AI Daily: OpenAI announces agreement to acquire Neptune

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:

NEPTUNE ACQUISITION: OpenAI has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire neptune.ai, which it says will strength the tools and infrastructure that support progress in frontier research. Neptune has worked closely with OpenAI to develop tools that enable researchers to compare thousands of runs, analyze metrics across layers, and surface issues. “Neptune’s depth in this area will help us move faster, learn more from each experiment, and make better decisions throughout the training process,” OpenAI said. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

PARTNERSHIP: Snowflake (SNOW) and Anthropic announced a significant expansion of their strategic partnership. The multi-year, $200M agreement will not only make Anthropic’s Claude models available in the Snowflake platform to more than 12,600 global customers across all three major clouds, but also establishes a joint global go-to-market initiative focused on deploying AI agents across the world’s largest enterprises. Claude will also serve as a key model powering Snowflake’s enterprise intelligence agent, Snowflake Intelligence, to “transform the nature of work by delivering all an organization’s knowledge through one trusted agent that sparks curiosity, encourages exploration, and accelerates innovation.” “Snowflake’s most strategic partnerships are measured not just in scale, but in the depth of innovation and customer value that we can create together,” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO, Snowflake. “Anthropic joins a very select group of partners where we have nine-figure alignment, co-innovation at the product level, and a proven track record of executing together for customers worldwide. Together, the combined power of Snowflake and Claude is raising the bar for how enterprises deploy scalable, context-aware AI on top of their most critical business data.”

SPACEX RIVAL: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has explored acquiring or partnering with rocket company Stoke Space, aiming for a controlling stake through billions in equity investments and to compete against Elon Musk’s SpaceX, The Wall Street Journal’s Berber Jin reports. The deal talks are no longer active, people close to OpenAI say. OpenAI on Monday declared a “code red” to improve ChatGPT, delaying other product rollouts and reassigning employees to address market share loss to Google’s Gemini.

BEST AI EXPOSURE: DA Davidson analyst Gil Luria keeps a Buy rating and $650 price target on Microsoft (MSFT), noting that the company will stay front of the line for OpenAI spend, which will keep it as the fastest growing hyperscaler in a wide range of scenarios. OpenAI still has one of the best frontier models, some of the deepest talent, and ChatGPT still has about 75% share of the AI chat market, and while OpenAI’s over-committing, inflating expectations, and asking for federal government guarantees has caused a backlash across the AI trade, its valuable assets are still there, the analyst tells investors in a research note.

AI CHIPS: Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Haung said he is unsure if China would accept the company’s H200 AI chips if the U.S. relaxed its restrictions, Maggie Eastland, Oma Seddiq, and Emily Birnbaum of Bloomberg report. When addressing interviewers, Huang said he discussed export controls with Trump and commented, “We can’t degrade chips that we sell to China, they won’t accept that.”

CHAIN REACTION: Palantir (PLTR) unveiled Chain Reaction, which it calls “the operating system for American AI infrastructure.” The company said, “The bottleneck to AI innovation is no longer algorithms; it is power and compute. America is at an inflection point in the energy infrastructure buildout, and it requires software built for an entirely different scale. Chain Reaction is designed to address this directly by accelerating the AI buildout with energy producers, power distributors, data centers and infrastructure builders to: transform aging power generation into high-uptime resources capable of meeting AI’s massive demand; stabilize and expand the power grid to meet surging demand from data centers and electrification; accelerate construction of new generation, transmission, and compute capacity; enable the design, development, and reproducibility of future hyperscale data centers supporting AI workloads.” Chain Reaction’s founding partners include CenterPoint Energy (CNP) and Nvidia.