Overpromised or underrated? OpenAI, Europe, and SEA on the line

When is US$300 billion just “ghost revenue?” And are we in an AI bubble?

This week on the 60/40 podcast, the team breaks down the tech and business headlines everyone’s buzzing about and asks the uncomfortable questions:

• OpenAI + Oracle: Is the US$300 billion deal – 5x OpenAI’s current revenue – visionary moonshot or math that only works in Sam Altman’s notebook?
• StatSig buyout: Why is OpenAI suddenly acting like it wants to own the whole AI value chain?
• ASML + Mistral: Is Europe finally behaving like a single player or just writing polite checks?
• Alibaba earnings: Cloud is soaring and revenue is flat, so has China’s consumer engine stalled out?
• Southeast Asia’s “consumer barbell”: Are VCs ignoring the middle class, or is it simply too messy to serve?

Check out the full episode on your favorite platform: YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts.

Timestamps

• 00:00 – OpenAI and Oracle’s US$300 billion compute deal
• 03:00 – Can OpenAI really afford this?
• 12:30 – A poetic take on Oracle + OpenAI
• 13:30 – OpenAI acquires StatSig: why it matters for safe model deployment
• 20:10 – ASML’s US$1.5 billion bet on Mistral and Europe’s AI ambitions
• 26:31 – Is there an AI bubble, or is it just the next paradigm shift?
• 34:40 – Alibaba’s flat revenue but booming cloud numbers
• 40:45 – Southeast Asia’s “consumer barbell” thesis: hits and misses
• 50:20 – The pitfalls of fintech lending and “cheap dopamine” apps

Give us feedback or nominate topics & speakers at 6040podcast@techinasia.com.

60/40 is a bi-weekly podcast co-hosted by Prashanth Ranganathan, Peter Bithos, Aleksey Mironenko, and Maria Li.