The AI Industry Just Hit a Wall. A Physical One.

The AI story stopped being a software story this week.

Not in some vague, future-tense, “things are changing” sense. I mean the actual capital flows — where the billions are going, what’s getting built, and who’s controlling the build — shifted in a direction that makes the last three years of model releases look like preamble. Five things happened between February 15 and 22 that, taken together, show you where this industry actually is. Not where the press releases say it is. Where it is.

The through-line across all of it: whoever controls the physical infrastructure controls the intelligence. And right now, the scramble to control that infrastructure is on.

Anthropic at $380B, Airbnb automating 33% of support, and Bernie Sanders wants to pause data centers. This week AI stopped being about chatbots and became about industrial infrastructure. Here's what actually happened and why it matters.

Anthropic closes in on $20B, Musk merges xAI into SpaceX, Super Bowl ads signal AI's mass-market moment, and over $30 billion in disclosed funding lands in a single week. Our first weekly recap of the biggest stories from McGauley Labs.