In April 2025, Eric Glyman, co-founder and co-CEO of Ramp, received some bad news: A deal was falling apart.

Glyman had been hoping Ramp, a highly valued startup that sells corporate credit cards and expense management software, could strike a partnership with Airwallex—a fast-growing fintech founded in Melbourne, Australia—that would improve Ramp’s ability to handle international payments. But now Airwallex CEO Jack Zhang was pulling the plug on the proposed deal—partly because of pressure from investors who wanted his company to compete with Ramp, according to employees of both companies.

Glyman made an attempt to salvage the partnership, according to people familiar with discussions between the two companies. Zhang demurred. Soon after, Glyman warned Zhang that the relationship between their companies might not be so friendly in the future, according to people familiar with the situation.

In the wake of the canceled deal, some of Ramp’s high-profile, politically connected investors have launched a public and private campaign to urge the U.S. government to saddle Airwallex with a government investigation that probes any links the company may have with the Chinese government. Those investors have alleged that the Chinese government could access customer data passing through Airwallex subsidiaries in China.

The U.S. Treasury Department on Thursday proposed to expand existing outbound investment restrictions out of national security concerns, in a move set to further decouple venture capital ties between the U.S. and China.

The proposed regulation widens the scope to prohibit Americans from ...

DeepSeek has closed its second funding round, raising 106 billion yuan ($15.9 billion) in one of the biggest-ever fundraising deals in China’s AI sector, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

The amount is more than double DeepSeek’s original fundraising target of 50 billion ...

One quotation has rattled around in my head for a while, which I first heard from early Anthropic investor Jaan Tallinn: “The future of the world will be decided by a group of people who fit in an elevator.” The enigmatic billionaire said on a podcast earlier this year that a friend had used the illustration to describe the concentration of power at the leading AI companies.

I’ve been reflecting on it as Anthropic prepares for its Wall Street debut because the company’s small group of powerful insiders, who are set to realize incredible wealth at unprecedented speed, face their biggest test in explaining themselves to the world outside their elevator. To raise the money Anthropic leaders need, and to keep raising it again and again, big fund managers need to fully buy in.

Greetings!  

On their earnings calls earlier in the week, Meta Platforms and SpaceX delivered the same underlying message to investors: demand for AI is running ahead of the supply of AI compute. On Thursday, another important player in the AI ecosystem—Blackstone, the alternative asset management giant—repeated a version of that refrain. 

On its own earnings call, the firm, a major investor at the center of the AI data center boom, faced pointed questions from analysts about rising financing costs and mounting investor concerns over the sustainability of the buildout. Its executives argued that the very factors threatening the AI industry’s expansion could actually work in Blackstone’s favor. CEO Steve Schwarzman noted that constraints on power availability and growing public opposition to new data centers are making it harder to bring new capacity online, potentially making existing facilities more valuable. Blackstone President Jon Gray also suggested the firm could seek higher returns on projects where it hasn’t signed leases yet in order to offset rising borrowing costs. 

Blackstone’s third-quarter results offered some support for that argument: Its infrastructure investments were buoyed by what executives called “extraordinary” data center leasing momentum, significantly outperforming its broader private equity and real estate holdings. “Despite all the negative things you’re reading about AI today, when we look across our business, this continues to be the area where we’re driving the highest returns,” Gray said during the call. 

But it’s hard to ignore the fact that the financing concerns and roadblocks threatening the broader AI infrastructure buildout are also hitting closer to home for Blackstone. Fears about rising financing costs have sent CoreWeave’s stock and bond prices plunging—the neocloud’s shares closed down another 10% Thursday after sliding last week—while Australian AI cloud provider Firmus abruptly pulled its initial public offering earlier this month. Blackstone has provided billions in loans to CoreWeave and has both invested in and lent money to Firmus. 

Blackstone has also been pressing ahead with brand-new AI ventures. In May, the firm announced an initial $5 billion equity commitment to a joint venture with Google to create a new cloud company that will use Google’s TPU chips, with plans to bring 500 megawatts of capacity online by next year. The venture could need as much as $25 billion in total investment, including some borrowed money, and it has reportedly encountered delays at potential data center sites. 

Blackstone, for its part, says that broader anxiety about AI hasn’t undermined its ability to raise fresh cash for making its own investments. “We’re continuing to be able to raise capital. Obviously investors are asking the same question around AI, but what we continue to see is demand and usage of the AI going up faster than the compute,” Gray said.

While Blackstone says it wants to continue going big in AI, it can only finance a tiny portion of the industry’s broader infrastructure buildout itself. The trillions of dollars of financing needed for chips and data centers in the coming years requires raising money from a far broader pool of investors. Blackstone itself has said it’s not clear where all the money will come from. 

Jas Khaira, the head of the team leading Blackstone’s push into AI investment, said late last month that the firm is still trying to determine which investors across the public debt and private credit markets will be able to provide the funding needed to sustain the buildout. 

“We have not mapped out who’s going to buy all the debt. We have some hypotheses, but the honest answer is we don’t know where all of it will come from,” he said at The Information’s AI Agenda event in San Francisco.

Data Center Headwinds

Despite Blackstone’s overall positive note on AI demand, we got fresh evidence Thursday afternoon of the uncertainty in the IPO market for companies in the data center business. Phoebe Liu and Valida Pau had a scoop that SB Energy, a company controlled by SoftBank Group that is developing an OpenAI data center in Ohio, is discussing a plan to put off its IPO until December or earlier next year. Previously, SB Energy was aiming to go public in September. The best hope for an SB Energy IPO is that the supply of AI compute gets so tight that investors start warming back up to data centers.—Nick Wingfield   

In Other News

• Meta Platforms’ stock fell 7% as investor enthusiasm over its third-quarter earnings report on Wednesday gave way to concerns about the probability that it will need to issue new equity to pay for its AI spending.
• Andreessen Horowitz renamed its flagship blockchain fund a16z Frontier, dropping “crypto” from its name (The Information’s earlier scoop on the change is here).
• Google partnered with energy company Voltus to pay homes and businesses to use less electricity during periods of peak demand.  

Today on The Information’s TITV

Check out today's episode of TITV, in which Akash Pasricha speaks with reporters Aaron Holmes and Leo Schwartz about the PHP security patch mayhem.

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Salesforce is leading the software industry’s attempt to collect fees from businesses that use Claude and other external AI tools to automate work in enterprise apps.

As soon as next month, Salesforce plans to require companies to register outside AI agents, a step toward charging them each time those agents update or analyze data stored in Salesforce. The fees let Salesforce earn money from customers who use such AI instead of paying for Salesforce’s built-in AI products. 

The Salesforce tollgate has implications for the rest of the industry, which is coming to terms with the idea that so-called AI agents may be able to use software firms’ apps more efficiently than humans do, meaning their seat-based or per-user pricing model might not have staying power. The question is whether the new AI tollgates—which Atlassian, Workday, ServiceNow and Datadog are also erecting to various extents—and other pricing shifts will more than make up for an eventual decline in per-seat subscription revenues. 

The vast majority of workers haven’t yet outsourced such work to AI, of course, and companies like Salesforce are trying to get more revenue from them as well. They charge fees based on how much they use the apps’ built-in AI tools and are also experimenting with outcome-based pricing, meaning customers only pay when such tools actually complete a task successfully or help the customers make more money.

For now, Salesforce and some other software firms developing tollgates for customers’ AI agents haven’t started charging the tolls. They’re letting customers experiment for free with the technology a little while longer. (The customers still have to pay providers such as Anthropic to use the AI agents in the first place.)

Starting around November, according to the company’s website, Salesforce will require customers to register any externally-made AI agents if they plan to use them to take actions on their behalf in Salesforce apps. Each action an agent takes in Salesforce counts as a billable “interaction,” according to the company. The move has lifted investor confidence in Salesforce recently.

Salesforce describes the registration requirement as a security measure because the company gives each agent its own identity and narrower data-access permissions, compared to humans. It isn’t clear how Salesforce will clamp down on customers using their own AI agents, such as OpenClaw-powered ones that run on a person’s computer and can access any app that runs on it. (Salesforce did not respond to requests for comment.)

Salesforce hasn’t announced prices tied to such agent usage, but customers could eventually end up paying a lot more money than they do now, given how many of them are already using their own AI on top of Salesforce apps and bypassing Salesforce’s own built-in AI tools, according to software consultants and chief information officers. 

Nick Hamm, a software consultant, said that most of the 150 enterprises he works with are currently using AI from Anthropic and OpenAI to automate work inside Salesforce apps, for free. But they’re reconsidering that usage in anticipation of the upcoming fees. If the fees are too high, the customers may move their business data outside of Salesforce’s apps so they can use AI to analyze the data without paying an extra cost, he said.

New customers will have a three month grace period after the new pricing is announced to register their AI agents, and the pricing won’t affect existing customers until their contracts are renewed. 

In addition to the billable “interactions,” customers have the option to buy unlimited agent usage by purchasing a “headless license,” a Salesforce account executive told Hamm in a LinkedIn message viewed by The Information. 

Some customers such as Lumen, a fiber-optic network provider to enterprises and data centers, say they are waiting to test Salesforce’s new connectors until pricing is disclosed.

So far, Lumen has leaned on Salesforce’s built-in AI. A longtime customer of Salesforce’s customer relationship management software, Lumen made a “major” investment in using Salesforce’s AI sales agents in the last 12 months, according to CIO Jim Fowler. The sales agents help with tasks such as collecting customer information and generating sales quotes for the customers to buy fiber connections between data centers, saving Lumen’s human salespeople considerable time, he said.

So far, Fowler said, Salesforce has been “super flexible” about letting Lumen use existing subscription fees to also cover its use of built-in AI features such as the sales agents.

Early customer reactions to the pricing announcement will likely determine how flexible Salesforce is with customers that start renewing their contracts after November. If its past AI pricing efforts are any guide, Salesforce could easily switch things up depending on the feedback, or any blowback, it receives.

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