Trump Brokers Gaza Peace Deal, National Guard in Chicago, OpenAI/AMD, AI Roundtripping, Gold Rally

The Israel-Hamas deal’s first phase pairs a ceasefire and full hostage release with unrestricted aid, 2,000 Palestinian prisoner releases, and an Israeli troop withdrawal. David Sacks’ key explanation was that Trump pressured both Netanyahu and Hamas, matching Aaron David Miller’s view that Washington acted less like “Israel’s lawyer” and more like a broker.

The episode’s sharpest immigration dispute was over tactics, not whether deportation should happen. Brad Gerstner said removals under Trump are roughly back to Clinton/Obama-era levels of 300,000–400,000 annually, while Jason Calacanis argued ICE’s expanded $30 billion budget implies roughly $100,000 per deportation and favors employer fines or self-deportation instead.

AMD effectively made OpenAI the validation customer for its AI comeback, offering warrants for up to 160 million shares—about 10% of AMD—in exchange for a six-gigawatt GPU commitment. Gerstner framed it as a “bet the farm”: Nvidia captured nearly all incremental AI data-center revenue since 2022, so AMD’s MI450 needs to prove competitive quickly.

AI’s next bottlenecks may be power and HBM memory rather than chip design itself. Palihapitiya said scarce inputs could shift bargaining power to suppliers, while the panel estimated a one-gigawatt data center costs roughly $50 billion—making the 10-gigawatt facilities OpenAI and xAI discuss potential $500 billion projects.

Nvidia’s biggest strategic risk is not training but inference, which Sacks estimated could become 99% of AI compute demand. Nvidia dominates training, but AMD, Google TPUs, Amazon Trainium, Groq, Cerebras, Huawei and custom ASICs could make inference more competitive if they can beat Nvidia on cost or performance per watt.

The panel’s best test for “round-tripping” was economic substance: investor-suppliers can finance customers without creating sham revenue if real downstream demand exists. Sacks and Gerstner argued Nvidia’s equity investments are small beside projected cash flow, while OpenAI is expected to exit the year above a $20 billion revenue run rate.

Gold’s surge above $4,000 was attributed less to one macro story than to new structural buyers. Palihapitiya pointed to Tether Gold, central banks and macro funds; Sacks added that China has increased reserves for 11 straight months to 74 million ounces as countries reduce exposure to dollar-based sanctions risk.

Polymarket moved from a $350 million valuation last year to a roughly $9 billion post-money valuation after ICE invested $2 billion and agreed to distribute its data globally. Palihapitiya’s larger point was that prediction markets may converge with sports betting and tokenized finance, turning more outcomes and assets into continuously traded markets.