Axios AM: AI’s money cannon
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  View in browser PRESENTED BY ANTHROPIC Axios AMBy Mike Allen · Jun 10, 2026 Happy Wednesday! Smart Brevity™ count: 1,384 words … 5 mins. Thanks to Noah Bressner for orchestrating. Edited by Andrew Pantazi and Bill Kole. 1 big thing: AI money cannon  Data: S&P Global Market Intelligence. (Includes debt and equity raised by Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle.) Chart: Emily Peck/AxiosInvestors have poured an unprecedented $255 billion into five AI hyperscalers — Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle — already this year, more than twice what those companies raised in all of 2025, Axios’ Emily Peck and Dan Primack write. Why it matters: Investors are more exposed to AI’s promises — and its risks — than ever. With savings dwindling and wages lagging inflation, portfolio gains are about the only place investors are making real money.  There’s a lot more money on the way. SpaceX goes public Friday in the biggest U.S. IPO ever, by a mile, raising at least $85 billion, with demand far outstripping the shares available.Alphabet just sold a record amount of new stock. Both could be dwarfed by OpenAI and Anthropic, which are expected to go public later this year.  By the numbers: The five companies have said that by year-end, they’ll have spent three-quarters of a trillion dollars on AI data centers, per Barron’s.The bull and bear case for SpaceX: It’s a foregone conclusion that SpaceX will raise at least $85 billion. The real question is what happens next.  Bull: SpaceX could generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue by 2030, despite booking less than $19 billion last year.The biggest chunk would come from Starlink, which could use Starship’s larger payloads to supercharge its young satellite phone service and corner the global market. SpaceX’s AI business has a high floor: It keeps selling computing power. Deals like those with Anthropic and Google are already worth about $2 billion a month combined.  Bear: For most of its life, SpaceX has been the runaway leader in a business it essentially invented: commercial rocket launches.Its newer ambitions in AI and telecom are far more crowded, and the stock is very expensive to start. Its giant Starship rocket is still a work in progress. Computing power — one of SpaceX’s cash cows — is getting cheaper as more and more data centers come online.  The wild card: Elon Musk. His market magic is real. Bet against him at your portfolio’s peril. If Musk were no longer leading SpaceX, investor enthusiasm would dissipate.Share this story.     2.  Platner’s big night  Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner and his wife, Amy Gertner, at an election-night party in Blue Hill, Maine. Photo: Robert F. Bukaty/APMaine Democrats handed progressive firebrand Graham Platner an easy win in yesterday’s Senate primary, looking past his personal scandals in hopes he can oust GOP Sen. Susan Collins in November, Axios’ Holly Otterbein writes.Standing behind a sign that defiantly read, “They Don’t Know Maine,” Platner delivered an acceptance speech that mixed talk of his past regrets and slammed elites who’d opposed him. Why it matters: Platner’s victory was a big win for Democratic progressives in their ongoing civil war with the party’s moderates.  Platner got 72% of the Democratic primary vote to 20% for Gov. Janet Mills, who suspended her campaign.The result sets up a general-election race against five-term Sen. Collins, the longest-serving Republican woman in Senate history.It’s sure to be a nasty, expensive battle for a seat that will go a long way toward determining control of the Senate.  Takeaways from election night:Scandals haven’t hurt Platner. His campaign has been a roller coaster ride of revelations, from the Nazi-linked tattoo he covered up to the recent reports that he’d sent sexually suggestive texts to women who weren’t his wife. The reports gripped D.C. and made lots of ad fodder for Republicans, but didn’t appear to damage Platner.Here come the attacks: In a preview of the smash-mouth assaults headed for Platner, RNC Chair Joe Gruters called the Democratic nominee a “racist, sexist, Nazi-loving domestic abuser. “Dems warm to controversy: Platner’s primary victory signals that Democratic voters have become more willing to accept skeletons in a candidate’s closet. More takeaways … AP results from Maine … Nevada … North Dakota … South Carolina. |
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