Elon Praises Google's TPU, Anthropic Beats OpenAI, & POOL's 3-Year Rebound
Portfolio News #26
Hi All,
Welcome to our brief overview of portfolio news from the past few days.
Project Prometheus & The Anthropic Funding
Bezos’s new venture, Project Prometheus, is reportedly nearing a $10 billion funding round at a $38 billion valuation. With co-CEO and Google veteran Vik Bajaj, the company is building AI models targeting physical AI (to interact with the real world).
Meanwhile, the capital flowing into Anthropic is impressive. Google confirmed it is planning to invest up to $40 billion in the firm ($10 billion upfront, $30 billion based on milestones). While Anthropic already relies on Google Cloud for chips and infrastructure this partnership brings another 5 gigawatts of capacity over the next five years.
Amazon few days earlier, also increased its investment in Anthropic by contributing another $25 billion ($5 billion initial, $20 billion milestone-based) to a total of $33 billion. In return, Anthropic committed to spending over $100 billion on AWS over the next decade, securing up to 5 gigawatts of computing capacity through Amazon’s Trainium AI chips. Anthropic is hungry for compute power as its efforts already bear fruit with annualized revenues tripled quarter-over-quarter in April to top $30 billion, officially outpacing OpenAI.
On another note, the NSA is already reportedly leveraging Mythos’s defensive power to secure critical infrastructure.
Alphabet partners with Marvell & The 8th-Gen TPU
Google is in talks to co-develop custom AI inference processors with Marvell Technology. This suggests that in the AI era, amid supply chain constraints and rapid innovation, hyperscalers are diversifying their chip ecosystems, reinforcing the idea that there will be more than one winner.
Further cementing its infrastructure dominance, Google just introduced its 8th-generation custom Tensor Processor Units.
TPU 8t (Training): Built to reduce frontier model development cycles from months to weeks. It delivers nearly 3x the compute performance per pod over the previous generation. A single superpod now scales to 9,600 chips and 2 petabytes of shared memory, delivering an incredible 121 ExaFlops of compute.
TPU 8i (Inference): Designed for intricate, collaborative workflows where specialized agents “swarm” together. It pairs 288 GB of high-bandwidth memory with 384 MB of on-chip SRAM (3x more than the previous generation) to eliminate idle processors, all powered by Google’s custom Axion Arm-based CPUs.
When CEO Sundar Pichai posted the announcement on X, even Elon Musk stated: “TPUs are underrated”. This further justifies the importance of this development and the place that TPUs have in this AI shift to agentic AI.
The Hardware & Silicon Surge
AMD: Jefferies noted that Intel’s recent earnings serve as validation of the massive AI tailwinds boosting server CPU demand into 2027. Following this, D.A. Davidson upgraded AMD to “Buy,” viewing Intel’s results as a precursor for a huge step-up in AMD’s CPU franchise. We believe as long as there is a shortage of AI chips, AMD has incredible pricing power. In fact, AMD is rapidly approaching the $389 target price we modeled back in November 2025 when it was trading at just $206.
AWS & Meta: In a massive win for Amazon, Meta has committed to tens of millions of Graviton CPU cores for its Agentic AI workloads. Complex multi-step orchestration, real-time reasoning, and code generation at scale are highly CPU-intensive. Amazon’s purpose-built Graviton5 instances deliver up to 33% lower latency between cores, cementing the fact that Agentic AI is becoming as much of a CPU story as a GPU story.
Software, Commerce & The Experience Economy
Adyen: Shifting from its traditional organic growth mindset, Adyen announced its first-ever acquisition: buying loyalty and incentives platform Talon.One for €750 million in cash. Talon.One expects to generate €60 million in ARR this year (a 12.5x multiple - sounds a bit expensive right?). By connecting Adyen’s dynamic payment identification with Talon.One’s SKU-level data, merchants can apply real-time, dynamic pricing and promotions directly in the cart, perfectly positioning Adyen for the emerging Agentic Commerce space.
Adobe is co-developing an industry-specialized AI agentic operating model with Omnicom to automate marketing workflows. Meanwhile, Adobe has also announced a massive new $25 billion share buyback program through 2030, a signal from the board that they believe the market is undervaluing their pivot to AI.
Fortinet received the 2026 Google Cloud Partner of the Year Award. Fortinet’s FortiCNAPP platform is gaining traction among enterprises by combining deep network visibility with cloud protection in a unified solution, reflecting a broader shift toward integrated cloud security platforms.
Earnings Watch: EVO & POOL
Evolution Ab: Q1 ‘26 results are mixed. Sales declined 1.5% overall but grew 6.8% in constant currency. Asia is still struggling but managed a 2.2% QoQ growth, while Europe dropped 5.9% QoQ. On the bright side, LATAM grew 29.3% YoY (aided by a competitor exiting Argentina) and North America grew 10.1% YoY, while it launched a second Michigan studio and there were positive regulatory developments in Maine. Overall, operations are stable, but cutting the dividend and a somewhat shady approach to their new 10% share repurchase authorization raised some governance concerns. After all, what was the purpose of delaying the announcement of their capital allocation policy??
Pool Corp: After a brutal three-year cycle of post-pandemic normalization, we see clear signs of a return to growth. Q1 ‘26 delivered a 6% bump in net sales and a 7% YoY growth in operating income, the first meaningful acceleration after nearly 12 quarters of flatness. The industry seems to have bottomed out at 58K new pools built in 2025 (similar to 2011 levels), and chemical deflation has officially stopped acting as a headwind.
That’s a wrap. See you soon.