that story, Bloomberg's Brodie Ford, and he's with us now. I think we need to get to the details of what you reported because there was a lot of detail in it, Brodie, specifically in terms of gigawatts, the scale of this new capacity.

Yeah, we saw earlier in the year, you know, Larry Ellison standing there in the White House talking about we're going to deploy $500 billion with OpenAI for data centers. A lot of people doubted that scale. Well, yesterday we broke that they have inked a pretty unprecedented deal, 4.5 gigawatts.

The usual rule of thumb is that a gigawatt's about a nuclear reactor. And so we're talking about a scale of four and a half worth of nuclear reactors or powering about three and a half million homes. I mean, this is likely the largest cloud deal of all time, and it's going to be tens of billions of dollars of chips, of power. I mean, it's going to be hard to wrap our head around what this looks like in the build out.

Okay, what do we know? What are sources telling us about where these new sites are going to be? What's under consideration? And kind of like how near term this is?

Right, so they've narrowed it on a handful of data center sites, right? I mean, it's in states like Wisconsin or Pennsylvania or Texas. They'll also be expanding the campus they've already built out in Abilene that a lot of us have seen, you know, images of. How near term? I mean, a lot of this stuff is tough to get off the ground. Oracle earlier this week said that the full ramp...

would likely not hit until 2028 and so it's fairly far out but I would expect to see some of these sites come out on a pretty rapid clip. We don't know exactly which one's going to move first but you know I'm sure we're going to be starting to get more details trickling out in the coming weeks and months.

Let's talk about the Oracle side of this. This is a stock that's now again pushing fresh record highs almost every day at the moment. It's up 40% so far in 2025. This is a big win for Oracle. They are really pushing and changing their position in the landscape of infrastructure and AI cloud computing.

Three years ago, if you said Oracle, major cloud player, people would make fun of you, definitely. But today, that's not the case, right? I mean, they're making, I think, around $10 billion per year in cloud infrastructure. On Monday, they said the deal that we connected is this OpenAI one.

will be 30 billion per year. I mean, that is triple the size of their entire current cloud business. And so it's huge for revenue. The big question is what it means for margins. And that's kind of the classic with a lot of these AI businesses that they're going to be buying a lot of chips and power and construction, and that's going to constrain their margins. What does that mean for cash flow? That's what investors are asking this morning.

Bloomberg's Brodie Ford there with the reporting. Let's get to the analysis. This expanded deal between Oracle and OpenAI, it's also good news for some chip makers. That's according to Bloomberg Intelligence, who say the likes of NVIDIA and AMD are going to benefit here. Kunjan Sabani offered that note, and he joins us now. Inside all of this infrastructure, at the heart of it is the compute. And the compute right now in this market is largely coming from NVIDIA, but also to a greater extent increasingly from AMD.

What's the thesis here that you've got, Kunjan?

Well, two points. As Brady mentioned, Oracle has been really beefing up their spending versus what we thought a year or two ago. If you look at the estimates now, even for 25, that is going to be the fastest CSP in terms of CapEx increases. So definitely increasing the wallet share and becoming a serious buyer of these chips. Second point, it is one of the only hyperscalers or cloud providers among the top five who does not have a custom silicon or an ASIC program. What does that mean is more

majority of the capex that it is going to spend to bring up this 4.5 gigawatts of capacity is going to merchant GPU providers likes Nvidia which it has been buying most of GPUs from in the past but also AMD because as they announced they are ordering about 130k m355 for the second half which equates to somewhere between three to four billion dollars of revenue for AMD

Just real quick, Kunjan, Brody was giving us the reporting on the dollar value of this deal to Oracle, right? It's that $30 billion that we were talking about earlier in the week per year starting in fiscal 28. Are you able to model or do the math on what these kinds of deals and the value of them are to AMD and NVIDIA in terms of like number of chips that they will send that way or kind of the pipeline of business that they're securing through Oracle?

To some extent, because there are a lot of assumptions, but what we can map is the gigawatts to the chip spending. So rather than the revenue that Oracle will collect, the 4.5 gigawatts, assuming that's all brand new data center build out, one gigawatt approximately in today's term equates to $60 billion of CapEx, which includes everything from chips and hardware. So even if you had to make

take conservative stance and cut it half. For chips, that still leaves you for what every gigabit at least $30 billion. Bloomberg Intelligence's Kunjan Subani there with the analysis. We had the reporting. We got the analysis. Now let's get the market reaction. Janet Mui, head of market analysis at RBC, Bruin Dolphin, found it really interesting. These big capital projects in infrastructure just keep coming. What does that signal to you about the

what the market should model for in the coming years ahead. Hi, Ash. Thanks for having me. I think the significance of this deal is that the

DEMAND FOR COMPUTING POWER IS INSATIABLE. REMEMBER WHEN DEEP SEQ CAME OUT, A LOT OF INVESTORS WERE WORRIED THAT ACTUALLY THERE MAY NOT BE THE NEED FOR SO MUCH COMPUTING POWER IF THE MODELLING IS SO EFFICIENT. BUT ACTUALLY, THAT IS NOT TRUE. WE SEE THAT THERE IS HIGH FASCINATI OF THE SCALE OF THE

SOVEREIGNS, HYPERSCALERS, MANY CORPORATES. I GUESS THIS IS REALLY THE BIG CONCLUSION, THE RUNWAY IS STILL VERY LONG AND THE INCENTIVE TO INVEST IS STILL VERY HIGH. I THINK THE THEME OF INVESTMENT IN AI, PARTICULARLY IN SEMICONDUCTORS AND CLOUD, WHICH ARE THE AI INFRASTRUCTURE, IS PARTICULARLY RELEVANT.

Janet, in Brody's reporting, he's saying that this expansion between Oracle and OpenAI is 4.5 gigawatts worth of capacity. And in the context of energy, you could power this country at that scale. How do you think about the energy sector and the energy infrastructure requirements that markets are going to have to fund to support these types of data center expansion?

I think the utility side, energy side of things goes hand in hand with the need for computing power. And that's why we have seen hyperscalers like Meta investing in nuclear energy, for example. So I think the quest...

for cheaper, more efficient energy would be there. And I think that is why I think the U.S. will remain basically the region that would lead the AI race because the U.S. is basically self-sufficient in energy production, relatively cheaper energy.

compared to say Europe and for example the UK. So I guess that's a very important conclusion is that there is incentive for companies to invest and base their production in the US to access its cheap energy base.

Janet, the story this Thursday is treasuries are falling, the dollar is stronger and equity markets, particularly the technology sector, pushing fresh record highs on the Nasdaq 100. Give me your reaction to the jobs data and the eco print that we got this morning.

I HAVE TO SAY THE DATA IS BASICALLY GOLDILOCKS. ON ONE HAND YOU GET BETTER THAN EXPECTED JOBS DATA. IN GENERAL, A SOFTENING TREND BUT IT IS STILL OKAY, STILL REFLECTIVE OF A SOLID LABOR MARKET. UNEMPLOYMENT RATE IS LOWER. AT THE SAME TIME, WAGE GROWTH IS ACTUALLY SLOWER DESPITE A STRENGTHENING LABOR FORCE. I WILL SAY IT IS GOLDILOCKS WHICH MARKET CLEARLY LIKES. THE CONCLUSION IS THAT THE FEDERAL RESERVE REALLY IS IN NO URGENCY TO CUT RATES.

because I think the markets would prefer the evidence of a strong labor market rather than fretting over the exact timing of a rate cut. I do see some outperformance in technology. Why is that? Why is that? Is it just a waiting issue right now and technology is what this market is? Or is there something in this economy and the path forward for the Fed that makes this sector more attractive right now?

I guess there are lots of reasons. First of all, in terms of earnings growth profile, technology is still the brightest spot out there. As I mentioned, clear visibility on AI investment. Secondly, in terms of the productivity gains, I think the tech sector is likely to see or have a lot of those productivity surplus. And of course, I think

In terms of the U.S. market, I think the tech sector is where the attraction is to access the AI theme, etc. And if we see, for example, rate cuts really coming by, I think lower bond yields, lower interest rate also particularly benefit those growth areas as well. So really a combination of factors.

If you're a technology investor, that was the what you needed to know. Janet Mui, head of market analysis at RBC, Burien Dolphin. Thank you very much. There is a lot more coming up. The House pulls an all-nighter as Republicans race to get a tax bill to President Trump's desk before their July 4th deadline. We're going to go live to Washington, D.C. next, and we will have the latest on where things stand. Don't go anywhere. This is Bloomberg Tech. Live the good life, good paying job, good housing.

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Welcome back to Bloomberg Tech. You're looking at live pictures from Capitol Hill where House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is delivering a blistering rebuttal of the tax bill that's now going into its sixth hour. Here with the very latest Bloomberg's Tyler Kendall out in Washington, D.C. What is the latest? What do we expect to happen? What do we need to know?

Yeah. Hey, Ed. So the House Democratic leader, Hawking Jeffries, has something known as the magic minute, which means that he can speak for however long as he wants. And as you mentioned, he started at 4.53 a.m. Eastern. So we could be in this for the long haul, but it really does feel like there's sort of a

of delaying the inevitable because republicans appear poised to pass president trump's signature legislative achievement which would be the one big beautiful bill once leader jeffries is done speaking house speaker mike johnson might take the mic or they could try to get this done as soon as possible and this would proceed immediately to a vote on finalized passage once that happens we're looking for that magic number of 217 which means house speaker mike johnson can only

afford to lose three votes, but he appears to have it. It seems like Republican leadership was able to flip some of those staunchest critics of this bill, those members of the House Freedom Caucus, those Republicans that were pitching themselves as fiscal hawks. And our reporting on the Hill this morning indicates that they did get some sort of concessions and assurances from this White House in order to flip their votes, including one that I know that you pay close attention to, which is when it comes to the phase out of those clean energy tax credits. Ralph Norman told our reporter

on the Hill today that one of the assurances that the White House gave them was that there would be strict enforcement when it does come to the phase out, particularly around solar and wind tax subsidies. So that's something to look forward and look out to as we try to glean more details on exactly what it took to get these Republicans to flip their vote when it came to the procedural vote earlier this morning.

Tyler, technology markets in real time, NASDAQ 100 already pushing fresh record highs, now extending its gain in the session to 1%. It is a short week because it is a July 4th holiday this Friday in the United States. There's a lot being made of like the symbolism of the president signing this bill July 4th. I heard you speaking with Bloomberg's Matt Miller about that earlier. Why is that symbolism there?

Well, it really was this self-imposed deadline from the administration that they wanted to get this done by July 4th. We are expecting a pretty big signing ceremony either later today or tomorrow so that President Trump can tout this legislative achievement that they're really hoping will pair with some of these potential trade deals, frameworks that we could get

next week ahead of that July 9th deadline that they have put into effect. Because the administration is really hoping for a few different things to happen here. They want to see a confluence, really, of economic factors going into the summer so that they can help push ahead when it comes to President Trump's economic

economic agenda. Now, of course, they're dealing with criticism. We have the House Speaker, for example, railing against some of the changes when it comes to Medicaid. But this administration is really trying to focus people on this idea of stabilizing the debt to GDP. Yes, this bill is going to add significantly to the national debt, but it is the other policies that they're working to put into place that ultimately they say will help grow the economy.

The national debt pile, the big focus of Elon Musk, as we've discussed all week. Bloomberg's Tyler Kendall, terrific work out in Washington, D.C. Thank you very much. Let's get to another big story. The U.S. and China are beginning to implement their recent trade deals. And as part of that, there's some easing of restrictions on critical technologies, including export license requirements for chip design software sales, particularly in China. Bloomberg's Peter Elstrom, who leads the team in covering Asia tech and European tech, is with us today.

So what we're talking about is EDA. And as of last night, we're hearing from the key players, the key names in the EDA space, that they're now free to do business in China. What do we need to know?

Yeah, that's right. So this is a strange one. It was just in May when we found out from the companies that they were going to have these export restrictions on China. Their EDA software is necessary to be able to design semiconductors. It was also strange the way that it got announced. It was the companies that actually revealed these new restrictions. It was not the Commerce Department, which is the agency behind that.

AGAIN, THIS TIME IT IS KIND OF SIMILAR. WE HAD SIEMENS COME OUT FIRST. THEY CAME OUT AND SAID IN FACT THOSE RESTRICTIONS ARE NOW BEING ROLLED BACK. THEY ARE NOT GOING TO HAVE THE SAME KIND OF RESTRICTIONS ON SERVICING AND SUPPORTING SELLING INTO CHINA TO SUPPORT THEIR CUSTOMERS. WHAT IS GOING ON BEHIND THE SCENES? AS YOU SAY, THE U.S. AND CHINA ARE NOW IN THE MIDDLE OF THESE TRADE NEGOTIATIONS. BACK IN MAY, CHINA WAS PLAYING TOUGH. THEY WERE NOT EXPORTING SOME OF THE RARE EARTHS, THE MINERALS

THE U.S. AND CHINA ARE COMING BACK TO THE TABLE. AS A RESULT, THESE COMPANIES ARE GOING TO HAVE MORE BREATHING SPACE. THAT IS VERY UNUSUAL. YOU HAVE EXPORT CONTROLS, WHICH ARE TYPICALLY NATIONAL SECURITY ISSUES, NOW BEING TRADED AS PART OF THE TRADE NEGOTIATIONS.

But really the stories around the software names, cadence synopsis, the two that you mentioned also pushing higher, we'll show those in just a second.

The modern day cutting edge chip has billions of transistors, right? No human brain can do the blueprint or design for that. But there is some concern here that Huawei in particular, if they are having free access to EDA, that they can use that technology and that software platform to close the gap a little bit, you know, design their own cutting edge chips. Why is America not more concerned about that, Peter?

Yeah, that's a key issue. In the technology race between the two countries, you have the U.S. ahead in a few different key areas. In particular, EDA is one of the most important ones. Of course, semiconductor equipment is another one. The Netherlands ASML is by far the leading player. Huawei, however, has been able to break through some of these barriers. It's become a national champion for China. It's helped try to focus on some of these key bottlenecks that they have

EDA IS ONE OF THE KEY AREAS WHERE IF THEY'RE ABLE TO USE THESE TOOLS, THEY CAN STEP AHEAD AND DESIGN SOME OF THESE CHIPS. THEY HAVE SURPRISED THE WORLD, I'D SAY, WITH SOME OF THEIR ADVANCEMENTS IN SEMICONDUCTORS, PARTICULARLY THIS 7-NANOMETER CHIP THAT THEY USED IN ONE OF THEIR SMARTPHONES IN THE PAST. BUT NOW THEY HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO MAKE SOME OF THE PROGRESS, HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO MOVE FORWARD QUITE AS QUICKLY. SO THESE TOOLS ARE GOING TO HELP THEM MAKE SOME OF THOSE STEPS GOING FORWARD. AGAIN, THAT'S WHY IT'S SO SURPRISING THAT THEY'RE TRADING THIS AWAY.

in the negotiations between the US and China. Bloomberg's executive editor for global technology, Peter Elstrom, thank you so much. It's time for Talking Tech. And first up, DeepSeek ramps up hiring. The Chinese AI startup posted 10 positions on LinkedIn, indicating it may be looking to lure talent from outside of its homeland. The listings include three roles focused on general intelligence, with the positions based in Beijing and Hangzhou.

Plus, ASML and other European semiconductor stocks extended losses today. There was a report from Nikkei Asia that said Samsung would be delaying its completion of a chip factory in Texas. The report citing sources says the delay is due to Samsung struggling to find customers for the plant's output.

And some news that broke this hour. CoreWeave's the first company to receive the latest AI system based on NVIDIA's newest chip. Dell delivered the first GB300 MVL72 rack of servers to CoreWeave and will deploy them in the US, with CoreWeave aiming to bring more of the tech online throughout the year. OpenAI is one of CoreWeave's customers, and the infrastructure players say the new systems will work well for larger, more complex

complex models. That's the reporting. That's the detail. I want to get some more analysis on this one. Mandeep Singh of Bloomberg Intelligence is with us. There's this like constant tracking of the launch and ramp of NVIDIA's latest generation server design that has the latest generation chip and chip combination of it. CoreWeave goes first. What do you make of that?

Well, when I look at Nvidia's release cycle, they are on a one-year rhythm. And in between that year, now they are launching the Blackwell Ultra before the Rubin series comes online. And look, they're almost giving a 50% performance upgrade with the Blackwell Ultra in terms of token processing. So from that perspective, Coreweave has...

having that chip first really gives them a leg up over the hyperscalers, which will also get their NVIDIA allocation. But for CoreWeave, you know, they have a backlog of about $26 billion. To convert that backlog to revenue, you need the most kind of impressive NVIDIA chips first.

And that helps with the faster backlog conversion. So really good news for Corweave, especially on the training front, because a lot of these latest black low ultra chips, I believe, will be used for training and then the older series will be used for inferencing over time. So Corweave's stock really pushed higher after news came out. I'm also looking at Dell. Help us understand the Dell component in this ecosystem.

Yeah, well, Dell is the one who is making that server. So NVIDIA is providing the chip and Corvive is really bringing those racks and the servers online to be consumed in a cloud consumption model.

But Dell is the one who is actually assembling that server and making sure that it can be delivered to Corviz. So from that perspective, they are part of that supply chain. And it's a good thing that they get to do that for NVIDIA before any other server maker like Quanta or any other Chinese OEMs come into play.

Very quick, we just have 20 seconds, Mandip. What's the BI big picture thesis right now and how this AI infrastructure build-out is going?

I mean, Oracle and OpenAI really raised up the ante when it comes to their big announcement, the $30 billion contract, and now this news. So to my mind, the infrastructure super cycle is really playing out, and we're seeing that right now. Mandeep Singh of Bloomberg Intelligence of BI, great to have the reaction here on the show.

Welcome back to Bloomberg Tech. Let's get right to the markets. And I'll start with the technology sector in the equity market, right? The NASDAQ 100 continuing to push fresh record highs. But we've got the jobs data for June. Strong labor market. And the story is really clear. Equity is pushed higher, outperformance in the tech sector. But you

You also saw treasuries fall, the dollar strengthened. Take all of that in aggregate. It's really important. This is what the bond market looks like. I know we go there less often, but there is always a relationship between what's happening in yields and particularly valuations around the technology sector. Now, this was the blowout jobs report. And there's only one guy that I want to go to on a day like today. That's Bloomberg's

economics and policy correspondent Michael McKee. As you know I just don't know. I don't really understand the granularity of the jobs data the revisions the changes. What is the need to know in June and the kind of explanation for why markets reacted the way they did. Well the explanation for why markets reacted the way they did is fairly simple. The economy seems stronger than it was expected to be. And that would suggest that corporate earnings can stay strong. But

This is a report that looks better on the surface than it does underneath. It's not terrible, but it's not as great as it looks. We had 147,000 jobs created and the unemployment rate falls to 4.1 percent. But of those 147,000 jobs, 73,000 were in government employment, most of that state and local education jobs.

schools are out in June. So there's probably a seasonal adjustment problem with these numbers that will cause them to be revised lower. Private payrolls were up only 74,000. That's lower than we had been seeing. So there is some concern about all this. And of course, the unemployment rate falls because 130,000 people left the labor force. So not quite as good as anticipated. And of course,

We want to know how they're doing out in your neck of the woods. We lost 5,000 jobs in computer manufacturing, another 1,000 in semiconductor manufacturing. Web search portals and hosting lost 300 jobs. So on the tech side, not so great either.

I'm really grateful for that level of detail on the tech sector. We're going to go deep into what the environment is right now, particularly in software, with our next guest. But what I'm seeing on the news cycle and terminal this morning is very Fed-related, a lot of questions directed towards the administration about what the Fed should or shouldn't do. Why is that? Well, everybody wants lower interest rates because, of course, it's going to mean higher corporate profits. But

But this report pretty much pushes the Fed out of that for the July meeting. There was only a couple of Fed officials who were talking about July. September still stays on the calendar as the most likely first month for a rate cut. We'll see what happens next week when we get the CPI report on the 15th. That could make.

a difference to the Fed. But at this point, Ed, it looks like the Fed stays on hold. And of course, the president will keep tweeting that he doesn't like Jay Powell. Bloomberg's Michael McKee, international economics and policy correspondent. It's great to have you back on Bloomberg Tech. Let's get right to tech and more on the jobs outlook in the sector. Eric Wasikowski is the bespoke partner's CEO, an absolute specialist.

in executive search, particularly in the fields of SaaS, software, also private equity here in the United States. And I want to talk about what that market is like right now, particularly at the higher end. There's been so much in the news cycle about talent poaching, frankly. But just on the data this morning, was there any read through for you that directly correlates to what you're seeing in the technology sector?

ED, THANK YOU FOR HAVING ME ON. I TEND TO AGREE WITH MICHAEL. I THINK THE HEADLINE NEWS SOUNDS FANTASTIC, BUT I THINK WHEN YOU PEEL BACK THE ONION, PRIVATE SECTOR JOBS, PARTICULARLY IN TECH AND INNOVATION, ARE FLAT. CEOs TODAY ARE TRAINED TO

IN THE MARKET, WHETHER IT BE THE IMPACT OF THE TARIFFS, THE GEOPOLITICAL ENVIRONMENT. THAT SAID, I DON'T THINK IT IS A NEGATIVE SITUATION BECAUSE I THINK WHAT WE SAW YESTERDAY WITH MICROSOFT ANNOUNCING THEY ARE CUTTING MORE JOBS, THE CEOs OVER THE LAST SIX MONTHS HAVE REALLY TIGHTENED THEIR BELT.

to see how the market pivots. If we get negative implications from tariffs, they're going to be able to weather the storm. But I actually think the underpinnings here are on a positive economy in the next six to 12 months, a strong future. And I think CEOs are sitting back with capital to invest as they get favorable news on tariffs and the geopolitical environments and hopefully a rate cut.

We did hear from the administration, so to speak, this morning. Stephen Moran gave an interview to Open Interest, one of our earlier shows. He leads the Council of Economic Advisers. Let's listen to what he said. What we see is an economy that continues to defy expectations, continues to defy, you

you know, all the doom and gloom that's out there, whether it's about the border or immigration or tariffs, this labor market continues to power ahead. There were tons of predictions that there'd be a disaster in the labor market because of the border policies, and nothing could be further from the truth. The economy continues to create jobs, and if you look at the details of the jobs, all of the job gains since the president took office are due to native-born Americans, and there's actually been a decline in foreign-born workers, which means that all of the benefits of the expanding economy are accruing to Americans instead of migrants.

What Stephen outlined, they're seeing in the relationship between policy and how it impacts fiscal policy and political policy and how it impacts the jobs market. Do you see what he explained reflected in software and SaaS?

I don't think it's reflected yet. I think there's an opportunity going forward because the largest creator of high-paying good jobs in the United States is innovation and private equity. And I think when we look at the number of deals that are done in private equity, the investment that's happening, I think we're still in a wait-and-see mode. I think

if you look year over year, the number of private equity deals is down. That said, in speaking with the investment banking firms, their mandate pipelines are full. In speaking with our private equity clients, they're reviewing a record number of new deals. And I think the next six to 12 months, I really think we're going to start to see all the deal activity pick up, which is going to fuel investment in jobs. So the big story has been

Mr. Mark Zuckerberg, according to Mr. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, approaching talent in the field of AI, but let's call it software and offering, according to Sam Altman, pay packages of 100 million US dollars. Is that the kind of market that you're seeing? This is what you specialize in.

Absolutely. And look, we're not privy to those particular deals. But I think the labor market at the high end in software, tech, SaaS is very tight because you don't have that natural flow of deals and exits that creates natural churn.

You've got a number of assets that are at the ready to transact in the next six to 18 months. And so executives today are not reticent to make a move. And so that notion of poaching, the notion of having to overpay to attract

star executives for those open roles you need is absolutely happening. The premium proven executives are at a premium right now, and that's why they're demanding outsized pay. AI is clearly another area that's on the frontier. The top executives that are leading there are demanding outsized pay packages. Eric, just very quickly, how does Bespoke use technology to find a solution in that type market?

So we have, as far as I know, the first executive index in executive recruiting. It's focused particularly on the software market. We used AI and ML to index the 676,000 software executives in North America. The technology gives us key indicators on job fits, propensity to make a move, productivity.

And the like. And so we, as far as I know, are the first and are going to continue to push the envelope on technology and recruiting.

THE PROGRAM. IT IS GREAT TO HAVE YOU ON THE PROGRAM. THERE IS SO MUCH CONVERSATION AROUND WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THE TECHNOLOGY JOBS MARKET. COMING UP, AMY SAIPA JOINS US TO TALK ABOUT THE STATE OF SEED STAGE INVESTING AND COMPETITION TO GET IN EARLY. HOW COMMON A THEME HAS THAT BEEN IN RECENT WEEKS?

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It's time for the VC Spotlight. Our next guest is a classically trained singer, backed Michael Jackson in one of his music videos, and competed across California. She's also worked at some of the world's most important technology companies, Twitter, Uber, and Stripe. And she's now a partner at Uncork Capital, a $1.2 billion venture firm chasing the biggest potential names in AI. Amy Saper joins us here in San Francisco. Welcome to the program. Thanks for having me.

increasingly on this program at all of the dinners I'm going to there is a big battle to get in earlier actually sometimes founders don't really have a fully baked idea and reading

your notes and the thesis but also being a subscriber to Tasting Notes, Uncork's newsletter. That's kind of where the focus is right now. Absolutely. So here at Uncork, we are focused on seed investing. So we typically write the first institutional check into a company. We are really excited about what we're seeing in AI and we back founders with a deep belief on

on a new customer segment or a new company, and we're trying to back the founders that are building the companies that are really going to define this next decade. And virtually all of those have AI as their undercurrent right now. What is also true is that the scale of the seed round is being redefined. I see seed rounds

in the high tens of millions, depending on which sort of corner of the technology market it is. How has that changed things for you? Yeah, absolutely. So I think if you look overall at the seed market, it is true that rounds are getting larger. I think the average in Q1 was over 3 million, up from maybe 2.5 last year. So the

Large rounds of the tens and 20 millions do make the headlines. Those are not the norm of what we're seeing, though they do occur. I do think it's true that companies and founders are raising a little bit more reflective of the increased expectations that the Series A investors are placing relative to a couple of years ago. There's what you can do in the field of AI and then there's what you can do with AI.

What is it you're looking for in a founder right now? Like people would say, well, I'm an AI adjacent company or I'm AI, we're native. They might just be using AI to do something else. They might be, you know, not,

necessarily developing a new technology, so to speak. Yeah, absolutely. So I think AI is already rapidly shifting from being a sector that you might invest in into encompassing every startup. So whether their core product is AI native and we do have several of those in our portfolio, Ivo, for example, in the legal contract review, GPT-0 for copy editing. We also have companies that are selling to AI companies. So Tailscale,

accounts, companies like Mistral and Perplexity and others amongst their customers set and are emerging as the de facto networking solution for those AI companies. So we are focused on companies that are cognizant that the market is changing right now. And so whether they are building that into their product, whether they're using it in their back office to streamline some of their operations or whether they're selling to AI customers, it really is everywhere right now.

I invite you to reflect on your music career, but I think largely your career in technology, Stripe, Uber, Twitter, now known as X. Are you more of an operator than traditional finance? And how are you helping the founders that you're backing? Yeah, absolutely. I leverage my operating career every day. And I will say my background is a mix of product, product marketing, international expansion. I use the product marketing side far more than I thought.

I'm particularly attracted to companies and founders that are largely technical, building AI-enabled applications for engineering product and design teams. And they might not have a product marketing or a sales background. And so I help them define who's their ideal customer, how do you reach them, how do you get your first sets of customers. And that's such a critical--

set of activities to do with the seed stage. I know a lot of venture capitalists watch this program. Many of you are not operators. You have a finance background, nothing against any of that, but really interested in the operator side of the story. Where is it that founders are struggling right now? Capital is basically commoditized, right? So what is it that they say we really need your help with?

imminently? Is it hiring, putting operational staff in? Absolutely. I think it's two main things at the seed stage that we focus on. One is really honing on getting as specific as possible about who your ideal customer is. And that's so critical for the seed stage because you have the large

horizontal players, the LLMs that are trying to be the horizontal layer for everyone. Where seed stage companies and early stage companies can really compete is by focusing on a particular customer segment and owning their workflow end to end. And so we spend a lot of time there and then helping them identify the right talent that they need to achieve those milestones and reach those customers. Amy Saper, partner at Uncaught Capital, thank you very much for joining us here.

Former OpenAI board member Helen Toner says Mark Zuckerberg and Meta's lavish spending for top AI talent may not guarantee their success. She spoke on Bloomberg Insight with Haslinda Amin.

What we're really seeing here with Meta is Meta has started to get a reputation of having a little bit of a dysfunctional AI team, not really having its organizational structure set up in a way that really lets them succeed and innovate. And what I think we're seeing here is CEO Mark Zuckerberg really stepping in and saying, well, we have to do something differently. We need a big new push. We need a big new effort. The real question is, can it turn around Meta's fortunes? And can it turn Meta into a real juggernaut?

Staying on Meta, the company's Twitter alternative, Threads, has grown to 350 million monthly users since its debut two years ago. Still, the social media platform is continuing to work on finding their own identity among the industry. It's the subject of today's Tech In Depth newsletter, written...

by Bloomberg's Kurt Wagner. I said Twitter. I, of course, meant X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. I don't know about threads. Like when it launched, I used it a lot because I liked the interaction between Instagram and threads. Like one thing I posted there, I could take there. I don't use it in the same way to share news as I do potentially on X or even LinkedIn. But it's your tech in-depth newsletter. What's the kind of conclusion here?

Well, I think we're in the same boat, Ed, because that was sort of my thinking here as we come up on the two-year anniversary of this product. I like threads. I use threads, but I still ask myself, what is this thing for, right? I think with Twitter, old Twitter, I knew what that was. That was a place I went for breaking news. That was a place I shared breaking news. That was where I assumed that I would get information.

you know, things that are happening right then, right now, right around me. And I just don't really feel that from threads. And part of that is that I don't think they leaned into politics during this last election cycle. And in my opinion, sort of missed an opportunity to plant that flag on the news side. And they made a few changes in the last few months that make me think maybe they do care more about news and they want to move in that direction. But again, two years in, my one critique of that platform is what do we use it for?

Well, also, how does Meta position it and value it, you know, as a platform vis-a-vis WhatsApp and Facebook and Instagram commercially or otherwise?

I mean, I spoke to the executive who's running that team, Emily Dalton Smith, earlier this week. And she said, you know, it's a platform for exchanging of ideas, right? It's clearly text. It's very much meant to stoke some type of interaction between people in a way that even Instagram, I think, is very much, you know, you sort of post something and people observe it, right? This is meant to be more a back and forth. But again, what are you talking about there, right? Like, what

People will find their communities, but what makes you want to open that app every single day and make that a destination for yourself? And that's where I feel like I at least don't know exactly why I'm opening threads all the time. I hope that it will be because it becomes a news source for me down the line. I just don't think we're there yet.

Bloomberg's Kurt Wagner, who is also the author of Battle for the Bird, the book on Twitter, Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter and its transition to X. Really, really highly recommend you go read that. That's why I kept referring to Twitter. Let's get to another really important piece of reporting.

Immigration lawyers are advising clients to scrub their social media accounts of controversy or politically sensitive topics. Warning the post could be used to block their entry to the U.S. or as grounds to remove them. Bloomberg's Cecilia D'Anastasio has been reporting this. And it's a particular segment that we're talking about. It's people who are online, influencers to a certain extent. What have you learned and what's the need to know?

Sure. So one in five Americans gets their news today from influencers. Influencers have a lot of power over what people think, especially politically these days. And what we heard from immigration lawyers is that despite influencers' status as citizens in the U.S., they are being advised not to post on topics that the lawyers are considering hot button for fear of potential repercussions. So this is potentially severe news.

It's part of a broader backdrop where migration in and out of the United States is in focus. We talked about it earlier this in the hour in the job sector. Are there any sort of examples of where this is already happening? Sure.

We have seen several examples of influencers in the U.S., both people who have been born here, people who emigrated here, people who might be undocumented, facing repercussions for the way that their speech is viewed by people both close to government and inside of the government.

One of the examples that we use in our story is far left-leaning Twitch streamer, Hassan Piker, who's been very outspoken on Palestine. He was detained and questioned when he was entering back into the country to Chicago O'Hare. And what he told us in an interview was that he believes that this was a tactic for people to become afraid of sharing their opinions on topics that might not align with current governmental positions. Right.

Cecilia, just very quickly, has there been any reaction to our reporting from the government? We haven't seen anything yet. But one of the concerns that I've heard from people who have read the story is that today's influencers who speak on politics tend to actually be more conservative than left-leaning, according to a recent Pew poll. And considering some of the concerns around speaking about certain topics in certain ways, there are worries that that gap might actually widen over time.

DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Trish McCoughlin also emailing us saying that their officers are following the law, not agendas. Really check out that reporting from the team. Bloomberg, Cecilia, De Anastasio, thank you very much.

That does it for this edition of Bloomberg Tech. It's a short week in the United States. There won't be any show this Friday because of the July 4th holiday. But this was a big show. So much to recap. Check out the BTEC podcast. You know where to find it on all the Bloomberg platforms and online. iHeart, Spotify and on Apple. From San Francisco, this is Bloomberg Tech.

The data that matters for your investments. The entire auto sector is higher today. And analysis on the companies making news on Wall Street. Tesla's been a stock that's been in focus. Shares have really been all over the map this morning. Listen to the Stock Movers Report from Bloomberg. Let's talk.

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