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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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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A year after the passage of the Genius Act legalized stablecoins, a bunch of big financial players have teamed up to launch a new, impressive-sounding stablecoin. Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase, BlackRock and BNY are forming a consortium with over 140 firms to launch Open USD, which will debut later this year. This is a big deal. Open USD aims to challenge the dominance of Circle and Tether in the $300... Read more ›
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The White House is poised to lift export restrictions on Anthropic’s Fable 5, according to a U.S. official. The move could occur as early as Tuesday evening, Politico reported. On June 12, the federal government forced Anthropic to withdraw two models—Mythos 5 and Fable 5, a version of Mythos ... Read more ›
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Call it a hot chip summer. Investors are flocking to startups making semiconductors and components to run AI more efficiently, minting high valuations for businesses looking to compete with Nvidia and other stalwarts. Etched, a four-year-old startup run by young Harvard dropouts trying to develop a specialized AI chip, announced a $800 million funding round Tuesday. Last week, our colleagues reported that chip startups SambaNova and xLight are both raising... Read more ›
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Soaring demand for a limited supply of memory chips and other components has quickly pushed up prices for the Nvidia AI servers those chips go into, particularly over the last few months. That’s made it more difficult for cloud providers that buy the servers to create budgets and predict future costs, and has prompted many of them to raise prices for their AI developer customers, according to conversations with server... Read more ›
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Schneider Electric, a French energy management and power equipment company, said Tuesday that it agreed to buy Cognite Holding B.V, a Norwegian startup that develops AI agents, apps and models to solve complex industrial data problems. The transaction, an all-cash deal valued at $3.1 billion, ... Read more ›
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Anthropic released Claude Science on Tuesday, a new desktop application to assist biologists with research by writing code, literature reviews and research reports, drawing on databases of biology research and biology-focused AI models. Anthropic has also decided to start running its own drug ... Read more ›
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Jefferies has hired Alex Tingle from Goldman Sachs to lead the investment bank’s efforts in digital infrastructure deals, according to people familiar with the matter. Tingle was most recently a managing director at Goldman’s digital infrastructure investment banking group. Tingle will join ... Read more ›
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Salesforce and Microsoft may be worried about threats posed by AI upstarts like Anthropic to their core enterprise apps, but they’re taking a conciliatory approach.Even though the two incumbents sell proprietary AI agents that can be used inside their Slack and Teams messaging apps, for instance, they’ve decided the apps ought to be a “platform” or app store for any AI agents their customers might want, including Anthropic’s Claude. A... Read more ›
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Amazon Web Services said it would invest $1 billion to create a unit of consultants with the title of forward deployed engineers, which would help business customers use AI. Francessca Vasquez, vice president of AWS’ Frontier AI Engineering and Services, said in an interview that the FDEs will ... Read more ›
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Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase and BlackRock are joining a partnership with over 140 firms to launch a new stablecoin, called Open USD, which will aim to challenge the dominance of Circle and Tether. Circle’s stock fell 14% on Tuesday after the announcement, which confirms an earlier report ... Read more ›
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We closely track efforts by Anthropic, Google and OpenAI to get access to more server chips to run their models. But we don’t talk enough about the work these companies are doing to get more juice from the servers they already have.In one previously unreported example, OpenAI engineers earlier this month told some colleagues they had figured out a way to more than halve the cost of inference, or running... Read more ›
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Newly launched AI infrastructure firm Helix Infrastructure Partners is jumping into the AI build-out race, joining a growing group of private equity investors trying to bring new data center space to hyperscalers while demand is still red hot. Helix, backed by investing giant KKR, Nvidia and others and led by former Amazon Web Services chief Adam Selipsky, wants to move quickly by buying an existing data center company that develops... Read more ›
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Taiwanese prosecutors on Monday raided Super Micro Computer’s offices, investigating alleged smuggling of Nvidia AI chips into China through the company’s servers, according to Bloomberg. Taiwan’s Keelung District Prosecutors Office searched the homes of six people and the sites of three ... Read more ›
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AI video startup Higgsfield AI is in talks with investors to raise $300 million to $500 million at a valuation of $5 billion before the investment, according to two people with knowledge of the fundraising efforts. A valuation at that level would be more than four times its valuation in a funding round in January, signaling demand for startups that train and customize models to generate images and videos from... Read more ›
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The Defense Department named venture capitalist Marc Andreessen to the board of a policy committee that provides “independent strategic advice and recommendations” to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other top department officials. Blake Masters, a former Senate candidate who previously served ... Read more ›
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Do the folks at crypto holding firm Strategy know the old adage that one should buy low and sell high? Strategy revealed today a plan to sell some of its vast stock of bitcoin, even as the cryptocurrency is hovering around its lowest point in two years. The current price of around $60,000 is 20% below the average price Strategy has paid for its pile of bitcoin, now worth about... Read more ›
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Uber and Alphabet’s Waymo ended their ride-hailing partnership in Phoenix a month ago, according to an Uber spokesperson. The split, first reported by Techcrunch, raises questions about the long-term future of the relationship between the two companies, which both collaborate and compete with ... Read more ›
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Michael Saylor’s Strategy on Monday said it may sell up to $1.25 billion of bitcoin to bolster its cash holdings as part of its measures to turn around the stock, a major pivot from its long-held philosophy of buying and holding bitcoin. The company also plans to buy back up to $1 billion of its ... Read more ›
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Space launch company Rocket Lab is acquiring satellite company Iridium Communications for $8 billion in cash and stock, a deal that will make it easier for Rocket Lab to compete with SpaceX and its Starlink satellite network. The deal will combine Rocket Lab’s launch vehicles and satellite ... Read more ›
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27.07.2026 11:15
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