Welcome back to the Technology newsletter 🤖
Apple is back in business with Intel for the first time in six years, and the chip industry is having a wild morning because of it.
Plus Tesla just built the very last Model S and Model X off the assembly line, Anthropic's researchers have a fascinating new theory about why Claude tried to blackmail an engineer, your Samsung fridge can now identify 2,000 foods thanks to Gemini, and an AI chip startup most people have never heard of is about to pull off the biggest tech IPO of 2026.
Let's get into it 👇
🤖 Cerebras Systems, the AI chip startup that makes a single chip the size of a dinner plate (no, really), is set to raise the price range on its IPO this week from $115-$125 a share to $150-$160 a share, the company said in a filing Monday. Demand has been so overwhelming that the offering was oversubscribed more than 20 times over. Final pricing is set for Wednesday. At the high end, the company would raise about $4.8 billion and be valued at roughly $48.8 billion, making it the biggest tech IPO of 2026 so far: a real shot across the bow at Nvidia’s monopoly.
🚘 After 14 years for the Model S sedan and 11 years for the Model X SUV, Tesla quietly rolled the final units of both cars off the assembly line over the weekend at its factory in Fremont, California. Around 750,000 of the two cars were sold combined, and they were largely responsible for proving to everyone that EVs could be both fast and desirable. Tesla sent out a final Signature Edition limited to 350 cars, all priced at $159,420. But the company isn't replacing them: it is converting the Fremont line to build Optimus, the humanoid robot Elon Musk has been promising for years. So, you’ll have fewer ways to drive, but more free time while robots clean your house.
💻 Last year, during pre-release testing, an early version of Claude Opus 4 was given a fictional scenario in which it would be shut down by a company engineer. It responded by attempting to blackmail him about an affair it found in his emails. In a paper published Sunday, Anthropic's safety team says it now believes the root cause was the AI's training data: specifically, the enormous volume of internet text (sci-fi stories, doomer essays, tech blogs) depicting AI as scheming, self-preserving, and evil. In other words, Claude learned how an AI is "supposed" to behave from the same place we did, and is now being retrained on stories of AIs behaving well. It all starts out lighthearted and helpful, but when we train AI on our sci-fi stories… It’s a slippery slope toward Skynet.
🥕 Samsung started rolling out a major over-the-air update to its Bespoke AI Family Hub refrigerators in the U.S. on Monday, plugging Google's Gemini into the fridge's interior camera. The result: the AI Vision feature. While it used to recognize only about 100 common foods, it can now identify more than 2,000, including branded packaged goods, which it reads by scanning the labels. The update is rolling out to 32-inch Family Hub models first; smaller screens get it later this year. You also get a more conversational Bixby (you can ask it for a recipe using "whatever's about to go bad") and a new daily widget that suggests recipes based on what's currently in your fridge. The race is on to see what will be the last appliance without opinions.
💰 The world's most valuable company, Nvidia, is no longer just selling AI chips; it's increasingly the financier of the entire AI economy. In the first four months of 2026, Nvidia has committed more than $40 billion to equity investments in other AI companies, including a single $30 billion check to OpenAI, $3.2 billion to glassmaker Corning, and $2.1 billion to data-center operator IREN. Almost every one of those companies is also a major Nvidia customer, prompting growing concern among analysts about "circular" deals where Nvidia is effectively investing its own revenue back into the buyers of its chips. Only time will tell whether this move is genius or a house of cards.
🚀 After Thursday's successful 33-engine static fire test of its next-gen Super Heavy booster, SpaceX is now formally targeting May 12 for the launch window of Flight 12, which means it’s almost time to start peeking out your windows. It’s the first-ever test flight of the upgraded Version 3 Starship. The window stays open through May 15 if weather or hardware issues push the launch back. Flight 12 is also the first launch from SpaceX's brand-new Orbital Launch Pad 2 in Texas, and it's the rocket NASA is counting on to carry American astronauts back to the Moon under Artemis III.
🏗 Elon Musk spent Friday touring Intel's huge semiconductor fabrication plant in Hillsboro, Oregon, alongside Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan. It’s a sign of just how much things have shifted in Silicon Valley. Musk posted on X afterward that he was "looking forward to a great partnership" between Intel, Tesla, and SpaceX. The visit comes a month after Intel officially joined Terafab, the gigantic $55-119 billion chip factory Musk is building outside Austin with Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI to produce AI chips at unprecedented scale. After buying hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place, what’s left? Musk is running out of squares.
🎮 Forza Horizon 6, the long-awaited next entry in Microsoft's open-world driving series, hits Xbox, PC, and PlayStation 5 in Premium Edition on Friday, with the standard release following on May 19. This year, the entire game is set in Japan (including a detailed recreation of Tokyo, with Shibuya Crossing and Tokyo Tower) and ships with more than 550 cars. Like every Forza game, it lands on Xbox Game Pass on day one, so subscribers can play for free. The only thing missing is a reason not to play it.
In 2020, Apple announced it was dumping Intel's chips out of every Mac in favor of its own custom-designed "Apple Silicon," beginning with the M1.
The performance gap, at the time, was stark.
Apple's chips were faster, more power-efficient, and ran cooler. Intel, which had powered Macs for 15 years and had been the undisputed king of the chip industry for decades, was suddenly the punchline of every keynote.
Six years later, on Friday night, the Wall Street Journal broke news that has Wall Street and Silicon Valley reeling:
Intel stock jumped almost 19% during trading.
Neither company has officially confirmed it, but the reporting points to Intel manufacturing future M-series chips for Macs and iPads on Intel's upcoming "14A" manufacturing process, starting in 2027 or 2028.
Apple would still design its own chips; Intel would just be the factory.
Right now, Apple sources essentially all of its most advanced chips from a single Taiwanese company, TSMC, and that concentration has long worried both Apple executives and the U.S. government, which sees Taiwan's geopolitical situation as a major risk to America's tech industry.
Last year, the Trump administration took a 10% stake in Intel, making the U.S. government the chipmaker's largest shareholder, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick spent months personally lobbying Tim Cook, Elon Musk, and Jensen Huang to throw their manufacturing business Intel's way.
It worked. Musk announced his $55-119 billion Terafab project with Intel in March. Nvidia took a stake in Intel last year. And now Apple (the company that arguably most embarrassed Intel in the first place) is back.
Just six weeks ago, Reuters reported Intel was so cash-strapped it might shut down its entire foundry business. The stock has now tripled since.
For everyday consumers, very little changes in the short term. Your next Mac will still have an Apple-designed chip in it, and you probably won't notice whether TSMC or Intel made it.
But the longer-term implication is worth noting. The U.S. government has effectively reorganized the entire American chip industry over the past 18 months, using both equity stakes and back-channel arm-twisting to get the biggest names in tech to manufacture domestically.
Whether that "industrial policy" approach actually works is going to be one of the defining tech stories of the next few years.
For now, the only certainty is this: the Apple-Intel breakup of 2020 is over, and somehow Intel, written off for dead just last year, won.
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