Your weekly pulse on Tech & AI · May 24, 2026 · Issue #7
FROM THE EDITOR
This week felt like the moment when everything started moving at once. Two of the most talked-about companies on the planet filed for public markets within days of each other, Google put its full weight behind Gemini at I/O, and regulators in Europe quietly rewrote the rulebook on AI compliance timelines. There is a lot to unpack, so let us get into it.
— Rudy
COVER STORY
The IPO Race Nobody Saw Coming: SpaceX and OpenAI Hit the Public Markets
On May 20, 2026, SpaceX dropped its S-1 filing with the SEC, targeting a Nasdaq listing under the ticker SPCX and seeking to raise $80 billion at a valuation of $1.7 trillion. That would make it one of the largest IPOs in history before a single share has been priced. The S-1 discloses $18.67 billion in 2025 revenue, a number that reflects not just rockets and Starlink satellites but the full weight of the xAI merger completed in February. SpaceX now owns the Colossus data center with over 220,000 Nvidia GPUs and an orbital data center partnership with Google.
The timing was not a coincidence. Within the same news cycle, CNBC reported that OpenAI is preparing a confidential S-1 filing of its own, targeting a September listing at a valuation somewhere between $852 billion and $1 trillion. OpenAI exited 2025 with an annualized revenue rate above $20 billion, driven by its 230 million weekly ChatGPT users, the GPT-5.5 model family, and a fast-growing enterprise API business. The company has been one of the defining forces of the current AI wave, and its entry into public markets will be one of the most watched financial events of the decade.
What makes this week particularly striking is the layered nature of both filings. SpaceX is not just a rocket company going public. It is an AI infrastructure company, a satellite internet provider, and a space logistics business all at once. OpenAI is not just a chatbot company. It is an API platform, a consumer product, an enterprise software provider, and increasingly a media company. Both of them are betting that public investors are ready to price in a version of the future that has not fully arrived yet. That bet has historically gone both ways.
What to watch: SpaceX pricing is expected in late June. If it trades above its initial valuation on day one, it will almost certainly trigger OpenAI to accelerate its own timeline. Watch the institutional demand signals coming out of roadshow coverage in early June.
PLATFORM SHIFT
Google Goes All In on Gemini: I/O 2026 Was the Biggest Bet the Company Has Ever Made
Google I/O 2026 was not a product announcement. It was a statement of intent. Across Search, Android, Chrome, Workspace, YouTube, and shopping, Google placed Gemini at the center of everything it builds. The headline product was Gemini Ultra, a new $100 per month subscription tier that delivers 5x higher usage limits than the $20 AI Pro plan, 20 terabytes of cloud storage, YouTube Premium, and early access to experimental features under the Gemini Spark label. That price point is a direct signal to enterprise and power users that Google is competing for serious wallet share.
The more technically interesting move was the announcement of Gemini 3.5 Flash reaching general availability. The model offers what Google describes as frontier-level intelligence at four times the speed of comparable models, priced at $1.50 per million input tokens and $9 per million output tokens. For developers and companies building on top of AI APIs, those numbers matter a great deal. Alongside this, Google introduced Gemini Omni, a multimodal model capable of processing text, images, audio, and video in a single context, and rolled out native integrations with Adobe, Canva, and CapCut so users can move creative work between Gemini and professional editing tools without switching platforms.
There is a bigger strategic story underneath all of this. Google is not just building AI features. It is building an AI operating system that runs on top of every surface it controls. The Blackstone joint venture announced this week, with an initial $5 billion equity commitment to bring 500 megawatts of AI infrastructure online by 2027, tells you exactly how serious Google is about the physical layer of this bet.
What to watch: Gemini Omni has not yet been released widely. When it ships for developers, test it against GPT-5.5 on multimodal tasks. The gap between frontier models is narrowing, and the real differentiation is increasingly about ecosystem lock-in rather than raw capability.
POLICY & REGULATION
Europe Rewrites Its AI Rules: What the AI Act Omnibus Means for Every Company Using AI
On May 7, 2026, the European Council and Parliament reached a political agreement on the AI Act Omnibus, a set of amendments designed to simplify and streamline the original regulation. The headline change is a 16-month delay for high-risk AI system obligations, pushing the compliance deadline from August 2, 2026 to December 2, 2027. For companies that were scrambling to meet this summer's requirements, that extension is significant. It does not make the regulation go away, but it gives organizations more runway to build proper compliance frameworks rather than rushing to check boxes.
The Omnibus also added two new categories of prohibited AI practices that were not in the original text. The first bans AI systems used to generate or manipulate non-consensual intimate images. The second explicitly prohibits AI-generated child sexual abuse material. These additions reflect the political reality that generative AI has moved faster than the original drafters anticipated.
Zooming out to the transatlantic picture, the contrast with the United States remains sharp. The US still has no federal AI statute. Instead, a patchwork of state laws is filling the void, including Colorado's AI Act which takes effect in 2026 and targets developers and deployers of high-risk AI systems with documentation requirements and anti-discrimination obligations. For multinational companies, this creates genuine compliance complexity.
What to watch: The December 2026 deadline for transparency obligations on synthetic content generation is still on the table. If you are building products that use AI to generate or manipulate images, audio, or video, that timeline should be in your product roadmap right now.
QUICK TAKES
- A transformer alternative arrives: Subquadratic shipped SubQ 1M-Preview on May 5, a model that is architecturally not a transformer, with a native 12 million token context window and $29 million in seed funding behind it. Worth following.
- Meta cuts 8,000 jobs: Meta completed the first phase of its planned 10% workforce reduction this week, targeting roles as it reallocates resources toward AI infrastructure and automation.
- Anthropic and the Gates Foundation partner on global AI: A four-year, $200 million agreement will fund development of AI tools focused on healthcare, education, agriculture, and economic development in underserved regions.
- Big tech capital spending reaches $725 billion: Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet have collectively signaled roughly $725 billion in capital expenditure for 2026, almost entirely earmarked for data centers, custom chips, and AI models.
IN THE PRESS
UAE Stories: Inside Rudy Shoushany's Mission
UAE Stories published a feature this week on the mission driving the work across digital transformation, AI, and responsible technology adoption in the region. It covers the thinking behind DxTalks, the philosophy that connects governance to innovation, and why the MENA market is one of the most important places to be having these conversations right now.
Read the full feature: uaestories.com/inside-rudy-shoushanys-mission-to
Worth Reading: Ready or Not (blog.its.ws)
This piece from the ITS blog takes a clear-eyed look at where organizations actually stand when AI transformation arrives, ready or not. The core argument: the question is no longer whether AI will change your organization — it already is. The question is whether you will shape that change or simply absorb it.
Read it here: blog.its.ws/ready-or-not
COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHT
MENA Blockchain Week Wraps Up in Dubai Today
MENA Blockchain Week 2026 closes today, May 24, after a full week of city-wide activity that turned Dubai into the region's most concentrated Web3 environment. The initiative ran from May 18 to 24 across more than 40 simultaneous events, more than 100 speakers, and an estimated 5,000 attendees spread across multiple venues throughout the city.
What makes MENA Blockchain Week significant is what it signals about the region's seriousness around Web3 infrastructure. Dubai and the UAE have been building regulatory and institutional frameworks for blockchain and digital assets for several years, and events like this one reflect a maturity in the conversation that goes beyond hype.
Official website: menablockchainweek.ae | Community & updates: luma.com/MENABCW
LAST CALL
AI for Executives Training by DxTalks
If you have been putting off getting structured on AI, this is your moment. The AI for Executives program from DxTalks is designed for exactly the kind of leader who reads this newsletter: someone who understands that AI is not going away, who wants to move beyond surface-level familiarity, and who needs a practical framework for making real decisions about AI strategy, governance, and adoption inside their organization. It is not a technical course. It is a leadership course built for the world we are already living in.
Seats are limited and this cohort is closing. Register before spots are gone → dxtalks.com/trainings
Until Next Week
A lot happened in seven days. Two of the most consequential companies in tech moved toward public markets at the same time. Google made its clearest bet yet on what the AI era looks like for the average consumer. And Europe gave the world a glimpse at what regulated AI governance could actually look like, even if the timeline just shifted. These are not isolated events. They are pieces of the same picture, and the picture is coming into focus faster than most people expected.
As always, I am reading so you do not have to. See you next Sunday.
Rudy Shoushany
Digital Transformation | AI | Blockchain | ICT Governance
