Warner Music Music (WMG) announced on Wednesday that it’s acquiring AI attribution startup Sureel AI. Sureel’s patented technology creates “AI DNA” for songs and breaks them down into component parts to trace how AI models use those elements.

Through the acquisition, WMG aims to better track when its artists’ and songwriters’ work is used in AI-generated content or for training AI models.

“Bringing Sureel into WMG strengthens our capability for protection, control and monetization and ensures that the creative community remains in control of its intellectual property, name, image, likeness, and voice,” said WMG chief executive Robert Kyncl in a press release.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Founded in 2022, Sureel also offers intellectual property provenance, audit and compliance reporting, model optimization, and AI business intelligence. The startup also has a name, image, and likeness (NIL) attribution suite to track how artist voices, likenesses, and performance identities are used in AI training and generation. This includes voice clones, AI-generated avatars, and style replication. 

The startup will continue to operate as a standalone platform serving the broader music and AI ecosystem, WMG says.

“Rightsholders deserve to know how AI interacts with their work, and to share fairly in the value it creates,” Sureel founder and chief executive Tamay Aykut said in remarks. “Sureel was built to make that possible, and with WMG’s backing, we can deliver on our mission at scale, building a more transparent and fair future and driving value growth for the whole music and entertainment ecosystem.”

WMG has embraced AI after initially opposing it, as the company originally sued music generation startup Suno in 2024 and later signed a licensing deal with the company last year. WMG said at the time that artists and songwriters would have full control over whether and how their names, images, likenesses, voices, and compositions are used in new AI-generated music.

It’s worth noting that Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group are still pursuing massive copyright infringement claims against the AI music startup.

WMG last year also settled its lawsuit against AI music startup Udio and reached a licensing deal with the company.

SpaceX is coming to market on Friday, and investors can barely contain their excitement. The $75 billion stock offering is reportedly deeply over-subscribed, with some institutional investors ponying up for $10 billion blocks of Elon Musk’s empire.

There are lots of reasons to be skeptical of the investment — big IPOs tend to sink, the company is losing money, and Musk’s erratic online behavior would be terrifying coming from any other tech CEO — but it doesn’t seem to be slowing anyone down. Tech investors have learned to never bet against Elon, whatever the business logic indicates.

But a dispassionate look at SpaceX’s financial plans can still tell us a lot about what they’re betting on: A business centered around orbital data centers that emerged in the last eighteen months as Musk sought a vision that would unite his conglomerate ahead of its IPO.

In true Musk style, it’s a bold scheme, and one that requires at least three near-impossible feats of engineering: a reusable rocket, a brand-new American chip foundry, and a sprint to build satellites faster than ever before.

That kind of business plan can be difficult to score. This week, two analyses tried to offer a more a sober assessment of SpaceX’s plan — one from Morningstar, the financial research firm, and another from Aswath Damodaran, a New York University finance professor who takes a special interest in corporate valuation. Both exercises find SpaceX significantly less valuable than the nearly $1.8 trillion assessment proffered by the company’s bankers. Morningstar assigns a value of about $825 billion, while Damodaran suggests the company is worth $1.2 trillion.

The significant difference is, in many ways, the result of bolting a world-beating space monopoly to a far riskier AI business. Morningstar’s analyst characterizes the difference between their assessment of a fair value of $63 a share, and SpaceX’s offering price of $135, as a $72 call option on the company’s ability to deliver orbital data centers at the rate and capability that Musk believes is possible.

In both analyses, the high-margins of the company’s space launch business and its satellite internet network are the most attractive things about the company, while its AI business is the most uncertain.

To cloud or not to cloud?

Part of the question is, what is SpaceX’s AI business? In the company’s S-1 market analysis, it frames its largest opportunity in enterprise AI — that its models will power coding tools built by the team it acqui-hired from Cursor, or the company’s Macrohard project, which is intended to equip digital agents with the capabilities to perform white-collar labor. SpaceX assessed the total market for that business as $22.7 trillion, compared to $2.4 trillion for AI infrastructure and just under $2 trillion for the company’s space efforts.

But that contradicts the company’s recent deals to sell significant amounts of compute to Anthropic and Google, ostensible competitors in the model business. That’s not out of place for a Musk company; SpaceX frequently launches satellites operated by competitors to its Starlink network. It just usually does that from a place of strength, not while playing catch-up.

Acting like a neocloud might be good near-term business, but it raises the question of where value will accrue in the AI tech stack: Is it better to be a compute provider or a model-builder, if you can’t be both?

The scaling logic that dominates the AI business demands that serious frontier labs constantly train new and more powerful models (or, as Musk admitted in his recent lawsuit against Sam Altman, by distilling capabilities from other companies models). Any competitor not rushing ahead is likely to fall behind, although the rising abilities of cheaper open-source models might undermine that dynamic.

Space data centers are one way to square the circle, providing so much compute that SpaceX could effectively do both.

Musk’s space data center architecture

In a video interview released by SpaceX this week, Musk laid out the logic for why SpaceX is best positioned to deliver on data centers. The core of the argument was that SpaceX is the only company capable of putting a lot of mass on orbit cheaply, building a lot of solar panels, and building a lot of chips. In general, industry experts see space data centers at scale being about a decade away, but Musk argued (with a lot of caveats) that they are much closer.

“This is not a promise of what we’ll do,” Musk said in the video. “This is what we are going to try to do, and think we probably can do, which is to get to roughly an annualized rate of a gigawatt per year by the end of next year, in terms of space AI compute.”

Based on his expected maximum power delivery of 150kW per satellite, that’s a production rate of 6,666 satellites a year, or about 556 a month. That’s roughly twice the reported current production rate of Starlink satellites, which is just 70 a week. Though Musk says that the AI satellites are simpler in architecture, that’s a lot to ask for a production facility that hasn’t been built yet. The company is also still building out its solar panel production facility.

That’s before we get to Terafab, the company’s much-discussed chip foundry, which Musk sees feeding into the later stages of this product as the company tries to scale up to a terawatt of annual compute production. Chip fabs are some of the hardest modern industrial projects, typically costing billions of dollars and taking as long as a decade to build.

Then there’s the most vital question: What about Starship, the key to SpaceX’s ability to economically put all those chips in orbit?

A recent test flight went well enough, but it didn’t suggest that rapid reusability is right around the corner. SpaceX may end up reusing just the booster at first, which would raise the costs of the space data center roll-out. For now, the company is still undergoing a mishap investigation for the FAA to understand why the booster stage failed to make a controlled reentry as planned. SpaceX hasn’t responded to questions about when the vehicle will fly again, thought it has said it expects to begin launching Starlink satellites with it by the end of this year.

But take that with a grain of salt: Consider that NASA, which has a nearly $4 billion contract with SpaceX to use Starship as a Moon lander, still isn’t ready to commit to a test mission with the vehicle scheduled for late 2027.

Buyer Beware

As public investors get their hands on SpaceX shares, they’ll find themselves owning a near-monopoly on access to space in the US and Europe, a world-spanning communications network, and a wager on the most ambitious infrastructure project of the AI era.

Those projects depend on SpaceX creating something never seen before — a fully-reusable rocket. The company will also need to build a high-rate production facility for AI satellites, but do so in eighteen months, not the decade it took to develop its Starlink manufacturing. Finally, it will need to build a chip foundry in the US, something even dedicated silicon firms are reluctant to take on. Musk is right that SpaceX is the only company positioned to build any of this anytime soon, but that speaks to the magnitude of the challenge as much as the company’s likelihood of achieving it.

Musk used to say he wouldn’t take SpaceX public until he reached Mars, since fickle investors might lose faith along the way. Those plans may have been put on hold, but what he’s laid out ahead of the company’s IPO could be just as difficult.

Pinterest is expanding its partnership with Amazon. The social pinboard site said on Wednesday that it will now serve as a home for creators’ Amazon Storefronts. These online stores allow creators to generate income from affiliate links that direct their fans to products that they often feature in their videos and social media content.

The move gives Pinterest another way to appeal to creators who have largely built their shopping and affiliate businesses on larger platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Facebook. Pinterest says more than half its users visit it to shop, and that it sees more than 80 billion searches per month.

The deal comes as Pinterest works to regain its position as a shopping destination, and responds to user complaints about the growing volume of AI-generated content on the platform.

Pinterest said creators will now be able to use a new tool to connect their Amazon Storefront directly to their Pinterest account. After setup, their affiliate link will be applied automatically whenever they tag an eligible Amazon product, automating the process of promoting items.

These storefronts can then be featured on creators’ Pinterest profiles, allowing their fans and followers to see a broader picture of their recommendations beyond a single Pin or Board.

The deal ties Amazon and Pinterest closer together after the companies first introduced their multi-year ads partnership in 2023, which made Amazon the first partner on third-party ads on Pinterest. The company then followed this up with a similar advertising deal with Google in 2024, as it continued to struggle to grow revenue for its popular but not fully monetized bookmarking, shopping, and inspiration platform.

However, Pinterest has also faced a barrage of AI content over the past year that has alienated some of its user base and led to many complaints about “AI slop.” The company last year rolled out a series of new tools to fight the AI content and put users in control, but it can only do so much when much of the AI content remains unlabeled.

This partnership offers Pinterest a new way to get back on track. By working with real-world creators, Pinterest could potentially reverse its souring reputation and become known once again as a place to shop and be inspired by other people’s recommendations.

Pinterest notes it will support storefront linking with “other partners” soon.