a16z

Deals

Guidewire borrows $1 billion to buy the AI that prices $75 billion of premiums

Guidewire signs a $1.7 billion cash deal, up to $2.1 billion with the earnout, for the AI pricing engine behind Aviva and Allianz. The 8-K filed the same morning shows the funding: a $1.0 billion term loan running to 2029.

October 27, 2026 · 2 min read

Chips

Amazon's Trainium can now train AI models, not just run them, testing Nvidia before Amazon's October 29 report

SemiAnalysis's hands-on test finds Trainium2 and Trainium3 now handle research training in native PyTorch, published the same day Andy Jassy called inference 10 times too expensive and pitched Amazon's chips as the fix. The software barrier that kept researchers on Nvidia is what moved; Amazon reports on October 29.

October 23, 2026 · 4 min read

Chips

Amazon's AWS pays Synopsys over $1 billion for chip blueprints to build past Nvidia

Amazon's cloud signed a multi-year deal worth over $1 billion for Synopsys chip-design blueprints, weeks after a reported plan to sell its own AI silicon outside AWS, and days after its finance chief claimed a $25 billion AI run rate with server paybacks under three years.

October 18, 2026 · 2 min read

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Also mentioned in

Guidewire borrows $1 billion to buy the AI that prices $75 billion of premiums

Amazon's Trainium can now train AI models, not just run them, testing Nvidia before Amazon's October 29 report

Amazon's AWS pays Synopsys over $1 billion for chip blueprints to build past Nvidia