tech

Rani Molla6/17/25

Ad firms Omnicom, Interpublic, and WPP fall after reports of pharma ad crackdown and Meta’s AI-generated ads

Major ad agencies Omnicom, Interpublic, Publicis, and WPP are each trading down about 2% amid news that the Trump administration plans to crack down on pharma ads, as well as news of AI ad tech updates from Meta and other tech companies.

Meta today said it’s testing a tool that would let advertisers quickly turn still images into full video ads, as part of its continued push into AI ad tech. It’s one of many Big Tech companies, including Amazon and TikTok, upending ad creation.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could disrupt the $10 billion in annual advertising revenue that pharmaceutical companies spend by making it more difficult for them to advertise their products. The pharmaceutical industry is one of the biggest ad agency customers in the US, with IPG making a whopping 29% of its revenue from health ads, according to Barclays.

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Larry Ellison at Oracle OpenWorld Conference

Oracle Q4 earnings and revenue top estimates; hyperscaler plans more debt issuance

The company posted Q4 FY 2026 earnings Wednesday after the bell.

tech

Report: OpenAI and Nvidia in talks to team up for 10-gigawatt data center in Ohio

Fresh off scaling back ambitious plans for its Stargate data centers, OpenAI may be moving forward with a new plan: a 10-gigawatt data center in Ohio powered and backed by Nvidia.

According to a report by The Information, the new data center, built on federal land, would dwarf the largest data centers being built today in terms of computing power.

The facility would cost about $500 billion to build, and OpenAI would would own the equipment and be on the hook for 20 years of lease payments, which Nvidia would provide a backstop for, per the report.

If this sounds familiar, Nvidia and OpenAI did announce a similar deal back in September. Nvidia said it would invest as much as $100 billion in what CEO Jensen Huang called “the biggest AI infrastructure project in history,” which never came to fruition (though Nvidia did invest $30 billion in OpenAI). Per the report, this potential deal is a new plan.

OpenAI’s Stargate partner SoftBank is part of the plan as well. SoftBank’s SB Energy is providing financing for the project, and broke ground on the facility in March. The land on which the data center would be built is owned by the Department of Energy.

OpenAI in Talks to Lease 10 Gigawatt Ohio Data Center with Backing From Nvidia

OpenAI in Talks to Lease 10 Gigawatt Ohio Data Center with Backing From Nvidia

The facility would cost about $500 billion to build, and OpenAI would would own the equipment and be on the hook for 20 years of lease payments, which Nvidia would provide a backstop for, per the report.

If this sounds familiar, Nvidia and OpenAI did announce a similar deal back in September. Nvidia said it would invest as much as $100 billion in what CEO Jensen Huang called “the biggest AI infrastructure project in history,” which never came to fruition (though Nvidia did invest $30 billion in OpenAI). Per the report, this potential deal is a new plan.

OpenAI’s Stargate partner SoftBank is part of the plan as well. SoftBank’s SB Energy is providing financing for the project, and broke ground on the facility in March. The land on which the data center would be built is owned by the Department of Energy.

A robotics system is demonstrated during LogiMAT 2026, highlighting advances in warehouse automation. (Photo by Leonardo Gerzon/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

The robots are coming... to help small businesses, actually

Labor shortages, not bots, are the bane of so-called blue-collar businesses.

Patrick Sisson7h

tech

Amazon just secured a massive $17.5 billion line of credit

Amazon has landed a $17.5 billion line of credit arranged by Citibank, according to a new SEC filing.

While the filing says the money is for “general corporate purposes,” the company is clearly on a global borrowing spree to fund its massive AI infrastructure investments, with $200 billion in planned capex this year. For perspective, that budget is larger than the entire GDP of most countries. This giant credit line comes shortly after Amazon shattered the record for issuance in Canada’s “maple bond” market.

The spending is so aggressive that credit rating agency S&P recently warned Amazon’s “leverage will increase substantially” and it will likely report negative free operating cash flow over the next two years to support the data center build-out. Yet, Amazon is rushing to borrow anyway, hoping to service a massive $364 billion cloud backlog.

I didn’t make this up: Tesla currently has authorization for 69 unsupervised Robotaxis in Texas, according to the state’s database. That’s up from 42 — perhaps a reference to 420 — last month. While that represents growth, it’s far from the scale that CEO Elon Musk had promised.

And having permission to be on the road doesn’t mean the vehicles are actually in service.

The number of unsupervised Robotaxis has actually declined recently, despite the company’s highly publicized expansion, according to data from Robotaxi Tracker. The site has tracked 32 active unsupervised Tesla Robotaxis in the last month and just 23 in the last week.

Tesla and Musk, who once threatened to take the company private at $420, have long been fans of sophomoric numerology. You can’t actually tip in the Robotaxi app, but as a joke the company suggests tips of $0.69 or $4.20 — and if you tap them, it brings up a “just kidding” graphic.

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