Second pass through the same pile, different tabs. No argument here either — just the things that stayed open after everything else got closed.

Start with the money that didn’t arrive. DeepSeek pausing its $1.5 billion second round days before signature is the sort of event that gets read as a funding story and is really a compute story, and the leaked transcript is where the actual information sits. Set that against the state-level version of the same problem: twenty-nine signatures on the WAICO founding agreement in Shanghai, open weights offered as an alternative to chips nobody can buy. One of those is a company running short of hardware. The other is a country building an institution around the shortage.

The pile refills faster than it empties. Here’s another pass across it, no order implied.

Money first, and it’s a big number: the reported Stripe and Advent bid for PayPal at roughly $53 billion, a deal that would consolidate stablecoin payments in one stroke. Against it, a quieter structural read on why enterprise money is leaving old-school IBM for AI infrastructure — the collapse as a demonstration of where budgets actually go.