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Justice Department probes a16z board seats as Nvidia funds OpenAI's Ohio site

Andreessen Horowitz seats on rival data boards drew a Justice Department inquiry. Nvidia puts 1.5 billion dollars into OpenAI's Ohio developer plus 105 billion dollars of credit. Anthropic took most Vercel gateway spending on far fewer tokens.

Artificial Intelligence··Evening
A crane lifts a wall panel over steel building frames at a large construction site, next to an electrical switchyard taking shape under a bright summer sky.

Partners at Andreessen Horowitz sit on rival data boards

The US Department of Justice is examining whether partners at Andreessen Horowitz improperly hold board seats at competing AI data companies, according to a Bloomberg report relayed on 18 August. Ben Horowitz sits on the Databricks board and Martin Casado on the Fivetran board; both companies are backed by the firm and compete in collecting, organising and analysing data. The law at issue is a 1914 ban on interlocking directorates, which stops the same person from serving on the boards of directly competing firms so that sensitive information cannot move between them. What makes this case unusual is its target: the reported inquiry looks at the firm itself instead of a single director, because several of its partners hold seats at companies that compete with one another. Andreessen Horowitz has also pressed the Trump administration to roll back AI safety rules, a change that helps portfolio companies including OpenAI and ElevenLabs.[1]

Nvidia becomes sole compute supplier at OpenAI's Ohio site

Nvidia is investing 1.5 billion dollars in SB Energy, the SoftBank-linked data centre developer behind the Ports-Pike project near Cincinnati, Ohio, and is extending credit of up to 105 billion dollars toward construction. The arrangement leaves Nvidia as the sole supplier of compute infrastructure at the site. Ports-Pike starts at 4.25 gigawatts and is designed to scale to 8 gigawatts, paired with a natural gas plant of 9.2 gigawatts costing 33 billion dollars. Gas plant construction costs have risen 66 per cent in the last two years, according to BloombergNEF. The land belongs to the US Department of Energy and previously enriched uranium for nuclear weapons and submarine programmes.[2]

Anthropic takes most Vercel gateway spending on fewer tokens

July figures from Vercel's AI Gateway put Anthropic at 65.1 per cent of spending but only 30 per cent of tokens, which makes its per-token cost 4.4 times the average of every other provider on the platform. Token volume across the gateway rose 59 per cent while spending rose 37 per cent, and the average token price fell 13.6 per cent. Opus 4.8 leads gateway spending. Fable 5 took 13.2 per cent of it, and nine out of ten teams using Fable 5 were new to the platform. The gap between a 59 per cent rise in tokens and a 37 per cent rise in spending is what pulls the average price down; it does not show that any one model became cheaper. These are one platform's customers over one month, so the figures show where developers on Vercel spend and do not settle the shape of the wider market.[3]

References

  1. News sourceThe DecoderAndreessen Horowitz partners' seats on rival data boards draw a Justice Department inquiry↩
  2. News sourceTechCrunchNvidia puts 1.5 billion dollars into the developer building OpenAI's Ohio site↩
  3. News sourceThe DecoderAnthropic takes 65 per cent of Vercel gateway spending on 30 per cent of the tokens↩
AI safety and regulationChip wars and the supply chainThe frontier model race

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