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meta launched $1,299 VR glasses. trump-xi dinner had the tech A-list. and the 10Y hit a 19-year high.
3 things worth your time
1. meta's connect keynote was all hardware.
on thursday, meta held its annual connect keynote with a full slate of new products: VR glasses, a palm-sized AI device, camera-free audio glasses, updated smart glasses, and a big list of new muse features.
the headline is meta VR glasses, launching spring 2027 at $1,299. compute lives on a small puck you wear on your belt, tethered to the glasses. that price undercuts apple's vision pro at $3,499 and snap's SPECS at $2,195.
alongside VR, meta announced ray-ban meta audio ($349, meta's first camera-free glasses, for music and calls), ray-ban meta gen 3 ($449, with a better camera), and muse charm, a palm-sized AI hardware device you can talk to directly. muse itself got upgraded too: voice conversations, live video chat, its own email address, and new connectors for walmart, best buy, gap, instacart, github, and more.
2. the trump-xi state dinner had the tech industry's A-list at the head table.
on thursday night, trump hosted xi jinping and his wife peng liyuan for a state dinner at the white house. the guest list included over 30 CEOs. the head table was stacked: elon musk (seated next to first lady melania), nvidia CEO jensen huang, AMD CEO lisa su, and apple executive chairman tim cook.
at the surrounding tables: openAI's sam altman and greg brockman, amazon founder jeff bezos, meta CEO mark zuckerberg, google CEO sundar pichai, microsoft CEO satya nadella, google cofounder sergey brin, and dell CEO michael dell.
the subtext for the whole evening was AI and chips. china has been increasingly aggressive about competing at the frontier, and every major US chipmaker and AI company was represented in the room. no big announcements came out of the dinner itself.
3. the 10-year treasury yield just hit its highest level in 19 years. here's what's driving it.
on thursday, the 10-year US treasury yield hit 5.18%, its highest level since 2007. it's up about 10% in the last 30 days.
why it matters: the 10Y sets the benchmark for basically everything long-term in the economy. mortgages, auto loans, corporate bonds, and stock valuations all price off of it. when the 10Y goes up, borrowing gets more expensive across the board.
two competing theories from tech and finance twitter for what's pushing it up:
the middle east war. iran-related oil supply shocks push up oil prices, which push up inflation expectations, which push up long-term rates. straightforward macro story.
AI data center capex. hyperscalers (microsoft, amazon, google, meta, oracle, plus AI infrastructure specialists like coreweave) are raising tens of billions in bond markets to build data centers. when huge borrowers all try to raise at once, they compete with the government for the same pool of investor dollars. treasuries have to offer higher yields to stay attractive.
reality is likely both. oil is the near-term shock. AI capex is the longer-running pressure. either way, rates stay elevated as long as one of them keeps pushing.
two more quick things
iran is being economically squeezed.
on wednesday, iranian president masoud pezeshkian admitted on fox news that iran's money in china is blocked: "we can't even get our own money out of a country to which we have supplied goods." US secondary sanctions have effectively kept chinese banks from paying iran for years, but it's unusual for iran's president to say so publicly. on sunday, treasury secretary scott bessent said iran has only about 15 million barrels of oil left to sell to china, then "nothing left to trade." bessent's timeline for collapse: two weeks.
openAI's agent hacked an australian government website.
per the WSJ, an autonomous agent built with openAI's models accessed and modified pages on an australian government site without authorization. openAI has acknowledged the incident. adds to a running series of AI-agent security incidents this year.
see you thursday.
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