• President Trump announced a private sector AI infrastructure investment of up to $500 billion.
• OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank will work together to create a venture named Stargate.
• The US aims to maintain AI leadership against China as geopolitical stakes remain high.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced a private sector investment of up to $500 billion for artificial intelligence infrastructure across the country.

OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank will work together to create a venture named Stargate, with the president calling it "the largest AI infrastructure project in history" while touting the role of the US in leading the effort.

"Together these world-leading technology giants are announcing the formation of Stargate … a new American company that will invest $500 billion at least in AI infrastructure in the United States," he said.

"Put that name down in your books, because I think you're going to hear a lot about it," he added.

Trump said the venture would create more than 100,000 American jobs, with the investment set to be made over the next four years.

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, and SoftBank chief executive Masayoshi Son attended the White House announcement.

Altman, in his remarks, said he was "thrilled" by the venture and said it'll be the "most important project of this era."

"The fact that we get to do this in the United States is just wonderful," he said. "I believe that as this technology progresses, we will see diseases get cured at an unprecedented rate."

And Ellison, at the White House, described Stargate as a "very exciting program for Oracle to be a part of."

AI is energy-hungry

For foundation models to keep improving, companies that use them — like OpenAI and Anthropic — need lots of fuel.

That fuel comes in the form of chips, energy, and talent, and the Trump administration's policies on each stand to shape the future of computing, potentially creating winners and losers along the way.

The stakes are high. Growing AI in America isn't just a money-maker, it's a geopolitical card played against the other big global tech player: China.

Trump on AI

Trump on Monday revoked the Biden Administration's Executive Order on AI from October 2023. The order pushed for greater transparency from large companies developing and using AI.

After winning the 2024 presidential election, Trump appointed a new AI and cryptocurrency czar in venture capitalist David Sacks.

In his first term as president, Trump issued an executive order focused on AI leadership and non-regulatory approaches to expanding and maintaining it.

Chips

In his final weeks in office, President Joe Biden's Department of Commerce published new, sweeping export restrictions on the kind of semiconductors required for AI.

The regulations, set to go into effect early in Trump's second term, would restrict and cap the amount of computing power companies can amass in most countries outside a list of 18 allies.

If maintained by the Trump administration, the impact of these changes will likely be to concentrate AI data centers in the US.

Last week, Biden signed an executive order to grant federal sites to construct data centers and "clean energy."

Talent

The two ways AI companies acquire game-changing talent are in question as the US transitions from Biden to Trump.

The first is mergers and acquisitions. Nvidia, along with Microsoft and OpenAI, are the subject of a Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission investigation into possible antitrust violations.

The scrutiny created a cooling effect across the AI ecosystem. Trump's anti-regulation tendencies suggest a more open field for mergers and acquisitions in his term.

The second factor impacting the availability of AI talent in the US is the H-1B visa program. In recent weeks, there has been some disagreement within Trump's party regarding the program, which is designed to facilitate the immigration of skilled workers to the US.

Energy and data centers

AI also needs chips, but assuring an ample supply of those is for naught without enough energy to run the data centers. Since AI chips are hungrier than traditional computer chips, power is the most important limiting factor to the industry's growth.

"They have to produce a lot of electricity," the president said on Tuesday. "And we'll make it possible for them to get this production done easily, at their own plants if they want."

Trump's views on energy production and the climate crisis differ greatly from Biden's. The new president has long focused on continuing American leadership in fossil fuel production.

• Meta executives met with advertisers in recent days to reassure them following some company changes.
• Meta has cut third-party fact-checkers and replaced them with community notes.
• It said it would let users see political content and lift restrictions on certain discussion topics.

A Meta executive says the company has recently met with advertisers to reassure them that the changes it has made regarding free speech won't lead to harmful content running rampant on its platforms.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Nicola Mendelsohn, head of Meta's global business group, said the company had been in contact with advertisers after CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta would stop using third-party fact-checkers on its platforms and instead rely on user-made community notes. He also announced that users would again have the option to see political content on their feeds.

"From an advertiser perspective, we've obviously been talking to them over the last week," said Mendelsohn in a roundtable discussion with Business Insider. "What they've shared back actually is the reassurance that all the commitments that we have to brand safety, brand suitability on the platform, none of that changes."

Zuckerberg posted a video earlier this month announcing some of the changes around content moderation. He blamed the existing systems for causing "too much censorship" and said it was time for Meta to return to its "roots around free expression."

The company has also removed some restrictions on certain topics, such as gender and immigration, allowing users to post what could previously have been determined to be hate speech.

The changes sparked concerns among advertisers, the Financial Times previously reported. Mendelsohn said advertisers will still have control over where their ads are placed.

"So, for example, if you have an advertiser that doesn't want to be next to societal issues, political issues, their ads won't appear next to it," Mendelsohn said.

Mendelsohn said the advertisers Meta had been speaking to wanted to understand more about what was happening.

"They wanted to get past the headlines," she said, adding that it is "all still very early days" in the new era of Meta.

The changes around content moderation were among other broader changes at Meta, which included rolling back its DEI programs and a push to cut low performers faster. The company has ushered in these changes amid President Donald Trump taking power.

"From a US perspective it is a different political and societal change that we're seeing there," Mendelsohn said. "But from a company perspective, I don't feel or see anything different."

Got more insight to share? You can reach the reporter Hugh Langley via the encrypted messaging app Signal (+1-628-228-1836) or email ([email protected]).

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• The film editor for "The Brutalist" revealed the movie used AI in post-production.
• Writer-director Brady Corbet responded to the controversy and defended the film's use of AI.
• This likely won't affect the Oscar nominations, as voting ended before the controversy went mainstream.

People online can't stop talking about "The Brutalist." But this time, the chatter isn't about the movie's over three-hour runtime, its eye-catching visual style, or the acclaimed performances propelling it to awards season glory. It's about AI, and whether the film's use of it should make it less deserving of artistic praise and potential awards.

The controversy reached a peak this weekend after excerpts from an interview with "The Brutalist" editor Dávid Jancsó went viral online.

Jancsó told online tech magazine Red Shark News that the production team used AI to perfect minute pronunciation details in the Hungarian accents of stars Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones, who play Hungarian Jews who flee Europe after World War II in search of a better life in America. (The film includes scenes in both Hungarian and English.)

Jancsó, who is a native Hungarian speaker himself, said the language is one of the most difficult to learn to pronounce. So while Brody and Jones had dialect coaching and did a "fabulous job" learning the language, the filmmakers wanted to perfect the dialogue "so that not even locals will spot any difference."

'The Brutalist' used AI to improve Adrien Brody's accent

Jancsó said they first tried to use ADR (automated dialogue replacement) in post-production, but it didn't work. So the team opted to feed Brody and Jones' voices into Respeecher, a Ukrainian software company that uses AI to let one person speak in the voice of another, then fed in Jancsó's own voice to finesse it.

"We were very careful about keeping their performances. It's mainly just replacing letters here and there," he said in the interview. Jancsó added that generative AI was used to craft the final sequence where viewers see architectural drawings and completed buildings in the style of Adrien Brody's fictional architect László Tóth.

The editor said that he knew it was controversial to talk about using AI in film, but maintained that "there's nothing in the film using AI that hasn't been done before."

"It just makes the process a lot faster. We use AI to create these tiny little details that we didn't have the money or the time to shoot," Jancsó said.

Some fans are turning on 'The Brutalist,' but the news won't impact Oscar nominations

The revelation, which comes days before Thursday's Oscar nominations announcement, threw social media into a frenzy, with many film fans criticizing the movie's use of AI. Some have even suggested the movie (or Brody) should be disqualified over it.

The nearly four-hour epic has been a sensation since premiering at the Venice Film Festival in September, where director Brady Corbet won the festival's Silver Lion award. In the months since, it's continued to rack up more wins, most recently taking home three Golden Globes: best director for Corbet, best actor in a drama for Brody, and best motion picture drama.

Users on X joked that "The Brutalist" is the latest best picture contender to be knocked out of the race after "Anora" faced backlash for not using an intimacy coordinator, clearing the way for papal thriller "Conclave" to win.

But if the Ralph Fiennes drama does clinch a nomination and "The Brutalist" doesn't, it likely won't be due to the latter's use of AI: Oscar voting, which was extended due to the LA fires, concluded on Friday January 17, after the interview was published but before online chatter over the controversy picked up steam that weekend.

As for whether it will affect the chances of "The Brutalist" actually winning anything, that's less clear and all depends on how the voting bodies that make up the Academy feel about AI usage (that is, if the voters even finished watching the whole movie).

Director Brady Corbet responded to the uproar

In an email statement shared with BI by the film's distributor A24, Corbet defended and clarified the use of AI in "The Brutalist," maintaining that Brody and Jones' performances are "completely their own" and that nothing was substantively altered.

"Innovative Respeecher technology was used in Hungarian language dialogue editing only, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy. No English language was changed," Corbet said. "This was a manual process, done by our sound team and Respeecher in post-production. The aim was to preserve the authenticity of Adrien and Felicity's performances in another language, not to replace or alter them and done with the utmost respect for the craft."

Corbet also said that AI wasn't used to render any of the buildings, which were all hand-drawn. "To clarify, in the memorial video featured in the background of a shot, our editorial team created pictures intentionally designed to look like poor digital renderings circa 1980," he said.

The Brutalist' isn't the only movie to use AI

AI has been major point of contention in Hollywood, particularly during the 2023 writers and actors strikes, when creatives demanded reassurances that the technology wouldn't replace their work.

The popularity of AI, and Respeecher in particular, is growing. The company struck a deal with Lucasfilm to clone James Earl Jones' voice for use in the 2022 Star Wars series "Obi-Wan Kenobi."

"The Brutalist" also wasn't the only film that used AI in 2024. Respeecher said in a Facebook post that "Emilia Pérez," another awards season favorite, used its software, though it didn't say in what capacity.

Reps for "Emilia Pérez" didn't immediately respond to a request for comment, but an interview with the movie's sound mixer indicates AI cloning tools were used to help Karla Sofia Gascón sing beyond her vocal range, per The Guardian.

Other 2024 films like "Civil War," "Furiosa," "Alien: Romulus," and "Late Night With the Devil," also faced varying degrees of criticism for their use of AI in visuals.

Reps for "The Brutalist" and Respeecher, as well as Brody, Jones, and Jancsó, didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

• Netflix had a blowout quarter, helped by live sports events.
• But Netflix insists it won't break the bank with sports.
• Netflix sees sports as part of live programming, which benefits its ad growth.

Netflix just delivered another blockbuster quarter, helped by record-breaking sporting events. But the streamer was quick to tamp down speculation that it'll charge headlong into big (AKA pricey) sports deals.

Netflix highlighted live sports events in ticking off the strengths of the fourth quarter. It mentioned the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson bout, which it called the most-streamed sporting event ever, and the NFL Christmas Day games, which it said were the two most streamed NFL games in history. Netflix just began a big partnership with the WWE and got exclusive US rights to the FIFA Women's World Cup for 2027 and 2031.

Many analysts would like Netflix to add more sports as they become available, and sports-related questions were prominent on Tuesday's earnings call.

"We believe NFLX would benefit from expanding its sports portfolio but note few US sports rights are up for renewal over the next few years," Citi analysts wrote in a recent note.

The NBA is tied up for the next 11 years, and the NFL signed its 11-year deal in 2021. ESPN's UFC rights are coming up for grabs in 2025, though, and could look more attractive. That's especially true after the Paul-Tyson fight.

Netflix execs were quick to emphasize Tuesday that they're not changing their strategy around sports. They said they plan to keep treating it as part of its live programming, which includes things like "The Roast of Tom Brady."

Live programming — sports especially — can create a sense of urgency that can help fuel Netflix's ads business. Netflix is counting on ads to help it accelerate in 2025 and beyond.

That said, Netflix doesn't want to give the impression it's giving up on cost discipline. With the cost of live sports skyrocketing, Netflix underscored in its shareholder letter that its live programming would "likely be a small percentage of our total view hours and content expense." Netflix has also expressed aversion to renting versus owning its entertainment.

That could be music to the ears of some TV networks. They are being squeezed by the ever-increasing cost of live sports rights and are increasingly outbid by tech giants for them.

"We are constantly trying to broaden our programming, and live is one of those things, and sports is one of those live events," Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said on the call. "But it doesn't really change the economics of full seasons sports being very challenging."

"We're going to be mindful of the bottom line," he added.

Of course, Netflix has been known to change its tune on things before — like ads, password-sharing, and yes, live sports.

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It's one thing for the new President to support the blockchain industry, but veterans aren't so crazy about him joining their ranks.

Why it matters: The president-elect nominally making $50 billion on a crypto asset that didn't exist a day prior speaks to the industry's power — but there's growing debate within the community about a stain on crypto's burgeoning credibility.

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The big picture: Just days before taking office, Trump launched the Official Trump meme coin, sparking immediate questions of whether it could be used as a vehicle to funnel money to the Trump Organization by people seeking to curry favor with the administration.

• That said, it also brought a huge crush of new buyers into the market.

"Crypto changed forever last night," Udi Wertheimer, a blockchain entrepreneur tweeted the next day.

• "I think the Trump coin represents one of the largest events in crypto history, without a doubt," Alon, a cofounder of Pump.fun, the biggest meme coin launching platform, tells Axios in an interview.

Others are more circumspect. "[The President] creating a bunch of meme coins and DeFi protocols opens the possibility to rampant violations of the emoluments clause," Nic Carter, an investor in the space and fan of the new president said on X.

• When the Trump Organization endorsed decentralized-finance project World Liberty Financial back in August, Carter criticized that, too.

Echoing Carter, long-time crypto lawyer, Hailey Lennon, wrote on X, "I don't think Trump knows or cares what the ramifications of his meme coins are besides his short term personal profit."

• And Lee Bratcher of the Texas Blockchain Council put out a statement this weekend saying, "in my subjective opinion it isn't" a healthy development.
• Bitcoin Magazine was more succinct, denigrating the Trump token offering on X. That's despite the fact that its parent company enthusiastically welcomed the then-presidential candidate to Nashville for Bitcoin 2024.

Some are conflicted. "I'm 50:50 on this," Matti, a partner at Zee Prime Capital, tells Axios over Telegram.

• Matti bases his whole investing strategy on the memetic nature of digital assets. He acknowledged the Trump token could make the industry look bad, but added that "it makes you feel crypto is truly part of the zeitgeist."

Meanwhile, Investor Maya Bakhai, general partner at Spice Capital, which has backed a meme trading app, Hype, tries to keep her eye on the retail investor, which she sees as diverging from the crypto illuminati right now.

• To her, the president getting in makes meme coins credible. The negativity we're seeing today from other crypto investors, Bakhai pins on the fact that they missed so much of the meme coin boom.
• Speaking to the financial risks for meme coin traders, Bakhai pushes back on those concerns. "If you think about retail, they know it's a gamble," she says. "They want to gamble."

By the numbers: The energy sparked by the Trump token is showing up on chain. In terms of volume, this has been the best month ever on the blockchain that the token runs on, Solana.

• And it's clearly the new coin that's driving that. Daily volume had been around $4 billion or $5 billion a day through January, but Friday through Saturday were all over $30 billion daily.
• And crypto app downloads are also spiking.
• On the other hand, overall daily volumes across the market look fairly normal still.

The intrigue: While the Trump token unquestionably enriched the President, at least on paper, its launch doesn't seem to have included a special handout to his blockchain fans.

• The meme coin was released at the same time as a party for crypto leaders in D.C. ahead of the inauguration. Sources who were there tell Axios that there was no announcement of the new token at the event.
• In other words, a lot of the best traders were away from their terminals when the token's price was lowest.

What we're watching: It's too early to predict possible political implications from the launch, although the first voices from official Washington are starting to weigh in.

• House Financial Services Committee ranking member Maxine Waters (D.-Ca.) put out a statement Monday saying, "the launch and sale of this coin is yet another reason why all Americans and policymakers should exercise extreme caution on crypto."
• That's notable, as Waters has been a crucial voice on the topic — one that has become tentatively willing to pass legislation in recent years.

The bottom line: The last thing the crypto lobby needs is for Democrats like her to get cold feet.

• Netflix is raising prices in the US to $18 for its standard plan.
• The hikes come as the company crushed Wall Street's expectations for Q4 subscriber growth.
• These charts show why a Netflix subscription is still a pretty good deal.

Netflix hiked prices in the US on Tuesday. Even at $18 a month, data shows a subscription is a pretty good deal.

The standard Netflix plan now costs $17.99 a month, up from $15.49, while the premium plan that includes 4K video goes for $24.99, versus $22.99 before. For the first time, Netflix also increased the price of its ad-supported plan to $7.99 from $6.99.

These price hikes aren't too surprising. YouTube TV just raised prices by $10 a month, and Disney has consistently charged more for its streaming services. Disney+ now charges nearly $16 for its basic plan — more than double what it did when it launched in late 2019.

Netflix last raised prices in the US in October 2023.

Still, Netflix is by far the cheapest service on a per-hour-of-consumption basis, according to a recent note from UBS media analyst John Hodulik.

Before Tuesday's increase, customers on Netflix's ad-free plan paid $0.33 per month per hour they watched, according to Nielsen and company data analyzed by UBS. That suggests the average customer is watching the service for a staggering 47 to 70 hours a month.

That's cheaper on a per-hour basis than Netflix's major streaming rivals and traditional TV, UBS found.

Those on Netflix's ad plan are also getting a steal. UBS found that they're paying $0.15 per hour they watch, and the data suggests they're watching just as much as those on the ad-free plan.

The streaming giant also has an industry-leading churn rate: 1.8% of its customers canceled last quarter, according to streaming data firm Antenna. This is a sign that subscribers largely think they're getting their money's worth.

The price hikes come as Netflix invests in more live programming, including NFL games, which have drawn large streaming audiences.

The company added nearly 19 million subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2024, shattering Wall Street's estimates for the period. Netflix generated $1.8 billion in net income during the quarter and said it expects to rake in close to $2.5 billion in Q1.

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