Uber Considers Buying SpotHero, xAI’s New Supersized Data Center, Nvidia Predictions | Dec 31, 2025

0:13Welcome, everyone, to the Information's TI-TV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Wednesday, December 31st. We are just hours away from the new year, and we have a fun show to close out 2025. First up, the information has new reporting around a potential acquisition that Uber is considering. And separately, we are talking about a third big data center that XAI is looking to build. We'll then have a bit of a brainstorm about where NVIDIA could look for more M &A next year, and we have another great prediction for you about Oracle's cloud business in 2026. We also have some exclusive reporting about Brookfield's ambitions in the cloud business, and we're going to end the show with a fun highlight reel recapping TITV's biggest moments of 2025.

1:02It's going to be a great show to close out the year, so let's get right on into things. The information has exclusive reporting that Uber is considering buying parking app Spot Hero, a service that allows drivers to reserve parking spaces. Here to talk about what we know is Corey Weinberg, our Deputy Bureau Chief of Finance. Corey, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here. Thanks, Akash. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Okay, so Spot Hero is a company. I didn't know this. Maybe I've parked there and I have used it unknowingly, perhaps. Well, Akash, I'm an Angeleno now, and I have to find parking often.

1:40So let me tell you, I know Spot Hero. You know Spot Hero. Okay. You got the app on your phone? I do. Okay. And so you reserve the spot, and this is, what, a business that Uber just really wants to get behind? What do we know here? Yeah. So we just reported this this morning, actually. Uber is considering buying Spot Hero. We don't know the exact price yet of it, but it's notable to us for a couple of reasons. One is just Spot Hero is one of these startups that has endured. It's been around. It's been around since 2011. It's one of the rare consumer parking companies that has outlasted the stages of everyone in tech saying that parking is dead.

2:34And that whether it's ride sharing or whether it's autonomous vehicles, no one will need to park anymore. our spot hero has been able to sort of prove that wrong and build a pretty nice business, we think, sort of getting people to be able to reserve parking spaces. And so I'm just trying to think here, you know, Uber getting into the parking business, what is this sort of like a horizontal play here in terms of when I open up the Uber app, like another feature that I can click basically? They've been building these features out for a while. I mean, if you go on your Uber app now, obviously ride hailing and delivery are the two main uses.

3:14But they have a partnership with a car rental company called Turo. They've rolled out in Europe being able to book train tickets. You can book ski lift tickets, weirdly enough. Wow. Uber. You know, yeah, it's sort of a we want to be the everything mobility app, the everything delivery app sort of. sort of play. But I think it also is an acknowledgement of, you know, another reality, which is the number of ride hailing trips or car rental trips that people take is a very tiny percentage of the overall trips that are taken, particularly in the US, like vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority are people driving themselves from point A to point B.

3:58And that requires a parking space on either end. Great. Well, Corey, it was some great reporting. I look forward to seeing what actually does shape up. That is Corey Weinberg, our Deputy Rural Chief of Finance here at The Information. Okay, xAI already has two giant data centers powering its AI operations, and a new exclusive story from my colleague, Theo Waite, reveals that the company is planning a third giant facility as it continues to pursue a markedly different strategy than other top AI model companies. I want to bring on Theo to tell us more about what he's learned. Theo, welcome back to the show.

4:35It's great to have you here. Good to be back. So what do we know about this third data center? It's currently a warehouse with a bunch of trucks in front of it. That's like every data center though, man. Come on. Well, no, actually, because some of them they have to build from the ground up and X-Guy is going in and buying these other facilities that are built for other things and converting them um but yeah it's huge it's 810 000 square feet and it's right next to another huge xai data center that is still under construction as well and what's the name of this third facility um well after our story came out elon uh tweeted about it and confirmed the story and said it was called macro harder um xai's second data center that it's close to is is called macro hard um which is a term that kind of started out as Elon making a joke about Microsoft's name.

5:34You know, a childish joke, as you can probably tell. But now it's actually a serious thing, and it's what he's calling XAI's attempts to build software with AI. Let me ask you something. What does it feel like as a reporter when Elon Musk confirms your story on Twitter? I mean, you see that tweet. What's going through your mind? I mean, it was cool. Like, you know, it doesn't happen that much because, you know, I reach out to this company for comment and they have an autoresponder for every journalist that says legacy media lies. It used to be, I don't know if we count as legacy media, though.

6:15I guess not because we didn't lie in this case. But it used to be a poop emoji before that. So, you know, generally there's this very confrontational attitude toward reporters and that they have. And so when I see them acknowledge that something we reported is correct, it's, it's rare. And, and, you know, I appreciate it. And I should say it happened pretty quickly too. I mean, this was minutes after your story was released. I mean, you know, clearly he, clearly he's reading is, is, is the point that I'm making. So I hope he, I hope he read our story and didn't just see a tweet about it. I hope.

6:48No, I think he read the story. The timing is too perfect. Okay. So, you know, one of the things you talk about in your story is the differing strategy here that XAI is taking compared to other fast-growing model companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Talk a little bit about why they are moving to build their own data centers and basically from the ground up, whereas other AI companies, and I'm not talking about, you know, the hyperscalers, the cloud companies that obviously have data centers for other purposes, or meta for that matter. But, you know, OpenAI and Anthropic, I mean, they seem to be working with a lot of partners to do this, right?

7:29It's a bit of a different approach. Yeah, we, you know, have all these names, Crusoe, CoreWeave, like Oracle, you know, all these companies that we associate with OpenAI that, you know, do different things, but ultimately are kind of part of their uh mission of getting is compute online and then you know there's also amazon building a data center for anthropic you know there's all kinds of these deals going on and you know xai is not entirely independent but is definitely more independent than these these other companies i mean they are going in and you know buying properties and developing themselves or renting and buying properties and developing them themselves um and And, you know, that means they can be kind of aggressive and, you know, like brash sometimes in a way that other companies wouldn't be comfortable doing.

8:20I mean, like putting the data centers where they are in Memphis, you know, is a bold move in itself. Like companies don't usually build data centers in cities that have a million people in them. You know, Meta's biggest data center project is in a part of Louisiana that's extremely rural and there aren't like even hotels for construction workers building it to stay in. So building in a city has given XAI access to a lot of infrastructure. It's let them find existing buildings like warehouses and factories that they can transform into data centers and get online faster. But it's also kind of exposed them to a lot of scrutiny and opposition.

8:58This seems to be sort of part of Elon Musk's way of operating, which is that he wants to have more control over more things, essentially. He doesn't want to leave anything to somebody else, you know, where he might not have as much say over the timeline or something like that. Right. I mean, you know, I was, I was, I was like, you know, outside the site the other day and you could see there were tons of people working between Christmas and New Year's. And, you know, I just, I don't think Elon trusts that if you hire someone else to do that, they're really going to be out there 24 seven on, on that kind of schedule.

9:33You know, I think he feels better having it in house. Now, let me ask you one more question here. These data centers that XAI, there's two of them and now there's a third. Do we know, are these only going to be for XAI's operations? Does Elon have sort of a broader agenda here in using these for his other companies or maybe companies outside of his empire too? You know, I think theoretically, yeah, they could be used for Tesla or SpaceX. and both Tesla and SpaceX are integrating some XAI services into their products. But for now, it's pretty much all to develop the latest Grok models as far as I know.

10:17Great. Well, Theo, I want to thank you for coming on. That is Theo Waite, our Elon Musk reporter here at The Information. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Okay. NVIDIA's big grok deal last week wasn't the first aqua hire that the company did this year. It also did that with another startup called Infabrica. And a few months before that, it bought chip software company CentML. Those were much smaller deals, but all of this reflection has prompted a question in my mind. What could NVIDIA buy in 2026? Or at least who might it look to for another aqua hire? To help us brainstorm, I want to bring on Austin Lyons, a senior analyst at Creative Strategies.

10:58Austin, it's great to see you. Welcome back to the show. Hey, Cash. Thanks for having me. I didn't wish, Theo, Happy New Year properly in the last segment, so I'm going to start by saying Happy New Year to you. Well, thank you, sir. Okay, so let's brainstorm here. What do you think that NVIDIA could buy next year? So that's a great question. And I think if you look at NVIDIA, and if we just speculate here, they have a history of buying technology companies for their talent and for their intellectual property. Obviously, going all the way back to the Mellanox days, which gave them scale-out networking and scale-up networking.

11:34So if you ask, thinking about networking, if you say, where is networking going next? We've already seen in 2025, NVIDIA mentioned that they are going to build co-package optics switches for scale-out networking, which scale-out networking already communicates using photons over optical signals over fibers. Bring it down one level for us. If we were explaining it to somebody who wasn't in tech. Totally, totally. So when GPUs have to talk over long distances, it's better to use light instead of electrons. There's fundamental reasons why that's more efficient. When GPUs are really close together and they talk to each other, historically, they've talked using electricity.

12:18over copper traces. But now as the industry starts to push more and more data around at faster and faster speeds for training and for inference, there actually will be some physical limits to communicating over using electricity, essentially. And how the chips talk to each other, basically. Exactly, exactly. And so for scale up, this is scale up when these GPs are really close, but they still talk to each other. There's actually technical reasons why the industry is starting to look to using optics for scale up. So for example, Marvell just bought a company, Celestial AI, and they make something called a photonic fabric.

13:00And so this is just letting chips, even if they're really close together, talk to each other using light. It would not be surprising to see NVIDIA make an acquisition here. A company that comes to mind is IR Labs, which is a company actually that NVIDIA has invested in already. So they're intimately familiar with them. IR Labs makes optical IO chiplets in these optical interconnects. So that is, I know it's very sort of meaty and technical, but that would definitely be an acquisition. I wouldn't be surprised if it's on the table in 2026. Well, look, this idea of photonics is an area that we've talked about on the show.

13:37Vinod Khosla pointed to it as one of the most promising areas that he was looking. And so I think the fact that NVIDIA might look to expand its operations there certainly makes sense to me. Outside of that, are there other names that you're looking at in this space? So in this space, there are other players. For example, Light Matter is a company that does essentially very similar things, and they're actually focused on 3D photonics. So what if you could actually stack the optical engine and the GPU and they could actually communicate vertically? So a little bit more interesting, maybe a little bit further out.

14:16That would be an architectural bet that they're making. But I would say IR Labs is one that definitely comes to mind for a lot of people tracking this space. So let me ask you about the business of the cloud. We had some reporting earlier this month that NVIDIA has basically put aside its ambitions to compete with AWS as far as building out a cloud business. And we also reported that they had basically reassigned some of the executives that were overseeing this work. you know i kind of thought that this would have been a logical step for nvidia especially as it looks to uh vertically integrate itself maybe not um upstream with the chip production but downstream insofar as what you do with the chips stuff like that i kind of thought maybe a cloud acquisition would have made sense uh do you think anything like that could be in the cards for 2026 or 27?

15:12So that's a good interesting question. This is very strategically interesting. Should NVIDIA go beyond silicon and actually run a cloud business? Early on, you know, they dipped their toes into this and a lot of analysts and industry followers were a little surprised because it felt like the danger there is that NVIDIA would be competing with their biggest customers, you know, Microsoft, even Google buys GPUs and rents them out, right? And so there was a question of, oh, is NVIDIA gonna make their customers mad if they start a competing cloud business? Now, if you fast forward a little bit and ask, well, what would need to come true for NVIDIA to get back into that game?

15:53If it's really about a business model and capturing margin and in the value chain right now, it's like a picks and shovels play. The people that make the hardware are capturing all the margins. In the future, if you believe in a world where those margins compress because of competitive pressures, whether it's from other GPU vendors like AMD or from hyperscalers making their own XPUs, so Amazon, maybe they don't need to buy as many GPUs in the future because they're building their own Tranium. There could be a world where the margin capture actually shifts higher in the stack to the application layer or to the inferences and API layer.

16:31And if NVIDIA felt that their margins would be compressed and they still had lots of cash, I could see them considering getting back in the game and asking, could we make money here? And it wouldn't be on like bare metal GPU rentals. It would probably be on the like inference as a service type play. Right. But the point you're making is that the economics of making the chip and selling the chip and the software around the chip, I mean, that would have to compress considerably for NVIDIA to look downstream in terms of what they might seek to offer. Totally. And, you know, we don't necessarily see a sign of that.

17:09NVIDIA has wonderful margins in the 70%. But this could be a longer-term thing. So 2026, not so sure, but could it happen in the future? Possibly. Right. Although I will say, look, to... And this is now a different point than the cloud point, but, you know, software is so key to these chips. some sort of acquisition to sort of keep that software moat strong, I mean, that could be another area that they look to because we've talked about this on the show. It's really, they're trying to sell people the full system end-to-end with their chips. And so definitely interesting to think about. Austin, I want to thank you for coming on.

17:51And happy new year to you. That is Austin Lyons, Senior Analyst at Creative Strategies here on TI TV. Okay. Today, we are publishing our latest piece in our newsroom's 2026 prediction series. Yesterday, our Apple reporter talked about why he thinks Apple will reverse its AI slump. Today, our finance reporter has some thoughts on how Oracle could get creative with the way that it finances its cloud buildout. I want to bring on Myles Krupa to help us understand what he's thinking. Myles, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here. Thanks, Akash. What is your 2026 prediction? Yeah, my 2026 prediction is that Oracle is going to do the first of its kind chipped backed asset backed security.

18:41I know that's a mouthful. Chipped backed asset backed security. Okay. Yes. Great. I think that's a great place to end it. So tell us what that means. Right. So the asset-backed securities market is huge. It's a bit over$800 billion so far this year. And it's already been used to finance things like data centers. And so what I'm proposing is basically that Oracle will look to this market to be able to raise money against its existing chips so that it can buy more chips to do things like build data centers for open AI and, you know, stay on track for this big cloud expansion that they're pushing.

19:26And I just want to make sure I'm clear on this. So, I mean, look, the idea of Oracle owning chips and then taking out a loan that is collateralized by those chips, I get that part. In terms of what they would spend that money on, would they be spending that money on buying more chips or would it be really building the data centers themselves? Yeah, that would be the idea. The chips are really the most expensive part of any data center, well, any AI data center in the cloud. And so Oracle's done a pretty good job of getting others to build the physical shells of the data centers for them so far.

20:02And they've been able to defray the upfront costs of that in a few different ways. But what I think they're going to need to start doing next year is really thinking about how they're financing the actual chips that go in those data centers and how to bring down those costs. So that's where I see them turning to the ABS market. Now, you started off by saying first of its kind. So no company has done anything like this before? Right. No company has done anything like this in the sort of publicly traded asset-backed securities markets. CoreWeave, which pioneered this kind of AI cloud model broadly, has raised about$13 billion of debt backed by chips, but it did that by going to private investors in the kind of private credit market in a more bespoke deal.

20:55What I'm proposing here would be a much more sort of standardized asset-backed securities issuance that big insurance funds, big pension funds, you know, risk-averse investors could get behind and then trade in and out of if they wanted to. As a public security, essentially? Essentially, yes. Okay. Now, you also talked about a special purpose vehicle in this system that you described. What would be the purpose of an SPV here, other than being special, which is the point of a special purpose vehicle? Yeah, well, it's a common tool in the ABS market and basically Oracle would put the chips that it's using as collateral in that special purpose vehicle so they're basically locked in there and lenders could have comfort that if everything went south they would be able to then do something with those chips in the SPV and it could also have the added benefit of keeping some of this off of Oracle's balance sheet which is already looking a bit stretched so it sort of serves that dual purpose and why why is it that companies can do this i mean you know the idea of keeping debt off the balance sheet that seems to make a lot of sense to me but i just i'm struggling to understand why a company could just basically um allocate all that risk to this third party entity or something that you know doesn't um beget any risk upon itself well it's a common tactic and it's it's actually something that the banks have done a lot more since the financial crisis.

22:32So it's sort of taking that concept and applying it to the tech world, which frankly, up until this point, hasn't had to do anything like this. You know, Google has grown a fairly big cloud business pretty quickly, and it was pretty unprofitable to begin with. And Google subsidized that with profits from the other part of its business. What's different now is basically that Oracle doesn't have that luxury. It's burning cash and it has to spend a lot of money to fulfill this commitment that it's made to open AI. So it is kind of, it's an interesting moment to see a tech company like Oracle that used to be very profitable, now in a position where I think it should be considering something like this.

23:18And what would be the risks with pursuing a strategy like this? Yeah, well, the risks are basically that the chips, this has been a hot topic of debate, that the chips maybe don't last as long as Oracle and other Cloud providers want them to. That instead of five or six years of useful life, it turns out maybe after two or three years, they're not as powerful or they're usurped by other chips. That's one big risk. Then ultimately, these will be backed by Cloud customer contracts. that's kind of the key backstop here. And so, you know, if all of a sudden Oracle got these huge customers canceling their cloud contracts, that would also be problematic for the ABS issuance.

24:06And I'm just trying to sort of play this out. So if we, let's say, if the chips do depreciate faster than people might think, then I guess what would happen here? The value of the collateral would basically, it would shrink, right? it might be, you know, 60, 70 % what they thought it were. And then they'd basically have to find new ways to collateralize it. Is that the idea? Probably not, but it would just be potentially harmful in the downside scenario if, you know, if they were to have to sort of seize the chips and also could be harmful for the revenues flowing through that SPV that ultimately go to repay the investors in the ABS.

24:51You know, if NVIDIA, well, that's less likely, but let's say if OpenAI all of a sudden doesn't want to use these older NVIDIA chips, you know, maybe that harms the cash flows going to the investors. But there are ways to sort of solve for this. You can over collateralize it. And there are other sort of techniques you can use to make sure that those cash flows keep flowing. Great. Miles, I want to pivot to another story that you published today about Brookfield. Brookfield is a giant asset management company. We haven't written too much about them here at The Information. What did you find about their ambitions in the cloud market?

25:28Yeah, it's interesting. They made this big announcement in November that they were going to acquire$100 billion of assets to power AI. So everything from land to energy to data centers. And there was a little notice part of that announcement where they actually said they were building a cloud company called Radiant and that NVIDIA was investing in this Brookfield fund as part of that. And so in this interview with Brookfield's head of AI infrastructure, I was able to basically learn that they're seeing Radiant as the sort of first cloud of choice for all of these data centers they're building around the globe.

26:08Sweden, France, Qatar, basically Brookfield thinks that they can go in, install chips themselves, and build a business renting them out to companies, which is something that I haven't seen any of the other major private capital firms do so far. So Brookfield basically is suggesting it could be another Oracle in terms of being a cloud provider or another AWS or something like that. I mean, that's the market they're competing in, right? Yeah, exactly. And it sees a way in through this kind of sovereign AI niche, you know, serving big governments, serving customers in Europe that need to store their data locally.

26:52And that is something where their sort of government connections, you know, famously, they have these tight government connections in Canada, in Europe, you know, they're kind of leaning on that to try to build this business. And so I think you'll probably see that paying dividends over the next few years. How much do you think about how their energy work could give them an advantage here? Because they do a lot of energy investing. They do a lot of infrastructure investing. I mean, I just think about the power that is needed for these data centers. Everyone can't stop talking about it. I mean, I'm sort of trying to think, if you have a company that owns energy assets already, is there a way maybe to vertically integrate more of this cloud operation and actually maybe even give you an advantage?

27:42I don't know, maybe insofar as price, does this come up as an advantage in the people you talk to? Yeah, well, it's interesting because we just saw Google pay almost$5 billion for a company called Intersect Power that basically creates microgrids for data centers that connect renewable energy to battery storage, I could definitely see Brookfield doing something similar. You know, they have Westinghouse, which is making nuclear facilities. They have a ton of wind, a ton of solar. They also have this deal with a company called Bloom Energy, which is doing fuel cells that they're planning to hook up to data centers.

28:21I think, you know, Brookfield having all of this sort of under one roof. It's just one phone call away. If you need a hookup for a new data center in Europe, or you're struggling to get connected to the grid somewhere else, you know, it's just that much easier. Let me ask you one more question. You had this conversation with the global head of AI infrastructure. Outside of this news, you know, I always like to ask people, you know, what stands out to them from the conversation on a human level, you know, did anything surprise you, you know, about this interview that you had? It's so rare that we get to sit down with folks like this.

29:02Yeah, it was interesting. I think it was interesting to me how sort of forthright he was about basically this idea that they're going to cut out the middleman. You know, he said basically, we're not as interested in working with five different partners in five different markets and that's what a lot of these data center players have had to do you know they've had to go and talk to core weave and talk to microsoft and talk to nebius and talk to all these other cloud players and try to play them off each other to get the best terms for these data centers they're building and um brookfield doesn't have to do that now so i thought it was sort of interesting how he kind of came out and said that and i think the other interesting thing was that he went out of his way to basically say, we're not doing any of this speculatively.