Technology

➚ MOVE FAST: Do what you know. Elon Musk may be the world’s greatest entrepreneur, but he finally met his match in the US government. Musk, in a farewell press briefing, said he was only able to cut $160 billion (far less than his $1 trillion mark) from a sprawling budget while tariffs and other policies roiled the global economy.

➘ BREAK THINGS: Know what you do. Google is inserting ads into AI chatbots to offset a major hit to the online advertising ecosystem that accounts for most of its revenue. The decision highlights the company’s reluctance to fully disrupt itself: The classic innovator’s dilemma.

At this school, teachers run on GPUs. Alpha School, a private school system in Texas and Florida, educates students using a personalized AI-powered learning platform developed by an edtech company called 2 Hour Learning, Newsweek reported. Students spend two hours on their computers each day learning English, math, science, and social studies — a method Alpha claims helps students learn topics two times faster on average. For the rest of the day, students participate in life skills workshops guided by human teachers on how to speak in public, invest, or swim, for example.

The first Alpha School opened in 2016, and it is continuing to scale with facilities in Texas, New York, and California opening this fall. Tuition varies based on the location, but most cost $40,000 per year.

Algorithm-based personal learning isn’t particularly new — I remember studying vocabulary using a similar system in the 2010s, and many homeschooling platforms function this way. But the expansion of these types of brick-and-mortar schools does underscore a broader shift towards AI-powered learning as the technology upends all kinds of ancient systems. Trump recently promoted the use of AI in classrooms and instruction for teachers on how to implement it.

— Rachyl Jones

The penalties slapped on TikTok, which was accused by the Irish Data Protection Commission of illegally sending the personal data of European users to China. The agency said the platform violated EU rules because it couldn’t guarantee that data was protected, given China’s surveillance laws. The commission also said the app admitted to storing some European data on Chinese servers, which it later deleted. The reason for the fine is also at the heart of US national security concerns about the app, which TikTok has consistently denied. It plans to appeal the Irish ruling.

A battle among tech giants over how to regulate semiconductor trades has broken new ground. Anthropic peeved American chipmakers this week with its recommendations to the Trump administration on limiting China’s access to advanced chips, which includes strengthening the Biden administration’s diffusion rule capping the amount of semiconductors sold in many countries. That pending rule, which Trump is considering changing, faced the wrath of tech firms like Nvidia, whose revenue would take a hit. Anthropic, whose MO is AI safety, doubled down on its support — citing in its letter cases of smugglers hiding chips with live lobsters and in prosthetic baby bumps.

To that, Nvidia said Anthropic should stop telling “tall tales” and instead “focus on innovation and rise to the challenge.” The chip giant also turned toward the White House to dispute Anthropic’s stance. “We need to accelerate the diffusion of American AI technology around the world,” CEO Jensen Huang told reporters in Washington, DC. “The policies and encouragement from the administration really need to support that.”

The dispute highlights the sometimes conflicting interests of America’s leading AI firms based on where they sit in the supply chain. Anthropic happens to be training its next big model on Amazon’s homegrown Trainium 2 cluster. We’ll know who wins out by May 15, when Biden’s rules are set to go into effect.

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Two weeks ago, we asked: What if the US were no longer the best place in the world to start a tech company? Top minds and big money are mobile, while the White House cuts federal science funding and discourages immigration. New reports agree that the US is losing its edge as the world’s top AI talent pool.

China’s ascendency has played a role. A recent paper from the Hoover Institution, a policy think tank, flags that some of the industry’s most exciting recent advancements — namely DeepSeek — were built by Chinese researchers who stayed put. In fact, more than half of the researchers listed on DeepSeek’s papers never left China for school or work — evidence that the country doesn’t need Western influence to develop some of the smartest AI minds, the report says.

Meanwhile, London is becoming the epicenter for AI safety, boosted by the presence of Google DeepMind. Europe and the Gulf States are doubling down on their talent retention efforts, as countries like the UAE and Saudi Arabia build out their AI infrastructure and energy sector to support AI, according to Zeki, which provides data on AI talent. India, traditionally an exporter of top tech talent, is gradually becoming a consumer of it, as the country bolsters its national tech sector and emigration to the US becomes more difficult.

Dubai data center firm Khazna is considering investing in the US — the latest UAE company looking to build out AI infrastructure there. “We can’t compete without a presence” in US artificial intelligence infrastructure, Hassan Alnaqbi, Khazna’s CEO, told Semafor’s Kelsey Warner.

Khazna, which counts Abu Dhabi AI conglomerate G42 as a majority shareholder, designs, builds, and leases out data center space to hyperscalers — firms like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Oracle — in the UAE, and has plans to build data centers across continents.

Washington has become a crucial ally in the UAE’s AI ambitions. The UAE is trying to prevent the sales restrictions imposed by a Biden-era executive order — which the Trump administration is considering scrapping — from curtailing their ambitions in AI. It’s also developing an ecosystem of investments and infrastructure, both with the US and internationally, in an increasingly two-way flow of dollars, software, and hardware between the nations. Last fall, G42 received US approval to buy cutting-edge Nvidia chips, consolidating the role of the Gulf as a growing global technology hub despite previous concerns about the region’s ties to China.

Khazna, for its part, removed Chinese components from its data centers in 2022, Alnaqbi said, the same time G42 was spinning out its Chinese holdings and removing hardware sourced from the country to comply with US demands.

Quarterly earnings reports from oil and gas companies suggest the industry is already feeling the impact of US President Donald Trump’s trade wars, pointing to headaches ahead for its shareholders, Semafor’s Tim McDonnell reports.

As much as Trump and his team are rhetorical boosters of Big Oil — “If I’m not president, you’re f*cked,” he reportedly told execs at Mar-a-Lago after the election — his unpredictable deployment of tariffs and enticement of OPEC countries to drill more have weighed down the oil price. It’s too soon to see the full toll that dip has had on the industry, since price falls began in earnest after the end of the first quarter. But red flags are going up, Tim noted.