Google's "Cancer Drug", Mega Deals 2.0, & 'What is AGI?'

In partnership with

THEWHITEBOX

TLDR;

Welcome back! This week, we take a look at Google’s AI-discovered cancer drug, new models by Anthropic and Google, new mega deals including AMD and Oracle, new AI consumer hardware coming from Apple, NVIDIA’s first-ever AI ‘Home GPU’, and research that states GPT-5 is halfway to AGI.

Enjoy!

FRONTIER AI COMPANIES

Three Mega-Rich Corporations Walk into a Bar…

A consortium led by BlackRock, NVIDIA, and Microsoft has agreed to purchase Aligned Data Centers for $40 billion. The company owns, operates, or plans to build up to 5 Gigawatts of data-center capacity across 50 sites.

This deal is the first significant investment by the Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership (AIP), a fund formed to scale AI-centric infrastructure. They aim to initially deploy $30 billion in equity (possibly rising to $100 billion including debt).

The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2026, subject to regulatory approval.

TheWhiteBox’s takeaway:

This is an interesting deal. First, it shows how expensive this industry is. $40 billion is a huge number, even for these guys, and shows the premium being placed on AI-ready infrastructure.

It can also help determine “the market value of an operated GW”, at around $8 billion, which is quite the sum, but may make more sense than building it yourself, which requires around $50 billion.

Of course, all this means that the industry is consolidating fast, to the point that the same subset of companies will own all data center capacity. In other words, AI compute will be in the hands of the few. This isn’t necessarily bad, but we both know what happens when we see such consolidation: suppliers have a lot of power over consumers.

That is why I don’t expect having to rely on external providers for these models and aspire to run most of my workloads locally.

CHIPS

AMD and Oracle’s Partnership

AMD and Oracle have announced an expanded partnership under which Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will deploy 50,000 AMD Instinct MI450 GPUs starting in 2026.

The system will use AMD’s new “Helios” rack design with MI450 GPUs, next-generation EPYC CPUs, and Pensando networking. This marks the first large-scale public AI supercluster on Oracle Cloud powered by AMD. Financial terms were not disclosed, and deployment will begin in 2026.

TheWhiteBox’s takeaway:

Do you notice what I did? Look at the timings (H2 2026) and the product (AMD’s MI450 GPUs). We both know who’s at the center of all this: OpenAI.

Nevertheless:

OpenAI announced a $300 billion deal with Oracle starting in 2027

OpenAI also announced a 10GW in AMD MI450 GPUs starting in H2 2026

This is just the circle jerk consolidating. These aren’t totally separate deals. The $300 billion deal with Oracle will include many of the GWs that OpenAI signed with AMD (and NVIDIA). Of course, they won’t tell you this because they need AMD and Oracle stocks to pop, but it’s mostly the same deals rephrased in different ways.

FRONTIER AI COMPANIES

Anthropic’s Business is booming.

Anthropic is…

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