# Dominion's Massive Acquisition Breakdown  ## Episode metadata - Episode title: Dominion's Massive Acquisition Breakdown - Show: Hardcore AI - Owner / Host: Hardcore AI - Episode publish date: 2026-05-18 - Episode AI description: A breakdown of Meta and Anduril’s AR glasses prototype for the U.S. Army and how different LLMs are being tested for military use. A look at AI-generated noise overwhelming bug bounty programs. Analysis of NextEra’s huge Dominion acquisition as a bet on AI-driven electricity demand. A peek at Alexa creating AI-driven podcasts and fresh AR optics funding. - Duration: 15:45 - Episode URL: [Open in Snipd](https://share.snipd.com/episode/2bce82af-ec50-46fa-acda-e7d381fef71d) - Show URL: [Open in Snipd](https://share.snipd.com/show/c0c4ab99-35e1-455f-9fc9-cabaddab0720) - Export date: 2026-07-11T23:42:04 ## Snips ### [Viral LinkedIn Joke Drove Real Business Results](https://share.snipd.com/snip/635096d2-d5cc-4f73-b7c5-fe0ef1e100ab) 🎧 01:02 - 03:56 (02:53) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/ba282870-49ef-490f-9b74-971604dcbaaa" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Jaeden Schafer's joke LinkedIn post about buying a second MacBook Air and running two Claude Max subscriptions went viral and drove major traffic to his company AI Box. - The post generated ~100k LinkedIn impressions, Reddit screenshots, 336 comments, and thousands of Google searches that pushed AI Box to record MRR and ARR. #### 💬 Quote > I posted over on LinkedIn as a joke...it had about 100,000 impressions on LinkedIn. > — Jaeden Schafer Jaeden Schafer on his viral LinkedIn post #### 📚 Transcript **Jaeden Schafer:** I posted over on LinkedIn as a joke. I had my son just took a picture of me sitting on the back of my truck with a laptop on each of my knees. I recently got another laptop because the one I currently have wasn't powerful enough. So I let my wife have it. I actually stole it from her a long time ago. So I was just giving it back to her and got a new one. But anyways, I had a laptop on each knee and I said, just bought a second MacBook Air so I can now have two Claude Max subscriptions running at once. Anyways, obviously this is a joke. I was like, let me walk you through the math. And then I go, I proceed to say that a Claude Max plan is worth $11,000 a month in raw API compute. And basically said that, because I kept hitting my token limit, you know, it's so subsidized. You're just making so much money. You, you, you know, you have to have this. And then this is the, this is the part that I think triggered a lot of people. I said, instant ROI math. The cost is $1,800 one time. Unlocked capacity is $11,000 a month. The payback period is under a week. Downtime eliminated 100%. Products in active development 13x. This is the line that I think triggered people. I said, if you're still on one subscription in 2026, respectfully, you're not serious. Anyways, this was a joke, but it blew up. And I ended up having 250 people or actually 336 comments on this post. It had about 100,000 impressions on LinkedIn. And then it got screenshotted and shared over to Reddit on the LinkedIn lunatics Reddit where someone said, I can't with these people. It had 1300 upvotes, 238 comments. Most of them are just people being like, hey, should we tell them about virtual machines? And then, you know, mostly everyone just trying to scroll through my entire work history, every company I've worked at, saying everything I've ever done in my life is terrible. That was kind of the LinkedIn side of it. Over on, or so that was on the Reddit side of it. Over on LinkedIn, it was pretty funny. There's probably a 50-50 of people that were like, ha ha, this is funny. And then probably 50% of the people that were trying to explain to me why running two laptops with two Cloud Max subscriptions was a bad idea and I could just run two Cloud Max subscriptions on one account, right? Like you get rate limited, just make a second account, log into that. Anyways, it was pretty funny. Every single person that commented, I replied to them, mostly just doubling down and saying they obviously didn't understand the thermal envelope of my computer or, I don't know, some other funny, overly technical thing. Google, just from that, I had 5,400 people search for the name of my company, AI Box, and go to my website on the first day. Google search console is a couple days behind, so I only really know what happened on that first day, but it went pretty viral the next day as well. --- ### [AR Glasses Are The Interface For A $20B Military AI Backbone](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f4f697cc-db7f-4d44-ae16-36749ecbcd85) 🎧 04:45 - 07:01 (02:16) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/4f18386f-a962-4116-bc92-3095fc4eecb8" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Meta and Anduril are prototyping AR glasses for the U.S. Army as a speech-to-command interface tied into Anduril's larger battlefield software backbone. - The $159M prototype complements a separate $20B Army investment in Anduril's Lattice, making the glasses a front-end to a wide AI-enabled military platform. #### 💬 Quote > It's kind of like having Siri or Alexa or something built into this. > — Jaeden Schafer Jaeden Schafer on Meta and Anduril AR glasses #### 📚 Transcript **Jaeden Schafer:** But basically how this piece of hardware works is that a soldier can look at a target, they can tap their temple, and then they can talk in, you know, plain language. And the glasses are going to recommend a course of action. So it could include things like sending a nearby drone strike that still has to be approved, up the normal chain of command. So it's not like AI is running the whole thing, but it is helping to be the interface, right? It's kind of like having Siri or Alexa or something built into this. The contract is for $159 million for the prototyping phase of the Army's soldier-born mission command program. And it's not just a one-off. The Army actually announced separately in march that it's spending 20 billion dollars to integrate andrel's lattice software that is the engine that pulls every army sensor and platform into one battlefield picture and that's going to happening across i think all of its infrastructure so the glasses are kind of the user interface interface on the front end of this kind of 20 billion dollar software backbone and i think that changes basically the conversation right this isn't just like a cool prototype. Andrel is really becoming part of the platform layer for AI-enabled warfare, which is very interesting. Something I think not a lot of people are talking about right now is that these glasses are testing three different as the speech-to command layer. So they're using Gemini, Llama, and Claude. Anthropic is not betting on any single AI company. Obviously, Claude has so much beef with the US government. That's a new story in itself that this is included in there. And anyways, Andrel is then going to pick whatever model handles military doctrine, classified content, and edge device latency best. So they're testing them all out, not ruling Claude out, but they're testing out all the models. Whoever does it best is going to kind of get the contractor get pulled into this tool. So for this whole project, components apparently started arriving in March, and that's because of a bunch of federal contracting rules. All of those parts had to come from supply chains that didn't rely on Chinese companies. Meta's commercial Ray-Bans that they have, those can come from China. That doesn't really matter when you make something for the US Army. They don't want to be reliant on China. So I think this is also a bit of a domestic manufacturing build that's happening right now. And Meta is building in kind of the displays and the waveguides. Andrel does a lot of the system integrations. --- ### [Multiple LLMs Compete As The Army's Command Layer](https://share.snipd.com/snip/210f35fc-1840-49b6-98ec-277fea5685fc) 🎧 05:53 - 06:25 (00:31) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/aed822dd-8442-43b2-b825-cf04d0e44075" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Anduril is testing three LLMs (Gemini, Llama, Claude) as the speech-to-command layer and will pick whichever model best handles doctrine, classified content, and edge latency. - Anthropic/Claude isn't excluded despite political tensions, showing selection is performance-driven. #### 💬 Quote > They're using Gemini, Llama, and Claude. > — Jaeden Schafer Jaeden Schafer on LLMs tested in AR glasses #### 📚 Transcript **Jaeden Schafer:** Something I think not a lot of people are talking about right now is that these glasses are testing three LLMs as the speech-to command layer. So they're using Gemini, Llama, and Claude. Anthropic is not betting on any single AI company. Obviously, Claude has so much beef with the US government. That's a new story in itself that this is included in there. And anyways, Andrel is then going to pick whatever model handles military doctrine, classified content, and edge device latency best. So they're testing them all out, not ruling Claude out, but they're testing out all the models. --- ### [Defense AR Builds Avoid Chinese Supply Chains](https://share.snipd.com/snip/637b8fc3-62d1-4216-af8f-c9be6471e122) 🎧 06:36 - 07:01 (00:24) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/48c4b68c-fb9e-4a88-a6e6-d31cf5fa87b0" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Military hardware supply chains require non-Chinese components, so AR headset parts arrived in March under domestic sourcing rules. - Meta supplies displays and waveguides while Anduril handles heavy system integration for defense use. #### 💬 Quote > All of those parts had to come from supply chains that didn't rely on Chinese companies. > — Jaeden Schafer Jaeden Schafer on supply rules for Army AR hardware #### 📚 Transcript **Jaeden Schafer:** All of those parts had to come from supply chains that didn't rely on Chinese companies. Meta's commercial Ray-Bans that they have, those can come from China. That doesn't really matter when you make something for the US Army. They don't want to be reliant on China. So I think this is also a bit of a domestic manufacturing build that's happening right now. And Meta is building in kind of the displays and the waveguides. Andrel does a lot of the system integrations. --- ### [AI Floods Bug Bounties With Low-Value Reports](https://share.snipd.com/snip/40e52a82-6866-4ed4-8c5b-02d8e1aceb0a) 🎧 07:47 - 08:58 (01:10) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/037105b7-221c-4145-8fcb-3175d5c04155" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Corporate bug bounty programs are being flooded with AI-generated, low-quality submissions, causing some firms to pause or shut programs. - Bugcrowd and HackerOne reported massive spikes (4x in weeks, 76% year) but only ~25% were real vulnerabilities, forcing AI-based triage. #### 💬 Quote > Reports more than quadrupled over a three-week stretch in March, and most of them were fake. > — Jaeden Schafer Jaeden Schafer on AI-generated bug bounty submissions #### 📚 Transcript **Jaeden Schafer:** So I feel like it's worth bringing up again. But apparently corporate bug bounty programs are basically just getting completely flooded by AI generated submissions. And so some of them are just completely shutting down. Some of these big companies that had bug bounty programs, they're just shutting them down, which is kind of a bummer. Bug crowd whose customers include OpenAI, T-Mobile, Motorola, they said that reports more than quadrupled over a three-week stretch in March, and most of them were fake. So that's kind of the hard thing. People will go in and tell Claude to go scrape all the code, try to find bugs, and then submit kind fake reports. That's really hard to go weed through all of them. Hacker One, which runs bounties for Goldman Sachs, Google, and the Department of Defense, they logged a 76% jump in submissions in a year. And what's interesting is out of that, right, they saw like a 76% jump, but only I think, you know, one out of four was an actual vulnerability, was a real one. So vulnerabilities are still flat at around 25%. And most of the leads that they're getting go nowhere. So this is a really big problem that's happening right now. We're literally having to use and rely on AI to filter these AI bug reports. --- ### [Utility Merger Is A Bet On AI Electricity Demand](https://share.snipd.com/snip/88fce2d8-e4ac-4e7f-a790-24dfc75fbb3f) 🎧 09:05 - 10:52 (01:47) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/1b2bb858-3115-4a1e-a9a4-ef20dc0b1f1e" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - NextEra's $66.8B bid for Dominion is framed as a bet that AI-driven data center demand will be structural and heavily centered in Virginia. - Dominion controls Virginia interconnection capacity near hyperscalers, so owning regulated power there secures essential megawatts for AI infrastructure. #### 💬 Quote > The deal is basically being framed openly as a bet on AI-driven power demand. > — Jaeden Schafer Jaeden Schafer on NextEra acquiring Dominion #### 📚 Transcript **Jaeden Schafer:** NextEra just agreed to acquire Dominion. This is one of the biggest U.S. utility ever announced, and the deal is basically being framed openly as a bet on AI-driven power demand. Routers was reporting on this, and apparently the combined company would be one of the largest investor-owned utilities in the entire country. The reason why this isn't so much about utilities as it is about AI is because Dominion's service territory, it covers Virginia, which hosts the densest concentration of hyperscaler data centers in the world. If you've ever been on AWS or many VPNs, if you've done anything where you, like where your server location is, it's always like, do you want it in Virginia? Or do you want it in like, you know, on the East Coast in like California? Like you usually have like a couple choices, but there's always the Virginia option because there's just so many data centers there right now. Ludon County alone has a huge chunk of global internet traffic going through it in Virginia. The reason I personally think this is a really big deal is because the bottleneck for these AI buildouts is not just GPUs anymore because that was kind of the problem before it was how you could get your hands on enough GPUs from Nvidia etc. Now I think it's not even just the capital it's basically the megawatts and it's a lot of the interconnection queues. So Dominion's Virginia interconnection queue has stretched into multi-year weights. There is a, you know, putting together a $66.8 billion utility It only makes sense if you believe that AI electricity demand is structural. It's not cyclical, right? This isn't just a big bubble. So this would make a lot of sense. And then if that's the case, then owning a lot of this regulated load serving capacity is basically the most defensible position in the AI value chain. So next era is making that bet. --- ### [Interconnection Rights Are The New Strategic Real Estate](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2ccc4a73-84d2-44fd-8d3b-8b869844e35b) 🎧 10:23 - 11:37 (01:14) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/21d2de4c-a87f-47a7-81a0-34b7f5ec1ea2" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - The true scarce asset for AI buildouts may be interconnection rights and megawatts, not just GPUs, because interconnection queues like Dominion's are multi-year. - Regulators in Virginia, Florida, and FERC must approve the deal, so timelines could stretch 12–24+ months. #### 💬 Quote > The bottleneck for these AI buildouts is not just GPUs anymore...it's basically the megawatts and the interconnection queues. > — Jaeden Schafer Jaeden Schafer on bottlenecks for AI data centers #### 📚 Transcript **Jaeden Schafer:** So Dominion's Virginia interconnection queue has stretched into multi-year weights. There is a, you know, putting together a $66.8 billion tie-up. It only makes sense if you believe that AI electricity demand is structural. It's not cyclical, right? This isn't just a big bubble. So this would make a lot of sense. And then if that's the case, then owning a lot of this regulated load serving capacity is basically the most defensible position in the AI value chain. So next era is making that bet. They're pretty clear about this. They're betting like, hey, it's going to be hard for people to build more of these data centers in Virginia. We're basically going to be powering all of them. There's also another interesting part of this, is that the state commissions in virginia florida and ferc at the federal level all of them have to sign off so approvals on deals this size historically take 12 to 24 months sometimes longer definitely there's a lot of interventions and a lot of you know regulation that goes through a lot of people are going to push hard to for ratepayer protections but if all of this clears, if this merger acquisition, I guess you could say, is actually going to happen, I think the most valuable real estate in AI isn't just going to be the model weights, right? It's basically the interconnection rights behind them. --- ### [Alexa Can Auto-Generate Podcasts On Demand](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e9b61058-4036-42c9-97ca-cdda55c8ace6) 🎧 11:42 - 12:54 (01:12) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/c7719fbd-f0ac-4263-8216-9924109895cf" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Amazon's Alexa Plus can generate on-demand AI podcasts with two AI hosts and user-controlled length, lowering barriers to produced audio content. - Jaeden worries this and similar tools (Google NotebookLM) change the podcast landscape by automating topical episodes from prompts or documents. #### 💬 Quote > You basically can tell a topic and it's going to show you the outline and then they'll have two AI hosts that are kind of talking about it. > — Jaeden Schafer Jaeden Schafer on Amazon's Alexa Plus AI podcast feature #### 📚 Transcript **Jaeden Schafer:** My job is officially at risk. You basically can tell a topic and it's going to show you the outline and then they'll have two AI hosts that are kind of talking about it. You can adjust the length and a few minutes later doing all of this, your echo show pings and you're ready to listen to the full episode. Routers talked about this and a bunch of other publishers as well, but I think the formats are not new. Google's notebook LM, we've been talking about it a lot on the show but you can do this. You can put a PDF or you can put your schoolwork or a paper or some sort of work report into notebook LM and it'll have like a podcast where it's two people talking about it. A lot of people find this more digestible than just trying to get through the content and read it yourself but of course notebook LM, you got to go to the website and upload it. Whereas the Alexa, you can just talk to it out loud, tell the topic and it can put something together for you. I could be completely wrong on this bet. But when I first started this podcast, basically my assumption was because there was a lot of AI tools out there. I wasn't going to clone my voice and just dump in AI news to be read because people probably wanted to hear it from a real person. Now you can see the downsides of this theory because right now my voice is lost and so maybe people think I sound terrible. I don't know. Or maybe it's just harder for me to talk when my voice is lost. --- ### [Lennon AR Optics Startup Gains Traction And Funding](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bc6004dc-ad66-4472-a161-ebf706138b18) 🎧 13:12 - 14:59 (01:46) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/cd83ac80-8cbc-4b53-be22-2dfaf6b1db33" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Lennon AR raised $18.5M from Korean Development Bank and Lotte Ventures, bringing total funding to $41.7M and targeting a 2026 IPO in Seoul. - They make a pin-tilt optical module used in a Swiss AR motorcycle helmet and ship to customers like DynaBook and LG. #### 💬 Quote > Global AI glasses shipments hit 8.7 million units last year. That is a 300% jump year over year. > — Jaeden Schafer Jaeden Schafer on Lennon AR and AR market growth #### 📚 Transcript **Jaeden Schafer:** This is a Korean optics startup. They just closed an $18.5 million round of funding from the Korean Development Bank and from Lottie Ventures. So they've raised total $41.7 million. They actually have an IPO planned for next year in Seoul. So what the heck does this company do? Why is it important on this show? This is what was really shocking to me. Global AI glasses shipments hit 8.7 million units last year. That is a 300% jump year over year. And Omdia is projecting 15 million units this year. So Lennon AR, this company I've been talking about, they don't just make the glasses. They actually make the optical module. That is the lens component that projects images onto your field of view. Their CEO is Jae Hyuk Kim. And he said that the optics module is the hardest part to get right because it has to be thin, light, and power efficient at the same time, and every glasses maker has to source one. So they have something called pin tilt design, which is going to direct light precisely towards the eye instead of scattering it across the lens like a dominant waveguide approach. This is going to throw away most of the photons, and it's going to drain the battery a lot faster. So they're already shipping inside a Swiss AR motorcycle helmet from EGIS Rider. It's a spin out of ETH Zurich's computer vision lab and that anchors navigation arrows to the actual road at about 160 kilometers an hour which is a super cool use case. They have a bunch of other big customers one of them is called DynaBook in Japan. LG was an earlier backer and is reportedly building their own AI glasses now. So they're kind of working with them. Personally, I love to talk about the companies behind a lot of the trends like AR glasses and the companies that are winning because of that. So this is a really fascinating story to me. --- ### [Optics Are The Hardest Part Of AR Glasses](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0712772c-6114-4dfa-9ed2-8d83e7b4cafa) 🎧 13:48 - 14:20 (00:31) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/1486a932-98a6-4875-9446-57521ebc0eff" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Lennon AR's pin tilt design directs light precisely to the eye instead of scattering across a waveguide, improving efficiency but risking photon loss and battery drain tradeoffs. - Optical modules are the hardest AR component because they must be thin, light, and power efficient simultaneously. #### 💬 Quote > The optics module is the hardest part to get right because it has to be thin, light, and power efficient at the same time. > — Jaeden Schafer Jaeden Schafer on Lennon AR's optical module #### 📚 Transcript **Jaeden Schafer:** They actually make the optical module. That is the lens component that projects images onto your field of view. Their CEO is Jae Hyuk Kim. And he said that the optics module is the hardest part to get right because it has to be thin, light, and power efficient at the same time, and every glasses maker has to source one. So they have something called pin tilt design, which is going to direct light precisely towards the eye instead of scattering it across the lens like a dominant waveguide approach. --- Created with [Snipd](https://www.snipd.com) | Highlight & Take Notes from Podcasts