Good morning. As the AI arms race drives capital expenditures into the hundreds of billions, tech giants are scrambling for capital. It's a search that can go beyond traditional funding sources.

Case in point, Google parent Alphabet on Monday announced an $80 billion equity issuance to fund its AI buildout, a plan that includes an agreement to sell $10 billion of stock to Berkshire Hathaway. The remaining $70 billion will be issued by various means this year, the WSJ reports.

Also Monday came news of Anthropic filing confidentially for an initial public offering.

The moves underscore the challenges even cash-rich hyperscalers like Google face in building the massive data centers needed to support their AI aspirations.

Here’s the Journal’s Katherine Blunt on Google's financial arrangement.

Alphabet said the proceeds would be used to finance data-center expansion and secure computing capacity needed to train and run AI models. The company earlier this year said that its 2026 capital expenditures were expected to be as much as $190 billion and that it expects capital expenditures next year to significantly increase by comparison.

Apollo.io CEO wants to tip employees into 'believers.' Sales tech startup Apollo.io named its chief operating officer, Matt Curl, as CEO in February.

Edited highlights of the conversation are below.

WSJLI: Let’s talk about speed, velocity. Share an example of what’s happening right now?

Curl: An engineering manager came to me with a great idea of this new version of the product he wanted to launch, that would be a totally different interface, command line interface only, chat interface.... And I was like, ‘I love this idea. How long would it take you to build this?' And he said he would need a team of engineers, and six to eight weeks.' And I was just like, 'You have five days. You have an unlimited budget on tokens... Show me what you can do.' He literally flipped that around in five days…

And I think that's what I'm doing. I view my responsibility as the CEO is to tip over people into believers...

What's really happening with AI is if you can get the context straight in your head, if you can get the picture of what you're trying to build clear, it's like context and taste preference matter a lot.

WSJLI: You are the second person I talked to recently who mentioned taste.

Curl: You probably have a great taste preference of what a good article might look like, what an interesting story might be that you've probably developed over years of being in your industry…

For me in particular, I think I have such firsthand knowledge of using go-to-market tools and all the pitfalls and the pain. It gives me a big advantage… I know what the end user wants and what it's supposed to look like. That's that taste preference. I have a good sense because I'm the user of that product.

WSJLI: Your engineers are seeing some of the bottlenecks around software development disappear. You’re faster now. How do you, as CEO, make sure you are accelerating in the right direction?

Curl: I've worked with amazing executives…The common pattern is always that the leader is very clear about what they want and they have a vision in their head… The team will run at a velocity that is wild compared to a manager that has no idea what they're wanting to do and is waiting for instructions of what to do next…

For us internally, what's my job, I think about as a CEO, I need to convert people into context machines. I need them to understand our customers.

I need them to understand the problems. I need them to understand what good looks like. And on that basis, they will move 10x faster. If I just give them AI tools, they're just going to build random stuff in random directions at a faster velocity.

• Anthropic has filed confidentially for an initial public offering, the company said Monday, a move that could put it on a path to go public this fall, the WSJ reports. Banks have told both Anthropic and rival OpenAI that whoever makes it to market first will get to define the new industry. The WSJ reported last month that OpenAI was preparing to submit its own IPO filing imminently.

• A lawsuit, filed Monday by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, claims OpenAI and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users, WSJ reports. Uthmeier opened a criminal investigation into OpenAI in April over the role its chatbot played in a mass shooting that killed two people at Florida State University last year.

• HPE pulled forward its long-term financial targets by two years after reporting second-quarter earnings that blew past Wall Street expectations, citing rampant compute demand from customers transitioning to agentic AI tools. The server and networking company on Monday reported a 40% increase in revenue during the second quarter to $10.68 billion.

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