Naveen had just returned from lunch when his manager knocked on his door.

"Big boss just called. Wants us in his office yesterday."

"Fuck," muttered Naveen.

"Come on, let's get this over with," said his manager unhappily.

Half an hour later they were standing in front of the desk of Marvin Maler, CEO of BallSoft.

"What happened with Radius?" asked the CEO calmly. "Did they give you any clues as to why they dropped us?"

"They didn't just drop us, sir," said Naveen. "They also dropped Yoctoly."

"Oh? Did they tell you this?"

"No, sir. My sister's boyfriend works for Yoctoly and he overheard two people talking in the breakroom. Radius dropped them the same day they dropped us."

"What did they tell you when you called them?" asked the CEO.

"I didn't need to call them. They called me and said they no longer needed our service. They even paid their balance due in advance. I asked them if there had been any problems with our service, and they said they'd had no problems with our service. They moved all their services on-prem."

"I'm sorry, I must not have heard correctly," said the CEO. "Did you say they moved their services on-prem?"

"Yes, sir," said Naveen. "They said they finally had enough data centers online, so they migrated all their services to their own data centers."

"How the fuck is that possible?!" muttered the CEO.

Ignoring the two men standing in front of him, the CEO grabbed his cell phone and angrily stabbed at it before putting it to his ear.

Naveen heard the faint sound of someone answering, then the CEO barked loudly, "Kang! You told me you were at capacity and wouldn't be able to satisfy our order for another six months!"

The person on the other end of the line answered, but it still wasn't loud enough to make out what they said.

"Then where the fuck did Radius get enough GPUs take their entire load on-prem! They would need at least ten million GPUs. Now you tell me where the fuck they got that many GPUs if it wasn't from you!"

"What?!"

This time, Naveen clearly heard the reply and understood the consternation he heard.

The rest of the reply was too quiet for Naveen to tell what the Blit Blaster CEO was saying.

"No," said Marvin Maler. "The Cerebras folks don't have that kind of manufacturing capacity; otherwise, we would have bought everything they could produce."

The two CEOs talked for a bit more, then his CEO hung up and turned to look at him and his manager.

"Well, this is certainly a mystery. And deeply concerning. They got their compute capacity from somewhere. And if they're not buying from us, that's a problem."

The CEO sighed and scrubbed his face with his hands.

"I'm authorizing you two to offer up to 20 percent off to existing or new customers. But only if it will lead to greater usage."

Then the CEO dismissed them with a wave of his hand, while muttering, "And I need to figure out just how screwed we are. Radius is chewing up AI market share like a starving wolf at a farm full of crippled rabbits."

——————————

Jack's phone dinged. He checked and saw that he had received a message on his secure communications app from Natalie, his money manager. She wanted to talk.

He was lounging by the pool inside his mansion, so he pressed the button to initiate a voice connection, and she accepted the connection after a few seconds.

"Thanks for calling, sir," said Natalie. "I wanted to inform you that the period of predictable volatility I had been utilizing has ended. Things turned a bit chaotic shortly after Radius went live, but I was able to predict how their arrival would affect the markets."

"Oh, good. I had wondered how their arrival would affect your plans," he said.

"Their arrival actually helped. The tone of that little economic war I was leveraging changed when Radius appeared, and one side seems to have panicked. It looked like one side had the advantage right up until Radius arrived. Then things took a turn."

She chuckled. "And last week, the side that had been winning panicked. It was a bloodbath, and we made out like a robber baron. The economic war seems to be over, so I'm sorry to say I won't be able to make the same kinds of profits for you I have over the last three months."

"Hold on a second."

He logged into one of his apps and checked his balance at Plutus Financial. It was larger than he had expected. Much larger. When he increased the amount she managed to 500 million credits, she had said she could get him between 300 and 900 percent returns over three months.

That would mean she could turn his 500 million credits into between 2 and 5 billion credits. She had exceeded that mark. Even after he had withdrawn close to 400 hundred million credits to buy Horizon VR and Jensen Manufacturing, create Radius and pay for all those data centers, he still had 9 billion credits.

"Well, I'm certainly not complaining. You've done excellent work, Natalie. If your former employer knew how much you've made me over the last three months, they would probably claw their eyes out in anguish."

She laughed. "Yes. Yes, they would. Still, I wish I had a better handle on what's going on right now. There's something happening with BallSoft, Yoctoly, and Blit Blaster. I just haven't figured out what yet."

"Would you consider it cheating if I told you what was happening behind the scenes with them?" asked Jack. "It will probably leak eventually, but I can tell you before then if you want."

"Is it insider information?" she asked warily.

"I own Radius."

"What?! Oh, damn! Um, I'm all ears. Radius is not traded on the market, so learning from their owner about something they did would not be considered insider information."

She sounded excited.

"A week ago, Radius transitioned all their services to their own data centers. They cut all dependencies on third-party providers. And all their compute hardware was built internally."

She gasped. "Oh, wow. That's huge. That... okay. Now I understand why one side of that war panicked. Blit Blaster has been making hundreds of billions of credits selling GPUs to BallSoft, Yoctoly, BayMoor, and many other companies."

"And with Radius dominating the AI market as well as having zero dependence on Blit Blaster, that means the demand for GPUs is going to fall off a cliff. With demand for non-Radius AI services plummeting, so too is demand for GPU services and GPUs. Blit Blaster stock is going to tank."

She gasped. "Sorry, gotta go. Please don't make any big withdrawals. We're about to make an absolute killing!"

She closed the connection before he could say anything. But she did send him several heart emojis and an eggplant emoji.

Seeing the eggplant emoji, he wondered if maybe he should talk to her again about joining his outer circle.

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