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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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This is Bloomberg Tech. Coming up, Meta agrees to a series of electricity deals to power data centers, making it the biggest buyer of nuclear power among the hyperscalers. Plus, Minimax, one of China's largest generative AI startups, goes public in Hong Kong. What that means for China's AI ecosystem. And Snowflake plans to buy Observe, an AI-powered observability platform
We're going to discuss the move with Snowflake's CEO. Let's get right to it and what's happening in the markets. Later in the program, we're going to go big on Intel. Lit Bhutan Intel CEO has spent the last 24 hours in Washington, D.C. in the White House with the president and with Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary.
Glowing remarks from President Trump about Lit Bhutan's leadership of Intel, but also the progress that the U.S. government's made in taking a stake in the chipmaker. More to come. Then there's the big one. Meta, investing in a multi-gigawatt deal with some big names in nuclear energy. Oklo, up 14% on that deal, of course, backed by Sam Altman. Vistracorp, up 13%. Meta, up 0.8% to 1%.
We said at the top of the program, this puts them among the biggest energy buyers among the hyperscalers. And we remind ourselves, Meta is not technically... A hyperscaler. Let's get to Bloomberg's Riley Griffin. Details here are really important. Size of the deal, how many gigawatts, but also the structure, please.
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Chapter 2: What energy deals is Meta making to become the biggest nuclear buyer among hyperscalers?
You co-reported this with Will Wade, who's just been really on top of the nuclear side of the story. There does seem to be some anxiety from the technology companies that the existing nuclear infrastructure that does exist in America, limited as it may be, is also at risk of being shut down. Is this kind of future-proofing a little bit?
Absolutely. That is what I'm hearing from Meta's head of global energy. They started back in December two years ago, and they were looking into what nuclear needed to keep going. And they heard we need investment now into plants that could potentially shutter. So this is a future-proofing, as you say.
Bloomberg's Riley Griffin leading our coverage of Meta with a must-read. Thank you very much. Access to power has been top of mind in AI. We spoke about that with NVIDIA's CEO, Jensen Wong, earlier this week.
In order for a new industry to emerge, you need energy. And so I think it's safe to say that we wish we had more energy in the United States.
Europe wishes it had more energy. I think the world all wishes we had more energy.
And so we have to invest in all sorts of different forms of energy.
Let's bring in Paul Meeks for more. He's managing director and head of technology research at Freedom Capital Markets. And when I was reading your research last night, Paul, a little bit relieved coming up this morning when I saw the Meta headline, because you're very focused on the real terms footprint of data centers. That's what we're talking about here.
You heard Riley's reporting on the specifics of what Meta has done to secure future capacity. How much of a bottleneck is that to your mind right now for this sector? It is absolutely critical of all the bottlenecks. It is the most important.
I like what Meta is doing here, but folks need to realize that if you ramp up nuclear capacity, we're not going to really see power generation until 2030 earliest, maybe even not until 2032. So what do we do for the next four to six years?
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Chapter 3: How does Meta's investment in nuclear power support its AI data centers?
to build the next data center, which can be a bottleneck, even though it sounds so old school in a new school business. But yes, these are some factors that are very, very interesting that people didn't even conceive of a couple of years ago. Paul, is there an adequate federal level framework, regulation to support the energy requirements of the AI industry in this country?
You know, there is not. And here is my problem. We are still suffering from a lack of solid regulation for the Internet, because even today in the U.S., the Internet is operating under 1996 legislation when Bill Clinton was president. And so I'm hoping. that we're not too restrictive, right? We need to embrace our entrepreneurial companies and give them room to roll.
But we need to have some guardrails on everything AI because what happened last time is we end up abdicating the legislation to the EU because we didn't have the will to do it ourselves. So we missed that opportunity in the internet. Here is the next wave.
We need to embrace it and at least come up with some guardrails that are going to guide all this because there's some important decisions on the federal level to be made. In your research, Paul, it's very interesting to see you approach data center from the perspective of, yes, you know, energy supply, but also real estate, the REITs, right?
And what I really want to ask you is, away from the GPUs, where are the frailties in that industry? Is it literally the folks building the tin can around the outside of the data center, the labor, the concrete industry? Yeah, we've seen some hit in short-term revenues because a couple of the number or a few of the players have subcontractors. Now, this is not them.
This is their subcontractors that are delayed what we call building a powered shell. So it's more than a Quonset hut that you might find the Army in. These powered shells are a little bit more sophisticated. But one company I cover had a $150 million revenue deferral from 25 to 26 because at one of their 41 data centers, someone couldn't pour concrete because it was raining.
And so, yes, all these things come into play. And it's interesting that they may not necessarily be technical bottlenecks, but old school, physical, including construction bottlenecks in addition to the power. I just got back from Vegas with all the attention on artificial intelligence in the digital world. We have an industry that's getting hit by a rainstorm. Paul Meeks.
Isn't that unbelievable? Unbelievable. It's great to have you on Bloomberg Tech. A lot more to come. And coming up, an exclusive interview with the co-founder and COO of Minimax after the company just went public in Hong Kong. And that's the debut trade. And this is Bloomberg Tech.
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Chapter 4: What challenges are facing the AI industry regarding energy supply?
Okay. Bloomberg's Cecilia D'Anastasio. Important reporting. Read the story on the Bloomberg terminal and Bloomberg.com. Thank you. Now, coming up in the program, we're going to speak with Snowflake CEO, Sridhar Ramaswamy, as the company enters into an agreement to buy AI-powered platform Observe. We'll get his observations on that piece of M&A. That's coming up next.
You're halfway through the program, and this is Bloomberg Tech. Welcome back to Bloomberg Tech. I've been using the power of my Bloomberg terminal. It's been a long week with CES in Las Vegas. The power of my brain is dwindling, but it tells me that Apple is down for an eighth straight session, which matches the run of declines that Apple saw in May of 2025. Now,
using more of the power of the Bloomberg terminal. If Apple was full for a ninth day, we think that would be the longest run of decline since the early 90s. And obviously we're only nine days into 2026, but so far year to date, this is a stock that's down five and a half percent. You saw the letter from Tim Cook to shareholders talking up the company's progress of late in last year.
But right now that stock heading down and we'll continue to track it. We had some M&A in the last 24 hours, but it's actually in the AI and software space. Snowflake has agreed to buy Observe, an observability platform, an AI-powered observability platform. Observability is something that's come up a lot recently, particularly in the context of agentic AI.
When I've been around the table, particularly on the engineering side, why this piece of M&A? Why now? Let's talk to Snowflake's CEO, Sridhar Ramaswamy. Those are the reasonable questions, right, Sridhar? I do want to get to defining observability and why it's important, but it's an interesting deal. Why did you do it? Hey, Ed, great to see you.
Snowflake's acquisition of Observe is a game changer for our customers. As you pointed out, observability is basically looking at applications, websites, AI agents to make sure that they are functioning properly. It's a diverse and messy problem. It's a big data problem.
And because Observe is built right on top of Snowflake, they are able to use our very efficient storage as well as compute platform to help customers find problems 10 times faster, often at 3 to 4x less cost. Take a company like Topgolf. It's a customer of Observe. I go to Topgolf all the time with my team. I'm not much of a golfer, so I'm playing an Angry Birds game or something like that.
Topgolf used to struggle when these games went down because they cut everything in a central place, but could not identify that a particular booth had problems. They're able to do that with Observe. In a matter of a few seconds, send over a tech team to go fix that problem and have happy customers. That's the power of this acquisition.
Increasingly, capabilities like Observability are going to be a core part of a platform like Snowflake. And we have great customers, folks like Barclays, Capital One, Commonwealth Bank of America. And we're super excited to bring this to our 10,000 plus customers on Snowflake. Sridhar, let's get it out of the way if we can. The reports are that it's about a billion dollar deal.
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