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Feb 18, 2026
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Supported by
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Happy Wednesday! Meta Platforms and Nvidia sign a strategic partnership. OpenAI can shift some of its revenue-sharing payments to Microsoft to later years under a renegotiated partnership. Thrive Capital raises $10 billion in new funds.
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Meta Platforms and Nvidia on Tuesday announced a multi-year strategic partnership, in which Meta will use millions of Nvidia chips across its own data centers and through cloud providers. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Meta, a longtime Nvidia customer, already puts Nvidia GPUs in its own data centers and rents them from cloud providers such as Oracle. But the new partnership, which involves multiple Nvidia technologies, including its forthcoming Vera Rubin chips and in-house networking technology, indicates that the companies will be working more closely together. The companies also said their engineering teams will work together to “co-design” Meta’s AI models. Meta has explored using rival AI chips. The Information reported in November that Meta was in talks with Google about spending billions of dollars to use TPUs in Meta’s data centers in 2027, as well as to rent Google chips from Google Cloud this year. It’s not clear whether the new deal will affect the TPU talks. A spokesperson for Meta said they had “nothing to share” and did not respond to a question about whether the talks were still ongoing. Nvidia said Meta would continue using Nvidia’s Grace central processing units and consider a “large-scale deployment” of the forthcoming Vera CPUs in 2027. (CPUs are traditional data center chips used to run non-AI workloads).
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OpenAI can shift some of its revenue-sharing payments to Microsoft to later years under the terms of the pair’s recently renegotiated partnership last fall, The Information reported Tuesday. This should reduce the impact of the payments on OpenAI’s cash flow. Last fall, OpenAI and Microsoft agreed to continue an arrangement in which OpenAI pays 20% of its revenue to Microsoft till 2032 in exchange for allowing OpenAI to work with other compute providers without giving Microsoft the option first, along with other conditions. As part of their original partnership agreement,
Microsoft was entitled to 20% of the startup’s revenue through 2030. OpenAI can make some of those payments in years later than when it generates the revenue. OpenAI expected to lose $9 billion in cash last year and $17 billion in cash this year, The Information previously reported. The company doesn’t expect to become cash flow positive till 2030, when it expects to generate $38 billion in cash. OpenAI projects paying more than $13 billion in total in revenue share, mostly to Microsoft, this year and next year.
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Thrive Capital said it has raised $10 billion in new funds, including $1 billion for early stage investments and $9 billion for growth stage. The New York-based firm is referring to these funds as “Thrive X,” double the $5 billion Thrive closed in August 2024, for its funds labeled “Thrive IX.” Founded by Josh Kushner in 2010, Thrive has been making large bets in companies including OpenAI, Stripe and SpaceX.
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Anthropic paid about $1.3 million in revenue share in 2024 to cloud providers for reselling Anthropic’s AI models, The Information reported on Tuesday. That figure is expected to rise to about $360 million last year, $1.9 billion this year and $6.4 billion next year, according to The Information’s analysis of Anthropic’s forecasts. That’s an increase from Anthropic’s past summer projections, when it expected to generate $1.6 billion this year and about $4.4 billion next year. By another measure, Anthropic shares about
50% of its gross profits to Amazon for any sales of Anthropic’s models Amazon sells. Google typically takes a cut between 20% and 30% of net revenue, after subtracting infrastructure costs, from resale of its partners’ software. It’s not clear what that portion is for Microsoft, which became Anthropic’s cloud provider in November.
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Palo Alto Networks on Tuesday announced plans to acquire Israeli cybersecurity startup Koi, a deal meant to strengthen Palo Alto’s cybersecurity tools amid new threats posed by the advancement of agentic AI. Palo Alto didn’t give a price but Calcalist reported the company is paying $400 million. Koi sells a tool meant to guard against AI agents containing malware. Palo Alto will integrate the tool into its security platforms. “AI agents and tools are the ultimate insiders. They have full access to your systems and data, but operate entirely outside the view of traditional security controls,” said Palo Alto’s chief technology officer, Lee Klarich, in a statement. “By acquiring Koi, we will be closing this gap and setting a new standard for endpoint security.” The news marks the latest in a series of acquisitions by the $131 billion company, including a blockbuster, $25 billion deal to purchase another Israeli startup, CyberArk, in July of 2025 as well as smaller-scale purchases of firms Protect AI and Talon. Palo Alto shares dropped following the announcement as investors await the company’s second quarter earnings results slated for release after the bell. The stock has fallen victim to a broad decline in software equities as Wall Street questions the impact of AI on the sector.
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