Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:• Shopping: Introducing the Summer Fun List—gear, gadgets and toys that all come highly recommended• AI: Where is China ahead of America? In cracking down on AI romances • Plus, Recommendations—our weekly pop culture picks: “The Last Twelve Weeks,” “The Nord Stream Conspiracy”and “The Dark Wizard”Just after 3 in the afternoon last Wednesday, I walked into Corgi Cafe, a coffee shop in San Francisco’s Financial District... Read more ›
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Before we get to today’s agenda, check out Phoebe’s report Wednesday night that Nvidia has launched a new program to financially backstop customers’ purchases of its AI chips. It’s yet another way Nvidia is leveraging its powerful balance sheet to keep the GPU data center party going.On to the column…As more companies reassess rising prices for advanced AI models and tokenmaxxing among their employees, model routers are having a moment... Read more ›
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Anthropic has begun early-stage work on its own AI chip and held talks with Samsung Electronics as a potential manufacturing partner, following the lead of rival OpenAI in trying to get more control over the costly computing systems behind its models, according to three people with direct knowledge of the project. If the Claude maker goes ahead with the chip, it would be a relative newcomer in developing its own... Read more ›
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Microsoft on Thursday announced the creation of a new business unit geared towards helping large customers set up customized AI applications, commercial CEO Judson Althoff announced. Microsoft is spending $2.5 billion and assigning 6,000 employees to the effort, called Microsoft Frontier ... Read more ›
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Signs that Microsoft is open to spinning off its struggling Xbox gaming unit have put the spotlight on the tech conglomerate’s vast mix of businesses. Investors typically don’t like conglomerates, and that’s as true for Microsoft as for any other such company. We calculated what Microsoft’s three main businesses—cloud, software and personal computing—would be worth if each was trading at valuations in line with rivals in those sectors. The total... Read more ›
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Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group and its affiliated payment processor AUS Merchant Services agreed to pay $600 million to resolve U.S. allegations that they failed to prevent illegal sales of pharmaceuticals, controlled substances and related equipment through Alibaba’s e-commerce ... Read more ›
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Nvidia is promising to financially backstop young cloud providers that rent out its graphics processing units in exchange for a share of their revenues, The Information reported Wednesday. The backstop would come in the form of promising to rent back unused GPUs if the companies can’t find ... Read more ›
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Nvidia is using its powerful balance sheet to help more companies buy its expensive AI chips, and possibly make some money back too. It’s promising to financially backstop young cloud providers that rent out its graphics processing units in exchange for a share of their revenues. The backstop would come in the form of promising to rent back unused GPUs if the companies can’t find AI developers to rent them,... Read more ›
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Could it be that Wall Street has a soft spot for refurbished internet brands? Bending Spoons, the Italian company whose stated mission is buying and overhauling left-for-dead digital businesses—such as AOL, Evernote and Vimeo—got a 40% pop on its first day as a public company on Wednesday. It was a much more impressive debut than the 4% pop scored by the other company going public on Wednesday, scooter rental firm... Read more ›
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Two senior executives in Uber’s data-labeling business have recently left their positions, the latest senior reorganization at the ride-hailing company. Pankaj Kamat, director of product at Uber AI Solutions, and Naga Kasu, senior director of engineering for AI Data Infrastructure, have ... Read more ›
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8VC, the venture firm run by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, raised a $1.5 billion fund—the firm’s seventh and largest—aimed at investing in manufacturing, defense tech and healthcare, Lonsdale announced in a post on X. The Austin-based firm’s fundraise comes 15 months after the firm raised ... Read more ›
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Financial data companies such as FactSet and Moody’s appear to have made progress reassuring investors that they won’t be replaced by finance-focused AI tools. But investors may have new questions these days around how the uncertainty of AI costs will affect usage of these businesses’ products.Investors were spooked when Anthropic and others touted AI products for finance and other professions earlier this year. Companies like FactSet, Moody’s, S&P Global and... Read more ›
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Italian conglomerate Bending Spoons, which is rolling up aging internet businesses, priced its initial public offering at $29 a share, just above the preliminary range of $26 to $28 a share. The IPO price values the company at $19.4 billion. The shares will start trading later Wednesday. Bending ... Read more ›
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Software developers are starting to combine the two most successful uses of large language models: coding and customer support.Specifically, they’re using AI to automate the process of turning customer complaints about software issues or feature requests into new code. Previously, that could be a long and tedious process, which involved sending customer support tickets to a company’s support team, directing those issues to the relevant engineer, and coding up and... Read more ›
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Meta Platforms is developing plans for a cloud infrastructure business, Bloomberg reported, putting it in direct competition with cloud firms such as Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure. Meta has spent heavily to expand its AI data centers in recent years, to give it more ... Read more ›
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Microsoft is planning to lay off thousands of employees across the company in the coming week, including in sales and engineering units, according to someone briefed on the plans. The layoffs will also include job cuts across Microsoft’s Xbox gaming organization that have been previously ... Read more ›
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Expectations are growing that Elon Musk will propose a merger of SpaceX and Tesla. But a close look at Tesla’s org chart, including the $55 billion Terafab semiconductor manufacturing project, a Tesla and SpaceX collaboration, shows that the two companies are already operating as one entity in key ways. Several people, aside from Musk himself, have senior responsibilities at both companies, including Charlie Kuehmann, who has held leadership roles in... Read more ›
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Anthropic is backtracking a spyware rolled out covertly to track users’ location and whether they are based in China or affiliated with Chinese AI labs, after the move sparked controversies on social media. A Reddit post earlier this week said Claude Code covertly tracks and transmits ... Read more ›
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Verkada, which makes security cameras and accompanying software, said Wednesday that Nvidia is investing an unspecified amount of capital in the 10-year-old company at a $5.8 billion valuation. It’s the same valuation as Verkada’s December financing led by Alphabet’s growth investment arm, ... Read more ›
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The company behind Lime electric scooters said late Tuesday it had priced its initial public offering at $25 a share, selling $174 million in new and existing shares. The IPO of the nine-year-old company is the latest venture-backed offering to test investor appetite after the massive listing ... Read more ›
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Chinese food delivery giant Meituan unveiled its new open-source large language model that it says has been trained entirely on Chinese chips. Meituan, which developed its first LLM last year, said its new model, LongCat-2.0, which has 1.6 trillion parameters, is the first model of this ... Read more ›
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27.07.2026 09:49
Last update: 09:41 EDT.
News rating updated: 16:40.
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