Bruin AI Current Events
SoftBank, Google Make Bold Moves | AI in Pharma and Big Tech
Good afternoon!
This week, we explore how SoftBank and Google’s multibillion-dollar acquisitions could reshape the AI and cloud computing landscape. We’ll also examine how AI is being used to repurpose existing drugs, offering new hope for patients with rare diseases.
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- Karen
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📍 UCLA Ackerman Grand Ballroom
🗓️ April 19th, 2025
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Abstract and poster submissions are due April 1st, 2025.
Critical Deals Made Over the Past Week
Despite consumer confidence jitters that demonstrate some doubts with regard to the future health of the economy, big-name acquisitions appear to be holding strong. Both SoftBank and Google have accomplished deals that could significantly alter the tech ecosystem.
SoftBank is a Japanese multinational investment holding company out of Tokyo that focuses primarily on investment management. Many will recognize SoftBank as one of the companies involved in the nearly $500 billion Stargate Project touted by the Trump administration. This week, SoftBank completed a deal with the Silicon Valley chip Start-up Ampere Computing to purchase it for $6.5 billion. Under the deal, Ampere will remain headquartered in California, operating as an independent subsidiary under SoftBank’s ownership. The investment appears to be based on the idea that its chips will play a significant role in artificial intelligence.
Ampere was founded in 2017 and sells chips to data centers based on technology from Arm Holdings, positioning it as a key competitor to companies such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Nvidia. If SoftBank’s bets regarding Ampere’s chips take up a more significant share of the AI chip market, it could represent a challenge to Nvidia's current dominance.
Aside from Ampere, AI-powered cybersecurity firm Wiz was bought by Alphabet, Google’s parent company, for nearly $32 billion. The acquisition is an all-cash deal and is worth far more than its next largest deal, the purchase of Motorola in 2012 for $12.5 billion.
This deal continues Google’s prior efforts to acquire Wiz. In July 2023, Wiz rejected a $23 billion takeover offer, choosing instead to go public, a plan that ultimately fell through. Wiz has seen rapid growth since its establishment in 2020, and its current $500 million in revenue is expected to surpass $1 billion within a year. Acquiring Wiz will likely boost Google Cloud and help Google challenge companies such as Microsoft or Amazon in the cloud-computing race.
Under the Trump administration’s Department of Justice, regulators have continued reluctance to encourage corporate consolidation and reduce mergers and acquisitions between many large firms. Given the scale of this acquisition and the fact that Google has “already been found guilty of anticompetitive conduct in the search market,” regulatory impediments pose a significant risk to the deal and will challenge Google’s ability to proceed with its purchase.
Even amid economic uncertainties, AI investments are likely to continue reshaping the tech landscape despite the continuation of heightened regulatory scrutiny and possible antitrust issues.
-Tobin
Novel AI Pharmaceutical Drug Combinations
While long time-frames for pharmaceutical developments have often been attributed to the necessity for lengthy clinical trials before drugs can be approved by the FDA and approved for the market, one of the most overlooked yet costly aspects of drug development is human creativity. Human researchers must essentially guess what molecules may create an effective drug based on their knowledge of molecule structures, but AI may change that. By using AI trained on a large database of existing molecules, AI “can explore all possible related molecules” and speed up the process of drug discovery.
Even with AI, however, the cost of developing new drugs is costly and slow, with some estimates suggesting it “costs about US$2.5 billion to bring a drug to market.” As a result, AI is not a silver bullet for those with diseases that currently have no developed cure. However, a promising possibility comes from AI predictions about how already existing drugs can interact with currently uncurable diseases.
The key advantage of utilizing the side effects of existing drugs to treat such diseases is that these drugs are already readily available and FDA-approved, meaning they would bypass lengthy development cycles. However, without creating a new drug, such treatments are unprofitable. While many pharmaceutical companies are reluctant to seek out such cures, Dr. David Fajgenbaum, a part of the University of Pennsylvania faculty, has worked to apply AI to his nonprofit, Every Cure, to help people with diseases that currently have no treatment. The company uses AI to help it determine which existing drugs could be used to treat rare diseases, running computations that would “need about 1,000 years” for a team of humans.
Approximately 300 million people live with rare diseases for which only about 5% have approved treatments. One example comes from 37-year-old Washington State resident Joseph Coates who was battling a rare blood disorder named POEMS syndrome. The treatments that did exist for him were no longer able to be effectively implemented, and Coates was almost convinced that the end for him was soon. However, just a day after reaching out to Dr. Fajgenbaum, he was recommended an “unconventional combination of chemotherapy, immunotherapy and steroids previously untested.” Within just a week Coates was responding to this AI-generated treatment plan, and he is now in remission.
With such significant potential to find cures that are hiding in plain sight, the biggest impediment remains the lack of profit potential, which may prevent major pharmaceutical companies from adopting Dr. Fajgenbaum’s technique. While companies such as Every Cure and others have found significant funding from private investors, given the scale of ongoing federal government cuts across both personnel and contracts, the funding behind such non-profit organizations may be at risk. Without sufficient funding, thousands of potential treatments could remain undiscovered, leaving patients without life-saving options.
-Tobin
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All the best,
Tobin Wilson, Editorial Intern
Karen Harrison, Newsletter Manager
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“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” - Steve Jobs