Washington spent years blocking Nvidia's advanced chips from China. Tuesday, the Trump administration approved H200 exports with a 25% government cut. By afternoon, Beijing told its own companies to hold off.
Apple tried to build its own AI. It failed. Now it's paying Google $1 billion a year to license Gemini while pretending the arrangement is strategic. The company that controlled every layer of the stack is now renting the most important one.
OneBrief's $2.15B valuation on $19M revenue bets military planning software can become a platform before Palantir notices. The Battle Road acquisition complicates the math: the simulation engine was already running on Palantir infrastructure.
Apple tried to build its own AI. It failed. Now it's paying Google $1 billion a year to license Gemini while pretending the arrangement is strategic. The company that controlled every layer of the stack is now renting the most important one.
The press release hit inboxes at 8 PM on a Sunday. No briefing. No embargo. Just a PDF dropped into the void while the markets were closed and the tech press was half-watching football. Apple and Google issued a joint statement, 147 words total, confirming what Bloomberg had reported weeks earlier: the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be built on Google's Gemini technology. A multi-year deal. Roughly $1 billion a year. And a Siri upgrade that's been promised since 2024.
That's the official version. Here's what actually happened: Apple tried to build its own AI. It failed. And now it's paying a competitor to do the work while pretending the arrangement is strategic. This is the silence of a company that hates admitting it needs help.
The Breakdown
• Apple will pay Google ~$1 billion annually to license Gemini for its foundation models and Siri upgrade
• The deal inverts 15 years of Apple collecting rent from Google—now Apple is the tenant
• Same day, Apple announced Creator Studio ($13/month) to compete with Adobe instead of AI leaders
• Alphabet's market cap passed Apple's for the first time since 2019 as Google logged its best stock year since 2009
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