The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch 20VC: Anthropic Raises $45BN but Falls Short on Compute | OpenAI Crushes with GPT5.5 and Codex: Back in the Game? | China Blocks Manus $2BN Deal to Meta | Thoma Bravo Hand Back Medallia Keys to Creditors | Why Google is a Bigger Buy Than Ever Before
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Apr 30, 2026 AI funding gets wild as Anthropic pulls in massive capital but runs into a compute crunch. OpenAI’s growth wobble sparks debate, while AI agents threaten to replace how people choose software. China’s blocked Meta deal raises geopolitical stakes. Google looks increasingly powerful in AI infrastructure, and Medallia’s collapse exposes how badly private equity can misfire.
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Compute Does Not Automatically Become Revenue
- Jason Lemkin said OpenAI’s miss may mark the first visible crack in Sam Altman’s compute-equals-revenue story.
- Rory O’Driscoll replied that compute is necessary but insufficient; weak models can still leave expensive capacity underutilized.
Google Has More Ways To Win In AI
- The Anthropic financing reinforced Google’s position as the most flexible AI infrastructure winner.
- Jason Lemkin said Google can route capacity across Gemini, Anthropic, and core workloads while also pushing its own chips against Nvidia’s margin pool.
The Manus Block Signals An AI Cold War
- China blocking Meta’s Manus deal looked less like a one-off transaction issue and more like AI-geopolitical signaling.
- Rory O’Driscoll said the point is deterrence: stop future talent-and-tech transfers, especially while chip sanctions already inflame both sides.