Good morning! OpenAI raised just $11B in its latest round, well short of its $30B target. Intel had its worst day since the 1970s after weak guidance, wiping ~$12B off the government’s stake. And Canada is taking an equity stake in AI firm Cohere.

AI investors are turning to options and credit-default swaps to hedge their bets. Wall Street’s boom is set to cut New York State’s budget deficit in half. And Anthropic is expected to receive a credit rating near the top of junk territory.

Plus: The new bottleneck in America’s AI build-out is a shortage of cheap money, and a look inside Kalshi’s Series A pitch deck.

Petrarch turns companies’ operational records into data AI labs can buy. Find out what those files could be worth. Book a call with their team.

Crypto set a record nobody wanted broken late last week when hackers drained $6.3B from the world’s largest crypto exchange, and most of the money disappeared in ~20 minutes. The haul was more than four times last year’s $1.5B Bybit theft. Binance halted withdrawals and promised customers it would eat any losses.

The hackers got Binance’s own wallets to send funds to addresses they controlled, the same methodology used in the Bybit hack. Binance first pointed to a compromised engineer’s laptop, then said it had found “additional points of breach.”

The FBI has since attributed the theft to TraderTraitor, a North Korean unit tied to the Lazarus Group that was also behind Bybit.

Binance’s ~$1B emergency fund (SAFU) covered barely a sixth of the loss, so the company set aside $6.34B of its own money to replace the stolen assets. It began reopening withdrawals in phases on Sunday, starting with bitcoin. Customer balances look unchanged, but Binance is footing the bill.

Will the money come back? ~$3B has been frozen so far, including more than $2.3B by stablecoin issuers Tether and Circle, which can lock tokens on their own networks. The rest is harder to get.

The FBI says the hackers are converting assets into ether and expects them to launder it through DeFi and instant-swap services, where funds are much harder to trace and seize. In past North Korean hacks, only a small fraction was ever recovered, so Binance is likely to absorb a multibillion-dollar loss even if the frozen funds are returned.

Takeaway: Customers use exchanges because they’d rather not be personally responsible for losing their crypto. But Binance just showed that outsourcing the job comes with its own complications. Its promise to cover the damage matters, but so does whether customers trust it enough to stay. The “future of finance” is discovering that theft has a way of evolving too.

AI companies are shopping for something businesses have been accumulating for years: their internal records.

Business Insider reported this week that one data broker says it pays $100,000 to $2 million for a midsize company’s data, with plans to spend $1 billion buying more over the next year.

For financial sponsors, distressed-credit investors, and M&A advisors, that becomes another asset worth examining. Petrarch sources operational records from businesses, including bankruptcy estates, then de-identifies and restructures the material for sale to AI labs and startups. Its process includes on-premise anonymization (reducing privacy risk) and legal-clearance checks (permission to sell the data) before resale.

Explore how Petrarch turns operational records into an asset. Book some time with their CEO.

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Description: Jay Heinrichs explores the art and science of persuasion, drawing on lessons from Aristotle, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, and modern popular culture. He explains how to use rhetoric, emotional intelligence, strategic framing, and carefully chosen language to influence opinions and win arguments without creating unnecessary conflict. The book offers practical techniques for negotiations, leadership, public speaking, and everyday communication.

Book Length: 480 pages
Release Date: April 21, 2020

Ideal For: Executives, CFOs, entrepreneurs, negotiators, and professionals looking to improve persuasion, leadership communication, conflict resolution, and their ability to influence business decisions.

The most persuasive person in the room isn't necessarily the loudest. It's the one who understands what moves people and knows how to make an argument that resonates.

The constraint on AI has less to do with better models and more to do with finding durable power sources to plug them in. Goldman Sachs projects global data center power demand will rise 170% between 2025 and 2030, with more than 60% of that growth in the U.S. Its latest infrastructure report calls power "probably the forever bottleneck."

Current data center construction operates on a 3-7 year timeline, which is ironically slow in an era built around speed.

BluSky AI, however, is a company planning to build for speed with AI factory sites that are distinct from other data center sites. Their sites are targeting a 12-month timeline, they’re energy efficient (<50MW per location compared to 500+MW), and they will operate on a closed loop water cooling system using near-zero water.

They’re currently raising capital for US expansion. If you are interested in investing in AI infrastructure, learn more about them here.*

In a room of 23 people, the chance that two share a birthday is 50.7%. With 57 people it reaches 99%.

The reason is pairs. 23 people form 253 pairs (23 times 22, divided by 2), and each pair is a separate chance of a match. The number of pairs grows with the square of the group.

We judge coincidences by the odds of one specific match, but the real question is how many chances there were. Test enough funds or signals and some will look brilliant by chance, so ask how many were tried before you trust a winner.

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