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Greetings! We have a change of pace this week after the AI dramas of the past few days. President Donald Trump’s latest tariff assault on Europe, related to his aspirations for owning Greenland, will have markets jumpy—as we saw on Monday. Maybe a deal can be worked out at the annual World Economic Forum confab at Davos, which started today. Expect to see endless television shots of news anchors and Very Important Persons standing in the snow wearing bulky jackets of various styles. The Information's editor in chief, Jessica Lessin, is in Davos. You can check out her dispatch below. Back at home, we’re entering tech earnings season, with Netflix reporting on Tuesday and Intel on Thursday. The two earnings reports will be closely watched, although for very different reasons. Netflix’s earnings have lately become predictably solid—the video-streaming giant has averaged 15% revenue growth in the past five quarters. For the fourth quarter, it has projected its revenue will increase 16.7%. (It no longer reports its subscriber count, a sign that number is no longer growing dramatically.) What will be interesting this time around, though, is any commentary about its intentions in the bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery. Netflix is well positioned: It already has signed a deal with WBD’s board, which the Ellison family’s Paramount Skydance is trying to spoil. Reports last week suggested Netflix would make its offer all cash, dropping a stock component. Doing so would require it to borrow more money than the $50 billion in loans it already plans to take out. We’d love to hear Netflix executives’ explanation of how they’ll make that work. Then there’s Intel, the company that once defined the U.S. semiconductor industry but has seen its fortunes declining for the past several years. A new CEO, along with fresh investments in the company from the U.S. government, Nvidia and SoftBank, have combined to give investors fresh hope in Intel. Its stock price has more than doubled since August to around $47. That ensures investors will be paying close attention to Thursday’s earnings report. It’s no secret that revenue is expected to fall in the fourth quarter—Intel itself projected a decline of between 3.5% and 10%. What investors will want to hear is CEO Lip-Bu Tan’s updates on the state of the business. The desktop and notebook computer market is a key source of business for Intel but one that is seeing rising memory costs, thanks to demand for memory chips from AI data centers. Meanwhile Intel’s data center server business, which has stagnated lately. They’ll also want to hear about any update on its new 18A technology, which Intel is hoping will boost its presence in the market for the most advanced chips. And, of course, any guidance the company gives about first-quarter revenue will be very important. Here are the details of what analysts are expecting from both earnings results, courtesy of S&P Global Market Intelligence: Netflix (Tuesday) Q4 revenue: $11.966 billion +16.8% EPS: 0.55 cents compared with 42 cents a share a year earlier, adjusted for a stock split Intel (Thursday) Q4 revenue: $13.375 billion -6.2% EPS: (0.09 cents) compared with a loss of three cents a share a year earlier It’s Jessica here, reporting from the snowy—and delightfully sunny—streets of the World Economic Forum in Davos. The fun officially kicks off tomorrow, and builds through President Trump’s speech on Wednesday. But I spent today meeting with CEOs up and down the central thoroughfare here known as the Promenade. You might mistake it for the Bay Area’s 101 billboards brought to life. The shops of this intimate street have been taken over by companies, most of them tech. And, it won’t surprise you to hear they are keen to promote their wares. There is a very large “AI can’t lead change. That’s your job” billboard from BetterUp, which sells combined AI and human coaching. And then there is the Salesforce “Davos Agentic Innovation Center,” not to be confused with their “Lodge” which is across from their “Chalet.” Oh these Davos marketing people must have so much fun! Meta, Google, Uber, Microsoft, Palantir and Cloudflare each have very prominent and brightly lit spaces. The bigger the company, typically, the less lettering on the side of their building. Inside, the conversations are all about AI. Yet, some longtime attendees told me they sense a change in the air. “Last year, when you looked at the Promenade, a lot of logos had AI in them,” Kate Smaje, McKinsey’s Global Leader of Tech and AI, told me over my sixth coffee meeting of the day. “But now there seems to be less hype and more pragmatism.” She then noted that it was only Monday, leaving plenty of room for the frothiness to emerge. I also caught up with Jason Droege, the CEO of Scale AI. Yes, Scale is still an independent company even after its founder Alexandr Wang decamped to Meta. Scale has two businesses: helping the AI model makers improve their models with human input and then a more traditional enterprise business. In the latter, he said the company is finding itself called up when some big AI deployment isn’t working and the company wants results. “It really all comes down to focusing on the right AI problems, getting data and human judgment organized and building systems that can keep improving,” Droege told me. I’m here for most of the week asking anyone who has the misfortune of bumping into me as many questions I can about AI. In particular, check out The Information’s TITV tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. PT for my conversation with a very special guest.—Jessica E. Lessin OpenAI did us all a favor over the weekend and published a handy cheatsheet showing the correlation between its growth in computing capacity, measured in gigawatts, and revenue. Finally, we have some way to benchmark all those announcements about new computing capacity deals—which are always measured in gigawatts—against real life! Thank you, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar! She revealed in this blog post that OpenAI’s computing capacity grew by 9.5 times between 2023 and 2025, from 0.2 GW in 2023 to about 1.9 GW in 2025, while annualized recurring revenue grew 10 times in the same period to more than $20 billion last year. For those following along at home, last September OpenAI announced a deal with Nvidia aimed at building “at least 10 gigawatts of AI data centers” while The Information reported then that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wanted 250 GW of computing capacity by 2033. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, meanwhile, announced a week ago that Meta was “planning to build tens of gigawatts this decade, and hundreds of gigawatts or more over time.” • If Elon Musk wins his breach of charitable trust lawsuit against OpenAI, the company should have to give up between $65.5 billion and $109.43 billion to Musk, lawyers for the billionaire argued in a court filing Friday. Microsoft, which Musk alleges has aided and abetted OpenAI’s breach of fiduciary duty, is on the hook for between $13.3 billion and $25.06 billion, Musk’s lawyers argued. • Figure AI, the humanoid robotics startup, responded to a lawsuit from its former head of product safety Rob Gruendel and countersued him, according to court filings made public on Friday. • ClickHouse, a database management startup competing with Snowflake and Databricks, said Friday it had raised $400 million in a financing led by Dragoneer Investment Group. The round values the startup at $15 billion including the new investment, a spokesperson said. That’s more than double the valuation of its last round in May. • Sequoia Capital is set to make a significant first-time investment in the AI start-up Anthropic as part of a major funding round expected to raise $25 billion or more, The Financial Times reported. • OpenAI is on track to reveal its first device by the second half of the year, OpenAI chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane said on Monday in Davos, Axios reported. Start your day with Applied AI, the newsletter from The Information that uncovers how leading businesses are leveraging AI to automate tasks across the board. Subscribe now for free to get it delivered straight to your inbox twice a week.
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