Tech brief: Meta raids Apple, TikTok bets $38B on Brazil, Microsoft blinks on AI targets, Stripe buys Metronome for $1B

TECH BRIEF

TikTok’s $38B Brazil data center play¹

ByteDance’s TikTok plans to invest more than 200 billion reais (about $38 billion) to build a massive data center complex in Brazil’s northeastern state of Ceará, its first Latin American project and one of the largest single data center bets globally. The complex will sit near the industrial port of Pecém, close to major submarine cable hubs linking South America to Europe and Africa, and will be powered entirely by wind-generated clean energy via partners Omnia and Casa dos Ventos.​

The scale and location effectively cement Brazil as the region’s prime AI infrastructure hub, leveraging abundant renewables and a strong national grid to host power-hungry AI workloads. For TikTok, the build-out localizes data, boosts latency-sensitive AI features, and positions the company for regulatory and geopolitical scrutiny around data residency in the Americas.

Meta poaches Apple’s design chief²

Meta has hired Alan Dye, Apple’s longtime head of Human Interface Design, in a major talent coup that underscores Mark Zuckerberg’s push into AI-equipped consumer devices. Dye, who has led Apple’s interface team since 2015 and helped shape software experiences across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro, will join Meta as chief design officer in Reality Labs, overseeing hardware, software, and AI integration for products like Ray-Ban smart glasses and VR headsets.​

Apple is elevating veteran designer Stephen Lemay, a nearly three-decade insider, to replace Dye as head of interface design, even as the company faces additional senior departures, including AI chief John Giannandrea and COO Jeff Williams. The move highlights an intensifying Silicon Valley AI talent war, with Meta offering aggressive packages and systematically pulling senior AI and design leaders from Apple to accelerate its device roadmap

Microsoft softens AI sales targets³

Multiple Microsoft divisions have lowered sales growth targets for certain AI software products after many sales teams missed quotas in the fiscal year ended June, an unusual step that points to slower-than-hyped adoption of newer AI offerings. Reports indicate quotas were eased for some Azure AI and Copilot-related products, prompting concerns that enterprises remain cautious about deploying AI agents at scale, with one MIT study cited as finding only about 5% of AI projects move beyond pilot.​

The news briefly knocked Microsoft’s stock by around 2–3%, adding to investor anxiety about whether record AI infrastructure capex—nearly $35 billion in a recent quarter and part of an industry-wide ~$400 billion AI spend this year—will translate into near-term software revenue. Microsoft has pushed back publicly, denying that it has broadly cut quotas, but the episode underlines a growing gap between AI infrastructure investment and realized customer demand for advanced AI agents.

Stripe’s $1 billion Metronome bet⁴

Stripe has agreed to acquire usage-billing startup Metronome for about $1 billion, roughly doubling Metronome’s valuation since a February Series C that pegged it at $470 million, according to multiple sources cited by Upstarts Media. Metronome specializes in metered and usage-based billing for modern software and AI companies and already counts Anthropic, Nvidia, and OpenAI among its customers, making it deeply embedded in the AI ecosystem’s monetization layer.​

For Stripe, the deal folds sophisticated, developer-friendly metering into its payments stack, positioning the company as the default billing infrastructure for AI-native services that charge based on tokens, API calls, or compute consumption. The acquisition also signals renewed M&A appetite from Stripe and underscores a broader shift in SaaS economics toward granular, AI-driven usage pricing rather than traditional seat-based models.