Factory-Cognition Drama, Instinct's Shopping Push, Gemini 4 Argon | Will Bruey, Christophe Beck, Hassaan Raza, Connor Renton

NVIDIA's cloud-aggregation ambitions ceded ground to CoreWeave even as AI infrastructure players (Varda, Ecolab, Tavis) show rapid commercial traction.

• NVIDIA's cloud ambitions stalled: DGX Cloud Lepton, Jensen's 2023 'planetary-scale AI factory' bid to aggregate NeoCloud compute (Lepton acquired ~$300-900M in April 2025), ended up as a software/standards layer rather than a true competitor to CoreWeave; CoreWeave launched its own 'CoreWeave Forge' full-stack AI cloud.
• VC firewall drama: Khosla's Vinod Khosla publicly attacked Factory (backed by rival Coastal Ventures) after Cognition fired an advisor (Chris Degnan) reportedly for interviewing at a competitor while still serving on Cognition's board/advisory role.

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