TheChek News Flow

Google is moving further into physical AI by bringing a familiar robotics software platform under its wing.

Alphabet-owned Intrinsic, which builds AI models and software designed to make industrial robots more accessible, is joining Google, the companies announced on Wednesday. Intrinsic will remain a distinct entity within Google but will work closely with Google DeepMind and will tap into Google’s Gemini AI models and cloud services.

Alphabet declined to share information regarding funding or purchase price.

Intrinsic “graduated” into an independent Alphabet-owned company in 2021 after five years of development within Alphabet’s X, the company’s moonshot research division. Other companies that have graduated from X include robotaxi company Waymo and drone delivery company Wing.

Wendy Tan White has served as Intrinsic’s CEO since its spinout in 2021.

The company hit the ground running. A few months after announcing its independence, Intrinsic acquired Vicarious, a fellow robotics software company, in April 2022. While the purchase price wasn’t disclosed, Vicarious had raised about $250 million from VCs and tech bigwigs like Jeff Bezos.

A few months later, Intrinsic acquired several for-profit divisions of Open Robotics, a nonprofit organization that builds hardware and software platforms for the robotics industry.

Despite this rapid expansion, Intrinsic laid off 20% of its workforce in January 2023.

The company announced its first product, Flowstate, just a few months later. Flowstate is a software platform for developing robotics workflows aimed at developers that don’t have deep robotics experience — aligning with the company’s mission to make robotics more accessible.

Since then, the company has fine-tuned the technology, improved its simulation capabilities, and released its Intrinsic Vision AI model in late 2025.

Intrinsic announced a joint venture with electronics manufacturer Foxconn in October 2025 that entails the two companies working together on general-purpose intelligent robots to transform how electronics are manufactured, with the goal of full factory automation.

Now, the company is working toward those goals with closer collaboration with Google’s AI prowess.

“Combined with Google’s incredible AI and infrastructure, we’re going to unlock the promise of physical AI for a much broader set of manufacturing businesses and developers. This will fundamentally shift production, from its economics to operations, and enable truly advanced manufacturing,” Tan White wrote in the company’s blog post.

This move makes a lot of sense for Google, as many tech leaders, including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon, see physical AI as the next natural step in the monetization and advancement of AI models and technology.

Anthropic on Wednesday announced that it has acquired Vercept, an AI startup with deep roots to some of the biggest names in Seattle’s tech scene. The acquisition marks the latest after Anthropic acquired coding agent engine Bun in December to help scale Claude Code.

Vercept had created tools for more complex agentic tasks, including its product Vy, a computer-use agent in the cloud that could operate a remote Apple MacBook. Vercept is one of the many startups working on re-imagining the personal computer for the age of AI agents. As part of the deal, Anthropic is shuttering Vercept’s product on March 25.

The startup was a grad of Seattle’s AI-focused incubator A12, which spawned from the longstanding Allen Institute for AI. Vercept’s co-founders had roots with the Allen Institute, as well, and were previously researchers there. One co-founder, Matt Deitke, made news last year as one of the AI researchers who negotiated a monster $250 million salary from Meta to join its Superintelligence Lab. On Wednesday, Deitke congratulated his former colleagues in a post on X.

Vercept was a relatively high-profile AI startup in the region. In a LinkedIn post announcing the acquisition by Anthropic, Vercept CEO Kiana Ehsani said the startup had raised a total of $50 million. She called out A12’s Seth Bannon, a board member, as the lead investor. Vercept previously announced it had raised a $16 million seed round last January.

The list of angel investors was impressive, too, and included former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean, Cruise founder Kyle Vogt, and Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, GeekWire reported.

In Anthropic’s announcement of the acquisition, the company named co-founders Ehsani, Luca Weihs, and Ross Girshick as some of the team brought on to join Anthropic in the acquisition. However, not all of Vercept’s co-founders are joining the Claude maker.

Oren Etzioni, who has previously been named as a co-founder of Vercept and investor in the startup, is well known in Seattle as the founding leader of the Allen Institute for AI. Along with Deitke, he is also not joining Anthropic, and was vocally less pleased about the acqui-hire. He posted on LinkedIn: “After a little bit more than a year, Vercept is throwing in the towel and giving their customers 30 days to get off the platform. Sad. A fantastic team is joining Anthropic. I wish them the very best!”

Etzioni is also a professor at the University of Washington and known for other startups he’s founded and backed as a VC. He did not respond to a request for comment.

On Etzioni’s LinkedIn post, he accused Bannon, the Vercept lead investor, of being “partly responsible” for Vercept not hiring the correct business people. A back and forth ensued between the investors, with Bannon condemning Etzioni’s remarks: “… you disparaged the heroic work of the founders for achieving an outcome most could only dream of,” Bannon replied in the LinkedIn string. They also accused each other of other less savory things like lying and legal threats.

While public spats between investors are entertaining, and essentially meaningless, the underlying motivation is notable. The stakes are high to build the next big AI winner, and now a promising startup that raised a decently sized war chest will be tucked into Anthropic.

While the terms of the deal were not disclosed, Etzioni says he got a return on his money. Anthropic clearly wanted these researchers (perhaps — especially — with another of them at Meta).

Still, Etzioni told GeekWire that he remains bummed. “I’m pleased to have gotten a positive return but obviously disappointed that after just a little over a year with so much traction, and such a fantastic team, we’re basically throwing in the towel,” he said.

The founders joining Anthropic, however, appear happy, according to CEO’s Ehsani’s LinkedIn post. “The choices were clear: we could build independently and work toward the same vision as two separate versions of it, or join forces with an incredible team and accelerate that vision into reality. The decision became an easy choice,” she said of joining Anthropic.

It was a tale of two AI cities when Nvidia and Salesforce on Wednesday reported the January-quarter earnings that ended their 2026 fiscal years. Nvidia kept its place at the top of the class, reporting better than projected 73% revenue growth. Net income rose 94% to $42.9 billion. For the full fiscal year, Nvidia had revenue of $216 billion and net profit of $120 billion, translating to a margin of 55.6%, which is impressive for a chip designer. By comparison, distant rival AMD’s net profit margin for the last 12 months was 12.5%, while Broadcom (a rival of a sort) had a margin of 36.2%, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence data.

But even as Nvidia bulls celebrated the moment—pushing the long-stalled stock above $200—uncertainties about the impact of AI on enterprise software surfaced in Salesforce’s results. On the surface, the quarter looked fine. Revenue grew 12%, which is nothing to write home about but a big improvement on the 8.6% year-on-year growth in the first three quarters of the year. Scratch the surface, though, and the picture isn’t quite as positive. If you exclude the contribution from Salesforce’s recently acquired Informatica, the quarter’s growth rate was only 8%. No one wants to see Salesforce too reliant on acquisitions for growth, as buying other companies isn’t a sustainable way to expand. That’s likely one reason why its stock fell 5% in after-hours trading.

That’s not all, however. Salesforce is reporting accelerating revenue from its AI flagship product Agentforce—annualized recurring revenue reached $800 million in the quarter, up from $500 million in the third quarter. That’s heartening. The question is why Agentforce isn’t lifting Salesforce’s revenue growth rate. Indeed, Salesforce projected fiscal 2027 growth of between 10% and 11%—including three points coming from Informatica. That implies Salesforce’s growth without Informatica will be 7% to 8%, slightly weaker than the just-finished year excluding the acquired firm. Could the growth in AI be cannibalizing Salesforce’s older software businesses? That’s one of the worries about AI, of course—that businesses will embrace new AI-powered products but simply shift money they’re spending from other software they’re buying.

When asked about this issue, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff gave a vague answer, preferring to emphasize his pride in what Salesforce had done. Earlier on the call, though, Chief Financial Officer Robin Washington had said Agentforce’s growth was expected to be offset this year by “weakness in marketing, commerce and [data analytics visualization unit] Tableau,” all issues that dampened last year’s performance as well. It’s also notable the company said it expected “organic revenue”—which comes from within existing businesses, rather than via acquisitions, to “reaccelerate” in the second half of the year. That all suggests at least some of the older businesses are not doing great right now.

There are few examples of software firms showing accelerating overall growth so far, even if they’re reporting fast-growing AI revenue. And in most cases, their AI revenue is tiny. Agentforce’s ARR, for instance, is just 1.7% of Salesforce’s total fiscal 2027 projected revenue of about $46 billion. To be sure, AI adoption within businesses is still in the very early days. But investors have good reason to be jittery about the future growth of software firms.

Nvidia’s Cash Machine

Nvidia generated $96.6 billion in free cash flow in fiscal 2026, the company’s January-quarter earnings revealed, up from $61 billion in fiscal 2025. Free cash flow is cash from its operations less capital expenditures, an expense Nvidia doesn’t have a lot of. Companies use the cash they generate for share buybacks, dividends, investments and acquisitions. It’s why Nvidia has the firepower to invest in a bunch of potential customers, as it has been doing.

It’s fun to compare Nvidia’s free cash flow with those of other tech giants, several of whom are Nvidia customers and therefore are responsible for the company’s explosive growth. In calendar year 2025, only Apple generated more in free cash flow—$123.5 billion. Alphabet’s free cash flow was $73 billion, Microsoft’s just a tad higher, Meta Platforms’ was $43.6 billion and Amazon’s $7.7 billion.

Media company is pursuing a high-stakes bid for rival Warner Bros. Discovery

Paramount’s PSKY -2.21%decrease; red down pointing triangle streaming revenue grew in the fourth quarter, but the company—which is pursuing a bid for rival media company Warner Bros. Discovery—reported weakness in its TV media segment.

Paramount, whose assets include CBS, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and its namesake studio, earlier this week revised its bid for Warner, now offering $31 a share.

In a letter to shareholders Wednesday, Paramount Chief Executive David Ellison said that the company views Warner as “an accelerant” to achieving its goals more quickly.

Paramount reported revenue of $8.15 billion for its fourth quarter, in line with analyst estimates.

Revenue for the direct-to-consumer segment, which includes the Paramount+ streaming service, was $2.2 billion, up 10% from the year-ago period, the company said. Paramount+ ended the quarter with 78.9 million subscribers; analysts polled by FactSet expected it to have 80.2 million subscribers at the end of the period.

TV media revenue declined by 5% year-over-year to $4.71 billion. Paramount said it expects to see continued headwinds to affiliate revenue, driven by declines in pay-TV subscribers.

Paramount’s shares were up less than 1% in after-hours trading.

The company forecast total first-quarter revenue between $7.15 billion and $7.35 billion and said it expects to grow direct-to-consumer profitability in 2026 and have stable margins in its TV media segment.

In November, Paramount raised its cost-cutting target to at least $3 billion, up from $2 billion. The company said Wednesday that it was on track to achieve its savings targets through 2027.

Earlier this week, Warner said it had received a revised offer from Paramount to buy the entire company for $31 a share and said its board of directors determined Paramount’s revised bid “could reasonably be expected to lead” to a proposal superior to Netflix’s signed agreement to buy Warner’s studios and HBO Max streaming service.

Paramount closed its $8 billion merger with Skydance in August. The deal was approved by the Federal Communications Commission in July, shortly after Paramount Global agreed to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit by President Trump over the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

The company expects annual revenue of $45.8 billion to $46.2 billion in the new fiscal year

Salesforce CRM 3.41%increase; green up pointing triangle expects revenue to grow in the current fiscal year at about the same rate as it did the year before, as investors worry about AI’s threat to software.

Chief Executive Marc Benioff told investors on a call Wednesday he wasn’t fazed by the selloff across software companies in recent weeks, which was driven by concerns that AI companies would replace software services. He said the stock’s price—which hit a three-year low earlier this month—created the opportunity to authorize a $50 billion share buyback.

“This is not our first SaaS-pocalypse,” Benioff said, referring to software-as-a-service. “We are going to make it through this one as well, so this is a great marketing opportunity and a great buying opportunity.”

The new buyback will replace all previously unused authorizations, Salesforce said.

In the new fiscal year, Salesforce expects annual revenue to be $45.8 billion to $46.2 billion, while analysts were projecting $46.11 billion. The company expects adjusted earnings per share to be $13.11 to $13.19, while the consensus estimate from Wall Street was $13.15.

At the midpoint, the full-year revenue guidance would represent roughly 10% growth, in line with the 10% sales increase Salesforce logged in the just-ended fiscal year.

The stock fell 5% to $181.25 in after-hours trading.

Benioff highlighted the growth of Salesforce’s AI product Agentforce, which made its debut in the fall of 2024. He said more companies, including SharkNinja and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, are adding agents at a rapid pace and turning to Agentforce to do that work for them.

Agentforce reached $800 million in the quarter, up from $540 million the quarter before. Salesforce said it closed 29,000 deals during the quarter, a 50% jump from the third quarter. Agentforce made its debut in the fall of 2024.

“If there is a SaaS-pocalypse, it may be eaten by the SaaS-quatch because there are a lot of companies using a lot of SaaS because it just got better with agents-as-a-service,” Benioff said.

Even before February’s software selloff, investors have been questioning Salesforce’s ability to stay relevant in the age of AI. Agentforce has been growing, but some investors worry it isn’t catching on fast enough. Despite consistently beating estimates with its financial results last year, Salesforce shares have lost 38% of their value in the past 12 months.

Revenue rose 12% to $11.20 billion in the fourth quarter. Analysts surveyed by FactSet forecast revenue of $11.19 billion.

Salesforce posted a profit of $1.87 billion, or $2.07 a share, compared with $1.82 billion, or $1.75 a share, a year earlier. Adjusted per-share earnings were $3.81, ahead of the $3.05 anticipated by analysts, according to FactSet.

In the current quarter, Salesforce anticipates revenue of $11.03 billion to $11.08 billion, ahead of the $11.0 billion analysts expected. Adjusted earnings per share are set to be $3.11 to $3.13, also ahead of Street estimates of $3.01.

‘Computing has changed,’ CEO Jensen Huang says, citing agentic AI as driver of 94% profit surge

Nvidia NVDA 1.41%increase; green up pointing triangle reported a 94% increase in profit and record sales for the fourth quarter, helping ease concerns over a possible artificial-intelligence bubble that rippled through markets in recent months.

The chip maker reported net income of $43 billion, up from $22.1 billion in the year-earlier quarter, on sales of $68.1 billion, up 73% from $39.3 billion a year earlier, easily beating consensus estimates.

Analysts polled by FactSet had predicted net income of $37.5 billion and revenue of $66.1 billion for the quarter.

Data center hardware—the chips and networking equipment that Nvidia sells to AI and cloud-computing companies—accounted for 91.4% of the quarter’s sales, or $62.3 billion, and the segment’s revenue grew slightly faster than the company’s overall sales.

“The simple way to think about it is, computing has changed,” Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang said on Wednesday’s earnings call with investors. “In this new world of AI, compute equals revenues…I am certain at this point that we’ve reached the inflection point” where agentic AI is upending how business is done worldwide and selling AI tools is starting to generate real profits.

With each passing quarter, the pressure grows on Nvidia—which at a market value of nearly $5 trillion is the world’s largest publicly traded company—to beat Wall Street’s expectations.

“It’s no longer enough for Nvidia to produce good quarterly results,” said Daniel Newman, chief executive of tech research and advisory firm Futurum Group. “They have to produce perfect quarterly results.”

Nvidia’s gross margins, which have been rising steadily for the past year, hit 75% in the January quarter, up from 73% a year earlier, in line with analysts’ predictions.

In recent months, investors have sent tech stocks on a wild ride as worries about the AI trade have risen, then subsided, only to resurface. Nvidia’s share price fell as low as $170.94 in mid-December but has recovered to over $196.

The biggest buyers of Nvidia’s chips include ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Oracle, Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Google parent Alphabet and Amazon.com. In recent months, investors have grown concerned over OpenAI’s fundraising abilities and rising competition from other chip designers, including Google and makers of custom chips.

In January, The Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia’s deal, announced in September, to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, was on ice. Instead, Nvidia has said it will participate in OpenAI’s latest funding round, making a smaller investment that people briefed on the situation said is in the range of $30 billion.

“They’re exposed to a subset of companies with fragile balance sheets,” Newman said.

A factor that will likely shape Nvidia’s fortunes will be the transition from AI-model training to inference, the process by which AI tools respond to queries. Training and inference require different types of computing, and as a result, different hardware.

Nvidia has for years dominated the training market with its graphics processors, known as GPUs—powerful chips capable of performing billions of simple tasks simultaneously. As more tech companies deploy AI tools in the real world, demand is expected to shift from training to inference, which relies more heavily on central processing units, or CPUs, a simpler type of data-center chip that more companies are capable of designing.

Last week, Nvidia announced a partnership with Meta that included its first major deployment of CPUs that aren’t connected in servers to GPUs, a sign that customers such as Meta need more inference-computing infrastructure to run their AI tools and other applications.

“It’s important to understand that inference equals revenues for our customers now,” Huang said. “As AI agents come into wider use, being able to quickly generate the computing tokens needed to operate them, customers have realized that their capital spending on Nvidia’s products leads to faster growth.”

In an interview following the earnings release, Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said that Nvidia wasn’t worried about competition from custom-chip designers because the company’s latest generation of servers, known as Grace Blackwell, provides the most efficient inference computing power on the market.

“It doesn’t surprise us that others want to take a part of the great market that we’re a big part of,” Kress said. “It sounds like a good idea, but right now we’re the king of inference. That’s what we are: the king of inference.”

One factor that isn’t yet driving meaningful revenue growth for Nvidia is the Trump administration’s relaxation of restrictions on selling the company’s H200 chips in China.

Although small quantities of H200 sales have been approved, “we have yet to generate any revenue and we do not know whether any imports will be allowed into China,” Kress said on the earnings call. The company warned that homegrown Chinese chip designers are catching up and could disrupt the global AI landscape if Nvidia was prevented from bringing Chinese developers onto its computing platform.

Nvidia said Wednesday that it expected $78 billion in revenue in the current quarter, significantly higher than the $72.9 billion predicted by analysts, and gross margins of 75%, slightly higher than Wall Street’s prediction. The better-than-expected revenue and rosy guidance nudged Nvidia’s stock up less than 1% in after hours trading, to $198.39.

Nvidia faces potential headwinds if it becomes more difficult for important customers such as OpenAI to obtain financing, or if competitors that specialize in custom AI chips gain market share, said Brian Mulberry, chief market strategist for Zacks Investment Management, which owns about $300 million worth of Nvidia stock across multiple funds.

But even if demand shifts, he expects minimal impact on Nvidia’s margins in the short term because of how the company has developed best-in-class products for multiple computing categories.

“At the end of the day, they’re still the most in-demand piece of hardware in the AI market, regardless of what side of it you’re on,” Mulberry said.

BlueScope Chair Jane McAloon says the board is open to further engagement

BlueScope BSL -2.64%decrease; red down pointing triangle Steel said a revised takeover offer from U.S. steelmaker Steel Dynamics STLD 0.35%increase; green up pointing triangle and Australian conglomerate SGH isn’t sufficient for directors to recommend a deal to shareholders, but that it is open to talks if the companies are able to address some of its concerns.

Last week, Steel Dynamics and SGH submitted a sweetened offer for Australia’s BlueScope that values its equity at roughly US$11 billion, and said they wouldn’t raise it again unless a rival bidder emerges.

The proposal intensified a takeover campaign by Indiana-based Steel Dynamics, which has been involved in five bids for BlueScope since late 2024. BlueScope owns a steel mill in Delta, Ohio, which Steel Dynamics covets at a time when demand for locally produced steel in the U.S. is being stoked by tariffs on imports.

Under the offer, SGH would acquire all of BlueScope’s assets and then sell the North American businesses to Steel Dynamics.

“The revised proposal does not adequately address our valuation concerns,” BlueScope Chair Jane McAloon said in a letter addressed to the chief executives of Steel Dynamics and SGH on Thursday. “Consequently, the offer price is not sufficient for the board to recommend a scheme of arrangement to its shareholders.”

She said the board is open to further engagement, including providing some due diligence information, if Steel Dynamics and SGH address several issues. That includes, “importantly, increasing the value of your proposal for all BlueScope shareholders,” she said.

In the letter, McAloon questioned the structure of the offer price and how the suitors value BlueScope’s North America business versus its operations elsewhere.

She also raised concerns about conditions attached to the revised proposal that she described as onerous—including exclusivity—and asked for more information about how the takeover would be funded.

“Notwithstanding your ‘best and final’ statement, we consider that there are various ways to increase the value that BlueScope shareholders could receive,” she said. BlueScope remains open to finding a deal, McAloon said.

Spokespeople for Steel Dynamics and SGH declined to comment. Shares in BlueScope were roughly 3.5% lower by early afternoon in Sydney.

The companies submitted a roughly US$8.8 billion takeover offer for BlueScope in December that was rejected by BlueScope directors last month.

Last week, they made a revised offer under which BlueScope shareholders would receive 32.35 Australian dollars, equivalent to about US$22.84, per share in cash. The offer equates to A$34.00 a share before payment of an interim and special dividend recently announced by BlueScope. It represents a total equity value of A$15 billion.

Since rejecting the pair’s earlier bid, BlueScope’s chief executive has outlined plans to make cost savings and boost shareholder returns. The company recently reported a more than doubling in first-half net profit and said it would increase dividend payments.

BlueScope owns the North Star steel mill in Ohio, which it said in 2024 accounted for roughly 4% of U.S. production of hot-rolled coil. The company has significantly expanded the operation since Trump imposed a 25% tariff on foreign-made steel in 2018. That tariff was doubled to 50% last year.

Steel Dynamics and SGH previously said that BlueScope’s North American operations aren’t strategically compatible with its other businesses “and would benefit as stand-alone businesses under new ownership.”

SGH would retain BlueScope’s operations outside of North America, including its Australian steel products, Asia coated products, and New Zealand and Pacific Islands businesses. That includes Australia’s largest steelworks, located south of Sydney.

McAloon said she has twice requested details on how the companies are valuing the North American operations, but hasn’t been provided that information.

“It is evident that an on-sale price has been agreed,” she said. “It is important for the board to understand this value attribution.”

In late 2024, BlueScope rebuffed two separate proposals made jointly by Steel Dynamics and Alan Kestenbaum’s Bedrock Industries.

Last year, Steel Dynamics proposed buying all of BlueScope. It intended to keep the North American operations and distribute the other assets to BlueScope shareholders—a proposal that BlueScope directors also rejected.