Wednesday May 13, 2026
In AI, Hardware Set the Rules But Software May Be Changing Them
AI has a chicken and egg problem, and for the first time, nobody is sure which one is winning. Does software pull hardware forward, or does hardware set the ceiling that software can only approach? The answer has enormous implications for where the next wave of value gets created, and the consensus is more fragile than it looks.
For the past three years, the answer has been unambiguously hardware. Nvidia won not because it had the best sales team or the best marketing, but because the frontier models physically required what only Nvidia could provide. CUDA, H100s, Blackwell, the whole stack became a de facto toll road. You wanted to train at scale, you chose Nvidia. The software ambitions of every major lab ran directly through Jensen Huang’s production facilities.
What is starting to shift is the assumption that this arrangement is permanent. The open-source AI community is moving faster than most institutional investors have internalized and is beginning to close the gap between capability and hardware dependency. Models that once demanded the most expensive clusters are being retrained, distilled, and optimized to run on a wider range of silicon. The question is no longer whether alternative hardware can run capable AI. It is whether the frontier itself begins to move in a direction that is less Nvidia-specific.
This is where the chicken and egg problem gets interesting. If new software architectures produce models that are genuinely competitive at a fraction of the compute cost, the hardware moat starts to look more like a product cycle advantage than a structural one. Nvidia is still exceptional, but exceptional is not the same as indispensable.
For investors, this is the signal worth tracking. The picks-and-shovels thesis that has driven Nvidia’s run depended on a very specific version of AI scaling: bigger models, more chips, more training runs. If the efficiency curve bends sharply, the capital flows will bend with it. New architectures, new entrants, and a different kind of infrastructure bet starts to look very interesting. The chicken and egg moment is not a threat to AI. It is a question of who collects the rent when the egg finally hatches.
◾ FCC approves EchoStar $SATS spectrum sale to SpaceX and $T, $40B deal (Cord Cutters News)
◾ CME Group and Silicon Data to launch first compute futures (PR Newswire)
◾ $SCHW rolling out spot crypto trading (X)
Government & NGO Actions
◾ CFTC in talks with every major pro sports league on prediction derivatives insider trading (CoinDesk)
◾ Spain advances own social media and AI regs despite Big Tech lobbying (Reuters)
◾ ECB urges euro-area banks to prep fast for next-gen AI cyberattacks (Reuters)
◾ CFTC files amicus brief backing Kalshi vs. Ohio on prediction market jurisdiction (The Block)
◾ Bank of France breaks with ECB’s Lagarde, calls for private tokenized euro to fight dollar stablecoins (CoinDesk)
◾ AFL-CIO opposes CLARITY Act, fears flood of digital assets into pension and retirement accounts (AFL-CIO)
◾ Bermuda to run payments and financial services on Stellar, targeting world’s first fully on-chain economy (PR Newswire)
◾ Canada funds 44 AI companies via new Access Fund (PR Newswire)
◾ Vietnam targets Q3 2026 for official crypto asset market launch (VN Economy)
Financial Notices & Public Company Releases
◾ Financial updates:
SoftBank Corp $SFTBY FY’26: Revenue ¥7,038.7B +7.6% y/y | Op income ¥1,042.6B +5.4% y/y | Net income ¥550.8B +4.7% y/y (SoftBank Corp)
Sega Sammy $SGAMY FY’26: Revenue ¥487.5B +13.7% y/y | Op income ¥47.1B | Net loss ¥5.8B | aEBITDA ¥16.7B (Sega Sammy)
Tencent $TCEHY Q1’26: Revenue ¥196.5B +9% y/y | Op income ¥67.4B +17% y/y | Net income ¥58.1B +21% y/y | aEBITDA ¥89.6B (Tencent)
Sea Limited $SE Q1’26: Revenue $7.1B +46.6% y/y | Op income $593M +29.9% y/y | Net income $438M +6.7% y/y | aEBITDA $1.0B +9.3% y/y (Sea Limited)
Bakkt $BKKT Q1’26: Revenue $243.6M -77.1% y/y | Op loss $16.9M | Net loss $11.7M | aEBITDA loss $13.7M (Globe Newswire)
eToro $ETOR Q1’26: Net Contribution $258M +19% y/y | Net income $82M +37% y/y | aEBITDA $109M +35% y/y (Globe Newswire)
Eutelsat $ETL Q3’26: Revenue €293.0M -2.3% y/y (Eutelsat)
Keel Infrastructure $KEEL Q1’26: Revenue $37M -23% y/y | Op loss $98M | Net loss $128M | aEBITDA loss $17M (Keel Infrastructure)
WonderFi $WNDR Q1’26: Revenue C$7.7M (Newsfile)
Fold $FLD Q1’26: Revenue $5.6M -21.1% y/y | Net loss $29.2M | aEBITDA loss $5.8M (Globe Newswire)
Upexi $UPXI Q3 FY’26: Revenue $4.6M +43.8% y/y | Net loss $109.3M (Globe Newswire)
Genius Group $GNS Q1’26: Revenue $3.3M +171% y/y | Op income $2.7M | Net income $2.7M | aEBITDA $600K (Globe Newswire)
◾ Operation updates:
Bitdeer $BTDR Apr’26: BTC produced 783 | Self-mining HR 65.5 EH/s | BTC holdings 73 (GlobeNewswire)
Hyperscale Data $GPUS BTC holdings 687 (PR Newswire)
◾ $EBAY rejects $GME takeover bid (CNBC)
◾ $JPM files to launch ETH-based tokenized money market fund (SEC)
◾ 21Shares launches THYP and TXXH, first US ETFs tracking Hyperliquid (Globe Newswire)
Restructuring, Hacks, Losses & Legal Updates
◾ Sam Altman testifies he never promised to keep OpenAI nonprofit (CNBC)
Crypto Protocols, Applications & Business News
◾ DTCC taps Chainlink for tokenized collateral appchain (CoinCentral)
◾ Kraken and Franklin Templeton $BEN partner on tokenized investment adoption (Business Wire)
◾ Legend DeFi superapp winding down (X)
◾ Balaji Srinivasan pitches crypto startup school to Malaysian officials (Bloomberg)
◾ FalconX offers structured credit facility on Monad EVM (X)
◾ LMAX launches Kiosk for institutional digital asset deposits and cross-asset collateral (LMAX)
◾ Atlas AI Labs approved for first permissionless asset-backed token in Dubai (PR Newswire)
◾ Coinhouse receives MiCA authorization in France (LinkedIn)
AI Models, Applications & Developments
◾ $GOOGL in talks with SpaceX on orbital data centers (WSJ)
◾ Anthropic warns investors away from unauthorized secondary share sellers (Bloomberg)
◾ $SAP integrates Anthropic Claude into SAP Business AI platform (SAP)
◾ OpenAI grants European Commission early access to new frontier models (IAPP)
◾ Unitree debuts $650K human-piloted giant humanoid robot (Gizmodo)
◾ $GOOGL rolling out Gemini AI features to Android (Google)
◾ $NVDA CEO Jensen Huang joins Trump’s China trip (CNBC)
◾ Thomson Reuters $TRI integrates Anthropic Claude into CoCounsel legal platform (PR Newswire)
◾ Anthropic in talks to raise $30B at $900B valuation Note: No URL provided — please add a link before publishing.
The Attention Economy, Gaming & Interactive Shifts
◾ Discord Nitro subscribers to get Xbox Game Pass Starter Edition (GamesIndustry.biz)
Space Systems, Satellites & Cosmic Activity
◾ SpaceX Starship V3 debut set for May 19, 6:30PM ET (Space.com)
◾ SpaceX launches NRO intelligence-gathering satellite batch (Spaceflight Now)