Startup Insider
Rechenzentren abgewählt, Gewichte umgeschrieben: Midterms & Weight-Space Programming – Philipp Müller & Daniel Höpfner
8 Nov · 41 min
Key points
- US midterms: 41 data centre ballot measures, only one passed, and AI now polls worse than ICE among the general US population.
- Anthropic's IPO prospectus shows $50 of every $100 revenue to compute, $11 to commissions, minus $4 operating profit, targeting 13% margin.
- MIT used OpenAI's Astra to change 0.016% of Qwen's weights, lifting MATH-500 from 8% to 50%, a technique called weight-space programming.
Anthropic's IPO prospectus shows compute taking half of revenue
Funding and deals
- Anthropic. AI model developer whose IPO prospectus shows $50 of every $100 in end-customer revenue going to compute and cloud, leaving minus $4 operating profit.
- Daytona. Croatian-founded, San Francisco-based container infrastructure for AI agents raised a $16m Series B at a $1bn valuation after reaching $100m ARR in four quarters.
Guest interviews
- Philipp Müller, co-founder and CEO of Signatrix. Müller says 41 local ballot measures on data centres across 10 US states produced one win, and AI now polls worse than ICE among Americans. He expects AI valuations to rebound because capacity already bought will be built and paid for, putting NVIDIA 24% and Micron 46% below their 2026 highs. He calls weight-space programming fully emergent, notes only Astra and Anthropic's Claude models can do it, and says scaling laws still govern the frontier.
News
- US voters reject data centre buildout. 41 local ballot measures on data centres in 10 states drew one vote in favour, and most exit-poll voters called AI an important election factor. Höpfner was surprised by the clarity, with 80% against in some votes.
- SpaceX plans 13GW data centre buildout. Announced on 3 November, SpaceX will build 13 gigawatts of data-centre capacity in 18 months, equal to everything Google built since 1999 and 20 times Germany's 0.6 to 0.7 gigawatts. Höpfner doubts Musk's claim that space will outbuild Earth.
- AI stocks shed $500bn in sell-off. The biggest sell-off in a long time wiped about $500bn off AI shares, with double-digit drops at large names, and Alphabet fell about 20% despite strong results. Müller calls valuations extremely ambitious but expects a rebound.
- AI boom drives half of US growth. Müller says the data-centre buildout accounts for roughly half of US economic growth, and Höpfner says more than half of the country's 3 to 4 percent growth comes from the AI boom.
- Qwen rewritten to run maths in its weights. A researcher wired Qwen's Gated Delta Net into a CPU inside the model, lifting arithmetic accuracy from 55% to 97.5%. Days later MIT had OpenAI's Astra rewrite 0.016% of Qwen's weights, taking MATH-500 from under 8% to about 50%.
- AWS stockpiles GPUs it cannot power. Müller says AWS reportedly buys $10m of GPUs a day with no power to connect them, and Germany could not match this pace without approval for 100 gas plants. He says compute will move wherever it can be built.