MAROKO133 Breaking ai: Investors Dumping American Stocks as the Country Bets Everything on

📌 MAROKO133 Hot ai: Investors Dumping American Stocks as the Country Bets Everythi

For decades, the United States stock market has been a juggernaut on the international stage. The US dollar has been — and still is — the de facto currency globally.

But for how much longer that will be the case is now looking uncertain. As the New York Times reports, investors are starting to look elsewhere as the Trump administration continues to threaten the independence of its central bank, start a trade war with Europe, and implement self-conflicting monetary policies. As a result of it all, the US dollar continues to weaken, making foreign investments in Europe and Asia far more lucrative.

Meanwhile, Wall Street continues to make enormous bets on artificial intelligence, a highly risky gambit, as tech companies still have plenty to prove and a return still appears to be many years out. The AI boom has sent tech company valuations soaring: the Magnificent Seven (Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, NVIDIA, and Tesla) now account for just over a third of the entire S&P 500, with experts warning that the industry could be propping up a rough-looking US economy.

The International Monetary Fund warned that the weakening hype surrounding AI could be among the biggest risks to global economic growth, noting that if expectations about AI turn out to be too optimistic, a market correction could send shockwaves across global markets.

President Donald Trump’s nomination for the next chair of the central banking system, Kevin Warsh, appeared to do little to stop the continued weakening of the US dollar, which hit a four-year low last week. The Euro and British pound saw their values soar when measured against the US dollar this year.

Trump —also a huge AI booster, underlining the circular nature of the whole situation — celebrated the weakening dollar, arguing it would make products more affordable, in comments that alarmed investors. Officials had to step in to smooth things over, the NYT reported, arguing that despite Trump’s comments, the US government still supports a strong dollar.

Whether Wall Street’s enormous appetite for AI continues to be a weakening economy’s saving grace, for how long remains to be seen. Investors are sending a clear signal: riskier bets are no longer a hot commodity, as demonstrated by the recent plummet in the value of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

Instead, historically safer bets like gold are proving far more lucrative, reaching record highs of $5,500 an ounce in January. Despite a massive drop last week, gold is trading 70 percent higher year over year, indicating investors are seriously on edge.

More on AI: Microsoft Stock Takes Most Massive Single-Day Loss Since Pandemic as Its AI Efforts Flail

The post Investors Dumping American Stocks as the Country Bets Everything on AI appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com

📌 MAROKO133 Breaking ai: Railway secures $100 million to challenge AWS with AI-nat

Railway, a San Francisco-based cloud platform that has quietly amassed two million developers without spending a dollar on marketing, announced Thursday that it raised $100 million in a Series B funding round, as surging demand for artificial intelligence applications exposes the limitations of legacy cloud infrastructure.

TQ Ventures led the round, with participation from FPV Ventures, Redpoint, and Unusual Ventures. The investment values Railway as one of the most significant infrastructure startups to emerge during the AI boom, capitalizing on developer frustration with the complexity and cost of traditional platforms like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

"As AI models get better at writing code, more and more people are asking the age-old question: where, and how, do I run my applications?" said Jake Cooper, Railway's 28-year-old founder and chief executive, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. "The last generation of cloud primitives were slow and outdated, and now with AI moving everything faster, teams simply can't keep up."

The funding is a dramatic acceleration for a company that has charted an unconventional path through the cloud computing industry. Railway raised just $24 million in total before this round, including a $20 million Series A from Redpoint in 2022. The company now processes more than 10 million deployments monthly and handles over one trillion requests through its edge network — metrics that rival far larger and better-funded competitors.

Why three-minute deploy times have become unacceptable in the age of AI coding assistants

Railway's pitch rests on a simple observation: the tools developers use to deploy and manage software were designed for a slower era. A standard build-and-deploy cycle using Terraform, the industry-standard infrastructure tool, takes two to three minutes. That delay, once tolerable, has become a critical bottleneck as AI coding assistants like Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor can generate working code in seconds.

"When godly intelligence is on tap and can solve any problem in three seconds, those amalgamations of systems become bottlenecks," Cooper told VentureBeat. "What was really cool for humans to deploy in 10 seconds or less is now table stakes for agents."

The company claims its platform delivers deployments in under one second — fast enough to keep pace with AI-generated code. Customers report a tenfold increase in developer velocity and up to 65 percent cost savings compared to traditional cloud providers.

These numbers come directly from enterprise clients, not internal benchmarks. Daniel Lobaton, chief technology officer at G2X, a platform serving 100,000 federal contractors, measured deployment speed improvements of seven times faster and an 87 percent cost reduction after migrating to Railway. His infrastructure bill dropped from $15,000 per month to approximately $1,000.

"The work that used to take me a week on our previous infrastructure, I can do in Railway in like a day," Lobaton said. "If I want to spin up a new service and test different architectures, it would take so long on our old setup. In Railway I can launch six services in two minutes."

Inside the controversial decision to abandon Google Cloud and build data centers from scratch

What distinguishes Railway from competitors like Render and Fly.io is the depth of its vertical integration. In 2024, the company made the unusual decision to abandon Google Cloud entirely and build its own data centers, a move that echoes the famous Alan Kay maxim: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."

"We wanted to design hardware in a way where we could build a differentiated experience," Cooper said. "Having full control over the network, compute, and storage layers lets us do really fast build and deploy loops, the kind that allows us to move at 'agentic speed' while staying 100 percent the smoothest ride in town."

The approach paid dividends during recent widespread outages that affected major cloud providers — Railway remained online throughout.

This soup-to-nuts control enables pricing that undercuts the hyperscalers by roughly 50 percent and newer cloud startups by three to four times. Railway charges by the second for actual compute usage: $0.00000386 per gigabyte-second of memory, $0.00000772 per vCPU-second, and $0.00000006 per gigabyte-second of storage. There are no charges for idle virtual machines — a stark contrast to the traditional cloud model where customers pay for provisioned capacity whether they use it or not.

"The conventional wisdom is that the big guys have economies of scale to offer better pricing," Cooper noted. "But when they're charging for VMs that usually sit idle in the cloud, and we've purpose-built everything to fit much more density on these machines, you have a big opportunity."

How 30 employees built a platform generating tens of millions in annual revenue

Railway has achieved its scale with a team of just 30 employees generating tens of millions in annual revenue — a ratio of revenue per employee that would be exceptional even for established software companies. The company grew revenue 3.5 times last year and continues to expand at 15 percent month-over-month.

Cooper emphasized that the fundraise was strategic rather than necessary. "We're default alive; there's no reason for us to raise money," he said. "We raised because we see a massive opportunity to accelerate, not because we needed to survive."

The company hired its first salesperson only last year and employs just two solutions engineers. Nearly all of Railway's two million users discovered the platform through word of mouth — developers telling other developers about a tool that actually works.

"We basically did the standard engineering thing: if you build it, they will come," Cooper recalled. "And to some degree, they came."

From side projects to Fortune 500 deployments: Railway's unlikely corporate expansion

Despite its grassroots developer community, Railway has made significant inroads into large organizations. The company claims that 31 percent of Fortune 500 companies now use its platform, though deployments range from company-wide infrastructure to individual team projects.

Notable customers include Bilt, the loyalty program company; Intuit's GoCo subsidiary; TripAdvisor's Cruise Critic; and MGM Resorts. Kernel, a Y Combinator-backed startup providing AI infrastructure to over 1,000 companies, runs its entire customer-facing system on Railway for $444 per month.

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🔗 Sumber: venturebeat.com