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🔄 Demis Hassabis Is No Longer Running Google DeepMind
Hassabis is stepping down as Google DeepMind CEO and moving to chairman of the AI unit, while also taking the title of chief scientist at Alphabet. He co-founded DeepMind and has led it since 2010. He’ll keep running the pharmaceutical spinoff Isomorphic Labs.
Koray Kavukcuoglu, currently Google DeepMind’s CTO, becomes senior vice president and takes over day-to-day operations, reporting directly to Sundar Pichai. Notably, DeepMind has never operated with a corporate chairman separate from its executive leadership — this structure is new.
And it’s not the only departure. Alphabet chief scientist Jeff Dean is leaving Google entirely to start a company called Discovery Loop. Dean has been at Google since 1999 and is arguably the most influential engineer in the company’s history.
Read together, this is a restructuring, not a retirement. Google has spent two years trying to close the gap with OpenAI and Anthropic, and the reporting frames this as centralizing AI operations at Mountain View under someone whose job is shipping rather than research direction. Whether moving your most famous researcher upstairs helps you ship faster is the bet.
🏭 Tesla and SpaceX Are Building a $16.8B Chip Factory Called Terafab
Tesla and SpaceX committed $16.8 billion to a first phase of “Terafab,” an AI semiconductor superfactory in Grimes County, Texas, formalized alongside Intel after signing a JETI tax abatement agreement and a $10 million non-refundable payment. The site will combine logic, memory, packaging, and testing in one place, with a total footprint exceeding 100 million square feet and at least 3,000 workers.
SpaceX filings suggest the multi-phase build could eventually reach $119 billion. The stated justification: the two companies project their combined compute needs will hit 1 terawatt in coming years. The chips are earmarked for Tesla’s Optimus robots and Cybercabs, and for high-power silicon supporting SpaceX’s space-based data centers.
Context worth holding onto — SpaceX just reported $18.4 billion in quarterly capex, $15.8 billion of it AI. The vertical integration play here is total: build the chips, build the data centers, put some of them in orbit.
🇨🇳 ByteDance Is Pre-Training a 10 Trillion Parameter Model
Per the Financial Times, ByteDance’s roughly 2,000-person Seed AI team has begun pre-training a mixture-of-experts model of up to 10 trillion parameters — requiring an estimated 30,000 GPUs and three to six months of continuous training.
For scale: that’s more than three times Moonshot’s Kimi K3 at 2.8 trillion. Industry estimates put Anthropic’s Mythos 5 around 8 trillion and Fable 5 around 5 trillion, though Anthropic publishes no official counts.
Two caveats before anyone declares a winner. The model is in pre-training and the final parameter count isn’t fixed. And raw parameter count has never been a clean proxy for capability — Kimi K3 activates 16 of 896 experts per token, and Qwen3.8-Max activates 95 billion of its 2.4 trillion. What’s more telling is the strategy: founder Zhang Yiming has reportedly directed the team to pursue genuine breakthroughs rather than distilling from Western models, which is a direct response to the accusations aimed at Moonshot two weeks ago.
⚡ Nvidia-Backed Firmus Doubled Its Valuation in Four Months
Australian AI infrastructure company Firmus closed a fully subscribed $2 billion equity round at a post-money valuation above $10.5 billion — up from roughly $5.5 billion in April. Follow-on money from Coatue and Nvidia, new investment from Blackstone Tactical Opportunities, plus participation from Jane Street. That’s more than $3 billion raised in a year.
The capital funds Project Southgate, Firmus’s AI factory rollout across Australia, with early expansion into Asia-Pacific markets including Indonesia. The build is based on Nvidia’s DSX AI Factory reference architecture. Doubling a valuation in four months on infrastructure buildout tells you where the capital is still comfortable.
🧩 Microsoft Is Collapsing Every Copilot Into One App
Microsoft is merging consumer Copilot, GitHub Copilot, Copilot Chat, and Copilot Cowork into a single unified application, with a new agentic layer called AutoPilot. Satya Nadella confirmed it on the FY Q4 earnings call. The internal effort is codenamed Copilot Fusion, and the goal is one codebase serving personal and enterprise users under a shared identity graph, with users toggling contexts inside a single window.
Casualties of the consolidation: Copilot Podcasts and Copilot Labs are being killed. EVP Jacob Andreou described the effort as stripping out “what wasn’t working.” Timeline is end of 2026.
Six branded Copilot products collapsing into one is an admission that the branding sprawl confused people more than it helped. It also makes the product much harder to leave.
🌟 What This Means
Two very different bets landed this week. Musk’s is that the constraint is physical — silicon, square footage, terawatts — and whoever owns the whole stack from fab to orbit wins. ByteDance’s is closer to the classic scaling bet, 10 trillion parameters and 30,000 GPUs pointed at the frontier. Firmus’s investors are betting on both without picking.
Google’s move is the interesting one because it’s a bet in the opposite direction. Pulling Hassabis up to chairman and losing Jeff Dean entirely, while handing operations to a CTO reporting straight to Pichai, reads like a company that has decided its problem isn’t research talent. It’s execution. That’s an unusual diagnosis for the lab that produced AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and the transformer’s most important descendants — and it’s a risky one, because research advantage is much easier to lose than to rebuild.
Blurb (for excerpt/preview):
Demis Hassabis is stepping down as Google DeepMind CEO to become chairman, and Jeff Dean is leaving Alphabet after 27 years to start his own company. Meanwhile Tesla and SpaceX committed $16.8B to a 100-million-square-foot Texas chip fab, ByteDance began pre-training a 10-trillion-parameter model, and Microsoft is collapsing every Copilot into one app.
Sources:
- Demis Hassabis steps down from Google DeepMind CEO role amid a major AI leadership shake-up — Fortune
- Google DeepMind’s Hassabis Moves to Chairman Role in Leadership Reshuffle — Bloomberg
- The next chapter of our AI momentum — Google
- Tesla and SpaceX will invest $16.8B to start building ‘Terafab’ chip factory in Texas — TechCrunch
- Tesla, SpaceX confirm ‘Terafab’ chip fab site — $16.8B first phase — Electrek
- ByteDance is training a 10-trillion-parameter model to chase the frontier — TNW
- ByteDance reportedly plans 10 trillion total-parameter model with 30,000 GPUs — Crypto Briefing
- Nvidia-backed Firmus raises $2bn more, doubling its value to over $10.5bn — TNW
- Firmus Announces Fully Subscribed $2 Billion Strategic Equity Investment — Firmus
- Microsoft Merges Consumer and Enterprise Copilot Into Single App — MLQ News