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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A couple days ago, John Carmack, a videogame pioneer and former virtual reality executive at Meta Platforms, wrote on X that he had begun seeing anti–data center yard signs popping up in his neighborhood. “I am entertaining the idea of paying for a billboard with something like ‘Data centers are awesome, Texas should lead!’” wrote Carmack, who has co-founded an AI startup, Keen Technologies. In a follow-up post, Carmack compared... Read more ›
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Trase Systems, a three-year-old startup that sells AI to healthcare and federal government customers like the U.S. Navy, has raised a $107 million seed round led by Chicago-based ARCH Venture Partners, according to a company spokesperson. Trase is part of an emerging segment of tech firms that ... Read more ›
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OpenAI has hired Amazon Web Services veteran Chris Grusz to serve as managing director of cloud partnerships, a role that involves working with the startup’s cloud provider and software partners. Grusz, whose recently updated LinkedIn profile reflects his new role, spent nearly 11 years at AWS ... Read more ›
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AI server chips that effectively compete with Nvidia’s have never been more in-demand as AI developers and cloud providers seek lower-cost alternatives to the market leader. In the latest example, nine-year-old chip startup SambaNova is set to raise between $800 million and $1 billion, its executive chairman, Lip-Bu Tan, said at an event on Tuesday. Tan, who is also CEO of chip designer and manufacturer Intel, didn’t elaborate. But people... Read more ›
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Finance isn’t exactly known for minting new business models overnight. The industry is heavily regulated, customers are slow to move money and licensing often keeps firms in familiar lanes. Prediction markets are proving a rare exception. Fast-growing U.S. prediction market Kalshi recently topped $2 billion in annualized revenue. At that pace, it would already be generating roughly half of Robinhood’s latest annual revenue and around one-third that of exchange operator... Read more ›
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For founders, the benefits of building a personal brand are undeniable. A high-profile personal brand can lead to more attention and opportunities from media and investors, create inbound demand from warm leads, and foster trust with potential customers. And, unlike traditional marketing, it can be executed with zero budget. However, building a personal brand can take a great deal of time. With so many founders and thought leaders competing for... Read more ›
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Since the start of the year, cities, towns, counties and states across America have slammed the brakes on allowing new data centers in their backyards. By exhaustively combing through a combination of legal documents and local news reports, The Information has identified more than 300 temporary and permanent bans on data center development that state and local governments throughout the U.S. have passed since 2023, and over 75 more under... Read more ›
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Qualcomm has agreed to pay around $3.9 billion in stock for Modular, a software startup that allows developers to write software to run on different chips without having to rewrite the code for each chip. The deal price, based on Qualcomm’s last closing price on Tuesday, more than doubled the ... Read more ›
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Ornn, a startup that tracks the cost of AI tokens and computing power, raised $33 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The money will be used to build a marketplace for trading compute, executives at the company told Bloomberg. Ornn is one of several companies seeking to turn ... Read more ›
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By some accounts, the compute crunch of 2026 has become even more dire than the chip crunch of 2023, which saw even venture capital firms becoming quasi-cloud providers temporarily. That’s good news for a subclass of firms that popped up to rent out computing power and help developers run open-source models to power applications. Some people call them compute resellers or inference providers.Most of these firms rent out Nvidia-powered servers... Read more ›
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OpenAI and Broadcom unveiled a new chip the two companies have developed for inference, a big step forward in OpenAI’s effort to reduce its reliance on Nvidia chips and control its own hardware. The companies are calling the new chip Jalapeno, and they said in a blog post that “early ... Read more ›
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SpaceX’s xAI is doubling down on video- and image-generating tools, people familiar with the project said. That’s seizing on an opening left by OpenAI and Anthropic, which offer fewer visual capabilities. XAI launched an upgraded video model last week, highlighting how it’s pushing ahead with its own visual efforts even as it brings in outside help to compete with rivals in areas like coding. SpaceX also touted the popularity of... Read more ›
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Alibaba Group has sued the U.S. Department of Defense, seeking to be removed from the Pentagon’s blacklist of Chinese companies with alleged military ties. In a federal complaint filed in California, Alibaba said the Pentagon’s label has “no basis in fact or law” and was imposed “without notice ... Read more ›
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Here’s a suggestion for Mark Zuckerberg: Maybe you should ditch AI model development and spend even more on smart glasses! Meta Platforms on Tuesday unveiled its latest selection of smart glasses, devised with eyewear giant EssilorLuxottica, and it’s hard not to be impressed with the way they look. Meta would seem to have more chance of succeeding with smart glasses than beating the leading AI labs in developing state-of-the-art models.... Read more ›
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XLight, a startup developing advanced lasers for semiconductor manufacturing, is in talks to raise $350 million in funding from a pair of investment firms just weeks after receiving substantial investment from the U.S. Department of Commerce, according to the company’s verbal and written pitch to prospective investors. The company wants to reduce the cost and time needed to make the most advanced AI server chips by developing an alternative approach... Read more ›
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Walmart’s $1.4 billion purchase of New York–based advertising technology startup Vibe on Tuesday is a reminder of how serious the retail giant is about building its ad business.Walmart is paying a big price for Vibe, which helps small businesses buy ads on streaming platforms and will allow Walmart to reach more advertisers looking to buy spots on its site. The $1.4 billion price, which includes a $180 million executive retention... Read more ›
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Anthropic and OpenAI are booming, but so are providers of open-source AI models and other cheaper alternatives, thanks to businesses using open-source to control their costs, we reported in detail this morning. But there’s more.Together AI, the neocloud which rents out Nvidia cloud servers and access to open source models, raised its annual revenue projections at least three times in the past few months due to the growing usage of... Read more ›
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OpenAI’s ad chief Dave Dugan said at Cannes this week that around 20% of ChatGPT queries have a “direct commercial intent,” demonstrating that a user is looking to buy a specific product. A greater proportion of queries, he said, extend beyond requests for specific products and signal that the ... Read more ›
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Meta Platforms is building a prediction market app that could rival offerings from Polymarket and Kalshi, The New York Times reported. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has instructed a small team to develop the app, internally known as Arena, through which users could potentially wager on events using either ... Read more ›
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Meta Platforms unveiled a new line of smart glasses on Tuesday, pricing one of the devices $80 below its previous entry-level model despite adding no new major capabilities—a move that underscores the company’s desire to expand market share ahead of expected rival entries from Apple and Google. ... Read more ›
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27.07.2026 12:48
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