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Dec 15, 2025
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Welcome back! SpaceX tells staff of its IPO plan. OpenAI hires a Google executive to lead M&A. Oracle struck $150 billion of data center leases in the November quarter.
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SpaceX chief financial officer Bret Johnsen confirmed to the company’s staff that it was preparing for an IPO next year, the Wall Street Journal reported. His statement follows The Information’s report on Dec. 5 that SpaceX, part of Elon Musk’s empire, was planning an IPO in the second half of next
year. The Journal report said Johnsen sent a memo to staff telling them: “The thinking is that if we execute brilliantly and the markets cooperate, a public offering could raise a significant amount of capital.” He also confirmed SpaceX’s new valuation of $800 billion, the Journal report said. His note also said the timing of the IPO was still highly uncertain. SpaceX had long been considered unlikely to go public, although there was speculation it could spin off its Starlink internet-access business as a public entity. But Musk’s interest in launching data centers in space is reportedly making an IPO of SpaceX more appealing, as it could help the company raise a lot of money.
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Oracle struck about $150 billion worth of lease commitments on data centers in the three months ending November, it revealed in securities filing late last week, a sign it is preparing for the cloud deals that customers such as OpenAI have struck with Oracle. The filing showed that as of Nov. 30, Oracle had $248 billion of lease commitments “substantially all related to data centers and cloud capacity arrangements” that are due to start between now and fiscal 2028 that weren’t on the balance sheet. That compared with $99.8 billion of additional lease commitments Oracle reported having made as of Aug. 31, according to a filing over the summer. As of May, Oracle had just $43.4 billion of additional lease commitments. Also as of Nov. 30, Oracle had customer commitments totalling $523 billion, stretching out over
more than five years. Oracle said in the securities filing 10% of these commitments were expected to be recognized over the next 12 months, with another 65% through the next five years.
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China’s tech giant Huawei Technologies and its manufacturing partner Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. have made some progress in chip production, but their products still lag far behind industry leaders, according to a teardown by research firm TechInsights last Thursday. The companies’ latest achievement is the Kirin 9030 processor, which powers Huawei’s Mate 80 Pro Max smartphone released last month. It represents China’s most advanced homegrown semiconductor manufacturing to date, achieved despite years of U.S. export control that has cut off the country’s access to cutting-edge chipmaking equipment. But the chip still falls significantly short of the industry-leading manufacturing technology used by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics,
according to TechInsights’ teardown report. The production method is also likely struggling with yield issues, which means the vast majority of chips produced didn’t work properly, according to TechInsights. That’s because SMIC had to rely on older, less precise equipment to repeat certain chipmaking processes to create denser patterns on chips, the report showed. The development indicates that China continues to find ways to advance its domestic chip capabilities despite U.S. export restrictions, though the path forward appears increasingly difficult and costly. Huawei and SMIC can still squeeze more performance out of current technology through design innovations and engineering discipline, but the latest TechInsights analysis suggests that they’re approaching the limits of what’s possible without access to the next-generation manufacturing tools.
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Revenue at Elon Musk’s social media service X jumped 17% to $752 million during the third quarter, though the site is still bringing in significantly less cash than when Musk acquired it, Bloomberg reported on Friday. Despite the surge in revenue, X reported a $577 million net loss for the quarter, due in part to restructuring charges, according to Bloomberg. X was acquired by Musk’s AI company xAI in March and has been integrating more technology and leadership from xAI, including by trying to replace some staff with xAI’s Grok models, The Information has reported. During the first nine months of 2025, X generated more than $2 billion in revenue, according to Bloomberg. By comparison, Twitter brought in $1.2 billion during the second quarter of 2022, the last time it publicly reported results before being acquired by Musk and renamed X. The vast majority of revenue at X still comes from advertising, though Musk is trying to diversify the business by selling premium subscriptions and getting into payments.
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Oracle has delayed the completion of some of the data centers it is developing for OpenAI to 2028 from 2027, according to a Bloomberg report. Oracle shares fell 5% Friday morning after already dipping earlier in the week, after the firm reported that it burned roughly $10 billion in the November quarter due to spending on data centers. Spokesperson for Oracle Michael Egbert said “there have been no delays to any sites required to meet our contractual commitments, and all milestones remain on track.” “We remain fully aligned with OpenAI and confident in our ability to execute against both our contractual commitments and future expansion plans,” he said. Bloomberg said the delays are due to labor and material shortages. The report didn’t say which data centers Oracle is pushing out to 2028. Oracle is developing a large facility for OpenAI in Abilene, Texas. Delays in the data center industry are common, especially for developers that are trying to build these types of facilities faster than ever before. The high-stakes race to develop server clusters for developing AI is causing tension in the industry, as companies involved in the work try to avoid being on the hook for missed deadlines. The deadlines impact when cloud providers can generate revenue from renting out the servers. Oracle doesn’t build data centers by itself; it works with developers such as Crusoe and Vantage Data Centers.
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