Ilya Sutskever takes over as CEO of Safe Superintelligence after Daniel Gross leaves for Meta. Sutskever posted on X confirming he’s now CEO, with Daniel Levy as President. The startup, valued at $32 billion, is reportedly courting acquisition offers but wants to focus on its mission.
Chinese AI firms are eating into U.S. dominance. The Wall Street Journal reports banks and companies worldwide are adopting Chinese models like DeepSeek and Alibaba as cheaper alternatives to ChatGPT. Even AWS, Microsoft, and Google offer Chinese AI access despite U.S. security rules. ChatGPT still leads with 910 million downloads, but Chinese AI is closing the gap on cost and performance.
Meta is locked in a brutal talent war, offering some OpenAI researchers up to $300 million over four years. Wired says at least 10 OpenAI employees got these proposals, with $100 million+ in year one pay and immediate stock vesting. Meta denies the top figure but admits senior engineers can make $850,000 to $1.5 million annually. 
Microsoft’s sales division is shifting hard into AI, per Business Insider. Judson Althoff’s team is focusing on embedding Copilot everywhere, expanding Azure cloud moves, and boosting AI-related cybersecurity. This comes alongside layoffs trimming sales roles but sets Microsoft to be a “Frontier AI Firm.”
Big Tech’s AI infrastructure spending is exploding. Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google plan a combined $320 billion this year on data centers and AI infrastructure—double their spend from two years ago. OpenAI just leased 4.5 gigawatts of Oracle data center power in the U.S., roughly one nuclear reactor’s worth, as part of its $500 billion Stargate plan.
An Accenture report warns AI data centers could spike carbon emissions 11x by 2030 and use more water annually than Norway or Sweden. Accenture offers a new metric, the Sustainable AI Quotient, to track AI’s true energy and water costs. The report urges efficiency and renewable power but notes AI races against China could block serious sustainability moves.
Google’s new sustainability report shows data center power use doubling since 2020. Still, Google cut related emissions by 12% in 2024 and boosted compute efficiency sixfold. Their power usage effectiveness hit 1.09—a near theoretical minimum.
Matthew Robinson of Accenture says:
“They kind of take your breath away.”
“The point really is to open the conversation around the actions that are available to avert this pathway—we don’t want to be right here.”
“Clearly more effort is needed to avert the rise in carbonisation fueled by AI data centers while still allowing for growth.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently warned the U.S. must ramp AI data center buildouts or risk losing to China.
“The U.S. really needs to focus on streamlining the ability to build data centers and produce energy,” Zuckerberg said. “Otherwise, we’ll be at a significant disadvantage.”
White House AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks echoes the urgency to expand infrastructure fast, calling current federal permitting “effectively impossible under the Biden administration.”
Coming soon: AI industry events keep stacking up, with the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva next week, ICML mid-July in Vancouver, and Fortune Brainstorm AI in Singapore later this month.
Sources: Accenture report, OpenAI Stargate, Bloomberg on Oracle deal, Reuters on Meta funding, WSJ on China AI, Wired on Meta offers, Business Insider on Microsoft, NYT on AI spending, Google Sustainability Report.
