The Signal — May 18, 2026
From the Vatican to the data center, the institutions shaping AI's trajectory are scaling up their commitments, whether moral, financial, computational, or strategic.
Pope Leo Signs First AI Encyclical, Launches Vatican AI Commission
Pope Leo XIV signed his first encyclical last Thursday, dedicating the document to artificial intelligence and its implications for human dignity, labor, social relationships, and economic justice. The encyclical, which places AI within the Catholic Church's social teaching tradition, warns against substituting human relationships with AI systems and calls on governments to protect workers from displacement.
Two days later, the Vatican announced the creation of a new AI commission to advise the Holy See on technology policy. Speaking to legislators from 68 countries, Leo declared that AI is "a tool meant to serve humans, not replace them." The Brookings Institution noted that the papal stance could encourage greater regulatory oversight globally, particularly in nations with large Catholic populations where the Church's moral authority carries political weight.
No pope has previously devoted an entire encyclical to artificial intelligence, and the choice to lead with it suggests the Vatican treats the technology as a central concern of this pontificate.
Sources: AP News · Axios · Politico EU · Brookings
Isomorphic Labs Raises $2.1B Series B for AI Drug Discovery
Isomorphic Labs, the DeepMind spinout founded by Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis, closed a $2.1 billion Series B on May 12. Thrive Capital led the round for the second consecutive time, joined by Alphabet, GV, MGX, Temasek, CapitalG, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund.
The funding will power development of the company's AI drug design engine, dubbed IsoDDE, which uses deep learning to predict molecular interactions and design novel drug candidates from scratch. Isomorphic expects to push its first AI-designed compounds into clinical trials by the end of 2026, a timeline that would make it one of the fastest progressions from computational design to human testing in the industry.
The company already has partnerships with Novartis, Eli Lilly, and Johnson & Johnson, lending credibility to the approach. The round's size and investor roster underscore growing conviction that AI-native drug discovery is moving past the proof-of-concept stage and into serious commercial territory.
Sources: Isomorphic Labs · Yahoo Finance · Fierce Biotech
Dell and NVIDIA Unveil AI Factory 2.0 at Dell Technologies World
Dell and NVIDIA are launching AI Factory 2.0 today at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, with a joint keynote from Michael Dell and Jensen Huang. The centerpiece is a new line of PowerEdge servers (the XE9780 and XE9785, including liquid-cooled variants) that support up to 192 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs per system and can be configured to 256 GPUs per rack.
Dell claims the new systems deliver 4x faster LLM training compared to the previous XE9680 generation, a leap driven by the Blackwell Ultra architecture and improved interconnect fabric. The "AI Factory" branding reflects both companies' push to position enterprise GPU infrastructure not as experimental but as standard production tooling: factories that output intelligence rather than physical goods.
The announcement lands as enterprises face mounting pressure to run AI workloads on their own infrastructure rather than relying solely on cloud providers, a trend Dell and NVIDIA are betting will accelerate through 2026 and beyond.
Sources: Let's Data Science · Dell Blog · NVIDIA
On the Editor's Desk
Several stories didn't make today's edition. Anthropic's reported $900 billion fundraise valuation lacks a signed term sheet, so we're holding until close. OpenAI's Daybreak cybersecurity platform and Anthropic's $200 million Gates Foundation partnership both tripped our rehash filter — we've covered both companies heavily this past week. And GPT-5.5 Instant becoming the default ChatGPT model, announced May 5, aged out of our freshness window. We'll revisit these when there's genuine new signal.
