Stop the presses.
Apparently, FAANG is dead.
The new acronym is MANGOS:
Meta
Anthropic
Nvidia
Google
OpenAI
SpaceX
It is memorable. It captures the current excitement around artificial intelligence, accelerated computing, frontier models, and space infrastructure. It also demonstrates how easily a convenient market label can be mistaken for a meaningful technical classification.
FAANG was never an engineering standard. Neither is MANGOS.
No architecture review board decides which companies qualify. There is no minimum number of data centers, servers, network devices, customers, GPUs, regions, or autonomous systems. Companies do not submit evidence of control-plane resilience or pass a distributed-systems examination before joining the club.
These acronyms are created by investors, analysts, journalists, and commentators. They describe a story about market leadership at a particular moment.
That story may be useful. But it is not the same thing as understanding how a company operates.