The company is seeking a $1.5 trillion valuation - the richest listing in history, per Bloomberg. Combined with other possible listings, Bloomberg estimates that as much as $2.9 trillion worth of private companies could go public next year. Other AI-linked "centicorns" - companies valued at $100-billion plus-are reportedly weighing listings, including Databricks and Anthropic. OpenAI has an implied valuation of over $500 billion, fueling speculation about a future stock listing, though it has attempted to tamp that down.
We've known for several months now that San Francisco has the fastest-rising rents in the country, and that the sharp rent increases are because of the AI boom. But the New York Times has a new analysis of how AI companies are gaming the rental market in their employees' favor, in some cases with $1,000-a-month rent stipends, or in other cases, simply paying the employees' rent for them out of the company's VC-rich coffers.
Cloudflare announced a new system to block AI companies from accessing websites without permission or compensation, following concerns over content scraping practices.