Nvidia, OpenAI, SpaceX: AI’s world changes again

AI’s everything – On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic—followed by an American economic shock and a cascade of major public moments. Now, on May 20, 2026, a different kind of rupture is being priced into markets: Nvidia’s $81.6 billion q

He says it started in the most ordinary place possible: on a toilet, both times—like history has a sense of timing.

The first jolt came on March 11. 2020. when America finally caught up to what the rest of the world had already been living through. More than 4. 000 people had died worldwide before that date. yet in the United States the virus still felt distant—so distant that multiple media outlets were admonishing Andreessen Horowitz not for its “retardmaxxing” rhetoric now. but for banning handshakes in its office to prevent the spread of the virus.

Then March 11 landed, and everything snapped into place at once. The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. The Dow Jones officially entered a bear market. Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson announced they had COVID. Donald Trump issued a travel ban on people traveling from Europe. And the NBA suspended its season after star center Rudy Gobert tested positive for the virus.

That evening, he described a “queasy, giddy, horrifying shiver”—the realization that the world he knew had ended, and a new, unmapped one had begun.

The second time he felt that same kind of shift was this past Wednesday. He ties it to May 20, 2026, calling it AI’s “everything changed” moment.

The numbers came first—so large they didn’t feel real. Nvidia posted record quarterly revenue of $81.6 billion, more than 26 times its revenue in the first quarter of 2020. Anthropic. a company that didn’t even exist in 2020. was projected by The Wall Street Journal to reach $10.9 billion in revenue next quarter. more than double the quarter before. at a growth rate faster than Zoom’s in the pandemic.

Then came the double whammy of OpenAI. The Wall Street Journal reported the company—fresh off its legal victory against Elon Musk—is preparing to go public within weeks. In the same stretch of news. OpenAI said one of its models had solved a famous geometry problem that had vexed mathematicians for 80 years. In the weepy announcement video. multiple OpenAI researchers and mathematicians looked “thunderstruck. ” describing how they were losing sleep over what the bot had achieved.

The momentum carried into SpaceX filings filed on Wednesday. SpaceX filed to go public, and its SEC filings, according to the piece, lay out the path for Elon Musk to become the world’s first trillionaire. They also reveal how much the rocket company aspires to be a world-dominating AI company.

The S-1 shows Anthropic is paying $15 billion a year to access SpaceX’s cloud computing infrastructure. It also points to a widely shared and questioned slide: SpaceX thinks its total addressable market for its space business is $370 billion. while its AI business could be $26.5 trillion—$6 trillion more than the GDP of China.

In the middle of these world-historic figures and the talk around the biggest IPO season in the history of money, Meta began to free up room for more investments in AI. Meta laid off 8,000 employees.

Those cuts landed in a wider chain reaction: the piece lists thousands more recently laid off employees from Amazon, Atlassian, Block, Cloudflare, Coinbase, Intuit, LinkedIn, Oracle, Workday, and elsewhere.

Wednesday’s AI torrent also arrived right after a busy week of public moments about technology and trust. A stadium full of undergraduates jeered former Google CEO Eric Schmidt every time he brought up AI. Google, in the piece’s description, is “ruining the internet” with its new AI search feature. And Citadel CEO Ken Griffin—who in January dismissed AI as “all garbage”—admitted onstage that he felt “fairly depressed” after witnessing AI agents perform “extraordinarily high skilled jobs” at his hedge fund. He said: “You could see this is going to have such a dramatic impact on society.”.

By the time the sun rose over Silicon Valley. all of it had broken—news stacked on news. companies and filings and product claims moving at the same pace. In the story’s telling, the cascade confirmed what some people still doubted: the old world’s sun had set. Another uncertain future was already underway, with no known end date.

Nvidia OpenAI Anthropic SpaceX Meta layoffs SEC filing IPO season AI market cloud computing infrastructure Ken Griffin Eric Schmidt ChatGPT COVID March 11 2020