Strategic Initiatives
12368 stories
·
45 followers

The Inside Story of IBM’s Shocking Profit Warning - WSJ

1 Share

LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite) summary:

  • Corporate Performance: ibm admitted to a disastrous second quarter resulting in a massive twenty-five percent decline in share value.
  • Strategic Miscalculation: the tech giant failed to anticipate the aggressive market shift toward ai, leaving its own hardware offerings stagnant.
  • Market Irrelevance: investors now treat ibm as a discretionary expenditure as clients choose to bypass mainframe upgrades in favor of new ai infrastructure.
  • Leadership Scrutiny: current management faces intense pressure to stabilize operations as the firm struggles to transition into the modern agentic era.
  • Investor Anxiety: the board is currently debating the necessity of restructuring or spinning off business units to appease restless shareholders.
  • Activist Vulnerability: the dramatic loss of market capitalization has left the company wide open to potential interventions by opportunistic activist investors.
  • Budget Disruptions: corporate technology spending has pivoted sharply toward ai buildouts to the direct detriment of legacy hardware sales and cybersecurity services.
  • Desperate Transparency: in a rare move, the firm issued a preemptive warning to disclose failure, attempting to feign credibility amidst a historical market selloff.

Emil Lendof/WSJ

July 16, 2026 6:00 pm ET

IBM’s IBM 3.72%increase; up pointing triangle board was staring down difficult news: The second quarter had been a bust.

Directors had long known that the artificial-intelligence revolution would upend the technology icon’s business, but the pain came sooner than expected, leaving the company with a tough choice, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Board members debated whether to issue a rare warning that bad news was coming or wait for the numbers to hit the tape a week later when executives could discuss them with investors, the people said. 

After asking tough questions of CEO Arvind Krishna, the board agreed to take its medicine and disclose the disappointing results in the hopes of winning credibility for transparency. “This quarter we faltered,” Krishna wrote in an investor letter that IBM published hours before markets opened Tuesday.

The stock plunged 25%, the worst day in the century-old company’s history.

International Business Machines, a company that helped send humans to the moon, worked on America’s Social Security system and built a supercomputer that beat contestants at “Jeopardy!” is reckoning with the punishing realities of the AI boom. 

It is one of the first big corporations to confront the costs and disruptions of the fast-evolving technology—and have to explain itself to anxious investors. Even as IBM helps its customers adapt to the AI age, it was caught flat-footed by it.

The news has sparked discussions on Wall Street about whether IBM should be broken apart or an activist investor will come hunting for Big Blue. It isn’t clear how much guidance the company will be able to give investors when it reports full quarterly results next week, one of the people said.

Arvind Krishna, who started as a software engineer at IBM in 1990, took over as CEO in 2020. Arvind Krishna, who started as a software engineer at IBM in 1990, took over as CEO in 2020. Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Krishna “needs to get this straightened out quickly because the last thing any 63-year-old CEO can afford is being stigmatized as a spotty executor that is responsible for historic selloffs,” said Don Bilson, head of event-driven research at Gordon Haskett, in a note to clients this week. 

IBM declined to comment. Krishna promised to go into deeper detail when he hosts a conference call next Wednesday. “We have conviction in the strength of our portfolio and the strategic transformation of our business,” the IBM boss wrote in his letter.

Fears that AI tools from companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI would replace software have rattled the shares of Salesforce, Workday and Snowflake over the last year. IBM presents a different problem. Its warning this week showed that investments in AI infrastructure such as memory and new cybersecurity concerns are displacing spending on hardware, too.

Squeezed between server orders and AI buildouts, some of IBM’s customers now treat the tech giant as discretionary spending, said Daniel Morgan, a portfolio manager and analyst at Synovus Trust. 

“I think you might see some, ‘Hey, we’ll hold off on this for a couple quarters…we don’t need to upgrade to the new mainframe right now,’” Morgan said. “That’s kind of hurting them.” 

Missing out

Unlike other AI-infrastructure providers and cloud companies such as Nvidia, Google and Oracle that rent computing capacity, sell chips and offer networking hardware, IBM sells hardware and software systems that corporate customers install at their own sites. Its customer base includes leading financial-services firms and retailers.

The company’s top leaders have discussed whether it has become too reliant on large accounts that come with inconsistent deals and upgrade cycles that they can push off in lean times, people familiar with the matter said. They have talked about the need to diversify and court a wider range of customers, such as medium-sized companies, but it would take time to see if such an approach paid off, one of the people said.

Board members will be watching to see if Krishna’s team comes together, because this will be a test of his leadership. Some also are concerned that the company might swing to a more conservative stance that could hamper growth. The board is expected to meet again in late July.

One IBM alum, who now runs his own AI company, praised Krishna for his candor and said the market reaction was overblown. 

“The punishment doesn’t fit the crime,” Debanjan Saha, CEO of DataRobot, wrote on LinkedIn. “This selloff wasn’t about a quarter. It was the market repricing a question: can a 115-year-old enterprise company lead the agentic era, or merely survive it?” 

IBM has reinvented itself many times, transitioning from tabulators and time clocks in its earliest days to personal computers, mainframes and supercomputers and later AI and hybrid cloud computing. 

Saha noted that the company had survived antitrust battles, the PC wars and the rise of the internet. “Every obituary was premature,” he wrote. “This one will be too.”

Krishna’s era 

Krishna, who joined IBM in 1990 as a software engineer, was appointed in 2020 to succeed CEO Ginni Rometty. The selection of an executive who had been senior vice president for cloud and cognitive software signaled where the company was headed. 

IBM bought open-source software company Red Hat for $34 billion, a deal Krishna helped integrate and would become a major growth driver. Software accounted for about $30 billion of IBM’s $67.5 billion in revenue last year.

IBM further sharpened its focus on the cloud-computing market with investments in hybrid cloud computing software and quantum computing. It spun off IT-outsourcing business Kyndryl to further simplify the business and bought cloud-software company HashiCorp.

Krishna told people last year that he expected AI would replace around half of the work in many workflows, increasing productivity and job reallocations. IBM has trimmed thousands of roles from its 260,000-person workforce and has hosted reskilling programming for its own staffers.

While Wall Street was initially skeptical of Krishna, his strategy started to bear fruit. As recently as last year, the company’s army of consultants had built up billions of dollars of bookings helping customers navigate how generative AI would change their business, and its software business was growing.

In April, IBM struck a first-of-its-kind settlement with the federal government, paying more than $17 million related to its diversity practices. The next month, its stock popped when the Trump administration awarded the company $1 billion in grants to boost quantum computing. IBM said it would invest $1 billion of its own cash alongside the award to set up a specialized quantum-chip manufacturing facility.

The stock’s drop this week has pushed its market capitalization below $200 billion, leaving it dwarfed by companies such as Broadcom ($1.8 trillion) or AMD ($800 billion) that were once seen as small suppliers to giants like IBM.

IBM and its advisers are aware that this week’s bad news could make it vulnerable to an activist investor showing up in its shares or pushing it to examine potentially splitting the company up, according to people familiar with the matter. 

Gary Cohn, vice chairman of IBM, speaking at the Semafor World Economy Summit.Gary Cohn, vice chairman of IBM, said changes in corporate technology budgets might be temporary. Aaron Schwartz/Bloomberg News

The quarterly warning was especially unusual coming from IBM, an American blue chip that held a reputation among investors for results that are steady, if unspectacular. For decades, IBM chief executives didn’t even participate on earnings conference calls, leaving such matters to the company’s financial executives.

Board members are aware that the near-term is likely to be messy and that an impatient Wall Street is unlikely to tolerate two or three more quarters of underperformance, according to the people familiar with the board discussions. 

Gary Cohn, who has been IBM’s vice chairman since 2021, suggested Wednesday on CNBC that the change in companies’ spending on technology products and services might be temporary. While IT budgets set months ago have been disrupted by high spending on computing, companies are now starting to question the return on investment. Some, Cohn said, are asking whether they should go back to reinvesting in proven enterprise infrastructure.

Asked about the decision to warn about the poor results, Cohn said, “Arvind took it upon himself to say, ‘Look, I want to be transparent with the world. I don’t want to surprise them.’”

Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the July 17, 2026, print edition as 'IBM’s Shocking Profit Warning Comes Amid an AI Reckoning'.

Anissa Gardizy is a reporter at The Wall Street Journal covering cloud computing and digital infrastructure. She focuses on the race to secure enough computing power for artificial intelligence—tracking chip deals, data center buildouts, and financing arrangements that are reshaping the industry.

Anissa built this beat from the ground up at The Information, where she broke exclusive news on Nvidia, OpenAI, and Oracle that reshaped how the industry understood the AI boom. She started her career as a reporter at The Boston Globe, covering business and technology.

Anissa was selected as an inaugural member of The Poynter Institute’s Reporting Workshop for Rising Stars in 2019, and she was part of a team that won a Best in Business award from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing for coverage of OpenAI in 2023.

Anissa grew up outside Philadelphia and is a graduate of Emerson College.

Emily Glazer is a Pulitzer Prize-winning enterprise reporter focusing on business leaders, power and influence for The Wall Street Journal in New York. Her articles often focus on the intersection of business and politics, CEO succession, board shakeups or regulatory investigations. Emily also contributes to the Journal’s Personal Board of Directors columns and interviews leaders at WSJ's CEO Council, Board of Directors Council, Future of Everything and Tech Live summits.

She previously covered tech, money and politics during the 2020 election. Earlier, Emily wrote about JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo. She also has covered global bankruptcy and restructuring; consumer products companies like Procter & Gamble, Avon and Herbalife; and personal finance.

Emily was the lead reporter on the WSJ team that won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for coverage of Elon Musk. She was also part of WSJ's Facebook Files team that won George Polk, Gerald Loeb and Deadline Club awards. Her reporting on a range of subjects, including Bill Gates and Elon Musk, has also been recognized by the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing (Sabew), the National Press Club, the New York Press Club, the Newswomen's Club of New York and the News Media Alliance.

Emily was featured in and consulted on Netflix's "Dirty Money" documentary series focusing on Wells Fargo.

Emily has reported for Dow Jones since 2008 in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. She graduated with honors from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

Lauren Thomas is the lead reporter on M&A and shareholder activism for The Wall Street Journal in New York. She consistently breaks market-moving news about the biggest deals across all industries. Some of her scoops have included the $55 billion leveraged buyout of Electronic Arts, Union Pacific's more than $70 billion deal for Norfolk Southern, Exxon Mobil’s $60 billion deal for Pioneer Natural Resources, Google parent Alphabet's $32 billion deal for Wiz, Mars’s $30 billion deal for food maker Kellanova, and Sycamore's $10 billion take-private of Walgreens. She also frequently scoops the biggest proxy fights in corporate America, including recent battles at Starbucks, Disney and Southwest Airlines.

Before joining the Journal in October 2022, Lauren covered the retail and consumer industries at CNBC. There, she broke news on companies ranging from Target to Macy’s to Peloton, and she regularly appeared on CNBC TV programming.

A native of Spartanburg, S.C., Lauren graduated with high honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she studied business journalism and Spanish.

Read the whole story
bogorad
16 minutes ago
reply
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Share this story
Delete

(4) A gonorrhea vaccine fails - and reveals a much bigger problem with the studies health bureaucrats use to push flu and Covid jabs

1 Share

LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite) summary:

  • Vaccine Inefficacy: a meningitis vaccine promoted as a gonorrhea preventative failed entirely in a randomized controlled trial.
  • Bureaucratic Obstinacy: health authorities in england continue to distribute the ineffective shot despite clear contradictory clinical data.
  • Media Complicity: mainstream news outlets have suppressed the negative results of the australian trial to maintain a pro-vaccine narrative.
  • Observational Fallacy: reliance on flawed observational studies creates deceptive statistics that ignore real-world performance discrepancies.
  • Statistical Distortion: the healthy vaccinee bias frequently generates an illusory forty to fifty percent effectiveness rate in non-randomized research.
  • Safety Concerns: the trial recorded a higher incidence of serious adverse events among participants receiving the vaccine compared to the placebo group.
  • Methodological Superiority: randomized controlled trials expose underlying biases in public health data that observational methods conveniently overlook.
  • Institutional Fetishism: ideological commitment to universal vaccination overrides evidence-based medicine and jeopardizes individual health outcomes.

Last year, England began offering gay and bisexual (aka gay) men a vaccine for gonorrhea, the sexually transmitted bacterial infection often called “the clap.”

Though not fatal, gonorrhea is unpleasant and increases risk for HIV. Like other sexually transmitted diseases, it is far more common in gay men. English authorities offered the vaccine, originally designed for meningitis, after studies showed it cut infections by about 40 percent. The shot could have a “huge impact,” England’s top vaccine regulator told the BBC.

Or not.

Last week, the New England Journal of Medicine published results from a trial of the vaccine in gay men in Australia. It failed to prevent gonorrhea — and some men who received it reported serious side effects.

The media has buried the trial’s results. Not one mainstream American news outlet reported the vaccine’s failure. And, after giving over 30,000 men the jab, English authorities are so far still recommending it despite the new results.

(Unearthing the results the media buries. For pennies a day. With your help.)

But the failure of what is called the 4CMenB vaccine (the “Men” in the shot’s name stands for meningitis) is not just about one vaccine.

It offers much larger lessons — ones health bureaucrats and the media are almost certain not to heed.

The gap between the earlier reports showing the vaccine worked and last week’s findings it didn’t are not a coincidence or an accident.

The earlier studies were based on observational real-world data, like the studies the Centers for Disease Control now uses to justify flu and Covid jabs.

The new study was much smaller, covering only about 600 men, but it was not observational. It was a randomized controlled trial that split subjects into two groups. One received two shots of the actual vaccine. The other received placebo injections.

The two groups were matched by age, reported sexual activity in the previous six months, and other factors. And the trial was blinded, meaning no one receiving the shots knew whether they were getting the vaccine or the placebo.

Blinded randomized trials control for hidden biases that observational data cannot. And the trial’s results were unequivocal. Men in it had a better than even chance of getting gonorrhea whether the received the vaccine or not. (The sex recession does not seem to have reached gay men in Australia. About 60 percent of the trialists reported having 11 or more partners in the six months before it began, including almost 10 percent who reported more than 50. Roughly 70 percent said they had had group sex at least once in the previous six months.)

(Unreported Truths is a serious news site!)

The trial’s failure is among the most compelling evidence yet that the observational studies that health bureaucrats and the media rely on to push the Covid and flu vaccines are little more than pro-jab propaganda.

In the real world, people who get vaccines differ from those who remain unvaccinated in crucial ways. They may be more concerned about their health, more likely to seek medical care or use condoms during sex (or stay home if they’re afraid of Covid). Researchers can try to correct for these differences, and good ones do.

But they inevitably fail, and the hidden biases almost always make vaccines look better. (I say “almost always” to be safe, but “always” is probably more accurate.)

The phenomenon even has a name: healthy vaccinee bias.

Healthy vaccinee bias is not a small effect. It typically gives vaccines a 40 to 50 percent advantage in observational studies — exactly the edge that the gonorrhea vaccine seemed to have but did not.

It is also no coincidence the Covid boosters, which have appeared essentially useless in clinical trials since Omicron emerged, often have about a 50 percent edge in observational trials. (Pfizer and Moderna have basically stopped running any randomized clinical trials on Covid jabs in the last couple of years, and governments and the bureaucracies have stopped making them do so; that’s not a coincidence either. You can’t find a vaccine doesn’t work if you don’t test it properly.)

But you can support Unreported Truths with a one-time donation! No subscription required, if subscriptions aren’t your thing.

Meanwhile, stunningly, the study’s authors did not catalog ordinary side effects from the vaccine in the gonorrhea trial, claiming that its side-effect profile is understood from its use as a meningitis vaccine. (Yes, that’s what they said.)

However, they did record serious adverse events, those requiring hospitalization. Not doing so would have been a major ethical breach.

And, yes, the vaccine was linked to notably more of those serious events. Eighteen participants who received the vaccine reported them, compared to nine who did not. In the study’s appendix, the investigators said the vaccine might have caused the serious side effects in four cases, though — as is typical — they offered no details about specific cases to explain their judgments.

(GoGo to the hospital, do not pass go!)

Barring stunningly unexpected results in two other trials that are still happening, this trial should mark the immediate end of efforts to use the meningitis vaccine for gonorrhea prevention. Most heterosexual adults, and even many gay men in committed relationships, are at very low risk for gonorrhea anyway.

Yet public health bureaucrats are refusing to change course. As the BBC reported:

The UK Health Security Agency said it was not making any changes at this time. Dr Mary Ramsay, director of public health programmes at UKHSA UK, said it was “important to consider a range of evidence.”

The losers here will be gay men, who may believe they are protected by a vaccine that doesn’t work, rather than focusing on safer sex practices that actually do, like using condoms and being regularly tested for sexually transmitted diseases.

Ahh, the public health vaccine fetish! More powerful than leather at an all-male after-hours club.

Read the whole story
bogorad
1 day ago
reply
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Share this story
Delete

The White House Made Fixing Intel Its Pet Project. It’s Working. - WSJ

1 Share

LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-20260507) summary:

  • State Capitalism: the u.s. government has effectively nationalized private interest by seizing a ten percent stake in a failing corporation via coerced federal grants.
  • Political Coercion: white house officials are actively forcing private market players like apple and nvidia to bankroll and utilize the administration’s handpicked corporate project.
  • Performative Nationalism: the state is mandating domestic chip production regardless of market efficiency to satisfy a superficial campaign narrative about rejuvenating heavy industry.
  • Bureaucratic Micromanagement: government handlers are embedded in corporate operations, with commerce department officials tracking product rollouts and quarterly business metrics.
  • Manufactured Resurgence: the supposed commercial turnaround relies entirely on federal funds and forced customer acquisitions rather than organic competitiveness or sustainable business innovation.
  • Transactional Alliances: ceo lip-bu tan secured his position and company survival by engaging in a desperate charm offensive to convince the administration of his political loyalty.
  • Sunk Cost Strategy: the administration is pouring billions into obsolete manufacturing models in a futile attempt to bypass the global competitive reality of advanced semiconductor fabrication.
  • Precedent Risks: this blatant government interference distorts market incentives and leaves the company hostage to the whims of future political cycles and leadership changes.

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan Vernon Yuen/Nexpher Images/ZUMA Press

July 10, 2026 9:00 pm ET

Tim Cook was under pressure from the White House last summer when he fielded an unusual request. 

The Apple chief was in Washington, scrambling to persuade the Trump administration to abandon its plan to impose tariffs of 100% on all semiconductor imports, a move that would likely increase the cost of its most important products. 

Apple eventually won an exemption after committing to invest hundreds of billions of dollars more in the U.S. In the course of their meetings with Cook, President Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick also brought up another American company: the troubled chip maker Intel. 

Trump and Lutnick urged Cook to use Intel’s manufacturing plants, or fabs, to make some of Apple’s chips, according to government officials. 

In one of the most remarkable examples of state capitalism in recent memory, the U.S. government became the chipmaker’s largest shareholder later that month when it converted $9 billion in federal grants into a 10% stake in the company.

Nearly a year later, Trump announced via Truth Social post that Apple would begin using Intel-made chips for some of its products, sending Intel shares to record trading highs. “I decided to help Intel because we need to design and build our Chips right here in America,” Trump wrote. 

President Trump, with Apple CEO Tim Cook, presents Apple's announcement of a $100 billion investment in U.S. manufacturing last August.President Trump, with Apple CEO Tim Cook, presents Apple's announcement of a $100 billion investment in U.S. manufacturing last August. jonathan ernst/Reuters

Apple plans to have Intel make chips for both Mac laptops and iPhones, according to a person familiar with the negotiations. The connection between the tariff talks and a potential deal between Apple and Intel has not been previously reported.  

Intel’s shares have more than quadrupled since Lip-Bu Tan took over as its CEO in March 2025, promising to cut spending, reinvigorate its product lines and attract game-changing customers to its contract manufacturing business, or foundry. 

The company’s stunning resurgence is partly good luck: the AI boom recently entered a new phase that demands huge quantities of the computer chips known as CPUs, Intel’s specialty. But the Trump administration’s financial and strategic patronage has been the more crucial factor.

The administration has taken a hands-on approach to the company, twisting the arms of major potential customers and partners including Apple, Nvidia and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, all of which have signed deals with Intel since the government stake was announced. 

Tan has been visiting Washington about once a month to meet with officials from the Commerce Department, Intel and U.S. government officials said. Tan also talks on the phone regularly with Lutnick, updating him on customer relationships and business conditions.

Bill Frauenhofer, the veteran semiconductor industry investment banker who serves as the administration’s chips czar, is even more in the weeds of Intel’s business. He gets a briefing from Chief Financial Officer David Zinsner every quarter and members of his staff meet regularly with Intel executives in Washington and at its Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters, keeping tabs on the progress of new manufacturing technologies. 

Created with Highcharts 9.0.1Intel share-price under CEO Lip-Bu​TanSource: FactSetAs of July 9
Created with Highcharts 9.0.1April 2025'260255075100125$150

Even as big questions remain about Intel’s ability to deliver long-term consistency to its customers and regain its mantle of chipmaking innovation, the Trump administration’s unprecedented involvement in helping to steer the strategy of a private-sector tech company underscores the power of government to create national champions in strategically vital industries. 

“From a technology perspective, it really seems like Intel is gaining credibility and confidence,” said Jacob Feldgoise, a senior research analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. “With each new customer commitment and each new fabrication process they unveil, the signs are looking better and better.”

One of the original firms that gave Silicon Valley its name, Intel dominated the global semiconductor industry from the 1980s through the early 2000s, designing and making the chips that powered the PC and early internet eras. The company fell behind during the rise of the mobile internet and ceded ground to rivals making processors for smartphones, data center servers and other devices in recent years.

Today, the company consists of two main businesses: its product segment, which designs and sells its own chips, mainly CPUs for personal computers; and its foundry, which manufactures chips in the U.S., Ireland, Israel and Malaysia, both for Intel and for other designers. 

An Intel chip An Intel chip Hannibal Hanschke/EPA/Shutterstock

The seeds of Intel’s government-supported renaissance were planted last summer, when Tom Cotton, the conservative U.S. senator from Arkansas, publicly criticized Tan as being compromised by what he described as uncomfortably close ties to China. 

Tan for decades had invested in China’s tech sector through his venture fund, Walden International, and counted Chinese tech firms and government agencies as customers when he was CEO of Cadence Design Systems, a semiconductor software company. 

Cotton’s criticism caught the president’s attention. In early August, Trump called for Tan to resign in a social-media post. The company sprang into damage-control mode, and Tan was soon sitting in the Oval Office, trying to persuade Trump that he was not a Chinese spy

The charm offensive worked. Trump took a liking to Tan, whom he views as a “winner,” according to people familiar with the president’s views. After meeting with Tan at the White House, Trump proposed a government stake. 

“Intel has been left behind,” Trump said at the time, and vowed to help the company recover its bearings. 

The first fruits of Trump’s matchmaking appeared in September, when Nvidia announced it would invest $5 billion in Intel and buy its custom data center chips. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called the deal a “historic” partnership.

In April, Musk followed suit, announcing that Intel would join his ambitious Terafab manufacturing initiative to help “design, fabricate, and package ultra-high-performance chips at scale.”

The Trump administration’s heavy hand in deals with Apple, Nvidia and others could set a bad precedent, especially if Intel fails to fix its foundry business, said Scott Lincicome, a lawyer who specializes in trade and industrial policy at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute. “Being the government’s darling only works as long as you’re doing well,” Lincicome said. “The risk for Tan is that if things start going south, politicians work on short timelines.” 

While the administration’s boosterism has played a key role in improving Intel’s fortunes, Tan has also instituted sweeping changes and made key hires that have helped the company sharpen its focus and instill confidence both internally and among potential partners, according to current and former Intel executives, government officials and customers. 

In September, Tan overhauled Intel’s reporting structure and established a new Central Engineering Group, hiring Srinivasan Iyengar, the top silicon engineer at Cadence, to consolidate custom chip design efforts under one team. 

Tan, shown here after a White House meeting last August, has made changes across Intel.Tan, shown here after a White House meeting last August, has made changes across Intel. Alex Wroblewski/Bloomberg News

In their meetings with Intel executives, Commerce officials—who want more chipmaking on U.S. soil, rather than in Asian countries such as Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and China — have expressed keen interest in the foundry business. Government officials are closely tracking the progress of the firm’s newest manufacturing initiatives. 

The administration is also pushing Intel to expand capacity at a New Mexico plant that produces what’s known as advanced packaging, or arrays of smaller chiplets that can be combined to function as a single custom semiconductor, according to government and company officials. 

Intel and the government both view advanced packaging as the company’s best chance to compete with rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, the world’s biggest fabricator of advanced AI chips, officials said. 

In a January earnings call, Zinsner, the CFO, predicted that the foundry business would start seeing billions of dollars in revenue in the near-term from advanced packaging, a prospect he called “way more exciting than even I had expected.”

Tan has been on a hiring spree, poaching executives from competitors including Samsung and SK Hynix, aimed at making Intel’s foundry—which reported $10.4 billion in operating losses over the last four fiscal quarters—more competitive with rivals like TSMC. In recent years, outside customers have largely lost confidence in Intel Foundry’s ability to produce reliable quantities of usable silicon wafers. 

Tan has also given more responsibility to Naga Chandrasekaran, a Ph.D engineer with a deep technical knowledge of semiconductors who has over the past year become the foundry’s most important salesman, people inside Intel say. 

The partnerships with the Trump administration and others have provided another benefit: cash. Intel executives say that without the immediate infusion of capital that came from the government’s conversion of $9 billion in federal grants into equity—along with the $5 billion from Nvidia and $2 billion that Japanese investment firm SoftBank injected into Intel in late August—the company would have had to significantly cut capital expenditures over the past year.

Instead, Intel has kept capex spending relatively consistent over the past year, and shifted its spending, at Tan’s direction, largely from building new chip plants to buying precision fabrication tools and other equipment, allowing the company to increase production of high-selling products, such as laptop and data-center CPUs.

In April, the company reported that surging demand for CPUs had driven quarterly sales in its important data-center segment up 22% year-over-year, to $5.1 billion—although the company still reported a net loss of $3.7 billion for the quarter. 

Alphabet’s Google Cloud unit announced in April it was placing a large order of Intel’s Xeon CPUs to power its data centers for so-called agentic workloads, or the type of computing required by large enterprises using AI tools. 

Google says that it has grown more confident in Intel because of the changes Tan has made in how it responds to customer needs and customization requests. 

“When they listen to our feedback and execute against it, that makes us even more excited to partner with them,” said Mark Lohmeyer, vice president and general manager of AI and Computing Infrastructure at Google Cloud, in an interview.

Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the July 11, 2026, print edition as 'The White House Made Fixing Intel Its Pet Project. It’s Working.'.

Robbie Whelan covers large tech companies for the Wall Street Journal, with a focus on semiconductor giants Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Broadcom and Qualcomm. A WSJ reporter since 2010, Robbie previously covered the business of Hollywood, public health policy, shipping companies, the housing market and commercial real estate. From 2016 to 2020, he was a Latin America correspondent covering politics, trade, economics, immigration and the drug war. He is the author of the forthcoming book "The House of Mouse: Bob Iger and the Fight for the Soul of Disney."

Robbie grew up in Pittsburgh and studied history at Johns Hopkins University. He's a massive Steelers fan, a music obsessive, and has played mandolin and guitar in bluegrass and country-rock bands in Brooklyn, Mexico City, Baltimore and Pittsburgh. He lives in Los Angeles.

Read the whole story
bogorad
5 days ago
reply
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Share this story
Delete

Alex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AI - WSJ

1 Share

LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-20260507) summary:

  • Corporate Posturing: palantir ceo alex karp attempts to position his company as a protector of institutional sovereignty while simultaneously criticizing competitors that threaten his firm's specific market niche
  • Financial Grievances: industry leaders express intensifying frustration over the high costs of artificial intelligence tokens that they claim often fail to deliver tangible enterprise value
  • Market Territorialism: large tech entities express alarm as ai labs expand their development scopes into vertical markets previously dominated by incumbent software and service providers
  • Alleged Theatrics: ai lab insiders dismiss recent public criticisms and emotive displays from rival executives as calculated efforts to promote their own commercial interests
  • Economic Uncertainty: major corporations have begun questioning the long-term utility of foundation models and are increasingly wary of losing proprietary insights to model developers
  • Regulatory Friction: government intervention in technology exports and potential intellectual property litigation highlight the chaotic struggle for dominance between established firms and emerging tech ventures
  • Competitive Rhetoric: established tech players use claims of protecting business value to justify their opposition to the pricing models and market reach of newer ai startups
  • Zero Sum Ambition: the shifting landscape suggests that despite high-minded talk of innovation, established corporations are primarily focused on defending their own market capitalization against disruptive technology rivals

Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies, speaking at the World Economic Forum.Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images

Alex Karp—describing himself as a “madman”—has brought the simmering tension between fast-rising AI giants and established tech players to a boil.

In both nuanced and dramatic fashion, the Palantir Technologies PLTR -1.74%decrease; down pointing triangle chief executive is drawing attention to concerns over the power and insight AI labs derive from their business customers’ data and decision-making—the magic sauce behind what makes a company successful.

This past week, Palantir PLTR -1.74%decrease; down pointing triangle released a dense white paper—entitled: “Institutional Sovereignty in the Age of AI”—that laid out 15 steps companies and governments could take to protect themselves from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.

That put polish on Karp’s more emotional TV appearance the week before, when he declared that “something has gone completely wrong” in the relationship between AI labs and their customers. Speaking at a frenetic pace, the tech company boss rattled on about AI labs hyping their capabilities, overcharging for tokens, or units of AI use, all while insisting that he wasn’t throwing shade at rivals while doing just that. 

Karp, who counts some of the largest U.S. companies as well as the government as clients, added, “at every single enterprise I deal with, these people are livid, they’re like, ‘I am paying for tokens that create no value.’ ” 

Karp’s I’m-mad-as-hell-and-I’m-not-going-to-take-it-anymore moment is perhaps the best illustration yet of the battle brewing between the tech establishment and the AI upstarts. That tension is playing out in politics as both parties weigh what role the government should play in overseeing AI, in geopolitics as the U.S. and China fight for tactical edges, and society writ large as the prospect of technological disruption threatens jobs and ways of life.

Karp’s lengthy CNBC appearance (nearly 20 minutes, during which anchor Becky Quick interrupted to say: “You sound pretty angry,”) ignited debate throughout the tech industry. Former White House AI czar David Sacks, a longtime critic of Anthropic, amplified Karp’s argument. 

Aerial view of a large Digital Realty Data Center building in Ashburn, Virginia.A data center in Ashburn, Va. Leah Millis/Reuters

“Anthropic has launched Claude Science, Claude Security, Claude Legal, and of course Claude Code—each expanding into categories previously served by companies building on top of their models,” Sacks posted on social media. “The pattern is consistent: Watch where value is being created, then move in directly. Dominate the model layer, then use that position to capture the most lucrative verticals.”

The big question now being spoken out loud is where do traditional businesses fit in an AI world? Who captures the value created by AI: the companies deploying it or the labs developing the actual AI? 

Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic have directly responded to Karp’s criticisms. Both have policies that say enterprise customer data aren’t used for training their models. One AI lab insider sniffed: “We would be fools reacting to Karpian theatrics; he does well talking his own book.”

Within tech circles, it is, admittedly, complicated. So many frenemies. So many deals among rivals. Last month, for example, the Trump administration put a hold on Anthropic’s ability to export its new powerful models after Amazon.com Chief Executive Andy Jassy quietly raised concerns. Amazon is an investor in Anthropic and has benefited from the AI lab using its special chips. 

Karp, too, has an angle. (He acknowledged as much.) Palantir has a product that essentially rides atop the so-called foundation model, bridging the gap between the AI and a customer. It’s a good business for the company. 

Still, Karp isn’t alone in voicing concerns in recent weeks about the imbalance between businesses and AI labs. Soaring costs have led some companies to re-evaluate how the technology is being used

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy speaking in front of a screen displaying "Generative AI."<a href="http://Amazon.com" rel="nofollow">Amazon.com</a> CEO Andy Jassy Brendan McDermid/Reuters

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote an essay on that topic and has been making the rounds talking about his concerns that companies be able to retain the learnings that come from using AI models. “If you’re just a consumer of a foundation model, then I’m not sure how you can retain enterprise value, let alone create,” Nadella said this month during an appearance at Stanford University. 

Nobody accused Nadella of having a meltdown like they did with Karp. 

Microsoft has been a big backer of OpenAI but is struggling to remain on the forefront of the fast-moving technology, which threatens to unseat software makers. On Thursday, for example, Microsoft and IBM shares were initially rocked by a media report that coffee company Starbucks is using AI to replace software it buys from those tech companies. 

By the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee, it seems the winners and losers of the new AI era can change. It is yet another sign that no one knows how the technology, which some rank up there with the advent of electricity, will remake things. What is clear is that the big tech players of today aren’t necessarily guaranteed to be the winners of tomorrow. 

But they aren’t giving up, as evident by Karp’s campaign. 

This past week wound down with Meta Platforms announcing a new version of its own AI model that included a paid tier.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in an interview with Bloomberg News, made it clear he sees an opening to compete on price. “The pricing from some of the other labs is very extreme and has very high margins,” he was quoted as saying. “We think that there’s a real ability to be able to offer frontier or very high-level intelligence at a much more affordable cost.” 

Then there are the expected IPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI, which will likely rank the AI labs among the most valuable companies in the world. Their central role in AI is increasingly worrisome to many across the political spectrum. 

Karp’s attacks add to the list of those speaking out. 

So, was Karp angry? 

“No,” he said. “This is the voice of American business that is being channeled through me.”

Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Tim Higgins is a business columnist for The Wall Street Journal, frequent contributor to CNBC, and author of books about Apple (“iWar”) and Tesla (“Power Play”). He also co-hosts “Bold Names,” the Journal’s weekly interview podcast with top business leaders. His weekly column focuses on influential companies and their leaders, such as Elon Musk, Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg. Tim became a columnist in 2023 after working for more than two decades as an award-winning reporter, covering everything from the bankruptcy of General Motors to the presidential campaigns of 2016.

A Missouri School of Journalism grad, Tim also earned an M.B.A. from Michigan State University. He lives in San Francisco. 


Up Next


Videos

Read the whole story
bogorad
5 days ago
reply
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Share this story
Delete

Opinion | Chinese restrictions on outbound investment expose weakness - The Washington Post

1 Share

LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-20260507) summary:

  • Capital Flight Panic: authorities are scrambling to contain a massive one trillion dollar outflow of personal wealth.
  • Restrictive Measures: new regulations are being forced onto overseas investments including foreign stocks real estate and insurance.
  • Economic Skepticism: residents are actively avoiding the domestic market due to mounting debt and a deteriorating housing sector.
  • Technological Protectionism: the government is aggressively restricting the movement of engineers and proprietary data to foreign companies.
  • Forced Divestment: recent orders have coerced the unwinding of international acquisitions like the meta deal for manus.
  • Autocratic Consolidation: state leaders are attempting to hoard capital and talent within borders through total central control.
  • Stifled Innovation: blocking access to global financial networks and venture capital threatens to destroy the domestic technology sector.
  • Inevitability Of Evasion: aggressive mandates will likely lead to desperate attempts by citizens to bypass state systems to preserve their savings.

China’s Communist rulers panicked about capital flight after a record $1 trillion flowed out of the country last year. Rather than dealing with the dynamics driving away wealth, Xi Jinping’s totalitarian regime is imposing stringent new controls on buying stocks, real estate and insurance policies overseas.

These investments have grown in popularity because people with savings prefer alternatives to China’s slowing economy, shaky housing market and accumulating local government debt.

The basket of regulations unveiled this month also imposes additional restrictions on Chinese engineers working abroad and bans unauthorized transfers of data, technology, goods or services to foreign companies.

That follows Beijing’s order for Meta, the owner of Facebook, to unwind its $2.5 billion purchase of the artificial intelligence start-up Manus. After originating in China, Manus transferred operations and staff to Singapore ahead of being acquired. China wants to prevent other companies from making similar moves.

The Communist Party wants to keep as much money, technology and talent as possible locked inside its borders. In addition to erecting a fire wall against America in the AI race, the goal is to boost domestic consumption. But the policy exposes fundamental weakness in their system and risks deepening Beijing’s global isolation.

It will also intensify the ire of citizens who cannot fully benefit from today’s technological gold rush.

This is what insecure leaders do in autocratic systems. Their impulse is to exert more control over every aspect of life: what to read, where to travel, the size of families and so on.

The Chinese people are inveterate savers. The average household saves around one-third of its disposable income, compared with under 4 percent among Americans, and they’re looking for somewhere productive to park that money. Overseas insurance policies have become so popular on the mainland that selling them is a coveted first job for graduates from prestigious Chinese and Hong Kong universities.

After the new limits take effect on July 1, enterprising Chinese nationals will seek more surreptitious ways to get their money out of the country. These may not generate the same returns on investment. The biggest losers will be Chinese entrepreneurs.

Tech start-ups look overseas for seed money. By cutting off access to outside capital and global financial networks, the government risks stifling the innovation it is so desperate to encourage. Economies flourish when money and talent are allowed to gravitate toward the best ideas.

Read the whole story
bogorad
6 days ago
reply
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Share this story
Delete

Anthropic’s Political Risks Are Real, but OpenAI’s Loom Even Larger - WSJ

1 Share

LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-20260507) summary:

  • Legal Standoff: anthropic continues to struggle through litigation after being designated a security risk for denying military access to its software.
  • Financial Insulation: the firm faces minimal long term fiscal exposure due to defense contracts being a negligible portion of its overall revenue stream.
  • Brand Narrative: public relations posturing frames the refusal to support automated warfare and surveillance as a sophisticated moral stance to attract corporate clients.
  • Market Reaction: minor shifts in user adoption trends illustrate a temporary uptick in software installations despite the ongoing regulatory pressure.
  • Regulatory Friction: government attempts to restrict export access to advanced models proved short lived as the company quickly smoothed over cybersecurity compliance issues.
  • Competitive Contrast: peer entities like openai face far greater existential threats due to their wider mass market reach and complex congressional scrutiny.
  • Ownership Schemes: proposed solutions regarding state equity stakes or public investment vehicles highlight the inevitable desperation of these corporate entities seeking political shelter.
  • Market Speculation: the looming pursuit of ipo status drives a frantic need for both firms to navigate treacherous geopolitical waters while maintaining thin margins of legitimacy.

July 8, 2026 5:30 am ET

Dario Amodei speaking at Journal House WEF 2026.Under Dario Amodei, Anthropic has filed lawsuits against the Defense Department. Maurizio Martorana For WSJ

Anthropic has been in the political crosshairs lately. But the business consequences aren’t as dire as they might seem. And among its AI rivals, there will be plenty of political risk to go around.

The AI-model developer is embroiled in a legal fight with the Trump administration, which deemed it a security risk earlier this year after the company declined to give the Defense Department unfettered access to its tools. That battle escalated last month with a government move that forced Anthropic to cut off access to its most-advanced models.

Serious though they might appear, those political challenges likely won’t be lasting. They might even prove to be much less thorny in the long term than those of its rival, OpenAI, as both companies gear up for IPOs.

Much of the concern that has led to curbs on Anthropic merely reflects how slow the political sphere has been to adapt to the rapid advance of artificial intelligence. There aren’t many laws in place that regulate AI, leaving the government to scramble for responses when perceived threats emerge.

Some of those responses have been ham-handed. When the Defense Department designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk, the administration relied on statutes intended to prevent foreign adversaries from involvement in U.S. defense procurement.

Anthropic, which is helmed by Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei, filed two lawsuits to block the designation, and it looks so far as though the government is likely to prevail in at least one of them, allowing it to continue excluding Anthropic from defense contracts.

That will certainly limit the market for Anthropic’s products. But the company’s exclusion from defense deals won’t take a huge financial toll. Defense, after all, is hardly the company’s bread and butter.

The bigger danger for the company is the reputational hit that could come with being seen as a security risk. That could theoretically scare away corporate customers that supply around 80% of its revenue.

Viewed in another way, though, the dustup could work to Anthropic’s reputational advantage.

The company’s beef with the Defense Department has been over its refusal to allow its models’ use in fully autonomous weapons and for mass surveillance. Even as ethical concerns are set aside, it might be more dangerous for Anthropic’s reputation among corporate customers to be associated with botched military operations and spying on ordinary people than being branded a risk by the Pentagon.

App download patterns give some support to the notion that users support Anthropic’s position. Uninstalls of OpenAI’s ChatGPT surged early this year following news that the company was negotiating its own deal with the Pentagon, according to the data provider Sensor Tower, even though OpenAI has said it places limits on how the military can use its technology. Moreover, more users installed Anthropic’s Claude than ChatGPT in the days after the Pentagon deemed Anthropic a security risk—a reversal of ChatGPT’s usual lead.

The Defense Department has plenty of reasons to mend fences with Anthropic. Anthropic has made it clear that it won’t relent on limits on its models’ use. That leaves the Pentagon with two options: find a way forward with Anthropic, or simply don’t use its tools. The latter option would deprive the department of some of the most cutting-edge AI models in the world. At some stage—possibly when political winds change—a resolution seems likely.

The Trump administration’s other crackdown on Anthropic also has been short-lived. The administration used the Commerce Department’s export-control authority to ban foreigners, including Anthropic’s own employees, from using its technology last month. That led Anthropic to cut off all access to its most-advanced Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models.

The temperature there has already cooled. The administration first allowed Anthropic to give access to a select group of trusted customers before giving it the go-ahead for wider access late last month after it addressed cybersecurity concerns.

That episode was more a testament to the Anthropic’s models’ abilities than any flaw that could put it in lasting political jeopardy. As BMO Capital Markets analyst Brian Pitz recently said in a note, the restriction “underscores the power of Anthropic’s models and their current leadership position.”

Also working in Anthropic’s favor is that its risks in the longer term look less acute than its nearest competitor’s.

OpenAI which, like Anthropic, is pursuing an IPO that could value it above $1 trillion, is more of a mass-market pIayer. While Anthropic gets almost all of its revenue from corporate customers and is the market-share leader in that area, OpenAI caters to a larger swath of users. OpenAI’s ChatGPT shot to more than a billion monthly active users in May, according to Sensor Tower, well above any other competitor and multiples of Anthropic’s user base.

But OpenAI’s wide reach is a political liability as much as a commercial asset. It exposes OpenAI to the kind of social-impact scrutiny that has dogged Meta Platforms and other social-media companies for many years. CEO Sam Altman has already testified before Congress about the risks AI poses. He is sure to be back.

Altman has repeatedly proposed that the government take an equity stake in his company and his competitors. If the U.S. owns part of OpenAI but others don’t bite, it could mean some political favor for the company. But it would also make OpenAI subject to political control that could hurt its competitive position. Rather than suggesting a straight government stake, Anthropic recently proposed investment accounts for Americans most affected by AI job losses. The accounts would hold shares of AI companies.

Any form of public-sector ownership of the companies would be a minefield and is just one of many political risks they will have to contend with in the years ahead. But fundamental differences between their two business models mean that political questions could loom larger over OpenAI in the long run, even if Anthropic is under a brighter spotlight now.

Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the July 9, 2026, print edition as 'OpenAI’s Political Risks Top Anthropic’s'.

Asa Fitch is a writer covering technology for The Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column, based in New York. He also co-writes the Journal's weekly AI & Business newsletter. Asa previously reported on semiconductor companies from the Journal’s San Francisco and New York bureaus, where he covered Nvidia’s rise amid the AI boom and Intel’s struggles to turn itself around.

Prior to that, Asa spent a decade as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East. He joined the Journal in Dubai, where he initially covered business and finance before shifting to covering regional politics and conflicts. He covered the Gaza War in 2014, the military campaign against Islamic State in Iraq, the Yemeni civil war, and Iranian elections and politics, including the country’s nuclear deal in 2015.

Asa began his career as a general-news reporter in Connecticut and a personal finance reporter in New York. He is a graduate of Carleton College and Columbia University's journalism school.


Up Next


Videos

Read the whole story
bogorad
6 days ago
reply
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Share this story
Delete
Next Page of Stories