Authored by Andrew Fenton via CoinTelegraph.com,

Australian tech firm Apate deploys a vast array of AI-bot characters worldwide that play the role of gullible scam victims to waste millions of hours of con artists’ time each month.

Hilariously, one of the company’s monthly performance metrics is how many times frustrated scammers swear at the idiot ‘victims’ who are playing dumb and stringing them along.

“I think we’re the only company in the world that is actually keeping as part of their KPIs the number of F-words that scammers are dropping at them,” Apate founder Dali Kaafar tells Magazine with a chuckle. 

The company has a stable of almost 200,000 AI characters that are able to hold convincing phone conversations and to chat on social media and messaging platforms.

”I can tell you that we’re basically servicing, as we call them, hundreds of thousands of calls a day, and pretty much hundreds of thousands of conversations on the other channels,” he says. 

Every hour of a con artist’s time they waste is another hour they’re not scamming a member of the public. In the six weeks up to the end of 2025, Apate’s bots engaged in 600,000 scam calls for a single telco called TPG in Australia. 

“Essentially, we wasted more than five hundred days of scammers’ time,” he explains. “That roughly equates to somewhere around thirteen million dollars being saved.”

The bots’ other goal is to elicit actionable intelligence for banks and telcos to combat scam rings across Australia, Asia, Africa and the UK and Europe.

Apate bots deal with scammers via chat. Source: Apate

Scam baiting at scale with AI victims

Kaafar says he got the idea when he received a scam call while having a picnic with his family in Sydney back in November 2021.

To his wife’s annoyance, but his kids’ delight, he strung the scammer along for 44 minutes by pretending to be a gullible rube falling for the scam. 

“What followed was really literally a full comedy show for my kids,” he says, adding that during the call he’d also learned a lot of potentially useful information about the mechanics of the scam and the tactics used.   

“As I hung up that call, I remember thinking very clearly: if I could do that just for fun, imagine what technology can do at scale.”

Working as a professor at Macquarie University at the time, he raised the idea with some of his doctoral students working on AI and security.

“I said, ‘Guys, there has to be a much better way of doing this. Let’s build something that is really automating this whole process of engaging scammers at scale, but also, perhaps most importantly, extracting all sorts of intelligence from these conversations.’ And that’s literally how it started.”

Within a few months they’d secured funding from the Office of National Intelligence to research the idea, and the project was spun off from the university into Apate in 2023. The company now works with most of the big banks in Australia, as well as numerous banks in the UK, South Africa and South East Asia. 

Apate is far from the only company scam baiting fraudsters using AI bots — though they are doing it on a greater scale than most. United Kingdom telco O2 rolled out an AI Granny campaign last year, which frustrates scammers by taking up hours of their time talking about her 28 cats. It was as much an ad campaign to warn the public about the dangers of scam calls as anything else.

O2’s highly entertaining AI Granny. Source: 02

Creating the perfect AI victims

Apate launched with 120 different personas across different genders, ages and personality types, and now have 197,000 personas with identifiable vocal tics, accents, and they make the same noises people make when they’re trying to think of what to say. 

“We spent a lot of time refining and building these AI bots that sound exactly like you and I and our neighbors,” he says. 

The AI models were trained on “hundreds and hundreds” of hours of recorded conversations between human scam baiters and scammers, so they can employ counter strategies.

“They know that they’re talking to bad guys, if you like, and they really navigate the conversations so that it sounds really very, very realistic to any scammer out there, even if a scammer is skeptical about things.”The bots get sent out on WhatsApp and Telegram to act as honeypots for scammers. While the old cliché that you can’t scam an honest man is not true, it’s still very possible to exploit the scammer’s desire for money. 

“They are cybercriminals, really. I think we just very often forget that they’re cybercriminals who are trying to get people’s life savings. And so that element of greed is sometimes what our bots also exploit.”

Bots collect valuable intel from each scam call

In the crypto industry, Apate works for “one of the leaders in blockchain analysis,” which may or may not be Chainalysis. They aren’t interested in wasting scammers’ time — they want intelligence on which wallets and methods scammers are using so they can track the flow of funds. 

“These bots, as they engage across different conversations, extract new crypto wallet addresses by the hundreds and by the thousands,” he says. “It’s data and intelligence that is coming literally before their damage happens.”

Scamming is big business, and the call centers are “pretty much corporate organizations,” Kaafar explains. 

“This data is very, very important because, literally, that’s the new account or the new wallet where you really need to pay extreme attention to. Because this is where these… scammer compounds are collecting their money or their funds with.”

“Think about it literally as being always ahead of the scammer’s tactics. And the more you know before the money gets transferred, the better it is.”

In July, Apate’s bots uncovered a marketplace for brokers soliciting verified bank accounts in India, offering commissions of up to 5% paid in USDT on the proceeds from scams passing through the accounts.

Apate’s human staff in Sydney. Source: Apate

AI arms race between good guys and bad guys

Scammers are increasingly using AI bots themselves, and it won’t be too long before AI scammers are as ubiquitous as spam emails. Scamming people is a $1.24 trillion business, so the industry can afford the compute required to scale up operations.
Apate’s research suggests that about 20% to 30% of scam text conversations employ AI already, but Kaafar isn’t too worried about the outcome of anti-scam bots fighting scam bots.
He says their researchers believe that AI bots playing defense have an advantage, according to game theory, because they’re trying to extract intelligence, while the scam bots are trying to get the other AI to perform an action.

“You can also demonstrate mathematically that that is to the advantage of a defender because it becomes easier to extract intelligence from the attacker’s AI model,” he says.

“We can imagine a world where scammers become a lot more sophisticated and deploy such technology. But that also means that if they do, they’re actually deemed to lose the game, which is great news in the fight against scams.”

The scandal and controversy over the USS Lincoln aircraft carrier continues, despite the Trump administration and top military brass reiterating this week that the issues have been hugely overblown. It’s long been reported that the supercarrier which is front line in the war against Iran has suffered resupply problems, low morale, sub-standard conditions, and mental health problems given the over-extended deployment.

One prominent media outlet is now alleging that the crisis is largely due to War Secretary Pete Hegseth having “hid” a crucial piece of information – that amid Iran’s retaliation during Operation Epic Fury, it had destroyed much of the main resupply base for the US Central Command region (CENTCOM).

MS Now senior national security reporter David Rohde made the claim, saying that when the logistics hub Naval Support Activity (NSA) Bahrain was struck by Iranian ballistic missiles at the start of the war, it effectively crippled Pentagon resupply and logistics for the Mideast region.

According to MS Now’s reporting:

During a segment in MS Now discussing President Donald Trump’s dismissal of reports of low morale and the mental health concerns of those aboard the carrier during an unusually long deployment, Rohde said the resupply issue was “because Pete Hegseth hid the fact that Iran destroyed the main resupply base that the United States has in the Gulf.“

“He did not make that public in press conference after press conference, and that is, again, the way that they have mishandled this war,” Rohde added. The full segment can be viewed here.

As a reminder, at the end of June the Wall Street Journal featured several satellite images which demonstrated the widespread destruction at the base. From there, the Pentagon was forced to only maintain a small staff there, and is said to be mulling abandoning it as an operations center altogether.

“When the Iranian missiles and drones came for the nerve center of America’s naval operations in the Middle East, some of them hit their mark,” that prior WSJ reporting indicated. According to more:

The U.S. Navy base in Bahrain was repeatedly targeted between late February and June. Strikes that got through caused extensive damage, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of satellite imagery, social-media footage and interviews with current and former servicemembers—damage that the Pentagon hasn’t publicly acknowledged. Hit hard were the command headquarters and at least a dozen other buildings, along with two satellite communications terminals. 

The military said no one was killed at the base, known as Naval Support Activity Bahrain, and that the strikes didn’t significantly impact operations. The U.S. evacuated most personnel but has kept a small staff on the ground. 

,,,The extensive damage done to America’s sole naval base in the Middle East—along with hits to at least 20 U.S. sites across the region, including military installations and diplomatic facilities—has the U.S. re-evaluating its entire footprint in the region, according to U.S. officials familiar with the deliberations.

All of this reportedly had significant impact on the USS Lincoln’s ability to maintain standard supplies and conditions. Again, all of this is being downplayed or else outright denied by the Pentagon and US administration. 

Media headlines focused on the Lincoln have been growing over the summer…

We will quote one unnamed former national security insider who has offered the following…

“Bahrain NSA was critical to keeping carriers on station because it provided nearby supplies and you can’t put the carriers in at ports within missile range of Iran as they will become sitting ducks (and sabotage targets). Bahrain NSA was a soft target (I’ve been there), and questions should be raised about why it wasn’t hardened if we were going to use military force against Iran. Iran could not destroy a carrier so it did the next best thing and destroyed its logistics.”

Jeffrey Tucker – founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, says top FDA and NIH officials told him that the purpose of the COVID-19 lockdowns were “to delay the onset of natural immunity… until after the shots were online.”

Tucker sat down for an hour-long conversation with Dr. Jessica Rose, where he says that ‘multiple sources’ who were involved in the response confirmed the bombshell revelation “without a shadow of a doubt.” 

As Vigilant Fox notes – 

The lockdowns that wiped out small businesses. The school closures that sent children’s reading scores back to 1971. The plexiglass, the masking, the stay-at-home orders. None of it was about keeping us safe. “It was exactly the opposite,” as Tucker put it.

Watch:

Jeffrey Tucker just revealed that top FDA and NIH quietly admitted the real reason for Covid lockdowns, masking, and social distancing to him.

It sounds like a “wild conspiracy theory.”

But it’s the truth.

The real reason for all of it was to “delay the onset of natural… pic.twitter.com/QPfjvXg2nx

— Brownstone Institute (@brownstoneinst) August 11, 2026

TUCKER: “We all have what we consider to be the most shocking feature of the COVID response. But for me, I still can’t get over the fact that I was told by top FDA, NIH officials that a major reason for social distancing, lockdowns, masking, Plexiglas, stay-at-home orders, and everything else was to delay the onset of natural immunity, to delay rising seroprevalence levels, to delay endemicity until after the shots were online.

“So, it wasn’t just that all these tactics, these sort of social engineering tactics, were designed to keep us [safe]. Well, no, it was exactly the opposite. It was to keep us from gaining natural capacity to resist the virus.

“So that they could wait until the injection came along. So the injection could be deployed and experimented upon us and, and thereby get all the credit for having solved the issue.

“That sounds like a wild conspiracy theory, but that’s what they meant by ‘flatten the curve.’ Flatten the curve meant to prolong the pain, delay the solution. And it sounds crazy until you hear it from people who were there on the ground, in the agencies, in the companies, watching all this unfold.

“And multiple sources have confirmed this without a shadow of doubt in their mind that was the real purpose of the school closures, the business shutdowns, the stay-at-home orders, the travel restrictions, and everything: to delay the point at which we would have solved, essentially solved, the problem through natural exposure and immune upgrades.”

h/t Vigilant Fox – give him a follow!

By Jason Ma of DataCenterDynamics

The Cherokee Nation in the US has banned data center development on its lands, according to an announcement made by its Chief Chuck Hoskin on August 5, Thursday.

“It’s clear that our Cherokee Nation Administration, Council, and citizens have serious concerns about the construction of hyperscale data centers on our tribal lands, which affect our resources and cultural lifeways. Our primary responsibility is to protect our citizens and tribal communities from these threats, so we will not support any hyperscale data centers on our reservation without proper consultation,” Chief Hoskin said.

“We want these companies to know that we expect them to engage with us early and transparently, as these projects impact every Cherokee.”

On the same day, the Cherokee Nation also released a report on data centers, which found that 64 percent of the 1,593 Cherokee Nation citizens surveyed did support hyperscale data center construction within the Reservation, a 7,000 sqm (75,347 sq ft) area in northeastern Oklahoma where the nation has legislative, executive, and judicial powers. Only 14 percent supported their development, and 22 percent remained unsure.

The report states that two data center projects – Project Clydesdale, a $1 billion campus in Tulsa County, and Project Mustang, potentially located in the Claremore Industrial Park – are currently under development within the Cherokee Nation Reservation.

But the report also emphasized that the nation had an interest in “continued reliable, secure, cost-effective access to colocation and cloud services for government and business operations, disaster recovery, and sovereign systems including tribal registration and vehicle tag administration.”

In August, a broadband data center was built in the Hoopa Valley Reservation, home to the Hoopa Valley Tribe in northwest California.

Authored by Kimberley Hayek via The Epoch Times,

President Donald Trump said that the University of Miami has given its original 1994 investigational new drug application for ibogaine to the federal government, a move he said would accelerate development of the psychedelic substance as a treatment for serious mental illness.

The gift aims to speed work on the substance as a possible treatment for serious mental illness suffered by veterans.

The 1994 application was the original filing that made early research into ibogaine possible.

Trump made the announcement on Aug. 18 in a Truth Social post.

“Today I am announcing that Secretary Kennedy has received a Historic Gift from the University of Miami, who has given the Federal Government its original 1994 Ibogaine Investigational New Drug application,” he wrote.

“This will give everyone direct access to the foundational FDA authorization to accelerate its development as a medical treatment in the U.S. This is HUGE! Special THANK YOU to the University of Miami, who has done this to ensure that Americans are helped as quickly as possible.”

Trump tied the donation directly to an executive order he signed in April. That order sought to accelerate medical treatments for serious mental illness, with a specific focus on psychedelic drugs including ibogaine.

“In April, I signed a very important Executive Order to accelerate medical treatments for serious mental illness — Specifically, psychedelic drugs, including IBOGAINE,” the president wrote.

“This is something that has helped so many of our amazing VETERANS and true American Heroes who were here in the Oval Office with me, and Joe Rogan.”

Trump said the university’s action builds on steps already taken since April, including substantial Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) research funding, collaboration between HHS and the Department of Veterans Affairs, and Food and Drug Administration guidance.

The president stressed the need to move quickly to bring potential new treatments to market.

“We are moving FAST, so that our Veterans with serious mental illness have a RIGHT TO TRY here in the U.S.,” he wrote.

“We hope to see more companies and institutions join us in this very important work. Our Veterans DESERVE it!”

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has fully supported the administration’s efforts to speed up experimental treatments.

“Thanks to the leadership of President Trump, under this historic Executive Order, @HHSGov will accelerate research, approval, and access to new mental health treatments, including psychedelic therapies such as ibogaine,” Kennedy said after the April order.

At a Senate hearing in April, Kennedy described ibogaine as the “most promising treatment for depression and PTSD that anybody’s ever seen.”

La-Z-Boy shares suffered their steepest decline in 4.5 years on Wednesday after the furniture maker’s second-quarter guidance missed expectations, providing even more evidence that weak housing turnover has suppressed demand for big-ticket discretionary goods such as sofas and recliners. With mortgage rates elevated and home prices near record levels, affordability remains severely stretched, keeping transaction volumes depressed, thus limiting replacement purchases that typically drive furniture demand.

La-Z-Boy forecasted second-quarter sales of $475.7 million, down 3% from a year earlier and well below the $537 million average analyst estimate tracked by Bloomberg. It forecast an adjusted operating margin of 3.9% to 4.8% and a reported operating margin ranging from negative .4% to 4.5%.

KeyBanc Capital Markets analyst Bradley Thomas said the company issued sales and implied earnings guidance below consensus, pressured partly by continued investment.

The soft guidance followed a weaker-than-expected first quarter. Adjusted earnings came in at 43 cents a share, compared with 47 cents one year ago and below the 49-cent analyst estimate. On a reported basis, La-Z-Boy lost 6 cents a share, compared with earnings of 44 cents a year earlier. 

Sofas and recliners are considered highly deferrable purchases – non-essential goods. The stock’s 14% plunge suggests investors view the dismal evidence as further evidence that households are delaying discretionary spending and that the trend will persist, with the 30-year fixed mortgage rate remaining around 6.7%.

The broader read-through is that dismal housing conditions have also dampened home-improvement demand at Home Depot and Lowe’s, as confirmed in this week’s earnings. Wayfair, RH, and Williams-Sonoma have also experienced sluggish demand for big-ticket household items. 

La-Z-Boy is another canary in the coal mine, warning that America’s frozen housing market continues to dampen consumer demand for big-ticket items. Last week, July retail sales were a major disappointment, with discretionary categories seeing sharp pullbacks. This all comes as the national average for gasoline at the pump is over $4 per gallon, continuing to dent consumer sentiment.  

Oil prices are chopping sideways (to modestly higher) for the second day in a row as traders weighed the ‘dark fleet’ transits with renewed tensions in the Middle East further clouding the outlook for flows through the vital Strait of Hormuz.

“A combination of the escalation between the UAE and Iran, coupled with a market increasingly pricing a ‘closed for longer scenario,’ keeps oil and refined products supported,” said Arne Lohmann Rasmussen, chief analyst at Global Risk Management.

Combine that with the ever-decreasing poll of global inventories (to soak up any supply shortage)…

…and every incremental report on supply and production matters (especially for refined products).

API

• Crude -328k

• Cushing -1.4mm

• Gasoline +1.1mm

• Distillates -2.8mm

DOE

• Crude +4.41mm (-707k exp)

• Cushing -1.314mm – biggest draw since mid-June

• Gasoline +688k

• Distillates -1.53mm

After last week’s massive crude inventory build, expectations were a calmer week (API showed a small draw). The official data showed a sizable build (4.41mm barrels) for the 3rd week in a row while Cushing stocks slipped back. Products were mixed with Distillates drawing down for a 3rd week…

Cushing stocks remain near ‘tank bottoms’…

The SPR saw another drain…

…pushing stocks back to ever lower lows (1983 lows now)…

US crude production rose last week, edging closer to record highs as rig counts continue to rise…

Crude imports eased after a big surge a week earlier mostly thanks to a significant slide in volumes from Canada. Still, shipments from Venezuela remain very strong holding above 700,000 barrels a day and near the highest levels since 2017. 

WTI Crude is rising on the report back up near $85…

Finally, as we have noted numerous times recently, it’s not crude that is the center of the current crisis but refined products with fuel prices, especially diesel, having rallied much harder than oil, as the war between Russia and Ukraine has also contributed to tighter energy markets following attacks on refineries.

That’s heaping cost pressure onto drivers, truckers and farmers, as well as overall industry, and leaks into inflationary impacts for the ‘average joe’ far quicker.

The margin for making diesel from crude oil in the US has topped $100 a barrel, setting all-time highs. In Europe, gasoil futures have more than doubled this year.

By Diana DiGangi of UtilityDive

Summary

• The U.S. Department of Energy will not move forward with the designation of three proposed National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors that the Biden administration selected for review in 2024, saying in a Wednesday release that the corridors were selected as a “means to advance” that administration’s “Green New Scam agenda.”

• “Transmission policy must serve the American people,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in the release, “not special interests or a climate-alarmist agenda that drives up costs, worsens reliability, and disregards the concerns of local communities.”

• DOE’s release alleged that the “current designation framework proved ineffective in strengthening grid reliability and reducing electricity costs. In some communities, it also contributed to confusion and concern about the scope and intent of NIETC authority.”

The three cancelled corridors are the Lake Erie–Canada Corridor, the Southwestern Grid Connector Corridor and the Tribal Energy Access Corridor.

The DOE’s webpage about the NIETC process no longer includes details about the three projects. A cached version, from March 2026, said that the three proposed corridors would serve various purposes, including providing needed resource adequacy support to the PJM Interconnection, providing “cross-interconnection and interregional connections” between the Southwest Power Pool and WestConnect regions, and facilitating Tribal energy and economic development “by addressing a lack of extra high-voltage transmission.”

According to the current DOE webpage, a NIETC designation can unlock federal financing tools, “specifically public-private partnerships,” as well as allow the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to “issue permits for the siting of transmission lines within the NIETC under circumstances where state siting authorities do not have authority to site the line, have not acted on an application for over one year, or have denied an application.”

DOE said a NIETC is an area of the country where the agency has “determined the lack of adequate transmission harms consumers and that the development of new transmission would advance important national interests in that area, such as increased reliability and reduced consumer costs.”

Cattle producer-only trade association R-CALF USA praised DOE’s decision, as it had raised concerns in 2024 about the siting of the corridors for their potential to “disrupt independent livestock operations or result in the loss of essential grazing and haying lands.” Other groups, including the Environmental Defense Fund and Clean Air Task Force, criticized the cancellation and said DOE is turning down an opportunity to strengthen the grid.

The cancelled corridors were selected to “help address areas with significant transmission congestion,” CATF said in a release. “Transmission congestion increases costs and reduces reliability for ratepayers.”

“If the goal is affordable, reliable, and secure electricity, we should be making it easier to build the infrastructure the grid needs — not dismantling federal frameworks designed to facilitate it,” said Nicole Pavia, CATF’s Director of Clean Energy Infrastructure Deployment.

EDF noted that while Wright said the current designation framework had “proved ineffective,” DOE’s National Transmission Needs Study from July said that NIETC designation “enables DOE and FERC to use valuable federal financing and permitting tools to spur construction or modification of transmission facilities within a NIETC.” The National Transmission Needs Study is a triennial report, the findings of which form the basis for NIETC designations, according to DOE.

DOE’s release said the Trump administration has taken other steps to build new transmission infrastructure and modernize existing infrastructure, citing several billion-dollar loans made by its Office of Energy Dominance Financing to build, rebuild and reconductor transmission lines.

Over the past several years, one of the more amusing debates gripping the market’s Fed-watchers was whether the Fed’s treasury buyback auctions were a form of soft QE, with this website consistently arguing that – contrary to what washed out ex-Bridgewater traders with a newsletter to sell may tell you – Treasury buybacks were just that, to wit:

*TREASURY SAYS IT’S EVALUATING ENHANCEMENTS TO BUYBACK PROGRAM

“Not QE”

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) April 30, 2025

*TREASURY INCREASES LIQUIDITY BUYBACK TOTAL TO $30B FROM $15B

“Not QE 2.0” is growing

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 31, 2024

TREASURY DEBT BUYBACK TARGETS COUPONS MATURING IN 2031 – 2034

Next QE rehearsal

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 24, 2024

And moments ago, Scott Bessent finally resolved the debate when, with 30Y yields at 20 year highs and threatening to blow out higher, the US Treasury shocked markets, sparked a meltdown in yields and surge in equity futures and gold when it announced at 8:30am that they will be “increasing, by at least double, the size of liquidity support buyback operations for longer-dated nominal coupon securities (the 10-year to 20-year sector and the 20-year to 30-year sector). The current maximum size of $2 billion per operation will be at least $4 billion per operation.”

This change will be effective September 9, 2026 and will be in effect for the remainder of this refunding quarter (through November 4, 2026). The releases noted that the Treasury will provide more information about future buyback sizes at the next Quarterly Refunding, scheduled for November 4, 2026, in other words it has the benefit of 3 months of “NOT QE” without having to even specify its thinking.

According to the statement, “this increase in buyback operation sizes reflects Treasury’s desire to provide greater liquidity support in longer-dated nominal sectors where there is consistent strong sponsorship from market participants, as evidenced by the significant volume of high-quality offers Treasury routinely receives in longer-dated buyback operations.”

Translation: Bessent panicked and the justification that there is no liquidity is just a strawman, with the Treasury now freaking out that the demand for AI paper is crowding out demand for Treasuries as we have been warning for the past several weeks, and as we predicted a week ago when looking at the blowing out Treasury skew, “Bessent will be busy.:”

Bessent will be busy https://t.co/0BslbpgnLs pic.twitter.com/kreaTPS1rh

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 11, 2026

It took just one week for him to show just how busy he would be.

The market reaction was instant and violent, with 30y yields down 6bps in an instant on the headlines, having been down 2bp prior,  This brings Wednesday’s yield decline to 8bp total

US 2s30s is 7bp flatter on the day and 10s30s 2bp flatter.

Naturally, with Bessent panicking, stock futures surged…

… but more importantly, gold is breaking out bigly….

… as the market realizes that with total US debt about to hit $40 trillion…

so close…. pic.twitter.com/edFs1kzVZB

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 18, 2026

… it all gets much worse from here. 

The circular financing circus rolls on…

Marvell shares are soaring this morning after fabless chip designer announced an expanded chip-development partnership with Google that includes a warrant from Marvell allowing the search giant to buy as much as $12.2 billion in shares.

The two firms will collaborate on custom AI chips.

“The expanded partnership spans a comprehensive range of custom silicon programs that attach to the TPU ecosystem, including AI inference accelerators, storage controllers, network interface controllers, memory interface controllers, and near-memory compute,” Marvell said in the filing.

And what does Marvell get for supplying all that?

An ‘investment’… of sorts…

Google may purchase as many as 58,970,907 Marvell shares at a price of $206.58 apiece, Marvell said Wednesday in a regulatory filing.

Nearly 1.4 million of the shares vest in equal quarterly installments during the first year following the execution of the warrant, according to the filing.

The remaining shares vest based on “discretionary purchases” from Marvell’s third quarter of fiscal 2027 through the end of its fiscal 2033, with one tranche vesting for each $500 million in revenue stemming from the products the companies have developed together.

Investors are reacting positively to the strategic validation of Marvell’s custom ASIC and data center platform with MRVL up over 12% in the pre-market…

While the warrant introduces long-term potential share dilution, retail and institutional investors are prioritizing the revenue visibility created by deep integration into Google’s hyperscale AI infrastructure.

The agreement reinforces Marvell role as a key custom silicon partner for hyperscalers and the spin is that tying Google’s equity vesting directly to incremental $500 million revenue milestones aligns both companies toward massive long-term commercial scale (provides strong multi-year revenue visibility through fiscal 2033, offsetting near-term dilution concerns with guaranteed ecosystem demand.)

While this is true, the reality is, of course, that this is an off balance sheet (no liquidity required) way to lock in chip supply (a giant buy now pay later scheme).

Shares of Broadcom (AVGO), which is known for being a major partner on Google’s TPU efforts, are down 3% in the pre-market.