Nvidia: $81.6 Billion in a Quarter. More Than the Czech State Budget

Let's start with numbers that take your breath away. Nvidia announced record quarterly revenue of $81.6 billion — more than 26 times its revenue from the first quarter of 2020. For comparison: the entire Czech state budget for 2025 was roughly 2.3 trillion crowns, or about $100 billion. Nvidia earned nearly as much in three months as the Czech Republic does in an entire year. And we're talking about a single company.

The driver of this growth remains data center chips for training and running AI models. Every large language model — whether GPT from OpenAI, Claude from Anthropic, or models from Google and Microsoft — runs on hardware produced by Nvidia. The company thus maintains its position as a key supplier for the entire AI industry. Its H100 processors and the newer Blackwell series remain the standard that no serious AI lab can do without. And it seems that will remain the case for a long time — Nvidia's lead in AI chip manufacturing is proving difficult for competitors to close.

As reported by Business Insider, this was the strongest quarter in the history of the semiconductor industry.

Anthropic: A Company That Didn't Exist Now Headed for a Trillion-Dollar Valuation

Even more remarkable is the story of Anthropic, creator of the Claude model. A company that didn't even exist in 2020 is now, according to the Wall Street Journal, expected to reach $10.9 billion in revenue next quarter. That's more than double compared to the current quarter — a growth pace that surpasses even the legendary expansion of Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees led by Dario and Daniela Amodei. Today, the company is valued at one trillion dollars on secondary markets, making it one of the most valuable private companies on the planet. Its Claude model ranks among the most powerful language models on the market and is commonly available in the Czech Republic, including Czech language support in the conversational interface. Czech companies and individuals can thus use the same technology that global corporations build on.

OpenAI: Heading to the Stock Market with a Mathematical Breakthrough

OpenAI, which kicked off the entire wave of AI chatbots with the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, announced two groundbreaking pieces of news. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company is preparing to go public within a few weeks — it will be one of the most watched IPOs in the history of the tech sector. The market speculates that the valuation could exceed $200 billion. The IPO comes shortly after OpenAI won a legal battle with Elon Musk, who had tried to block the conversion to a for-profit company.

The second piece of news, however, is even more remarkable from a technology standpoint. One of OpenAI's models solved a famous geometric problem that had puzzled mathematicians for 80 years. In an emotional announcement video, OpenAI researchers and collaborating mathematicians admitted they couldn't sleep due to the implications of what the model had proven. The exact details of the solution have not yet been fully published, but the very fact that an AI model was able to come up with an original mathematical proof — not just reproduce what it had learned — signals a shift from language skills to genuine scientific creativity.

SpaceX: The Rocket Company That Wants to Dominate AI

The most surprising news of the day came from SpaceX. Musk's space company filed to go public (S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) and the documents revealed something many suspected but few expected on this scale: SpaceX doesn't just want to be a rocket company. It wants to be a dominant player in the artificial intelligence market.

According to the published filings, Anthropic pays SpaceX $15 billion a year for access to its cloud computing infrastructure. Alongside rockets, SpaceX has built its own network of data centers and offers it as an alternative to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. And what's more — an internal SpaceX presentation states that the total addressable market for its space business is "only" $370 billion, while SpaceX estimates the market potential for its AI business at $26.5 trillion — that's $6 trillion more than the GDP of all of China. These numbers sparked considerable skepticism on Wall Street, but the direction is clear: Musk's company is betting that the future belongs not to rockets, but to artificial intelligence.

The Human Cost: Layoffs, Uncertainty, and Billionaire Confessions

While the numbers on the stock exchanges were rising, the human impacts of AI transformation are no less real. On the same day, Meta announced the layoff of 8,000 employees — with the explicit goal of freeing up resources for artificial intelligence investments. It thus joined a long list of companies that have laid off massively in recent weeks: Amazon, Atlassian, Block, Cloudflare, Coinbase, Intuit, LinkedIn, Oracle, and Workday. Thousands of skilled professionals found themselves in a job market that is dramatically transforming under the pressure of AI automation.

Also telling was the appearance of Ken Griffin, head of the hedge fund Citadel, who back in January had called AI "complete garbage." Last week at a public event, he admitted he felt "quite depressed" after seeing AI agents perform "extraordinarily highly skilled work" within his own fund. "You can see this is going to have such a dramatic impact on society," he added.

What It Means for the Czech Republic and Europe

For European — and thus Czech — companies and individuals, several key implications arise from this news.

First: the cost of entering the AI race is skyrocketing. When Anthropic pays $15 billion a year just for cloud infrastructure, it's clear that developing proprietary large models will remain the domain of a handful of global giants. European companies — including Czech ones — should therefore focus on applications and integrations of existing models, not on developing them from scratch. The exception is specialized models for specific domains (healthcare, law, industry), where a smaller model with narrowly focused data can have an advantage.

Second: the wave of AI IPOs will create new investment opportunities, but at the same time concentrates economic power. Elon Musk could, according to analyses, become the first dollar trillionaire in history. For European regulatory bodies, this means an increased need for oversight of market concentration — a topic that is at the core of the EU AI Act, which came into full effect in 2025.

Third: for the average Czech user and company, it is crucial to learn how to work with these tools. Claude from Anthropic, ChatGPT from OpenAI, and models from Google are commonly available in the Czech Republic, mostly with Czech language support — although the quality of Czech still lags behind English. Competition among the giants means rapid improvement of features and more accessible prices, at least for now. The basic versions of ChatGPT and Claude are free, advanced ones cost around $20 (roughly 460 CZK) per month.

More Than the Sum of Its Parts

Individually, each of these stories would be significant. Together — within a single morning — they created a moment that Business Insider compares to March 11, 2020, the day the world realized the COVID-19 pandemic would change everything. Whether this comparison is exaggerated or not, one thing is certain: May 20, 2026 definitively confirmed that the artificial intelligence economy is no longer a speculative bubble. It is a reality measured in tens of billions of dollars — and right now, it is being decided who will play the leading role in it.