Bitcoin slipped under $78,000 this weekend, touching $77,711 before clawing back, with 10-year Treasury yields near 4.6% piling on the macro pressure. Square hit 1 million US merchants accepting Bitcoin over Lightning. Tether put money into Ark Labs to push stablecoins onto Bitcoin rails. Meta locked in up to 6.6 gigawatts of nuclear power for its data centers. And Google's unannounced Gemini Omni video model just leaked with some genuinely impressive demos. Let's get into it.
The AI power story is no longer subtle. It's now the dominant constraint on where this industry goes next.
Meta just secured up to 6.6 gigawatts of nuclear capacity through deals with TerraPower, Oklo, and Vistra. That includes funding two Natrium small modular reactors, one with integrated molten salt storage, plus a 2,609 megawatt power purchase agreement across three existing nuclear plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania. This is the output of Meta's December 2024 nuclear RFP, and the scale tells you everything. Meta is not hedging. They are betting the next decade of AI compute on fission.
Microsoft already has its 20-year deal tied to restarting Three Mile Island, with Constellation putting in around $1.6 billion to get that reactor back online by 2028. Amazon is going a different direction in Nevada, signing for 700 megawatts of clean power around Reno, including 100 megawatts of geothermal from Zanskar on a 20-year agreement, plus 600 megawatts of solar paired with 600 megawatts of battery storage. It's Amazon's first data center project partly powered by dedicated geothermal, and Amazon is eating all the costs so it doesn't get passed to local ratepayers.
Then there's the wild card. NANO Nuclear signed a non-binding MoU with Super Micro to explore putting 15-megawatt microreactors directly next to AI server racks. Grid-independent compute. If that actually ships, the economics of where you build a data center change completely.
The IEA projects global data center electricity demand roughly doubles from 460 terawatt-hours in 2022 to about 945 by 2030. In northern Virginia, Dominion Energy's interconnection queue is so backed up they've paused applications. Nuclear runs at 90%-plus capacity factor, around the clock, zero operational carbon. That's the only baseload story that actually pencils out for AI at scale. Natural gas is the bridge. Solar plus storage helps at the margin. But the hyperscalers have done the math, and they're buying reactors.
AI video generation just had a moment. Two stories worth tracking.
First, Veo 4 is out and it's not subtle. 4K cinematic output up to about 2 minutes per clip with no stitching. Native audio generation, meaning synchronized dialogue, Foley, ambient sound, and believable lip sync, all in one pass. Director-style camera prompts like dolly-in, crane-up, rack focus, orbital drone. Locked character identity across shots, so the same actor with the same outfit shows up consistently across an entire project. About 40% faster than Veo 3. SynthID provenance baked into every clip. Google says over 40 million videos rendered and more than a million creators on the platform.
The thing to understand is that previous generation models produced short experimental loops. Veo 4 is producing finished cuts from a single prompt session. That collapses production timelines for indie filmmakers, e-commerce teams, and ad shops by orders of magnitude.
And then leaks dropped about something called Gemini Omni. Not officially announced, but the demos show realistic text-heavy scenes, like a professor writing a trig proof on a chalkboard, plus two guys eating spaghetti with clean mouth movement. The pitch is video generation integrated directly into the Gemini chat surface. In-chat editing, so you swap an object or change lighting without regenerating from scratch. Video remixing where you upload a clip and instruct the model to modify it. Templates for new users. Expect more at Google I/O 2026.
Meanwhile OpenAI is leaning hard into a creator strategy post-Sora, partnering with influencers and trying to figure out a monetization model. Creators want revenue share and citation credit. OpenAI hasn't shipped either yet.
The bigger picture: video generation is consolidating into multimodal platforms, not standing alone as a separate tool. The winner of that race controls a chunk of how marketing, entertainment, and short-form content gets made.
Square just enabled Bitcoin payments at 1 million US merchants. Let that sit for a second. A new business turns it on roughly every 8 seconds.
Here's how it actually works. Customers pay in Bitcoin over the Lightning Network. Merchants receive dollars by default, with near-instant settlement, so they take no price exposure unless they want it. Merchants can opt to convert up to 50% of daily sales into BTC straight from the Square Dashboard. Block is eating all processing fees through 2026 to drive adoption. And Block disclosed proof-of-reserves of about 28,355 BTC, roughly 2.2 billion dollars on the balance sheet.
This is the boring, structural adoption story that actually matters. For years the Bitcoin payments narrative was vibes and conference slides. What changed is Lightning maturing to the point where settlement is fast enough and cheap enough that a payment processor can wrap it inside their existing flow and the merchant doesn't have to think about Bitcoin at all. The customer scans, the merchant gets dollars, done.
While that's happening, Strike's Jack Mallers used Bitcoin 2026 to announce lending proof-of-reserves so borrowers can verify their collateral is segregated on-chain, plus a new volatility-proof loan structure built with Tether designed to avoid forced liquidations on price drops. Strike is sitting on a 2.1 billion dollar credit facility. Pricing runs from about 10.5% APR on smaller loans down to 7.49% on loans over 5 million. And Mallers backed a Tether plan to merge Strike with Twenty-One Capital and Elektron Energy, a 50-exahash miner, into a single integrated Bitcoin company spanning treasury, mining, lending, and capital markets.
Mallers' framing: financial services, infrastructure, capital markets, and M&A all under one roof, using operating income to buy more Bitcoin. Whether you buy the empire-building pitch or not, the direction of travel is clear. Bitcoin financial services are professionalizing fast, and they're vertically integrating.
Real activity on Bitcoin layer 2 and sidechain infrastructure this week.
Tether put money into Ark Labs as part of a 5.2 million dollar round. Ark is building software to make stablecoins settle on Bitcoin rails. Why this matters: Tether is the largest stablecoin issuer in the world, and they're putting capital behind Bitcoin-native settlement infrastructure. That's a signal about where they think long-term stablecoin volume should live.
Arkade Protocol, separately, is heading into a token generation event on May 27. Chimera Wallet is the first major integration, positioned as a Bitcoin super-app combining payments and self-custody with Arkade as the payment layer underneath. Nimbus Capital led a 15 million dollar round. The Lightning integration angle is the part to watch, because what Bitcoiners actually need is wallets where Lightning works without thinking about it.
On the more experimental side, Starknet launched strkBTC, a privacy-enabled wrapped Bitcoin built on the new STRK20 framework. It's 1-to-1 backed by BTC locked on Bitcoin mainnet, redeemable any time, and holders can flip between public ERC20 mode and shielded mode using zero-knowledge proofs to hide balances and transfer amounts. There's a viewing key shared with an independent auditor for regulator access, which is the compliance-friendly version of privacy. Currently a federated bridge with Twinstake, NEAR Intents, Luganodes, UTXO, and Xverse, but the roadmap points at BitVM integration to drop to a 1-of-N trust model, and eventually a trustless bridge if OP_CAT activates.
And BTQ Technologies pushed out a quantum-protected Bitcoin testnet implementing BIP-360, which removes Taproot key-path spending and adds post-quantum Dilithium signatures. Over 100,000 blocks mined, 50-plus miners on it. Galaxy Digital has said the quantum risk is overstated. BTQ is making the bet that proactive testing is worth doing now. Either way, it's healthy to see research-grade work happening on Bitcoin protocol upgrades while everyone else is fighting over ETF flows.
One observation to close on. The hyperscalers are buying reactors, and Square just turned 1 million merchants into Bitcoin acceptance points. Both stories are about infrastructure that compounds quietly until one day you notice the world rearranged itself while you were watching the price chart.