Dark painting of a bronze ticket stub glowing in amber light on a stadium railing at night, with the lit baseball diamond far below

Tuesday Brief: The FTC’s Price for Publicis’s LiveRamp Deal, the Brewers’ $1,000 World Series Ticket, Amazon’s Indiana Reactors

October 20, 2026 Aaron Harme

The biggest U.S. ad agency gets to buy the data service its rivals’ clients run on, as long as it promises for five years not to lean on it. In Milwaukee, fans who bought a $1,000 ticket in 2015 good for “even a World Series” are finding out what “best available seat” means now that the World Series is here.

Amazon is paying for a nuclear plant on an old Indiana coal site, the Valkyries passed $100 million in revenue in their second season, and Meta explained why a training run on its new Ohio supercluster keeps thousands of chips in reserve.

In this Brief

The FTC’s order keeps LiveRamp neutral for five years under an outside auditor
The Brewers’ 2015 “Timeless Tickets” promised the best seat “subject to ticket availability”
Amazon’s Indiana plant would use 12 reactors still in licensing, with no timeline
The Valkyries went from a $50 million expansion fee to a $100 million revenue year
A 32,768-GPU run on Meta’s Prometheus cluster needs 37,656 GPUs on hand

The FTC’s price for Publicis buying LiveRamp

Publicis Groupe, the largest of the five big U.S. ad agencies, can buy all of LiveRamp for $2.2 billion under a proposed consent order, the Federal Trade Commission said Monday. LiveRamp is the leading U.S. service that lets brands match their customer lists to ad platforms without handing over the raw data. The FTC’s complaint says Publicis would have had the “ability and incentive” to use it to pull rival agencies’ clients toward Publicis and to see their sensitive data.

For five years, Publicis must give every LiveRamp customer fair, non-discriminatory access, firewall their data and answer to an independent auditor every six months for two years, then yearly for three. The vote was 2-0, and the order is open for 30 days of comment. Publicis says it expects to close before the end of the year. When year five ends, the order expires and LiveRamp still belongs to the agency its customers compete against.

Brewers fans cash in a 2015 World Series ticket

In 2015 the Brewers sold 1,000 “Timeless Tickets” at $1,000 each, good for any home game, “even a World Series,” Sportico reports. The terms promised the “best available seat location(s), subject to ticket availability at the time of redemption.” Milwaukee hadn’t reached the World Series since 1982, and it will face Tampa Bay, which clinched the AL pennant Monday night, ESPN reports.

Some holders have been offered upper-level seats, while the cheapest Game 1 resale ticket costs more than $2,300. The team’s Rick Schlesinger said in a statement that fans should “strongly consider securing a 2027 season seat plan.” The Brewers sold an option on a World Series a decade early, and the fine print left the club in charge of what “available” means once the option paid off.

Amazon pays for reactors on an Indiana coal site

Amazon signed with X-energy and American Electric Power to fund a planned nuclear plant of up to 960 megawatts at the defunct Breed coal station in Sullivan County, Indiana, The Verge reports. The power would serve the regional grid and Amazon’s data centers. The design calls for 12 of X-energy’s Xe-100 small modular reactors, smaller units built in sections, which are still in development and licensing. No construction timeline or deal terms were disclosed.

It is Amazon’s second X-energy project, toward a goal of more than 5 gigawatts of new U.S. nuclear power by 2039. Amazon is paying now for power that doesn’t exist yet, and the licensing process, more than the money, sets when any of it runs. Aaron’s post has the coal-site details.

The Valkyries pass $100 million in year two

The Golden State Valkyries are the first women’s sports franchise past $100 million in annual revenue, the San Francisco Standard reports, three years after Joe Lacob’s group paid a $50 million expansion fee. In May, Sportico valued the team at $850 million and CNBC at $1 billion. The 2025 expansion slots went for $250 million each.

The team has sold out every home game over two seasons, and only 8% of its season-ticket holders also hold Warriors seats, Yahoo Sports reports. Atlanta evened the WNBA Finals at a game apiece Monday night, per ESPN. The Warriors’ owners paid $50 million for a second fan base that barely overlaps with the first, and the league’s own later expansion prices show what that was worth. Aaron’s post has the revenue math.

Meta keeps thousands of GPUs idle on purpose

The first phase of Prometheus, Meta’s gigawatt-scale AI supercluster in New Albany, Ohio, is done and trained its Muse models, Engineering at Meta writes. Meta is working toward about 1 million GPUs there. Each 72-GPU rack runs 64 and holds 8 as spares, plus about 2% extra racks, so a 32,768-GPU training run takes 523 racks, or 37,656 GPUs.

Job-stopping interruptions are down 99% from a mid-2025 peak of nearly 1,000 a day per 8,000 GPUs. The bigger racks give training more bandwidth and also widen what a single fault takes down. That’s 4,888 top-end chips held back for one run, which is what reliability costs at this size.

Also noted

JPMorgan put $5 billion into startups in year one of its security and resiliency initiative, halfway to its $10 billion goal, CNBC reports; Aaron’s post has the pace.
Tenstorrent raised a $1.5 billion Series E at a $6.2 billion post-money valuation, the company said; our longer read covers the sale talks with Intel and Qualcomm it passed on.
Campaigns have spent more than $137 million on 220 AI-made political ads this cycle, and 27% carry a disclaimer, the Wesleyan Media Project found; Aaron’s post has the 2024 comparison.
Kalshi’s new broker rebate pays 40% to 55% of exchange fees on customers’ perpetual futures trades through 2027, under an Oct. 15 CFTC filing; our longer read explains who it pays.

Sources

Discover more from Bitter Fool

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.