The ridiculousness of Allbirds becoming an AI company seems like it would be hard to beat…but as the Equity Podcast knows, never bet against 2026’s ability to surprise:

“It works!” This surprise breakthrough led to @geckomaterials launching, and eventually landing customers like Apple, Ford, and General Motors with its especially adhesive product.

Listen to the full episode of Build mode to hear how founder and CEO, Capella Kerst, went from Stanford PhD to CEO:

The gap between AI insiders and everyone else is widening, and the spending, suspicion, and even new vocabulary are starting to show it. While OpenAI is busy buying up everything from finance apps to talk shows, a certain shoe company just rebranded as an AI infrastructure play, and Anthropic unveiled a model it says is too powerful to release publicly …but apparently not too powerful to demo to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into what’s actually being built in AI infrastructure, who’s winning the enterprise battle between OpenAI and Anthropic, and more of the week’s headlines.

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:25 Allbirds is now an AI company, apparently

04:48 Why chipmakers are betting on Wayve

12:01 Fluidstack wants $1B to build AI data centers

16:24 OpenAI buys a finance app and a talk show

21:27 Anthropic vs. OpenAI in enterprise

24:15 The Anthropic model they won’t release to the public

26:47 Why AI feels so distant to everyone else

30:47 What even is tokenmaxxing?

34:49 Parasail’s $32M bet on cheaper AI inference

36:39 Outro