Good morning. Reporter Lily Mae Lazarus is pinch-hitting today for Andrew.

Apparently, the PTA has a better portfolio than you.

Silicon Valley private schools are replacing silent auctions with cap tables, with a handful of Bay Area campuses now running miniature venture funds steered by parent-investors from Sequoia, Lightspeed, and Battery. The programs have become something of Silicon Valley lore, Fortune's Amanda Gerut writes. Saint Francis High School's parent-run growth fund turned a $15,000 bet on Snap into roughly $34 million at the company's IPO.

With SpaceX having just pulled off the biggest IPO in history and Anthropic and OpenAI widely expected to follow, these school funds could be sitting on the next windfall.

Here's what else moved tech and money today.

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Nvidia wants your pension fund in the AI trade

Nvidia announced partnerships this week with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to build financing platforms aimed at mobilizing more than $500 billion for AI infrastructure, with the cash coming largely from "third-party investors" rather than Nvidia's own balance sheet. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described the approach as treating AI compute like "productive infrastructure," and said the company is offering residual-value support of up to 25% on some deals to make the pitch more attractive.

The push reflects the sheer scale of capital required for the AI buildout, with major banks and consultancies projecting global AI infrastructure spending in the trillions over the coming years. By positioning GPU clusters as income-producing assets that can be leased and financed much like real estate or energy projects, Nvidia is effectively trying to create a new infrastructure asset class—one that could unlock capital from pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and insurers that collectively manage tens of trillions of dollars but typically avoid direct technology bets.

Wall Street mostly likes the strategy. Morgan Stanley and Bank of America both said Nvidia's chips are unusually financeable. But Stratechery's Ben Thompson is less convinced, warning that it is "a completely new nerve-racking thing to bring safety-seeking assets to bear" on a pile of GPUs. — Eva Roytburg

Apple taps an airline lobbyist to run its D.C. relationship

Apple hired Nate Gatten, American Airlines' head of government affairs since 2017, as its new vice president of government affairs, starting Aug. 31. Gatten, a Republican who previously worked at JPMorgan and Fannie Mae, will report directly to Tim Cook.

The hire may signal that Apple wants a lobbyist who can work closely with the Trump administration. Apple has historically maintained a leaner Washington presence than tech peers like Google and Meta, but the company now faces mounting regulatory pressure on multiple fronts, including the EU's Digital Markets Act, a US antitrust lawsuit over App Store practices, and ongoing scrutiny of its services revenue. The hiring also comes just weeks before Cook is expected to hand the CEO title to hardware chief John Ternus in September while staying on as executive chairman, a role that is also expected to keep him active in Washington, D.C. — Lily Mae Lazarus

Sergey Brin's fingerprints on Google's AI shakeup

Sergey Brin has reportedly spent months personally urging Google DeepMind staff to move faster on Gemini, as Anthropic pulled ahead with its Claude Mythos preview, according to Reuters. Google also allegedly delayed its next flagship Gemini release by two months after internal testing showed its coding performance still lagged behind rivals.

Last week's reshuffle gave day-to-day authority from DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis to his deputy, Koray Kavukcuoglu, who now has final say on major DeepMind decisions and reports to CEO Sundar Pichai.

The move marks another step in the erosion of DeepMind's independence since Google bought the London lab in 2014, following the company's 2023 decision to merge DeepMind with its Google Brain unit under Hassabis's leadership. Some teams have shifted into corporate Google, and other top talent, including Gemini's original co-leads Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals, have also left. — Lily Mae Lazarus

More tech

— Vibe-coding startup Lovable raised $400 million at a $13.3 billion valuation, more than double its December price tag.

— DeepSeek is quietly hiring to challenge Anthropic's Claude Code, posting job listings for a new AI-agent team.

— Google's newest wearables will track insulin resistance, a category first using AI and sensor data instead of continuous glucose monitoring.

— Uber is quietly building a "tween" rides option for kids ages 10 to 12, based on code spotted in its latest iOS app.

— New York City is probing Polymarket, Kalshi, Coinbase, and Titan over their ad practices, the latest legal headache for the booming prediction-markets industry.

— Grubhub's $23.8 million FTC settlement is finally reaching diners and drivers, with checks and PayPal payouts going to more than 640,000 people over misleading earnings claims and phantom restaurant listings.

— Uber Freight is investigating a data breach claimed by the hacking group Helix, which says it stole dispatch records and accounts payable files.

— Trump Media is charging up to $100,000 a month for a head start on Truth Social posts, and nearly a dozen trading firms are already paying up; at least one economist is calling it insider trading.

— Sam Altman says a Goldman Sachs internship "sounds unbelievably terrible now," recalling the offer he turned down before founding OpenAI, which has since hired more than 100 former bankers itself.