⛏️ Gold Rush, AI Edition

Happy Wednesday, it’s May 28, 2025.

Here’s today’s dose of what you signed up for.

🔥 Top Shelf Chaos

⚡ Europe’s electric old guard cashes in on AI chaos. While Silicon Valley burns billions chasing sentience, Europe’s industrial fossils - Schneider, Siemens, ABB, and Legrand are stacking €151B selling the unsexy guts - wires, power rigs, server racks. They’re the plug-and-play gods behind AI’s electricity addiction. While hyperscalers throw tantrums and grids flirt with breakdown, these quiet titans cash in on compute’s power surge. This isn’t legacy, it’s leverage. Everyone’s chasing GPT glory. Europe’s just selling them the juice to run it. Boring? Maybe. Profitable? Obscenely. (More)

⛏️ Supreme Court greenlights Rio Tinto’s copper colossus. The highest court just gave Rio Tinto and BHP the thumbs-up to turn sacred Apache land into a glorified sinkhole. Oak Flat, hallowed ground for generations, is about to become collateral damage for copper. The mine could feed 25% of America’s demand, but at the cost of culture, sovereignty, and sanity. Gorsuch called it a “grave mistake.” Washington called it “strategy.” In reality? It’s bulldozing belief for better battery cables. National security now comes with a backhoe. (More)

🏗️ Steel deal bends for America, not breaks. Nippon Steel wanted U.S. Steel, what it’s getting is a deal wrapped in red, white, and bureaucratic barbed wire. American CEO? Check. U.S.-majority board? Check. A “golden share” that lets Washington slam the brakes on anything it doesn’t like? Oh yeah. Trump’s calling it a win, but it’s less merger, more controlled detonation. Japan gets market access. D.C. gets veto power. Everyone else gets spectacle. This isn’t globalization, it’s nationalized theater with steel-toed boots. (More)

👀 Side-Eye Central

💸 EU to Apple: fix your store or bleed cash. The EU just gave Apple 30 days to actually comply with the DMA or start paying daily fines that scale with its bank account. At issue: Apple’s shady workaround to anti-steering rules, which the Commission says “undermines the effectiveness” of the law. Apple’s defense? Semantics and a 27% detour tax. Brussels isn’t buying it. (More)

🧩 Neuralink just got a $600M brain boost. Musk’s mind-meld startup snagged $600M at a $9B valuation, doubling last year’s estimate as it rides FDA “breakthrough” hype and brain-tweet headlines. The chip’s already letting one patient game and scroll with his mind, but Musk’s pitching it as a cure-all for everything from paralysis to depression to telepathy. Silicon Valley’s wildest sci-fi bet just got seriously funded. (More)

🌍 TSMC is planting chip roots in Germany. Taiwan’s chip titan is opening a design center in Munich to cozy up to European clients and support its upcoming fab in Dresden. No word on headcount or spend, but the move’s clearly part of TSMC’s global hedge against China risk, planting flags where customers live and politicians don’t panic. (More)

💾 Salesforce drops $8B on Informatica to fuel AI takeover. A year after denying it was for sale, Informatica’s now getting scooped up for $8B in cash as Salesforce bulks up its data war chest. The move supercharges its AI agent dreams with governance muscle and cloud DNA. Agentforce, Tableau, MuleSoft, Benioff wants them all running on clean, compliant, enterprise-grade data crack. (More)

🛢️ US pulls Chevron plug in Venezuela, Maduro shrugs. Trump’s team just let Chevron’s oil license expire, cutting US cash flow to Maduro’s regime, despite internal drama and Chevron warning the real winner will be China. With Rubio driving sanctions hard and 350,000 Venezuelans losing US protection, the play’s part pressure, part chaos. Maduro’s survived worse, and with Beijing in his corner, he’s not sweating it. (More)

🤷‍♂️ Whatever

⚛️ US nuclear revival looks like a fanfic plot. Trump’s big nuclear comeback plan includes fantasy timelines, DOE shortcuts, and reactors running by 2026. Too bad nobody’s building, funding, or approving anything real. (More)

🚗 Xiaomi beats revenue forecasts, but EV dreams hit a wall. Strong smartphone sales and a $15.5B quarter couldn’t mask the blow of a fatal SU7 crash and BYD’s price war. SUV launch now carries baggage. (More)

⚖️ Meta’s monopoly trial wraps, breakup on the table. The FTC wants Instagram and WhatsApp sliced off for good, accusing Meta of “buy or bury” tactics. Judge’s decision could redraw Silicon Valley’s power map. (More)

📈 Citadel cashes in as Trump-era chaos fuels record trades. Volatility is Citadel’s love language, $1.7B in Q1 profit, up 70%, as Trump’s executive order spree jolted markets. It’s the new king of chaos trading. (More)

🛠️ Mistral drops Agents API for enterprise AI orchestration. Developers can now spin up AI agents with memory, web search, and code execution, if they’re cool with a proprietary stack, locked access, and rising API bills. (More)

🏬 Ruby Liu swoops in to revive Bay stores with a twist. Billionaire Ruby Liu is snapping up 28 Hudson’s Bay leases to launch a flashy new department store concept. The 17th-century icon might get a 21st-century glow-up. (More)

📱 WhatsApp finally lands on iPad, 15 years late. Meta dropped a native iPad app with full call support and multitasking, years after users begged for it. Better late than never, but wow, that clock was broken. (More)

🧠 The More You Nope

🦐 Shrimp were found doing cocaine in British rivers. A study of UK freshwater streams turned up traces of coke in every shrimp tested, along with ketamine, pesticides, and antidepressants. These tiny crustaceans are basically swimming around in a drug-fueled rave, and no one knows what it’s doing to them, or the food chain.

📜 Cursed Wisdom

🧯 Send Help (to Others)

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Hit forward. Share the chaos. Perform CPR, the metaphorical kind, obviously.
We’ll even reward you. Eventually. Probably. But don’t do it for the prize. Do it because you’re a good person. Or at least want to look like one.