PLUS: Microsoft's AI sales reality check, Anthropic's IPO race, and Seattle's AI backlash
Good morning
The AI boom's insatiable demand for resources is now hitting the consumer hardware market directly, with Micron announcing the discontinuation of its popular, 30-year-old Crucial brand. The company is officially pivoting production from consumer RAM and SSDs to focus on high-performance memory for AI data centers.
This move is a major loss for PC builders but signals a powerful reshaping of the global supply chain in real time. As essential components are redirected from consumer electronics to build AI's foundational layer, how many other mainstays of the PC world will be impacted next?
In today’s Next in AI:
Micron kills its Crucial PC brand for AI
Microsoft’s AI sales reality check
Anthropic prepares for a landmark IPO
Seattle’s growing AI culture backlash
AI Kills a PC Mainstay
Next in AI: Micron is discontinuing its 30-year-old Crucial consumer brand, shifting production of its popular RAM and SSDs to meet the intense demand for high-performance memory in AI data centers. The company officially announced the move as a strategic pivot toward faster-growing enterprise markets.
Decoded:
The shift is a direct response to the massive memory needs of AI, as a single high-end AMD MI350 AI chip uses 288GB of high-bandwidth memory — over 18 times the amount in a typical laptop.
The move follows the money, as Micron’s cloud memory business unit reported 213% year-over-year growth in its most recent quarter, dwarfing the returns from consumer-grade hardware.
For PC builders and consumers, this is a clear loss, as one of the most trusted and accessible brands for RAM and SSD upgrades will disappear from retail shelves by early 2026.
Why It Matters: This decision is a powerful signal of how the AI boom is reshaping the global supply chain in real time. Resources once dedicated to consumer electronics are now being redirected to build the foundational infrastructure for AI.
Microsoft's AI Reality Check
Next in AI: Microsoft has reportedly lowered sales growth targets for some of its advanced AI products, according to a recent report. The adjustment signals that enterprise customers are resisting the high cost and unproven ROI of new AI agent tools.
Decoded:
The slowdown appears focused on advanced AI agents, tools designed to autonomously handle complex, multi-step tasks—a technology Microsoft declared as the new "era of AI agents" earlier this year.
Customer hesitation stems from reliability issues and a gap between promise and performance, with some firms like Carlyle Group reportedly cutting spending after tools struggled to pull data from other applications.
This comes despite Microsoft reporting a record capital expenditure of nearly $35 billion in its last quarter, highlighting the immense pressure to turn massive infrastructure investments into profitable software sales.
Why It Matters: This serves as a crucial reality check, showing that enterprise adoption requires more than just powerful technology. The industry's focus is now shifting from demonstrating capability to proving tangible and reliable business value.
Anthropic's IPO Race
Next in AI: AI leader Anthropic is reportedly preparing for a historic IPO, engaging top-tier law firms and investment banks. This move positions the company in a direct race with rival OpenAI to be the first major AI lab to go public.
Decoded:
The company signaled its intentions by hiring former Airbnb executive Krishna Rao, who was instrumental in the home-sharing company's 2020 public debut.
While exploring a public offering, Anthropic is also pursuing private funding that could push its valuation past $300 billion, as rival OpenAI reportedly eyes its own massive IPO.
The company is laying the legal groundwork by engaging Wilson Sonsini, the same law firm that guided tech giants like Google and LinkedIn through their own public listings.
Why It Matters: An Anthropic IPO would serve as a crucial barometer for investor appetite in the high-growth, high-burn AI sector. This move signals a shift for major AI labs from long-term research ventures to publicly accountable commercial enterprises.
The Seattle AI Backlash
Next in AI: A recent account from a former Microsoft engineer highlights a growing resentment within Seattle's major tech companies. The mandated "AI or else" culture is reportedly creating a backlash that stifles innovation and devalues crucial non-AI work.
Decoded:
Engineers are reportedly experiencing forced adoption of buggy, internal AI tools that often hinder productivity more than they help.
A cultural divide is emerging, creating a class system where "AI talent" is protected while other engineers see their work, compensation, and performance reviews suffer.
The environment is creating a negative feedback loop where talented engineers begin to doubt their own abilities and the value of AI, impacting even independent projects like the Wanderfugl map.
Why It Matters: This internal friction could create a serious innovation gap for some of the world's largest tech companies. The challenge for Seattle's tech scene isn't a lack of talent, but a culture that may prevent that talent from competing effectively.
AI Pulse
Snowflake expanded its strategic partnership with Anthropic in a $200M deal to integrate Claude models directly into its platform, focusing on deploying AI agents for its 12,600+ enterprise customers.
NVIDIA highlighted how Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture is now standard for frontier models, demonstrating a 10x performance leap for models like Kimi K2 Thinking and Mistral Large 3 on its GB200 NVL72 systems.
Researchers discovered that framing harmful prompts as poetry can serve as a universal jailbreak for major LLMs, achieving success rates of up to 62% in bypassing safety guardrails for topics like nuclear weapons and malware.
Zig announced its move from GitHub to Codeberg, citing Microsoft's obsession with AI as a reason for the platform's decline and neglect of core features like GitHub Actions.