Hard Fork

Data centers became 2025’s defining technology as AI infrastructure reached economy-scale spending, tying chips, electricity, cooling, rare earths, and environmental politics into one concentrated build-out.Claude Code and Granola show clearer monetization where AI removes concrete work, while DeepSeek, Sora, TrumpCoin, and age-verification laws leave competitive, governance, and regulatory risks to monitor.

Matthew Barnett × Ege Erdil × Allison Williams

Trump Mobile packages wholesale network capacity into a $47.45 monthly service, but the T1 Phone 8002’s $499 “made in the USA” claim faces a supply-chain test against the $1,999 Liberty Phone benchmark.Mechanize is building scored virtual workplaces to train agents for software engineering and other professions, with 20% job automation within five years potentially valuable while transition policy remains unresolved.

Kevin Roose × Casey Newton × Chris Hayes

TikTok has become “Schrödinger’s app”: existing US users can access it after Oracle and Akamai accepted Trump’s non-enforcement promise, while Apple and Google keep ByteDance apps out of stores because statutory exposure is $5,000 per user.The same political discretion is monetizing attention through TRUMP, MELANIA, and Pump.fun, with reported family fees of $58 million and concentrated token holdings, while security updates, corruption concerns, and a potential China-US deal remain unresolved.

Gemini topped Chatbot Arena, yet ChatGPT reported 300 million weekly users, reinforcing that distribution and cultural default status can outweigh benchmark parity.Watch for an AI culture-war congressional hearing, Waymo’s expansion into Atlanta, Austin and Miami, and a possible OpenAI–Microsoft rupture over AGI obligations.