CoreWeave’s $14 Billion Meta Deal, Spotify’s Ek to Leave CEO Role

14:43Caroline Hyde:Mike, OpenAI is holding Dev Day next Monday. It's probably on your calendar for peripheral awareness. But I'm very conscious that you're kind of speaking to us 24 hours after the news of CloudSonic 4.5 came out. Have you any data on the sort of reaction to it, early demand, and where that's coming from?

15:04Daniel Ek:It's been really interesting how quick people are to adopt a new model. So by, I think, about 1 p.m. yesterday, we already had more usage of CloudSynet 4.5 than all of our other models combined, which really speaks to the eagerness of a lot of these startups that are using or building on top of our models as well as early adopters. On day one, you saw GitHub and Cursor and Windsurf and many of these products that build on top of our models want to incorporate CloudSynet 4.5. And so we had this really early crossover moment as well.

15:32Caroline Hyde:That is interesting data. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this model is running on Project Rainier, right? Is that sort of operationally and infrastructure-wise where the training and now inference of it is being done?

15:47Daniel Ek:So we do our both training and inference across, you know, we have partnerships with Google and Amazon, but we have a significant part of this model being served now from Amazon as well. And we're seeing a lot of growth on AWS Bedrock as well.

16:01Mike Krieger:Just going to that infrastructure layer, you're obviously the product visionary here, but you need to have the energy, the compute to bring your products to life. Many worrying that we're in some sort of bubble cycle around AI. How do you think about that as you drive this business forward, Mike?

16:17Daniel Ek:I think there's this combined need to both scale up for the training side, but also on inference. And as we've scaled, especially with our business arrangements and the companies building on top of Sonnet, I think we now have a sort of forward-looking perspective on what our inference needs will be. And I think that will let us go out and also secure the kinds of compute deals that we need to both feel the training, but also have that sort of revenue-generating inference side as well.

16:39Mike Krieger:And we get so focused on the compute needs of the United States. But we've been talking a lot about that in Europe, how it's scaling in the UK. From your adoption, how are you seeing things different globally, Mike, of those that are actually deploying what's happened with Sonic 4.5 and the latest models?

16:55Daniel Ek:We see this a lot in terms of our global footprint. This is something we started expanding earlier this year. And so for our rollout of Tranium 2, which is the chip that Amazon has built for AWS that we use pretty extensively for our cloud models, a lot of that deployment is actually international. And when I go to Europe, for example, I hear a lot of questions about data locality and making sure that inference is happening in local data centers. And the only way we're going to be able to do that is to have that international footprint of these chips. And so you're seeing the same in APAC.

17:24Caroline Hyde:Mike, we are going to ask you a question about talent wars, but I'm just going to make an appeal to you to just be honest with me on this, how big a factor it is or isn't for you right now on the product team at Anthropic. In particular, I'm looking at the pace at which OpenAI is putting stuff out, Meta is putting stuff out. Just through your experience, what's the talent situation right now?

17:48Daniel Ek:I'm seeing much more of that talent sort of back and forth happen within the research side in general, a little bit less on the product, although I think there's some key hires where that's been the case. One thing that's been a positive sort of maybe surprise or just outcome of how mission-oriented a lot of the Anthropic team really is has been it's affected us very minimally in terms of that back and forth that you're seeing maybe among some of the other frontier labs, which is very encouraging. Of course, you have to continue to make sure we build a great culture and maintain that mission alignment.

18:18Daniel Ek:But so far, it's been minimally affecting us.

18:21Caroline Hyde:If we take Sonic 4.5 as the case study, what were the types of roles that you needed to bring in to roll out the release?

18:29Daniel Ek:I think people think of research and model science as being fairly cut and dry. I actually think that there's a lot of art and taste to it as well. You're making a lot of decisions from a research engineering perspective around what are the tasks the model needs to improve on? How will it improve on that? How will we know that it's improving on that? And so a lot of that reinforcement learning post-training piece is the key shape of what we really thought about in Sonic 4.5.

18:54Caroline Hyde:Mike Krieger, Anthropic Chief Product Officer. It was a real deep dive into Sonic 4.5. Thank you so much for joining us back on Bloomberg Tech. Coming up on the show, DoorDash has a new autonomous robot. Meet Dot. Hi, Dot. We'll talk to the VP of DoorDash Labs about what this robot delivers in terms of its capabilities. That's next. This is Bloomberg Tech.

19:42Caroline Hyde:Delivery company DoorDash is unveiling a new autonomous delivery robot called Dot. The company says Dot is the first commercial delivery bot to seamlessly navigate bike lanes, roads, and sidewalks. Here to tell us more, Ashley Red, vice president of DoorDash Labs. This robotics experience includes work with Zoox, NVIDIA, but the real terms parameters for deployment, which cities, how many deliveries, when?

20:13Daniel Ek:So we have been focusing on the greater Phoenix area, and that's our focus for this year. We are hoping to address about 1.5 million customers by the end of this year. And then, you know, as we progress, we'll see what happens. Dot likes to travel, though, so hopefully we can expand to more cities.

20:33Caroline Hyde:Team, let's bring up some pictures of Dot again. I mean, to me, Yashu, this looks kind of the design like a bit like a stroller or a pram, as we might have said in the United Kingdom. Could you just talk us through the design of it and then how this is what you arrived at?

20:51Daniel Ek:Sure. So there were three sort of key pillars for us when we looked into the design of DOT. The first one was product market fit. So we wanted to make sure that DOT would have the right cargo capacity and the payload that it can carry up to 30 pounds fits a vast amount of the DoorDash deliveries that we do today. The other big part was it had to be going at speeds that allowed us to do a big chunk of deliveries in the three to five mile range. And that's why the design point was it needs to be able to go on bike lanes, on roads, on sidewalks. But the other key part is the pickup and drop-off for deliveries, which makes it very different from RideHale.

21:36Daniel Ek:And one of the key feedbacks we had gotten from merchants was it is absolutely imperative to have the robot come as close as possible to the merchant right next to the doorstep, which is what Dot does. And so that was a key design feature, was that it could go on sidewalks and be sort of narrow enough to navigate sidewalks pretty well.

21:58Mike Krieger:And is that what, Ashu, currently isn't on the market? Because you were already using Cocoa Robotics, just backed by Sam Altman. There are others on the market. Is it just the speed, the pace that they can't meet? Yeah.

22:08Daniel Ek:So we actually also announced the key product called the Autonomous Delivery Platform, in which all our partners, including Coco and our drone partners and other robots, including Dot, can participate. And the idea is that as the demand for delivery is growing, we have an all-of-the-above approach, which is there will be dashers, there will be drones, there will be Dot. And so we are looking to work with all of our partners to enable this different modalities. So we believe the future will be multimodal for delivery. And this is the first step towards that.

22:45Mike Krieger:I cycle every day. I navigate dashes. How many dashes will I be navigating in the future? Is this going to replace careers in the longer term? How much of a percentage do you want delivered by dot?

22:57Daniel Ek:Well, we don't look at this as a percentage. We look at it as just a growing pie. So if you think about just over the last few years, DoorDash, the demand for delivery has been growing significantly year over year. So we think of this as, like I said before, it's just going to be multimodal. There are going to be many, many different forms of delivery. And you look at the range of deliveries we do. If you just look back to even five years ago, we were doing mostly restaurants. Now DoorDash does groceries. It does household items like toothpaste or diapers, even home electronics. You can buy a complete laptop on DoorDash and have it delivered to your doorstep.

23:34Daniel Ek:So we expect all kinds of deliveries to be happening on our platform. And this ADP that we announced yesterday is the first step towards that.

23:43Caroline Hyde:Ashu, who is going to manufacture DOT and where will they manufacture DOT?

23:49Daniel Ek:So at this point, we are going through that process of figuring out all of the pieces of where the manufacturing is going to be and where all the components, etc. So it's not decided? It's still being discussed internally as to how we will end up doing this.

24:05Mike Krieger:Is the aim to have it largely U.S. made?

24:11Daniel Ek:So the technology that we have developed here is all built here in the U.S. in DoorDash Labs. So it's pretty much purpose-built, homegrown robot. And it uses a state-of-the-art technology, again, developed by the engineers at DoorDash. It is a fully L4 autonomous system. So, as you can see, it navigates through all of the various situations it can encounter, whether it is pedestrians or cars. And, again, going up on sidewalks, going up to your doorsteps, lots of pedestrian and what are called VRUs, vulnerable road users, which means kids, pets, and so on. So, all of that technology was developed at DoorDash Labs.

24:50Mike Krieger:Wow. So, motoring along at 20 miles an hour next to me on the cycle lane shortly, I'm sure. Ashu, thanks so much for joining us. Ashu Rege, Vice President of DoorDash Labs at DoorDash. And coming up, AI chip startup Cerebra Systems. Well, it's closed a new funding round, an over$8 billion valuation. We're going to talk to the CEO, Andrew Feldman, because remember, this is a company that actually wanted to IPO. Does that delay that inevitable? We could talk the ambitions next. Ed, what are you looking at?

25:18Caroline Hyde:That's a private markets conversation. In equity markets and technology, there is some stuff going on. I mean, the broad story is that we are basically flat on the NASDAQ 100. traders are in wait and see mode. Will we get some economic data? Will we not? But we know the big story out there on the single mover side is CoreWeave, up 13%, highest level in six weeks on a $14.2 billion compute deal with Meta, which is down 1.5%. So much more to come on the show. Stay with us. This is Bloomberg Tech.

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26:57Mike Krieger:Welcome back to Bloomberg Tech. Let's check in on these markets because on the surface, some calm. We're currently off by just a quarter percent of the NASDAQ 100. Anxiety about a potential government shutdown here in the U.S. What does that mean for key data in the jobs market, particularly on Friday? What does it mean for the Federal Reserve? We stand pat in terms of big tech. But underneath the hood, let's look at individual movers because there are some big deals being done. Once again, in the spectrum space, we are having the best month for EchoStar on record, up more than 20 % because it keeps on selling spectrum.

27:25Mike Krieger:This time we understand it's likely to be selling to Verizon. There's Torx aplomb and the moment for AWS. Three licenses already they've been selling to AT &T and SpaceX. Let's have a little look at what's also on the move. Big deals being done in AI compute. We're going to delve into that throughout this section. We're up 12, call it 13 % on CoreWeave. $14 billion deal to Meta, yet more GPU access, more compute. But we've got plenty more when it comes to the world of AI infrastructure, Ed.

27:51Caroline Hyde:Yeah, a lot more happening in technology in private markets. AI chip making startup Cerebrus Systems has closed a$1.1 billion funding round. Cerebrus, which aims to rival NVIDIA, now has a post-money valuation of$8.1 billion. The company's CEO, Andrew Feldman, joins us for more. Andrew, good morning. Welcome to Bloomberg Tech. You know, my assessment of where Cerebrus is is that you claim that the technology is as competitive or better than what NVIDIA's systems offer. and you are aggressively building out that infrastructure and you are doing deals with end customers. In the context of this funding round, what's your priority here?

28:32Sure.

28:32Ed Ludlow:I think it's not just what we think. Every third-party benchmark has shown that we are ordered 20 times faster than NVIDIA GPUs for inference work. So that's for the using of AI. And so this is the largest and sort of fastest growing part of the market. So we wanted to fuel our continued extraordinary growth. And so we're going to use this money to double our manufacturing capacity. We manufacture in the U.S. and we're going to double in the U.S. to extend our footprint, more data centers so we can support more customers. And those are in the U.S. as well. and to continue to invest behind our pioneering technology, which has sort of solved problems that were open for 75 years in the compute industry.

29:31Caroline Hyde:Andrew, to what extent are you supply constrained? In other words, you have all of these customers. Are you having to choose who gets first dibs when some capacity comes online?

29:42Ed Ludlow:Right now, one of the most challenging components is to get access to data centers. And those are some of the massive contracts you discussed in your previous segment with CoreWeave that they're providing to the likes of Meta. Meta is also one of our customers.

30:03Ed Ludlow:But the ability to stand up and deliver data centers filled with our gear so that our customers can enjoy the benefit of the fastest inference through the cloud is one of the limiting factors right now.

30:17Mike Krieger:You've got, what, five new data centers just in the course of 2025. Looking at Dallas, Oklahoma City, looking at Santa Clara. What's really interesting, Andrew, is that where are you building? Are you literally going out there building? Are you just trying to win future relationships with a CoreWeave so that they take your compute rather than that of NVIDIA?

30:37Ed Ludlow:Well, I think we are renters of data centers. We are not builders of data centers. And so we partner with those who own the real estate and those who stand up the facility. We fill the facility, we rent the facility and then fill it with our infrastructure. And that infrastructure is then used by customers around the world, either by the day, by the month, by the token, to get their fast AI. And so I think that's the way we think about it, Carolyn.

31:15Mike Krieger:Andrew, we think about your customers and you're mentioning the likes of Meta. I'm interested in also where the money has been coming from for this round, because I noticed that one of your key backers of the past isn't on the list, it seems. G42, key investor in previous, and of course, Middle Eastern base, relationships potentially CEO with China. And that's been an issue for CFIUS in particular, if you wanted to IPO. Have you decided not to take money from them this time?

31:40Ed Ludlow:No, that wasn't the situation at all. I think it is very common in your dash to get to being public to raise a late-stage round from public market investors. Our round was led by Fidelity and Atreides. It included Tiger Global, Valor, 1789. It included Alpha Wave, all of whom have large and predominant public market practices. And so I think this was a round that was aimed at a different class of investor. We are continuing to collaborate with G42. They are our strategic partner. We are building enormous clusters in the U.S. for them. We are training models. We are serving models, including one that they built in partnership with their leading university in the UAE, MBZ UAI.

32:45Ed Ludlow:So that partnership remains rock solid.

32:49Caroline Hyde:Andrew, quickly then, the obvious question is, does your ongoing association with G42 preclude you from pushing forward with an investment based on the history of the CFIUS review?

33:00Ed Ludlow:Oh, not at all. Not at all. I think each investor has their own appetite by stage. And what we found in this round was that the lead investors had a very large appetite. And so we were able to meet that appetite. We cleared CFIUS in March. And so there is nothing blocking the IPO.

33:27Mike Krieger:Also when, Andrew, when?

33:30Ed Ludlow:In mid-March, we cleared CFIUS.

33:31Mike Krieger:When will you IPO, dare we ask?

33:36Ed Ludlow:That's the big question. I appreciate you asking. And as you also know, I'm unable to tell you with S1 on file, but I appreciate it.

33:44Mike Krieger:We keep the dance going, Andrew Feldman. It's so good to have you, CEO of Cerebra Systems. We appreciate it. Look, we're going to stick with AI infrastructure now because spending has been dominant theme in equities. Ever since ChatGPT turned everyone's attention to the technology and, of course, its compute needs. But the proliferation of data centers across the United States is putting pressure on energy supply and sending wholesale electricity costs soaring for you, for customers paying their bills. It's more on this with the big take. Let's bring in Bloomberg Power reporter Josh Saul, Solar Bloomberg DataVis reporter Leo Nicoletti.

34:16Mike Krieger:And I start with you, Josh. The compute, you go down to the individuals this is affecting. You particularly go to Baltimore. Can you tell us a little bit about how you found these individuals and what the effect on them is of, well, basically all the data centers being built pretty close to them?

34:32Ed Ludlow:Right. So the headline here is that data centers and their massive power demands are driving up power bills for everyone. The people that we spoke to in Baltimore, some we found because they had testified in a city council meeting about their bills. Some we found because they were eating eggs next to us at a diner. We talked to a lot of people, and everyone's really upset and having a hard time paying their power bills because of this effect.

34:56Caroline Hyde:Leo, this is the latest in a series, really, of pieces of data journalism from this newsroom about the impact of the build-out in data centers. Just explain methodology and the data set that we arrived at that gave us that headline.

35:10Ed Ludlow:Yeah, so, you know, essentially we dove into very granular data on wholesale power prices, which is an important component of what then makes up power bills. And we looked at locations, tens of thousands of locations throughout the country. And we kind of related it to the location of data centers. and what we found essentially is that areas located closer to data center activity are much more likely to experience price increases than areas located far from data centers.

35:44Mike Krieger:That's what's so interesting about Data Center Alley in the Virginia region and this is why you go to Baltimore. Can you therefore just break down us in New York? Are we going to be feeling the impact? How are you going to start seeing people built up and affected by region that they live and how certain local governments are going to have to stand in and help in some way?

36:04Ed Ludlow:Well, data centers affect power prices and your power bills in two main ways. One, they just use up so much power that economics 101 makes power more expensive for everyone else. And two, they require so much infrastructure, you know, new transmission lines, new power plants. The way utilities work is those costs are spread out among everyone. The reason this might matter for some of our listeners here, maybe they're like, I pay my power bill fine, that's okay, and some poor people have a hard time paying theirs, okay, but it can really affect these companies because if data center developers, big tech firms, have a harder time connecting to the grid or if that's slowed down because of public anger, that slows down some of these AI plays like we were just listening to, and it can also hurt utilities if regulators tell them that they need to do something differently.

36:53Ed Ludlow:That can affect everything from their share price to their future planning.

36:56Caroline Hyde:Leo, data analysis can take you in lots of different directions. So the headline is up to 267 % more. But were we able to rank in which geographies, regions, this gain in price is most present? And what are the factors behind it?

37:14Ed Ludlow:Yeah, so we looked at data, like I said, all over the country, tens of thousands of locations. And of course, there are areas in the country that are more affected than others, especially on the East Coast, the Northeast, the PJM grid in northern Virginia, but also interest in Baltimore, which doesn't have data centers immediately nearby, but it is actually very close to northern Virginia. that is Data Center Alley. And what we found is people and locations in the Baltimore area were experiencing some of the highest increases, sometimes three times as much since 2020, in 2025, than other parts of the country.

37:59Caroline Hyde:It is today's Bloomberg Big Take, the impact of AI data centers on boosting the cost of electricity for consumers. Check it out. Bloomberg's Josh Sol, Elio Nicoletti. Thank you very much. Now, coming up, shares of Spotify are lower today as the company announces changes in the C-suite with the departure of CEO Daniel Ek. And it is moving the stock a little bit lower. We'll have more next. This is Bloomberg Tech.

38:37Caroline Hyde:Big changes over at Spotify. CEO Daniel Ek is stepping aside after almost two decades, leaving the leadership in the hands of Chief Products and Technology Officer Gustav Suderstrom and Chief Business Officer Alex Nordstrom starting January 1st. The two officers have been co-presidents since 2023 and have been largely leading strategic and operational development. Bloomberg's Spotify reporter, Ashley Carman, is with us on set. You know, the stock tells a story. It's down more than 5 % on the news. But we gave the context after two decades. Daniel Ek is passing on the torch.

39:12Ed Ludlow:Right. And a founder. So that's obviously always going to be big news and investors always have strong feelings about that. But the way they're portraying this is that it's kind of status quo. They're saying Alex and Gustav have been doing this work essentially since they took over as co-presidents and that Daniel's kind of the visionary and he's

39:29Mike Krieger:still going to be very hands-on. That's what they're telling everybody. But what's not status quo is the world of music and the way in which Spotify is trying to identify new ways of doing audiobooks and trying to galvanize people perhaps around AI development of music and whether or not They want to be paying actual musicians royalties. How will these two leaders navigate that? That's the big question.

39:51Ed Ludlow:I mean, they're portraying this as a huge opportunity, right? AI music, huge new frontier, expanding to new markets that have never really adopted streaming or haven't in the same amount that the US and Europe have. But these are also the big challenges. I mean, there's a world in which if everyone can create their own music, do they need to have a streaming service? So these are the big questions that Spotify and Alex and Gustav are going to have to answer. Can they actually bring the value of AI, get these emerging markets to pay more, and then from a video front, compete with YouTube?

40:20Caroline Hyde:I think it's worth a health check on Spotify generally. At the end of 2022, this was a$75,$80 stock. It's now$689. Clearly, something's going right there. I spend quite a lot of time on Spotify. I know Cara does too. They're still dominant in certain categories. How do you see them as the beat reporter?

40:39Ed Ludlow:Yeah, no, they absolutely are the biggest music streaming service. So they have owned that category completely. Part of the reason the stock was down at that time was because they had been investing so much money in podcasting. And the investors didn't like that. Now, in this past year, I mean, they switched to a loss now, but they were profitable for a full year. They showed they can do this. Investors loved that. And so I think they just have this new confidence that they're going to spend their money more wisely and, if necessary, flip the switch to turn to profitability.

41:07Mike Krieger:Now, that was a big message from Ek himself. I leave it in profitable hands. I leave it on a high, basically. What's he leaving to do? Because he's staying on as chair. He's going to be there for strategy. But he has been active in Founderland, building new companies and new ventures and backing defense ones, health ones. Exactly. So he didn't really speak about that.

41:26Ed Ludlow:He really kept it focused on Spotify. But it does seem like he's going to spend more of his time in his investments, probably focusing on what they're up to. But he is, again, really saying he's going to be involved in the day-to-day with Spotify. He's going to be sharing his office,

41:38Mike Krieger:as he does with Alex and Gustav as well. Ashley Carman of Bloomberg, so appreciate the time on all things Spotify. Meanwhile, coming up, we speak with Microsoft Security Corporate VP, Vasu Jekyll, as the company unveils Microsoft Sentinel or improvements to it, about a unified focus on security. This is Bloomberg Tech.

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