Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.&nbsp; <br>Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and… Read more

HPE raised its savings target for the Juniper Networks acquisition, set its integration teams, said no customer will be left behind and provided the first installment of vision for the combined companies.

Antonio Neri, CEO of HPE, said on a conference call with Wall Street analysts that the integration of Juniper Networks is underway. HPE's networking business will be run by former Juniper Networks CEO Rami Rahim. HPE closed the Juniper Networks deal last week.

The company didn't outline revenue projections but said it will provide three-year guidance at its analyst meeting in October.

"HPE will offer a full stack solution for AI data centers at scale that spans high performing routers and switches, firewall servers, storage and services, with our data center and liquid cooling it and design expertise," said Neri. "We will simplify the deployment and management for AI training and inference."

For now, HPE is focused on the workstreams behind the integration of Juniper. In addition to Rahim running HPE Networking, Neri outlined the following:

• Phil Mottram, who led HPE Aruba, will focus on growth in emerging markets.
• John Schultz, Chief Operating and Legal Officer, will lead the integration of Juniper. He has been involved in the split of HPE and HP, the spinoff of HPE's software and enterprise services unit and GreenLake launch.

Neri said:

"Our first integration priority is to maintain continuity momentum across the traditional HP, Aruba and juniper networking businesses. We are fully committed to supporting the life cycle of existing products and protecting the investments our customers have made. No customer will be left behind. Our second priority is to thoughtfully converge our cloud product roadmaps and integrate our go-to-to-market coverage strategies. This will enable us to accelerate cross-selling and upselling across our combined portfolio. Over time, we will align our offerings around a single secure AI native and cloud native architecture."

HPE said it will realize at least $600 million in annual run rate savings over the next three years, up from the original projections of $450 million. A third of the savings will come in year one with the rest spread out evenly over the next two years.

Other key points from the update call:

• Rahim said Juniper's second quarter finished strong with orders growing 40% from a year ago and revenue up 20%. Enterprise is becoming a strong market.
• HPE plans to use its scale to leverage Juniper Networks' portfolio globally. HPE has a substantial international footprint.
• HPE said its savings target was raised due to supply chain efficiencies. HPE's supply chain scale will help Juniper's cost of goods sold. AI and automation will also drive increased savings.

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.&nbsp; <br>Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and… Read more

Corporate boards need to build in structures and processes to adapt quickly to artificial intelligence and a rapid pace of change.

That's one takeaway from a conversation with Dr. David Bray, an AI150 member, principal of LeadDoAdapt Ventures and Distinguished Fellow with the Stimson Center.

Bray emphasized that adaptability is a competitive advantage in today's rapidly changing environment, and boards should focus on empowering their organizations to sense and respond quickly to changes rather than getting bogged down in tactical decisions.

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Here are some of the highlights from our conversation:

Separate AI hype from reality. "What boards need to be thinking about is what are they trying to do as a company, and then what are the appropriate AI tools to help them get there," said Bray.

Boards need more agile planning cycles. "Boards need to be more nimble," said Bray. "I would say every four weeks, you need to be updating your plan because things are changing so rapidly."

Human-AI collaboration is essential. "What humans do is they help provide the context for what data and possibly AI as it helps analyze it are seeing," said Bray. "It's really this idea of collective intelligence."

Organizations need decision elasticity. Bray said: "Future organizations really are trying to turn to their humans and say, 'Look, there's so much going on. You can only be in so many places at once'... Let the AI be the alert when something changes."

Encourage diverse thinking. "I come from a world in the intelligence community that if we force everybody to think the same, we're actually doing a disservice to what we're supposed to be doing," said Bray.

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.&nbsp; <br>Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and… Read more

Samsung launched its latest devices--Galaxy Z Fold7, Z Flip7 and Watch8 Series--but the more interesting development may be the company's big bet on digital healthcare via the acquisition of Xealth.

The company fleshed out its digital health plans during its Unpacked event. Not surprisingly, Samsung outlined its sensor technology and updates for Galaxy Watch8 that revolved around health.

Samsung outlined sleep experience features, a health coach, a feature called Vascular Load that monitors stress levels on your vascular system, and an Antioxidant Index, which measures carotenoid levels in five seconds. The upshot is Samsung is looking to create an ecosystem for Galaxy Watch8, Galaxy Ring and its devices.

In Samsung's health strategy, the devices are collecting data, but without an ecosystem and integration the data doesn't count for much. That's where the acquisition of Xealth comes in. Xealth is a platform that combines healthcare workflows, patient experiences and an API that connects systems.

Xealth's platform includes the following interconnected modules:

• Digital care management within the electronic health record.
• Xealth digital command center, which has customized reporting and analytics of patient and provider engagement, activation and usage.
• Xealth integration suite, which integrates multiple health systems with a clinical rules engine.

According to Samsung, the Xealth acquisition "will help advance Samsung’s transformation into a connected care platform." The general idea is to combine wellness, medical care and prevention to people via data. Samsung said it is looking to unify health information and connect with clinical records and physicians via Xealth, which is a spin-off of Providence health system.

TM Roh, President and Acting Head of the Device eXperience (DX) Division at Samsung Electronics, said Xealth and its expertise will "be an anchor to accelerate Samsung’s efforts to support health systems and digital health partners through a truly connected care."

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Mike McSherry, CEO of Xealth, said at Samsung Unpacked that the combination of his company and the consumer electronics giant can simplify home health care. Xealth has more than 500 hospitals and 70 digital health vendors in its ecosystem.

"Together with Xealth, Samsung will be able to bring to reality a shared vision of connected care by simplifying it in two ways," said McSherry. "First, Samsung will bring the context of wellness data to help physicians make better decisions and monitor how patients are doing within their care workflows. And second, Samsung will make care more actionable and convenient like reminding you to take medications or remotely monitoring health conditions. We will meet people where they are and help them by making it easier to do the right thing."

The acquisition will put Samsung into an ecosystem that includes Xealth's investors including Advocate Health, Banner Health, Cleveland Clinic, MemorialCare Innovation Fund, Cerner, McKesson Ventures, Novartis, Philips, and ResMed as well as Providence Ventures and the Froedtert and Medical College of Wisconsin Health Network.

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.&nbsp; <br>Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and… Read more

Apple said Jeff Williams, chief operating officer, will retire at the end of the year and Sabibh Khan, senior vice president of operations and architect of the company's supply chain, will take over this month.

Williams, who also oversees Apple design and Apple Watch, will continue to report to CEO Tim Cook before he retires at the end of the year. After Williams retires, Apple's design team will report directly to Cook.

As for the big picture, Williams was seen as a potential successor to Cook. Now John Temus, senior vice president of hardware engineering, is seen as a Cook successor.

In a statement, Cook said Williams helped create Apple's global supply chain, launched Apple Watch and oversaw its development and launched the company's health strategy.

Kahn becomes chief operating officer at an interesting time as Apple tries to expand its manufacturing footprint in the US and respond to a bevy of challenges due to geopolitics, tariffs and sustainability goals. Cook said Kahn, a 30-year Apple veteran, "has helped pioneer new technologies in advanced manufacturing, overseen the expansion of Apple’s manufacturing footprint in the United States, and helped ensure that Apple can be nimble in response to global challenges."

According to Apple, Kahn has been vice president of operations since 2019.

Concerns about executive turnover have been prominent in the last two years. Those concerns aren't likely to go away considering Meta has reportedly hired the head of Apple's foundation models team. 

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Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.&nbsp; <br>Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and… Read more

Chief financial officers are paring expectations for the economy, revenue, earnings and capital investments for the second quarter as they become more risk averse, according to Deloitte's latest CFO Signals report.

Deloitte's quarterly report showed that CFO sentiment fell in the second quarter as the CFO confidence score was 5.4, indicating medium confidence, down from 6.4 in the first quarter. The first quarter tally indicated high confidence among CFOs.

By the numbers:

• 23% of CFOs rate the North American economy as good now. In the first quarter, half of CFOs said the North American economy was good.
• 46% of CFOs said the US stock market was undervalued with 41% saying it was overvalued.
• 53% of CFOs said debt financing was attractive.
• One in three CFOs believe it's a good time to take on risk. That reading is the lowest since the third quarter of 2024 and well below the 60% of CFOs who thought the first quarter was a good time to take risk.

The top external and internal risks for CFOs were worth noting. CFOs were worried about the following external risks.

• 53% of CFOs said the economy was top external risk.
• 51% cited cybersecurity.
• 43% said interest rates.
• 42% supply chain disruptions.
• 42% said inflation.
• 37% said geopolitics followed by 32% who cited taxes.

The top internal risks included the following:

• 46% of CFOs were worried about talent.
• 46% were worried about lack of ability and resilience.
• 45% cited cost management.
• 43% cited efficiency and productivity.
• 43% cited data compatibility and accessibility.
• 43% cited technology deployment including AI.
• 36% cited strategy execution.

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.&nbsp; <br>Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and… Read more

Ingram Micro, a large technology distributor, said the company has been hit with a ransomware attack that took down its systems.

The press release confirms reports from BleepingComputer as well as comments on Reddit about the outage. Ingram Micro systems have been down since Thursday. The company said Tuesday that it has been restoring systems, but is taking orders via phone and email in many cases.

In a statement, Ingram Micro said:

"Ingram Micro recently identified ransomware on certain of its internal systems. Promptly after learning of the issue, the Company took steps to secure the relevant environment, including proactively taking certain systems offline and implementing other mitigation measures. The Company also launched an investigation with the assistance of leading cybersecurity experts and notified law enforcement.

Ingram Micro is working diligently to restore the affected systems so that it can process and ship orders, and the Company apologizes for any disruption this issue is causing its customers, vendor partners, and others."

According to BleepingComputer, Ingram Micro was hit by the SafePay ranswomware attack.

On July 7, Ingram Micro had posted an update. Ingram Micro said it has made progress restoring systems, but is using its unified support organization to fulfill orders. The company said:

"Today, we made important progress on restoring our transactional business. Subscription orders, including renewals and modifications, are available globally and are being processed centrally via Ingram Micro’s support organization. Additionally, we are now able to process orders received by phone or email from the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Brazil, India, China, Portugal and Nordics. Some limitations still exist with hardware and other technology orders, which will be clarified as orders are placed. To place subscription orders, customers should contact Unified Support. For general inquiries, customers should contact their sales representative."

Ingram Micro didn't detail what systems have been impacted, but the company's recently announced Xvantage distribution platform is reportedly one of them. Ingram Micro had scheduled a preview of Xvantage components for July 17.

Xvantage was launched in 2022 and now uses AI to automate quote creation, order management and real-time tracking.

The thing to watch now is whether Ingram Micro pays the ransom to get its systems back or continues to take a sales hit. Ingram Micro's outage occurred before a long July 4th holiday weekend when business was likely to be slow. Each day Ingram Micro is down, there will be a sales hit. Ingram Micro will also have to detail costs associated with the attack.

Based on Ingram Micro's first quarter sales of $12.28 billion, the company stands to lose more than $136 million in sales for each day it can't fulfill orders. For instance, Clorox had to issue a profit warning due to a cyberattack and saw sales decline more than 20%.

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.&nbsp; <br>Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and… Read more

CoreWeave said it will acquire Core Scientific in an all-stock deal valued at about $9 billion. Core Scientific, a crypto mining company, was a data center provider to CoreWeave.

According to CoreWeave, the acquisition of Core Scientific will eliminate about $10 billion of future leases, create $500 million annual run rate cost savings by the end of 2027 and simplify operations.

CoreWeave said it may "repurpose or divest" Core Scientific's crypto mining business over time.

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Under the terms of the deal, expected to close in the fourth quarter, CoreWeave sill issue 0.1235 shares of Class A share for each Core Scientific shares. When the deal closes, Core Scientific shareholders will own less than 10% of CoreWeave.

The purchase of Core Scientific will give CoreWeave 1.3 GW of gross power and an expanded data center footprint. CoreWeave also said the deal will give it 1 GW of power for expansion.

Michael Intrator, CEO of CoreWeave, said adding CoreScientific's data center network enables it to " significantly enhance operating efficiency and de-risk our future expansion, solidifying our growth trajectory."

CoreWeave said the purchase will give reduce its cost of capital, give it more control over its footprint and add expertise in construction, power and site management. CoreWeave derives 83% of its revenue from three customers led by Microsoft. The company also recently announced deals with OpenAI and IBM.

The AI-cloud provider has been expanding rapidly since its March 2025 IPO. CoreWeave has been standing up systems based on Nvidia's latest technology, acquiring firms like Weights & Balances and growing revenue at a rapid clip amid a boom in AI infrastructure.

For the first quarter, CoreWeave reported revenue of $981.63 million, up 420% from a year ago. The company's net loss was $314 million. Non-GAAP net loss for the first quarter was $149.55 million.

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.&nbsp; <br>Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and… Read more

Enterprises may want to start thinking of large language models (LLMs) as ensemble casts that can combine knowledge and reasoning to complete tasks, according to Japanese AI lab Sakana AI.

Sakana AI in a research paper outlined a method called Multi-LLM AB-MCTS (Adaptive Branching Monte Carlo Tree Search) that uses a collection of LLMs to cooperate, perform trial-and-error and leverage strengths to solve complex problems.

In a post, Sakana AI said:

"Frontier AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek are evolving at a breathtaking pace amidst fierce competition. However, no matter how advanced they become, each model retains its own individuality stemming from its unique training data and methods. We see these biases and varied aptitudes not as limitations, but as precious resources for creating collective intelligence. Just as a dream team of diverse human experts tackles complex problems, AIs should also collaborate by bringing their unique strengths to the table."

Sakana AI said AB-MCTS is a method for inference-time scaling to enable frontier AIs to cooperate and revisit problems and solutions. Sakana AI released the algorithm as an open source framework called TreeQuest, which has a flexible API that allows users to use AB-MCTS for tasks with multiple LLMs and custom scoring.

What's interesting is that Sakana AI gets out of that zero-sum LLM argument. The companies behind LLM training would like you to think there's one model to rule them all. And you'd do the same if you were spending so much on training models and wanted to lock in customers for scale and returns.

Sakana AI's deceptively simple solution can only come from a company that's not trying to play LLM leapfrog every few minutes. The power of AI is in the ability to maximize the potential of each LLM. Sakana AI said:

"We saw examples where problems that were unsolvable by any single LLM were solved by combining multiple LLMs. This went beyond simply assigning the best LLM to each problem. In (an) example, even though the solution initially generated by o4-mini was incorrect, DeepSeek-R1-0528 and Gemini-2.5-Pro were able to use it as a hint to arrive at the correct solution in the next step. This demonstrates that Multi-LLM AB-MCTS can flexibly combine frontier models to solve previously unsolvable problems, pushing the limits of what is achievable by using LLMs as a collective intelligence."

A few thoughts:

• Sakana AI's research and move to emphasize collective intelligence over on LLM and stack is critical to enterprises that need to create architectures that don't lock them into one provider.
• AB-MCTS could play into what agentic AI needs to become to be effective and complement emerging standards such as Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent2Agent.
• If combining multiple models to solve problems becomes frictionless, the costs will plunge. Will you need to pay up for OpenAI when you can leverage LLMs like DeepSeek combined with Gemini and a few others? 
• Enterprises may want to start thinking about how to build decision engines instead of an overall AI stack. 
• We could see a scenario where a collective of LLMs achieves superintelligence before any one model or provider. If that scenario plays out, can LLM giants maintain valuations?
• The value in AI may not be in the infrastructure or foundational models in the long run, but the architecture and approaches.

More:

• AI's boom and the questions few ask
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• Agentic AI: Is it really just about UX disruption for now?
• RPA and those older technologies aren’t dead yet
• Lessons from early AI agent efforts so far
• Every vendor wants to be your AI agent orchestrator: Here's how you pick
• Agentic AI: Everything that’s still missing to scale
• BT150 zeitgeist: Agentic AI has to be more than an 'API wearing an agent t-shirt'

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights Constellation Research

About Larry Dignan: Dignan was most recently Celonis Media’s Editor-in-Chief, where he sat at the intersection of media and marketing. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in CNET, Knowledge@Wharton, Wall Street Week, Interactive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Temple University and a member of the Advisory Board for The Fox Business School's Institute of Business and Information Technology.&nbsp; <br>Constellation Insights does the following: Cover the buy side and sell side of enterprise tech with news, analysis, profiles, interviews, and event coverage of vendors, as well as Constellation Research's community and… Read more

The money being thrown around AI talent and infrastructure is staggering, but the return on investment may be sketchy for longer time frames. What happens if AI demand doesn't deliver triple-digit growth forever?

In recent weeks, we've seen the following:

Oracle is predicting revenue gains for fiscal 2028. CEO Safra Catz told employees Oracle is off to a strong start in fiscal 2026 and the company signed multiple large cloud deals "including one that is expected to contribute more than $30 billion in annual revenue starting in FY28." Bloomberg later reported that Oracle's big cloud deal was with OpenAI.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is trying to hire a dream team and throwing billions into the effort. Zuckerberg is chasing superintelligence, but supergroups can be tough to manage.

CoreWeave said it’s the first AI cloud provider to deploy Nvidia's GB300 NVL72 systems for customers. CoreWeave has also signed a $11.9 billion deal with OpenAI for future compute capacity for model training. CoreWeave's model is fairly simple: Lever up with debt ($8.8 billion as of March 31) and grow your way out of it as future demand materializes. The issue: CoreWeave paid $460 million to service its debt for the first quarter ended March 30 and delivered overall net cash of $61 million. Simply put, CoreWeave would be a great business if it didn't have to pay interest rates between 9% and 15% depending on the credit facility. The company has cash and equivalents of $1.3 billion as of March 31. CoreWeave raises $7.5 billion in debt financing for AI data center buildout

As previously noted, the AI infrastructure game is really just a big leveraged bet that's working for now, but it's worth asking a few questions.

• How much of the AI boom is dependent on OpenAI posting crazy growth years into the future? Turns out a good bit. Oracle is building like mad on the bet that OpenAI is going to be bigger, badder and superintelligent in two years. What could go wrong? Well, Google, China's AI champions, Microsoft competition, hardware risks and a model training wall to name a few. CoreWeave is betting that OpenAI will be "a significant customer in future periods." Let's hope so. Microsoft was 72% of revenue in the first quarter. Three customers were 83% of CoreWeave revenue.
• Is Microsoft the smartest of the bunch? Microsoft is allowing OpenAI to diversify its infrastructure spending so it doesn't have to fork over so much dough. Microsoft and OpenAI are bickering over the terms of their partnership as the latter tries to ultimately go public and needs a new structure.
• Will Nvidia's rivals be good enough? The base of this AI infrastructure boom is Nvidia. Giants are spending mostly on Nvidia, but the market is diversifying with hyperscale cloud custom silicon and AMD. Is it possible that levering up to buy Nvidia GPUs isn't a slam dunk?
• When will the AI infrastructure music stop? The only guarantee is that the spending boom will pause and there will be glut. Timelines are debatable, but rest assured that deals based on demand years into the future are going to produce spectacular failures.

Add it up and AI infrastructure is looking a lot more like the sports world. Billionaires are spending hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars on player that may produce into the future (or not). A $300 million contract for a player often doesn't pay off. These AI deals aren't much different.