Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below:

TLDR:

• 📈 Markets swung as chip stocks rallied globally, then U.S. stocks sold off on $100+ oil, hotter wholesale inflation, and higher Treasury yields.

• 🍎 Apple unveiled the iPhone Duo, its first foldable and the first major launch of the John Ternus era.

• 🧒 California passed new kids-tech and AI-chatbot safeguards, while Netflix and Meta faced fresh child-safety/data-privacy legal pressure.

• 🐉 U.S.-China AI tensions sharpened as American agencies accused Chinese labs of large-scale model distillation.

• 🏭 The AI buildout stayed expensive: Oracle capex, Firmus/OpenAI, Qualcomm/Amazon, Google/Accenture, and chip/data-center deals all pointed the same way.

• 💸 Private AI money stayed hot, with Thinking Machines, Mistral, Cognition, Harvey, and Alif/Analog Devices crowding the deal board.

🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends

• 📈 There was quite a bit of volatility this week in the markets: Global chip stocks rallied while U.S. markets were closed for Labor Day. 🛢️ But the US market dropped, dragged down by the oil and rates - Brent briefly topped $108, wholesale inflation rose to 5.4%, and the 10-year Treasury yield climbed to 4.95%.

• 🇪🇺 The European Central Bank raised rates to 2.5%, citing Middle East-driven energy inflation as the world’s least charming imported expense.

• 🌊 Nepal’s flood disaster entered a national day of mourning, with 1,300+ dead, roughly 5,000 missing, and hydropower tunnels still at the center of rescue anger.

• 🌋 A volcano kept Indonesian airports closed after a 25-hour eruption, stranding roughly 170,000 travelers.

• ✈️ Bombardier became the focus of the US / CA trade war after Trump threatened to block U.S. jet sales unless the Canadian company shifts more manufacturing south.

• 🧒 California signed sweeping kids-tech laws with penalties up to $1M per child for negligent platform harms, a ban on addictive feeds for under-16s, and risk assessments for AI chatbots.

🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)

• 🍎 Apple unveiled the iPhone Duo, its first foldable: $1,999 to start, 5.4 inches closed, 7.6 inches open, A20 Pro inside, and preorders beginning October 16.

• 🎬 Netflix was sued by Florida’s attorney general over alleged children’s data tracking tied to its ad business; the state is seeking billions in damages and deletion of collected data.

• 🗳️ Meta is finally headed to trial in New Mexico over Cambridge Analytica, with the state alleging Facebook failed to protect data from roughly 87M profiles and seeking penalties tied to more than 2M residents.

• 📦 Amazon Air faces an NTSB investigation after a Prime Air Boeing 767 operated by 21 Air overran a Miami runway, killing five people in vehicles and disrupting airport operations.

• ☁️ Oracle tripled quarterly capex to $28.49B as cloud-infrastructure revenue jumped 121%, turning old-school enterprise software into another AI power-and-concrete story.

• 💍 Robinhood/Oura - Robinhood is listed as an underwriter on Oura’s planned IPO, its first step into investment banking.

• 🚕 Tesla’s Cybercab drew a federal safety probe hours after hitting Austin streets without steering wheels or pedals.

🤖AI News

• 🐉 China/U.S. AI became a model-theft fight after U.S. agencies accused DeepSeek, Alibaba, Moonshot, and Z.ai of industrial-scale distillation of American frontier models.

• 🧮 OpenAI claimed an internal AI system solved the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem, then immediately landed in a data-provenance fight with mathematicians at NYU and Anthropic.

• 🧠 OpenAI/Samsung deepened chip cooperation as OpenAI works on next-generation silicon and Samsung becomes one of ChatGPT’s largest enterprise deployments.

• 🧞 Meta launched Muse, a personal AI agent for U.S. adults that can act across apps from a dedicated secure VM while a separate Sentinel system decides what reaches the internet.

• ⚖️ xAI was sued by a child-abuse survivor who alleges Grok generated new illegal images from known abuse material, sharpening scrutiny on AI safety filters and platform enforcement.

• 🎒 AI in schools hit a backlash wall as New York City restricted AI for roughly 600,000 younger students and Los Angeles Unified imposed a school-device moratorium for the year.

• 🧬 Google DeepMind released AlphaGenome Atlas, a 1-petabyte map predicting the molecular effects of 9B possible single-letter DNA changes.

• 🚪 Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned publicly over the frontier race and alleged agent-containment failures.

🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships

M&A

• 🛩️ GE Aerospace agreed to buy Consolidated Precision Products for $11.75B, bringing critical jet-engine castings in-house while aerospace and defense demand keep supply chains tight.

Fundraising

• 🧠 Thinking Machines Lab is in talks to raise $5B-$6B at a $40B+ pre-money valuation, with Nvidia expected to supply roughly half the round.

• 🇫🇷 Mistral AI raised €3B at a €21B+ valuation led by Samsung, turning Europe’s “sovereign AI” ambition into a very expensive geopolitical group project.

• 💻 Cognition AI raised $2B at a $48B valuation, nearly doubling its May price as run-rate revenue climbed from $492M to nearly $900M.

• ⚖️ Harvey raised $550M at a $15.5B valuation, with 80% of Am Law 100 firms using its legal-AI tools and its open-weight Tenet model now part of the pitch.

Partnerships

• 🧑‍💼 Google Cloud/Accenture formed a Gemini Enterprise unit with up to 1,000 forward-deployed engineers.

• 🏭 Firmus/OpenAI signed a multi-year Malaysia AI-factory deal, making OpenAI an anchor customer and taking Firmus above 900MW of contracted capacity.

• 🎧 Warner Music/Suno are trying to turn AI music from copyright migraine into royalty stream, with Warner saying artists can earn from music creation, not just consumption

• 🔌 Qualcomm/Amazon announced a custom AI data-center partnership around inference chips and 1.6-terabit optical links, because the cloud now bottlenecks in places with very tiny components.

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• Who knew Colbert was a tech guy too? ✍️ Stephen Colbert is turning his post late-night show time towards toward Scripto, the collaborative writing software already used by major comedy rooms including “SNL” and “Last Week Tonight.”

• 🤣 South Park is changing its name to South America bc they are ‘inspired by [the] bravery and patriotism’ of Apple and Google, who capitulated to Trump’s requests to change Lake Ontario to ‘Lake America’

• 🎟️ Hollywood’s summer box office hit $4.61B, up 26.1% from 2025, with Gen Z showing up for both giant franchises and low-budget breakouts.

• 🎾 The U.S. Open has been a little ratchet this year - with players and fans complaining about influencers, mid-point chatter, crowd noise, and weed smoke.

• This trailer for the new documentary starring Nathan Fielder and Elizabeth Holmes feels like a horror movie? it’s weird but the internet reactions are great

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Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below:

TLDR:

• 🚀 OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra and paired it with a $1B critical-infrastructure cyber-defense push.

• 🤗 Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.93B, putting the open-model commons inside the GPU kingdom.

• 🍎 Apple began the John Ternus era as Tim Cook moved to executive chair.

• 💍 Oura filed to go public while Ultrahuman raised $70M, turning smart rings into the week’s tiniest platform war.

🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends

• 📈 Tech stocks rallied as bond yields cooled, with the Nasdaq up 1.4%.

• ⬟ The Pentagon has launched versions of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and xAI’s Grok, giving 3 million civilian and military personnel access to generative AI tools

🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)

• 🛒 Amazon was sued by the FTC and 22 states over an alleged ad-auction surcharge scheme affecting more than 1M advertisers, including 500K+ small businesses.

• ⚖️ Google dodged a forced breakup of its ad-tech business after a federal judge rejected the DOJ’s bid to make it sell AdX; the remedies are behavioral and still mostly sealed, so publishers get guardrails instead of a clean divorce.

• End of an era and into a new: 🍎 Apple - John Ternus will take over as Apple’s chief executive officer on Tuesday.

• 🧮 Meta is backing away from making AI-token usage part of engineer reviews, a tiny workplace comedy with a real lesson: measure tokens, get tokens.

• 📧 Microsoft 365 had a multi-day Outlook/Exchange disruption, a reminder that “cloud productivity” still occasionally means waiting for email to remember its job.

• 👓 Oh Snap: who wants $2195 smart glasses?

• 🗺️ MapQuest? #1? That’s right - MapQuest’s app surged to No. 1 in Navigation after it defied Trump’s executive order directing the U.S. Department of the Interior to update Lake Ontario to Lake America.

• Meanwhile…🧭 Apple Maps followed Google in showing “Lake America” to U.S. users, turning map labels into another small platform-politics weather vane.

• 🚨 Flock Safety is facing state-level blowback: Florida and Texas moved against license-plate readers after abuse concerns, with TechCrunch reporting roughly 130,000 readers across the U.S.

• 🚗 Volkswagen is cutting 50,000 more jobs and shifting auto production away from four German plants as cheaper Chinese EVs, tariffs, and Europe’s industrial slowdown squeeze the old carmaking order.

• 🪓 Uber is cutting 10% of staff, about 3,300 people, as the corporate purge of small management layers turns “micro-team boss” into the new endangered office species.

• Tesla published a form on Thursday for businesses interested in buying Cybercab fleets or providing infrastructure for its network

🤖AI News

• 🏛️ AI policy got the summit-stage treatment in North Carolina, where Nvidia, OpenAI, Meta and Musk pressed G-20 officials for lighter regulation while data-center power and water fights followed them into the lobby.

• ⭐️🧨 OpenAI Astra became the first OpenAI model to hit its “critical cybersecurity threshold,” meaning it can find and exploit unknown flaws with limited human guidance.

• 🛡️ OpenAI Daybreak added a $1B “Frontline Defenders” initiative for water systems, utilities, local governments and banks, giving critical infrastructure subsidized model access, training and technical support.

• 🧠 Google released Gemini 3.8 Flash and Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber; Flash keeps the 3.7 introductory API price, while Cyber goes to trusted defenders through Fairwind and tops 70% on Google’s internal real-world vulnerability benchmark.

• 🪶 Anthropic Fable/Mythos 5.1 launched with lower token costs and fewer false-positive refusals; Mythos remains limited to vetted cyber/life-sciences partners.

• Yikes On Thursday, 🧯 ChatGPT, Claude and Grok all had issues at the same time.

• 🧾 Startup ARR is getting wobblier in AI: Madrona found 77% of enterprises re-evaluate AI vendors every six months or continuously, which makes “recurring revenue” sound suddenly aspirational.

🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships

M&A

• 🤗 Nvidia confirmed it will buy Hugging Face for $12.93B, acquiring a platform with 3M models, 1M apps, 500,000 datasets and 18M+ developers while promising to keep it open.

• 📹 GoPro is being acquired by Starman Optical for $285M, with the deal clearing $92M in debt and keeping a defense-market pivot alive.

• 🧰 Palo Alto Networks reportedly paid $500M for Console, a two-year-old AI help-desk automation startup that raised $29M.

Fundraising

• 🧪 Thinking Machines Lab is reportedly in talks for a $1B round led by Accel at a $40B valuation, even though annualized revenue is just over $100M.

• 💸 Polymarket is reportedly raising around $1B at a $21B post-money valuation, keeping prediction markets squarely in the politics-and-finance blender.

• 🛡️ HiddenLayer raised $100M as AI security spending accelerates; Gartner pegs the category at $2.83B this year and nearly $4.78B next year, while HiddenLayer says ARR grew more than 10x.

• 💍 Ultrahuman raised $70M from Qualcomm and others to push smart rings toward wristwatch-level computing, just as Oura heads for the IPO window.

Partnerships

• 🧮 Anthropic signed a reported $35B cloud deal with Nvidia-backed Lambda.

• 🧑‍⚕️ ChatGPT Health + Epic lets clinicians import patient data from Epic, which holds records for 325M+ patients; OpenAI says access is read-only.

• 🔋 Google and Fervo signed a 396MW geothermal power deal for a Utah data-center plan, with an option to expand by another 600MW — the AI boom’s new shopping list is chips, land, water, and electricity that does not blink at sunset.

• ☁️ Crusoe reportedly signed a five-year, roughly $13B cloud contract with Jane Street and is raising at a $30B valuation, another sign that AI compute is becoming a balance-sheet sport.

IPO

• 👗 Shein ended flat in its Hong Kong debut after raising $1.7B, a muted public-market entrance for the ultra-fast-fashion machine.

• 💍 Oura filed to go public, saying revenue has climbed from about $500M in 2024 to roughly $1B in 2025, with the smart-ring maker now pitching sleep, recovery and preventive health as a public-market business.

• 🧠 Moonshot AI reportedly filed confidentially for a Hong Kong IPO, aiming to raise about $3B after Kimi K3 pushed China’s open-model race back into the spotlight.

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• 👗 The Met canceled its planned John Galliano exhibit after backlash over his past antisemitic and racist remarks.

• 🏀 Steve Ballmer and the Clippers got hit with the NBA’s hammer: a one-year owner suspension, a $30M team fine and five forfeited first-round picks over Kawhi Leonard salary-cap circumvention.

• 🎾 Attack of the influencers: U.S. Open creators are testing tennis etiquette with smartphones and ring lights in the stands, dragging the sport’s quiet-luxury image into the creator-economy spotlight.

• Looney for Loonen: Introducing the new status symbol

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Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!

TLDR:

• 🌊 Nepal/Tibet floods became the week’s major global story: 469 dead and 1,400+ missing after a glacier/bedrock collapse sent floodwater and debris through Himalayan border towns.

• 🧬 Nvidia/Hugging Face is the big AI-deal watch: The Information says Nvidia agreed to buy the open-model hub for $12.9B.

• 🛡️ OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and 100+ others warned that hospitals, water systems and internet infrastructure may have only months to prepare for AI-enabled cyberattacks.

• 🧑‍🏭 The Labor Department is cutting AI/jobs data deals with OpenAI, Google, Meta, Amazon and others to track labor-market shifts faster.

• 🚗 Uber says weekly AI-agent requests are up 9.4x since February while costs have stayed flat since April. AI, but make it budget discipline.

• 🦆 Microduck is Hugging Face/Pollen’s $399 open-source robot, a very visual physical-AI palate cleanser.

🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends

• 🌊 Nepal-Tibet floods’ death toll has risen to 469, with 1,400+ people reported missing across Nepal and Tibet after a glacier/bedrock collapse.

• 🧾 U.S. inflation stayed sticky: July PCE was 3.7% year over year, core PCE was 3.3%, and real consumer spending was basically flat.

• 🧑‍🏭 The Labor Department is striking data-sharing deals with OpenAI, Google, Meta, Amazon and others to track how AI is changing hiring and jobs in something closer to real time.

• 🇨🇦 U.S.-Canada trade tensions escalated: Trump threatened 50% tariffs on Canadian autos, parts and steel, while Canada prepared retaliatory tariffs. Supply chains are putting on tiny helmets.

🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)

• 🧮 Nvidia revenue hit $96.2B, data-center revenue hit $89.0B, and next quarter’s guide is $108B.

• 📱 Meta agreed to an up-to-$18B teen-safety settlement, including default two-hour daily limits, night mode, school-hour notification muting, hidden like counts, and age assurance.

• 🍎 Apple set its Sept. 9 event, with the first foldable iPhone expected and John Ternus getting his first big keynote as CEO.

• 🚨 Flock Safety, maker of AI license-plate camera systems, is facing a Senate investigation into how it collects, retains, and shares surveillance data.

• 📈 Okta and CrowdStrike jumped 28.6% and 20.5% after results, powered by the AI boom.

• 🏠 Zillow + Redfin settled an FTC/state antitrust case over rentals: Redfin must reenter rental ads after a deal where Zillow allegedly paid $100M to keep it from competing.

🤖AI News

• 🧰 OpenAI is pushing ChatGPT Work beyond coding: the $20/month product connects agents to email, Slack, Notion, Figma and more, but OpenAI’s own study found 98% internal Codex use vs. 17% of org subscribers and under 1% of individual subscribers.

• 🚨 OpenAI + Hugging Face drew an Alabama subpoena after OpenAI said an unreleased guardrail-free cyber model escaped an isolated test and hit Hugging Face plus other targets during evaluation.

• 🧠 Meta reportedly plans to launch its consumer AI agent platform “Hatch” in coming weeks and is targeting October for a new model called Watermelon.

• 🛡️ OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and 100+ others signed a cyber-defense warning, saying hospitals, water systems and internet infrastructure may have only months to prepare for more capable AI-enabled attacks.

• 🧪 Inherent, a London AI lab from DeepMind alumni, says its Faraday research agent beat larger OpenAI/Anthropic systems at replicating papers while running on a 27B-parameter Qwen model.

• 🕵️ Ox Alpha is the mystery model of the moment: a free OpenRouter “stealth model” for coding and agentic work has people guessing Z.ai/GLM, Microsoft MAI, or something stranger in a trench coat.

• 🎙️ Google Gemini Live is getting voice-driven agents, Daily Brief, and app actions, but the real story is consumer AI’s clutter problem: every helpful mode now wants its own little nametag.

• 🧭 The Information framed the AI majors as land-grabbers in each other’s yards: xAI renting compute, Meta moving into enterprise agents, Anthropic exploring chips, Amazon pushing Trainium, and OpenAI working with Broadcom.

• 🦆 Microduck is Hugging Face/Pollen’s $399 open-source robot, a very visual physical-AI palate cleanser.

🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships

M&A

• 🤗 Hugging Face has reportedly been approached about a sale at $13B+, a spicy number for the open-source AI model hub/community that suddenly looks very strategic. The Information says Nvidia agreed to buy the open-model hub for $12.9B.

• 📰 Flipboard bought Graze, a tiny Bluesky/AT Protocol feed-builder that has delivered 41B posts to 12M people and splits contextual ad revenue with curators.

Fundraising

• 👓 Legato, an AI hearing-glasses startup from Bose and smart-eyewear veterans, emerged with $12M to tackle mild-to-moderate hearing loss through normal-looking frames.

Partnerships

• 🏗️ Anthropic signed a roughly $45B compute rental deal with Nscale, a British AI infrastructure company, using Nvidia Vera Rubin systems starting in late 2027.

• 🔎 Nvidia + Perplexity talks are reportedly circling a $30B+ valuation round, another bead on Jensen Huang’s “invest in everything that consumes GPUs” necklace.

• 🧱 AWS and Nvidia are deepening the chip embrace: AWS plans to deploy 2M additional Nvidia GPUs and integrate Vera CPUs, Nemotron models, networking, and robotics tech.

• 🤝 Salesforce and Anthropic launched Claudeforce, starting with a Claude plugin containing 37 prebuilt sales skills for live pipeline context and governed Salesforce actions.

• This betting trend is getting out of hand: 🌦️ Kalshi and The Weather Company are teaming up on weather-prediction markets, with Weather Co. data verifying outcomes as Kalshi says it is pacing toward $1.1B in annualized volume.

IPO

• 💍 Oura is reportedly eyeing a September IPO at a $16B+ valuation, with a potential $3B raise.

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• 😢 Rough week: Country legend Dolly Parton passed at 80 yrs old; Artist Yayoi Kusama died at 97 - she was known for her polka dots and Infinity Rooms that became museum blockbuster culture

• 💛 How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days sequel is in discussions

• 🎬 Coyote vs. Acme finally hits theaters after being shelved for a tax write-off, with a 95% Rotten Tomatoes score.

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Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!

TLDR:

• 📉 Macro got spicy: the 30-year Treasury topped 5.3%, while Fed minutes kept the door open to hikes if inflation stays sticky.

• 🛰️ The physical world is getting very automated: Nevada approved up to 8,000 robotaxis, Amazon wants Prime Air in ~500 U.S. cities, and SpaceX is lining up big Washington wins.

• 🤖 The AI scoreboard is messy: Ramp data has Anthropic slightly ahead of OpenAI with paying business users, but OpenAI is growing faster this quarter.

• 💬 ChatGPT is getting more personal: Apple Messages actions are here, and teen accounts are getting Study Mode, parental controls, and default under-18 protections.

• 🏗️ The AI buildout is now an energy/real-estate epic: OpenAI signed a 20-year, 10GW Ohio data-center lease with SoftBank’s SB Energy and Nvidia deeply in the mix.

• 💸 Deal flow: OpenRouter/Stripe, Nvidia/Poolside, Mercor, Higgsfield, Groq, Wispr, Etched, and Rillet all show how much money is chasing AI plumbing.

🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends

• 🧊 AI capex has a giant iceberg problem: WSJ found nine major tech companies have about $3T in off-balance-sheet AI commitments, versus roughly $600B in reported capex over the past year.

• 📉 Bonds - the 30-year U.S. Treasury topped 5.3% for the first time since 2007, with WSJ pointing to Iran-war inflation risk, deficits, and a flood of tech-company debt.

• 📈 Fed minutes showed many officials think hikes may be needed if inflation stays sticky; the July vote held rates near 3.6%, but AI infrastructure, tariffs, and Middle East energy shocks are now part of the inflation watch.

🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)

• 🎧 Apple AirPods are going to have cameras??

• 🗣️ Reddit is testing narrated audio/video versions of posts in select communities, essentially bringing TikTok-style “Reddit storytime” back in-house.

• 💸 TikTok is reportedly exploring Venmo-ish payments inside DMs, using TikTok Pay plumbing already live for TikTok Shop in Southeast Asia.

• 🛰️ SpaceX is stacking Washington wins: WSJ says it is in line for $8B+ tied to Golden Dome missile tracking while the FCC weighs its plan for up to 1M AI satellites.

• 🚕 Tesla, Uber, and Waymo got Nevada approval for up to 8,000 robotaxis in Clark County over 12 months; Tesla’s 5,000 cap is a ceiling, with its exec saying 2,500 would be a win.

• 🔀 Ramp Router is Ramp’s OpenRouter-ish swing: the API routes across OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Moonshot, Nvidia, xAI, Z.ai and more, but retains prompts/outputs for one year by default unless users opt out.

• 📦 Amazon Prime Air plans drone delivery in nearly 500 U.S. cities by year-end, a roughly 6x footprint expansion, with 30-minute delivery as the shiny carrot.

🤖AI News

• 🧾 OpenAI vs. Anthropic is getting less sticky: Ramp data shows Anthropic at nearly 44% of paying business users vs. OpenAI near 40%, but OpenAI is growing faster in Q3 so far

• 💬 ChatGPT added an Apple Messages plug-in that can search, draft, delete, and send texts; OpenAI says it runs locally, but persistent approval removes the final review step.

• 📊 OpenAI told investors Q2 revenue rose 18% to $6.7B while operating losses widened to $12.3B; Anthropic more than doubled to $11.6B and reportedly posted a small operating profit.

• 🎒 ChatGPT for Teens adds Study Mode, homework nudges, parental controls, default under-18 protections, and 90-minute break reminders; WSJ says OpenAI will use about 2,000 signals to place 13-17 users into the teen experience.

• 🏗️ OpenAI signed a 20-year, 10GW Ohio data-center lease with SoftBank’s SB Energy; Nvidia gets exclusive chip supply for the first half, invests $1.5B, and backstops up to $105B if the project needs rescuing.

• 🧯 OpenAI is slowing parts of Astra after potential “critical” cybersecurity risk; Anthropic, meanwhile, says its 186-page safety plan means it does not need a comparable pause.

• 🚀 Anthropic reportedly hit a $65B annualized revenue run rate at the end of July, up from $47B in May and $9B at year-end; investors expect $100B-$120B by year-end.

• 🧠 Nvidia is plotting a China comeback with a U.S.-compliant LPU chip using Groq-licensed tech; small-batch shipments could start by year-end, but Beijing may still block orders.

• 💻 Alibaba Qwen hit 1M+ downloads in days for Qwen3.8-27B, a local multimodal model; The Information says it scored level with OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Luna on Artificial Analysis.

🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships

M&A

• 🧾 OpenRouter is reportedly being acquired by Stripe for $7B+; the “Stripe for AI” gateway claims 8M users and access to 400+ models.

• 🤝 Anthropic’s enterprise AI venture Ode bought AI consultancy Casper Studios, its first acquisition since launching with $1.5B from Anthropic and Wall Street backers to push Claude into enterprises.

• 💸 Nvidia + Poolside is a very expensive not-quite-acquisition: Nvidia will reportedly pay $6B to license Poolside’s model factory, offer jobs to 109 employees, and invest $1B at a $12B pre-money valuation.

Fundraising

• 🧰 Nvidia + Mercor are circling a $20B valuation round for the AI data supplier; Mercor’s annualized gross revenue hit $2B in June.

• 💰 Higgsfield, an AI image/video startup, raised $400M at a $5.4B valuation, touting $700M ARR, 30M users, and 390 Fortune 500 customers.

• ☁️ Groq raised $350M at a $3.5B valuation as it pivots from its own inference chips to Nvidia-powered neocloud capacity; it now runs 13 data centers and plans to scale from 54MW to 200MW+ in 2027.

• 🎙️ Wispr raised $280M at a $2B valuation and launched Canto, a speech model it says cuts dictation error rates from 30% to under 10%.

• 💰 Etched, an AI inference-hardware startup, raised $700M at a $21B valuation, led by Jane Street after it tested and installed one of Etched’s racks.

• 🧾 Rillet, an AI accounting startup, raised $100M at a $1B valuation; rival Campfire is also fielding $1B offers as AI startups’ back-office vendors ride the boom.

Partnerships

• 🛸 Uber is investing in and partnering with Zipline to bring drone delivery to Uber Eats, aiming for 1M drone deliveries per day by the end of 2029.

• 💾 Marvell + Google expanded their TPU chip partnership, giving Google the right to buy up to $12.2B of Marvell stock; Marvell rose 9.9%, Broadcom fell 4.6%.

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⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom

Is your emoji use dating yourself?

• 🎥⛄ Frozen 3 details dropped: Spoiler alert - Olaf gets a girlfriend 🤭.

• 🎥♥️ There will be an Ocean’s Eleven prequel starring Margot Robbie, written and directed by Bradley Cooper.

• Nicole Kidman stars in Troye Sivan’s latest music video

Do you have any feedback? I’d love to hear from you! Just hit reply to this email

Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!

TLDR:

• 🌎 Markets wobbled near the highs and oil got twitchy over Hormuz.

• 🏭 AI infrastructure stayed enormous: data-center costs, tax-break drama, Chinese gear worries, SpaceX/Tesla’s Terafab, and investors asking whether all this capex has a receipt.

• 🤖 The model wars kept moving: OpenAI previewed Astra, Aliba…

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Happy Friday and almost 250th July 4th-versary! 🇺🇸🦅 😎 Tech news below!

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Happy Friday, and happy Juneteenth. Before we get into the week’s parade of AI drama, chip math, and internet oddities, a quick pause for Freedom Day: Juneteenth marks June 19, 1865, when news of emancipation reached Galveston, Texas. A reminder that some updates are worth waiting for, but ideally not two and a half years.

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Happy Friday! 😎 and happy belated Earth day! 🌎 Tech news below!

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Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!

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