Microsoft & NVIDIA Invest in Anthropic, Google Gemini 3.0, Jeff Bezos’ AI Startup | Nov 18, 2025

0:13Welcome, everyone, to the Informations TI TV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Wednesday, November 18th. We have got a great show for you with some exciting guests. But first, a couple of notable headlines. A cloud flare outage took down certain parts of the internet this morning. The company confirmed a fix has been implemented, and they believe the incident is now resolved. Sites like X, ChatGPT, and even our own platform at the information were impacted by the outage. The company CTO posted an apology on X, clarifying that the outage was not caused by an attack, but by a bug that caused systems to crash.

0:49The firm promised transparency and a further explanation, which we will be on the lookout for. The incident occurred just one month after a widespread AWS outage. I also want to highlight some exclusive reporting that we have at the information. Databricks, a database provider whose tools help customers develop and use AI, is in talks to raise money at a valuation of more than$130 billion. That is up around 30 % from its valuation in a financing round just two months ago. We will link that story in the show notes. Okay, here's what's on deck for today's show. First off, I am joined by Editor-in-Chief Jessica Lesson and Microsoft reporter Aaron Holmes to discuss some breaking news, a new partnership between Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Anthropic.

1:36Jessica will also talk about Jeff Bezos' new AI startup. Then, our Google reporter will break down the rollout and strategy behind Gemini 3.0. We'll then turn to a great discussion with our advertising reporter who published a story today about how Pinterest is adapting to the AI era. And finally, we will end things with a conversation about Amazon's$15 billion bond issuance, which is sparking conversations about how big tech companies are funding their big CapEx spend around AI. It's a big show, and so let's get right on into things. We had big news this morning that NVIDIA is investing up to$10 billion in Anthropic.

2:14Microsoft is investing up to$5 billion, and Anthropic has committed to buy up to$30 billion in compute from Microsoft. It is the latest data point in a very interconnected AI ecosystem. And I want to bring on our editor-in-chief, Jessica Lesson, and our Microsoft reporter, Aaron Holmes, to help us break it all down. Jessica and Aaron, welcome to the show. It's great to have you back. Thanks, Akash. Another big news morning. It is big all around and so many players involved. Aaron, given that you're the Microsoft reporter, I want to come to you very quickly. Break us down to us the details of the announcement this morning and what stood out for you.

2:50Yeah, so I think what's particularly interesting about this is that Microsoft is essentially, you know, with this investment in Anthropic, winning some of the startup's business away from its rivals, Amazon and Google, who are also shareholders in Anthropic and up to now have been the cloud providers for Anthropic. And at the same time, this shows how Microsoft is getting closer to the arch rival of OpenAI, which had been, you know, up to now Microsoft's chosen horse in the AI race. It has invested$13 billion into OpenAI and has the rights to reuse that startup's models. And we're basically moving closer to this world where instead of a model provider being closely allied with one or two cloud providers, they're clearly willing to work with all of the cloud providers on the market, while also scoring investments from those cloud providers at the same time, which is really fascinating.

3:40Jessica, this kind of feels like one of those circular deals that we've seen so much of, right? Absolutely, Akash. My reaction to this was honestly, what took so long? It was so clear that to fulfill these compute demands, everyone was going to be a customer of everyone. Last time I was on here, I talked about multilateralism. That is the name of the game. And I think what's happening is that the fundraising needs are immense for players like Anthropic. Now, also, the compute needs are. So this makes sense until demand shifts, if demand shifts, right? And then we're all in trouble as an industry.

4:16But my reaction to this was what took so long. I mean, Aaron was the first to report that Microsoft, in terms of co-pilot, was working closely in integrating Anthropics technology, which was a huge shift when that story came out because it was the first sign that OpenAI wasn't going to be the only partner on the sort of consumer and business-facing side. And I think these deals are always multifaceted where each side wants many things from each other. And I think this is the second shoe to drop and there will probably be more between those companies. So Aaron, as Jessica said, you reported, you were first to report this relationship between Microsoft and Anthropic getting closer.

4:55What do you think this now means for the relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI? You know, we've seen Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, essentially shouting from the rooftops recently that he doesn't want to just have one giant cloud customer that's driving the bulk of Azure's revenue, which, you know, in the past couple of years has been OpenAI. And we really saw that on the last earnings call that he was trying to reassure shareholders that Microsoft wouldn't be overly concentrated in its cloud business for AI customers. So in some ways, this is proof that he's serious about that by inking this deal with essentially one of the only other AI labs that is willing to spend as heavily on servers as OpenAI.

5:36At the same time, Microsoft is still using OpenAI's models and has the rights to reuse those models for free in its software. And so we're not going to see that go away. And I think Microsoft is still saying that its strategy is to focus on that OpenAI partnership as its sort of primary AI partnership. But basically, Microsoft is also showing that it's not afraid to diversify and offer its customers even more models from OpenAI's rivals. Jessica, I want to get your take on how the strategies of OpenAI and Anthropic have compared and contrasted because we've done some reporting about the focus on efficiency that Anthropic has and the tighter timeline it has towards getting towards actually generating free cash flow.

6:20We haven't seen as many announcements from Anthropic until lately around data centers and around compute. It really feels like they've started to increase the frequency of those announcements. How do you sort of square the differences or similarities in the strategies of these two companies? Anthropic and OpenAI are very different businesses and I think headed in very different directions. You know, a week or so, we had the exclusive Anthropic Financials published by our Anthropic and OpenAI reporter, Sri, that showed that I think through 2028, OpenAI is scheduled to spend$235 billion on infra with Open, I'm sorry, with Anthropic, a third of that.

7:00So that was one data point that actually shows they have very different strategies, even on the compute forecasting side, which of course is the bedrock for what they intend to do. I mean, they're in somewhat different businesses today with Anthropic really pushing the enterprise side. OpenAI is kind of going a thousand miles an hour in all directions right now on the revenue side. We see a huge push with businesses. Sarah Fryer, the CFO, cannot sit at a conference without talking about how many new business customers they've nabbed. And now we have the CEO of Applications, Fiji Simo, out there saying, our consumer business is going to make money from basically democratizing high-end advice, high-end shopping advice, high-end financial advice.

7:44I think that's much more of an open question, whether consumers will pay for that or not, given there are a lot of free products out there. So to answer your question, I think their strategies are diverging. And I think it's so useful to see, because I increasingly think a question for next year is going to be, if you spend less on compute, how are you going to adjust? We don't know which projects are actually going to come to fruition. We also don't know what Wall Street is going to say and how much runway they're going to give these companies on CapEx. And so I think it's going to be really interesting to look at, okay, these were our forecasts.

8:20Yes, demand is high, but if we're paying a little more attention to the bottom line, investors are more scrutinizing this. Where do you get more efficient? Do you spend less on research? Do you spend less on inference? So it is fascinating to watch, obviously still a fierce rivalry between the two, but they give us very two different models. on how you sort of top and bottom line going forward. Also on strategic partnerships. I mean, we have been sitting here at the information the last couple of weeks trying to figure out exactly how Anthropic is going to raise more money. They've got Amazon.

8:56They've got Google. You know, I'm sort of saying, oh, duh, now they have Microsoft. Why didn't we think of that? But that is very different from how OpenAI has gone in terms of how it's raising its capital. So it's fascinating to compare and contrast. Right. Very quickly, Aaron, before we let you go, Jessica mentioned the relationships that Anthropic now has with all three of the big hyperscalers. Do you think this has any meaning of sorts with Anthropic's relationship with Amazon or with Google at all? Yeah, I mean, one thing that's really significant here is that Anthropic is committing to work with NVIDIA to optimize how it trains and runs its models on NVIDIA chips even more so.

9:36And so far, you know, Google and Amazon have been very eager to show that Anthropic is using their in-house AI chips, TPUs at Google and, you know, Tranium at Amazon as kind of like the poster child for how their chips can be used. So in some ways, this is, you know, NVIDIA's way to claw back some of that business and show that it still is, you know, the number one destination for Frontier AI Labs. And I think that it makes it a little bit harder for Amazon and Google to continue to pitch their chips as, you know, being key to Anthropic. However, at the same time, Anthropic said today that AWS is still its most important cloud provider.

10:14So we'll have to see how that plays out. Right. Well, Aaron, I want to thank you for coming on. We will let you get back to the newsroom because I know you have more reporting to do. Thanks again for joining us. Jessica, stick around for a minute because I do want to talk about another story this week, which is Jeff Bezos is officially now in the AI game with his new startup. What are you hearing on the ground about this startup and how they're thinking about it? So we started hearing maybe about six months ago that Jeff was raising for a monster AI company. And the Times obviously reported this week that that company is codenamed Prometheus and focused on AI and manufacturing.

10:52And instantly, you know, my head went off because, of course, in March, myself and Aaron Wu at The Information Broke that Larry Page has a new company called Dynatomics focused on AI and manufacturing, specifically planes. And so I think it is a fascinating moment. You know, if you had asked me at the beginning of this year, would Larry and Jeff be operating AI and manufacturing companies? I probably would have said, I think not. And Larry isn't the CEO, although I hear he's in the office several days a week. So Jeff is the co-CEO, and we'll see how this plays out. There's a lot of interesting information around Prometheus.

11:34For one, I now know that Rick Klausner, who is sort of a well-known AI scientist, was involved in the longevity space with Yuri Milner, is also involved in this project. I'm not sure why you need a scientist in a manufacturing company, but that's never stopped these billionaires from thinking big. So my prediction is that it will be a long, long time before we see sort of anything from Prometheus. I think, you know, Jeff is probably trying to assemble really interesting people to study these problems. He needs to accelerate manufacturing with regards to space. I see that Elon called him a copycat on X yesterday as news of this broke.

12:17And I think it's early. You know, I hear this round isn't even done, but I think obviously it won't be hard for Jeff to get a lot of checks for it. So my takeaway is that there is some real excitement over sort of AI for building things. There are a lot of things in this space. And, you know, I'm sort of a broken horse on this, but I now live in Waymo land, which I think is a really interesting example here in the Bay Area of how kind of physical things and manufacturing and AI and robotics are really front and center on the frontier right now. Right. You said that your kids were taking Waymos to school and they're not even phased by it.

12:58Not to school, Akash. I wish. My kids are so young. We took a quick lap to the ice cream store over the weekend. I was getting that car seat in and out as fast as I could. But what was amazing to me about that is it was a non-event. Right. The idea, this was normal. They were relaxed. They wanted to connect their Spotify. So, you know, that was our report from the streets of San Francisco. Can I just ask you a question? I kind of was thinking about the AI meets physical world trend that we've been seeing. This is obviously what Larry Page and what Jeff Bezos are focused on here. On the other end of the spectrum, we have folks like Mira Mirati, who are sort of technical people by training.

13:42It strikes me that that type of fundraising is a little bit more for the foundational technology and stuff like that. Both are raising tons of money. I wonder what you make of sort of this idea that we have physical world getting a lot of funding, but then we have the underlying models that also still need to be improved. You know, what Mira and Thinking Machines Lab are really doing is still very confusing. And by design, I will say. I mean, you can talk to people who are working there and, you know, it's not actually clear. They know fully what they're doing. So by design. But yes, you're seeing these AI leaders like Ilya, like Mira Moradi, who are still trying to push the boundaries of the models or tweak the boundaries of existing models.

14:30And honestly, Akash, until we see what they're doing and really understand how it's being picked up by businesses in the research community, it's impossible to judge. I think it's also really hard to invest in, but they're investing off their reputations, which may be a very sound bet given their track records. But it's just very, very hard to really understand what they're doing. You know, you'll talk to two people who had meetings with them last week, and they'll describe the business in two entirely different ways. Again, I think probably mid-next year, maybe we'll start to see some products from Thinking Machines a little bit more.

15:05But right now they're raising funds off, you know, momentum and the founder power. Great. Well, Jessica, I want to thank you for coming on. It's a dynamic time and I trust there's going to be more news to be unearthed. So we'll let you get back to it and we'll have you back on the show again soon. Thanks, Akash. All right. See you soon. Okay. Gemini 3.0 is here. That is, of course, Google's new flagship large language model. It often takes some time to assess how good these new models are. And every time they're launched, there are tons and tons of reviews that continue to come out. But my colleague, Erin Wu, who covers Google, has some good reporting out today on how it fits into the company's overall strategy.

15:47And so I want to bring her on to help us break it all down. Erin, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you on. Hey, thanks so much for having me. Let's talk about 3.0. What can you tell us about how, well, we'll get to the reviews in a second. but how is the company thinking about 3.0? Maybe let's start there. Yeah, so I mean, 3.0 is continuing this really incredible run that Google's on. Like they've done quite well with all of their recent model releases. 2.5 Pro, which came out earlier this year, very well regarded. Nano Banana, which was Gemini. Google's image editing model also was one of the first products to go kind of like independently viral on Twitter.

16:26And so they've been on like a good run And Gemini 3, at least the metrics that they gave us pre-release, all look really good. Obviously, the big question is going to be how do users and developers feel once they actually get their hands on this thing. But I think Google is riding high right now, and their hope is that this continues that progress. Okay, and so early reviews, how are people finding it? Yeah, again, a little bit hard to say. I chatted with Figma's chief design officer yesterday. Google connected us. Unsurprisingly, they are really liking it. They're using the new Gemini model for design.

17:02They're finding that it can generate a broader range of styles compared to other models that they've tested and that it's really good at kind of maintaining the fidelity of the designer's original vision when it's translating a design into actual code. And so in terms of where this model is now implemented in Google's front end layer, so So there's Google Search, which has the AI mode, and then there's Gemini. And so based on what you wrote this morning, it's both of them. I mean, you can sort of go one or the other. Yeah. So look, Google's strategy is that Google is huge. Google has 190 ,000 employees.

17:40Google has seven different products with more than 2 billion users. And so essentially what they're trying to do is they're trying to put Gemini into everything. So for the first time, this model is launching immediately day one. in search for AI mode. That's the first time they've done this. It's also launching in Gemini. If you're a developer, you can get it on AI Studio and the Gemini API. And if you're a business, you can get it on Vertex and the Vertex AI Studio. And they're also launching a brand new coding tool today. And so the Google strategy, such as it exists, her product seems to just be making everything, putting Gemini into everything, making a ton of different options for people to use this stuff.

18:23Okay. And just out of curiosity, I mean, let's just talk me and you. I mean, this overlapping strategy where Google is saying, you can use 3.0 wherever, wherever, you know, it's kind of like wherever you get your podcasts, right? Like that's where you can find it. Do people think this is a good strategy? Does this have any risks? I mean, talk about that. Yes and no. I mean, a lot of the reporting that I've done has been talking to employees, former employees, longtime Googlers who are like, what are they doing? What is the overarching product strategy? Why can you have Gemini at all of these different places?

19:03And it doesn't work the same and it doesn't necessarily connect what you're doing here to what you're doing here against what could be a really unified suite of product experiences. Even just in this most recent press demo is back to back, here's how you can do this cool new trip planning feature on Gemini. And then it's like, here's how you can do this cool new trip planning feature on AI mode, but they're not the same and they don't do quite the same things. And so, I mean, there's the argument that this is a huge company and it's a bureaucracy and it just kind of, there's not a central vision in the way that maybe you could have more so with an open AI where they're starting from Greenfield and it's just ChatGPT.

19:43It's just the ChatGPT API. But then And I think on the other hand, there's the argument that this doesn't matter in some senses. They're a big company. They have the resources. Is this as efficient as they could possibly be with it? Probably not. But the numbers are up and to the right. People are using this stuff. Search revenue, despite a lot of people's fear, is not going down. And so I think there's also the argument that, you know what? It's fine. Yeah. The model is good. And speaking of the numbers, can you just remind us just about how much traction Gemini is getting, just so we have a sense there?

20:19Yeah, so the most recent number we've got is from earnings last month, reiterated again in the press release for Gemini. But it's 650 monthly active users, which is a lot. It's grown quite quickly. That's a lot of people. I mean, that's a lot of people used. Yeah, it's still lower than ChatGPT. ChatGPT is at 800 million weekly active users, which is a more meaningful metric because it shows that people are relying on this more in their day-to-day or week routine. But if you think about the name recognition of people using ChatGPT in conversation and you sort of apply that context, I mean, look, three quarters or something of the user numbers, it's not bad when people are not using Gemini in conversation.

21:09It's not bad, but you also have to remember, I mean, like OpenAI is a company that came out of nowhere. Like Google is this, like people maybe aren't using Gemini in conversation, but like everyone's using Google in conversation. I do think there's still this idea that Google squandered what could have been their opportunity to be like the name brand chatbot company. Right. Well, Aaron, thanks so much for coming on. As you hear more and more about how people are reacting to it, I look forward to having you share that with us. That is Aaron Wu, our Google reporter here at The Information. Okay.

21:44AI and social media are two terms that go hand in hand nowadays. But a new story from my colleague, Catherine Perloff, reveals how Pinterest is taking a more measured approach to embracing AI features. Part of that strategy is based on what the company says its customers actually want. To tell us more about what she found, I want to bring on Catherine to tell us more about her story. Catherine, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here. Hi. So let's talk about AI and Pinterest. How much of a threat does AI conceivably pose to a company like Pinterest? I guess it depends on who you ask.

22:19Hence the point of the story. Yeah. The company, like, you know, they're kind of like, well, we don't compete with Google. We do a more specialized type of search. And so we're not going to compete with ChatGPT. But not everyone thinks that, you know, there are folks on Wall Street really see the potential to for Pinterest to get their luncheat in by ChatGPT because the kind of questions people come to Pinterest with, which is like, how do I redecorate my living room or, you know, show me a good outfit, you know, those are questions people could ask ChatGPT and could even ask ChatGPT to generate images for them to sort of get ideas.

23:00People come to Pinterest for inspiration. Now, at the same time, ChatGPT is not a visual search engine at the moment. So it's not like Google Images. But yeah, it obviously produces images and that is a threat to Pinterest. The other kind of notable thing is that Pinterest started as a website and it started as a way for users to collect, you know, their favorite photos and videos from the web. And the whole ecosystem, web ecosystem is being threatened by ChatGPT. So that's another reason why they're sort of kind of uniquely in the line of fire. Okay. Now, what is Pinterest doing to combat this?

23:40How is it using AI to hedge against some of these threats? Yeah, you know, it's interesting. So Pinterest, you know, they've been using generative AI, but they've been using it more in their systems and like, and sort of not to sort of kind of become a chatbot company or give users the ability to like create photos or create videos or create text with AI, like Meta and TikTok have been giving these abilities to their users. And, you know, I think that Pinterest is sort of like, we just want generative AI to make Pinterest better at what Pinterest does. So, you know, servicing better recommendations in search.

24:19They release this assistant product, which you can kind of talk to it or ask it questions in conversational language that pull up, like, you know, maybe shopping recommendations and that uses AI. But it's not, you know, they're not turning themselves into a chatbot. And I talked to their chief technology officer, Matt Madrigal. and you know he was like that's not what our users want um and we don't want to be sora we don't want to create sora and i just think yeah it's very interesting because i think a lot of the stuff we talk about on this show is sort of like how is chat gbt going to change everything and i think there is an open question pinterest is like it's not it's not going to change everything it's like but you know the back end let's start with the back end let's let's see if it even works right yeah does every media company does every tech company have to become a version of ChatGPT.

25:05Yeah. You know, that's... It seems like a... I'm going to be honest, it seems like a smarter strategy, more reserved and methodical strategy than I think some companies are taking. You know, I think so in the sense that, like, you don't want to just shove a bunch of products that are flashy in your consumers' faces that they won't really like. Yeah. I think the risk, you know, comes with, you know, First, if the chatbot interface becomes so ubiquitous, do they fall behind if they don't have more of that user experience? And the other risk is not necessarily making themselves in the image of ChatGPT, but what are they doing to prepare?

25:48And that kind of question, I talked about the question of where is their content going to come from, if the web is a harder place to get content from. And then also, all websites have face declines in Google traffic. So it's, you know, and that's because a lot of websites have, as Google sort of prioritizes their own AI experience that is less link forward. So I think, you know, it's like, A, how much do you have to become ChatGBT? And then B, how much do you have to prepare for the world that ChatGBT will create, you know? Right. And are we seeing any evidence of AI eating into Pinterest growth rate at all?

26:26I mean, we talked about how Google search on the last segment with Aaron Wu, Google search is still pretty strong. Any evidence of that with Pinterest? You know, I think that, you know, Pinterest has been growing. And in 2021, 2022, and they actually tried to be more like TikTok in some ways. They introduced vertical video. They started to lose users. And when they kind of got back to what they were doing well under the new CEO who joined in 2022, Bill Reddy, they've been kind of growing steadily. I mean, not gangbusters, but SETI, you know, 17 % top line growth, some growth in their, you know, U.S.