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What I Read This Week... 1) Oracle entered their largest deals in its history with OpenAI and TikTok. First, Oracle has locked in a $300 billion, five-year cloud infrastructure deal with OpenAI. This deal starts in 2027 as part of the previously announced Project Stargate data center building initiative. Under this deal, Oracle is committing to build out massive compute capacity to support OpenAI’s rapidly scaling model development and deployment. "We signed four multi-billion-dollar contracts with three different customers in Q1," said Oracle CEO, Safra Catz. Critics do warn of an “AI bubble” as they point out that OpenAI’s current revenue base ($12.7B projected revenue in 2025, with $58B in total funding) is much smaller than the size of its future obligations under this deal. This leaves Oracle's RPOs heavily concentrated with OpenAI, and delivering the required infrastructure at scale (especially power, cooling, energy, real estate) is a non-trivial task. At the same time, Oracle is being woven into another high-stakes geopolitical and regulatory story: the proposed TikTok deal. Under the framework agreement being discussed between the U.S. and China, Oracle, along with investors like Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz, would hold an 80% stake in TikTok U.S. operations, while ByteDance (TikTok’s Chinese parent) would retain a minority share (<20%), satisfying the divestment requirement in recent U.S. law. Oracle is expected not only to serve as a principal investor but also to host and manage U.S. user data (via its cloud infrastructure) under the Project Texas environment as an additional security safeguard. 2) @adcock_brett announced that Figure just closed a $1 billion Series C at a $39 billion post-money valuation, led by Parkway Venture Capital with participation from Brookfield, NVIDIA, Intel, LG, Salesforce, T-Mobile, and others. This is a significant jump from its February 2024 Series B funding, which valued the company at $2.6 billion. The raise cements Figure as one of the frontrunners in humanoid robotics along with Tesla’s Optimus, with capital earmarked for three priorities: 1. Scaling production and real-world deployment of humanoid robots via its BotQ manufacturing line, targeting both households and commercial operations 2. Building next-generation GPU infrastructure to accelerate training and simulation for its Helix AI platform, designed for embodied intelligence in perception, reasoning, and control 3. Launching advanced data-collection pipelines using human video and multimodal sensory input to better model how robots operate in dynamic environments. This is the next step in Figure’s Master Plan to bring general-purpose robots into everyday life to help bolster productivity and combat flatlining labor supply growth. 3) The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ preliminary benchmark revision published September 9, 2025 revealed that from April 2024 to March 2025 nonfarm employment is now estimated to be 911,000 jobs fewer than previously reported. While benchmark revisions are a standard annual adjustment, this scale is unusually large. The revision has shown that the labor market has been substantially weaker than monthly reports suggested, especially over the transition between administrations. This emphasizes my concern that the government is lacking the tools to accurately read and forecast the necessary data to calibrate policy more cautiously. Against this backdrop of labor market softness, the Federal Reserve on September 17 cut interest rates by 25 basis points. This marks the first rate cut since December 2024 and moved the target range down to 4.00%-4.25%. The move was characterized as a “risk-management” action by Jerome Powell, highlighting weakening job growth and rising unemployment risks, even while inflation remains elevated at around 2.9%. During this time we can also see that spot gold hit a new all-time high near US$3,700/gl ounce (up 38.5% YTD), as Central Banks demand for gold across the world has increased due to inflation risk and geopolitical tensions. There is a chance that current labor reports might be revised lower in the future, and we’ve seen a downtrend in yields YTD for the 2 year, 5 year and even 10 year Treasuries, which can signal that market participants are pricing in further rate cuts and potentially even a recession. But this is where it gets complicated, because even if we are in the midst of a recession or coming upon one, it doesn’t necessarily mean we will have a massive sustained downtrend in the markets. More on substack... https://t.co/7ktqLNq23i