Good morning, and welcome to the Friday, July 3rd edition.

Tesla's Fremont factory is now a robot plant. Elon Musk posted a group photo from the production floor this week — no more Model S or Model X rolling off the line. The entire former flagship vehicle assembly has been converted to Optimus Gen 3 humanoid robot production. Last Model S and X units ended in May; the line is now tooling up for pilot runs starting late July through August. Musk himself warned output will be "extremely slow" at first, calling it "not like making a car." But the fact that an actual production line — not a lab bench — is being retooled for humanoid robots marks a real shift. And while Tesla races to get its first units out, China is already shipping 90 percent of the world's humanoids. The mega-factory at Giga Texas is still under construction for the big ramp, but Fremont is the proving ground. First real production Optimus units could start flowing within weeks.

Together AI just raised $800 million in a Series C round led by Aramco Ventures, with Nvidia, Vista Equity Partners, and General Catalyst also in. The post-money valuation hits $8.3 billion. But the most interesting number isn't the funding — it's the annualized bookings, which hit $1.15 billion. Together AI doesn't build its own foundation model. It's an inference cloud — serverless and dedicated endpoints for open-source models via OpenAI-compatible APIs. In other words: the pick-and-shovel play for companies that want frontier AI performance without paying Anthropic or OpenAI premiums. The CEO reportedly won't rule out an IPO next year. And they're planning a roughly 50-fold compute capacity expansion over the next five years. The open-source inference market is becoming a real business.

Nvidia and Corning are partnering to build three new advanced optical fiber and connectivity manufacturing facilities in North Carolina and Texas, creating more than 3,000 jobs. Corning — the 175-year-old glass company that makes the optical cables stitching AI data centers together — has been up nearly 200 percent year-to-date before pulling back 13 percent in a single day this week. This partnership is part of Nvidia's broader plan to produce up to $500 billion of AI infrastructure in the US with domestic partners. The thesis is straightforward: every new data center needs optical connectivity, and the more GPUs you cluster, the more bandwidth you need between them. Corning makes that plumbing. The stock pullback is probably just profit-taking on a parabolic run, but the infrastructure demand is very real.

And finally, Sam Altman has published an op-ed in the Financial Times proposing a U.S.-led international AI governance forum, modeled after the IAEA or international aviation safety bodies. He's also proposing that OpenAI transfer a five percent stake to the U.S. government through a sovereign wealth fund. This comes as Anthropic overtakes OpenAI in business subscriptions and ChatGPT's market share drops below fifty percent for the first time. The timing invites questions — is this genuine safety leadership or an IPO-era positioning play? Probably both. But the fact that a governance framework backed by government equity is on the table signals how much the conversation has shifted from "should we regulate AI" to "how do we govern it without stifling development."

That's it for today. Have a great weekend.