Raunaq's World

The World Cup is in the Bay Area. Qatar vs Switzerland (June 13, noon), Austria vs Jordan (June 16, 9pm), Turkey vs Paraguay (June 19, 8pm), Jordan vs Algeria (June 22, 8pm), Paraguay vs Australia (June 25, 7pm), Round of 32 (July 1, 5pm). Cheapest tickets from ~$200.

Saturday June 6, 11:15am-6pm. Almost a dozen bands on two stages at the Salesforce Transit Center rooftop park. Free. Bring a picnic blanket. Food and drinks for purchase. It's the 4th year and it's become a signature Pride Month kickoff event.

The 89th season of America's longest-running free music festival. June 14: Peter Cat Recording Co. June 21: Bomba Estereo. June 28: Japanese Breakfast. Later: Major Lazer, Charley Crockett, Patti LaBelle, Public Enemy, Al Green. Free tickets via lottery at sterngrove.org.

Celebration on Saturday-Sunday June 27-28, 11am-6pm at Civic Center Plaza. Multiple live music stages, DJs, community pavilions, vendor marketplace. The Parade is Sunday June 28 starting 10:30am from Embarcadero to 8th Street. Completely free.

Broadcom broke through its previous 52-week high of $442.36, closing at $446.77. The Anthropic TPU deal (Broadcom backstopping the $36B debt facility) is a massive tailwind. DELL's AI server revenue nearly tripling to $29B validated the entire supply chain thesis. If you're still watching entry zones, this one may have left the station.

Microsoft ripped 5.4% to $450.24, the biggest single-day Mag 7 move. Still well off its 52-week high of $555, but the move signals the market pricing in Maia 200 chip deals and Azure's AI buildout. Every other Mag 7 name was flat or down. MSFT stood alone.

NVIDIA opened hot on DELL earnings momentum but couldn't hold it. The close at $211.14 (-1.5%) was disappointing given the setup. Previous close was $214.25. The 52-week high of $236.54 feels close but keeps slipping away. Rotation into AVGO and MSFT pulled flow.

US and Iran reportedly agreed to extend their ceasefire and begin nuclear negotiations. Oil held steady: WTI $89.20, Brent $93.71. Gold ripped 2% to $4,530. Bitcoin at $73,300. Dollar index down 0.2% to 99.00. The Iran detente is a modest risk-off signal for oil -- good for tech multiples if it holds.

Anthropic closed its Series H at 965B, surpassing OpenAI's 852B. Revenue set to hit 10.9B in Q2 -- more than doubling. First operating profit ever at 559M. The Claude Code moment was real: coders adopting it en masse turned Anthropic from an also-ran into the frontrunner. IPO likely this year.

VC firms that built their reputations on SaaS and crypto are pivoting to physical world bets. Paradigm invested in SendCutSend (custom sheet metal for robots and data centers). As one VC put it: "Traditional software isn't interesting anymore because AI can replicate it in seconds." The SaaSpocalypse is real.

After licensing its chip tech to NVIDIA for 17B in December, Groq is asking existing investors to fund "Groq 2.0" -- a new entity focused on AI inference. Disruptive and Infinitum are backstopping. Existing shareholders get cash distributions from the NVIDIA deal, then the option to roll into the new company.

What was supposed to be an 8-hour endurance test turned into a 200-hour viral spectacle. Five Figure 03 robots sorted packages at 2.83 seconds each -- near human parity. CEO Brett Adcock had said "high odds something breaks." The Helix-02 AI ran everything onboard, no teleoperation. The 10M-view livestream proved warehouses are the beachhead.

Hyundai plans to deploy 25,000 Atlas robots in US manufacturing and produce 300,000+ actuator units per year at domestic facilities. The latest Atlas demo showed heavy object manipulation -- squatting, picking up a mini-fridge, rotating its torso while maintaining balance. All learned through reinforcement learning and sim-to-real transfer.

China's EngineAI hit 10,000 unit/year manufacturing capacity for its T800 humanoid robot. Full in-house R&D and manufacturing in Shenzhen. 79 quality checks and 46 simulated conditions per unit. The West is still in pilot mode; China is in production mode. That gap matters more than any demo video.

Personal terms agreed, fee around 38M with 35M upfront. His manager even benched him because a "major club" is chasing him. He's a destroyer, not a creator -- cleans up but won't ping diagonals like prime Carrick. Casemiro's replacement, not his upgrade.

The club has freed up 250M for summer spending after paying off revolving credit and banking 31.36M from Hojlund's permanent move to Napoli. That's real money, not just Ineos PowerPoint money. Still, United's outstanding transfer fees sit at 405M -- among the highest in football.

After banking 31M from Hojlund to Napoli, United want another 100M from offloading Joshua Zirkzee, Andre Onana, and Manuel Ugarte. That's aggressive but necessary -- the squad bloat from the Glazer-era shopping sprees has to end. Carrick needs a thinner, sharper group.

If you know, you know. Boards of Canada releasing new music is the kind of event that happens once a decade. Inferno dropped today (May 29) on Warp. Their first proper album since Music Has the Right to Children got them here. Expect ambient, downtempo, beautifully weird electronics.

Iceman is the strongest of the three (and that's not saying much). Drake sounds his age on a few tracks, opens up about his dad's cancer diagnosis, and takes shots at the post-Kendrick mockery. But 18 tracks of score-settling is exhausting. Critics gave it an average of 40-50/100. The world has moved on; Drake apparently hasn't.

Shinedown's Eight is classic arena rock. The Black Keys' Peaches! is a return to raw garage blues. Kurt Vile wrapped his arms around Philly with his most personal record yet. And yes, Dogstar (Keanu's band) put out All In Now -- grunge-adjacent alt-rock that's better than it has any right to be.