This Week in Tech (Week Ending Jul 31, 2026)

Jul 31, 2026

Hey folks!

Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!

🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends

🏦 Federal Reserve held rates at 3.50%-3.75%
📊 U.S. GDP grew at a 1.5% annualized rate in Q2, softer than the 1.8% expected, but underlying demand looked sturdier: real final sales to domestic purchasers rose 3.9%, with consumer spending and AI-fueled business investment still carrying the tray.
✈️ American Airlines resumed flights after the FAA issued a nationwide ground stop for an IT outage on Tues. The halt delayed about 1,100 flights, and hit while East Coast storms were already snarling airports.
🌏 Japan was hit by a 7.1 magnitude earthquake in Kyushu, with deaths, evacuations, transit disruption, and factory shutdowns.
🏗️ AI hyperscalers: Bond investors are getting twitchy about the debt behind data centers, especially as Oracle, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft borrow heavily to keep the AI furnace lit.
📈 The Fed heads into a tense rate decision with core inflation still around 3%+, oil pressure from the Iran war, tariffs, and AI-driven energy demand all making “wait and see” feel less cozy.

🛰️ Amazon: Amazon asked the FCC for permission to launch 5,105 direct-to-phone satellites.
☁️ Amazon’s Q2 revenue hit $200.6B, AWS grew 37%, and 2026 capex guidance jumped to $220B.
🍎 Apple launched a Klarna-powered device leasing program for iPhones, Macs, iPads, and Watches
🍎 Apple: Apple was sued after a fake Sparrow Wallet app allegedly cost users $1.8M in crypto.
🧒 Meta: Meta is fighting a mountain of teen-safety lawsuits just as it tries to sell investors on up to $145B in AI spending.
💳 X Money is rolling out in the U.S. for paid X users, with a Visa debit card, in-app peer payments, cash back, and up to 6% APY.
🧊 Google: Google is planning a new “Frozen” chip to run its AI models more efficiently, while also using financing backstops to expand AI chip sales. Cold name, hot spreadsheet.
🧾 eBay reached a $56M settlement with ecommerce newsletter writers targeted in a 2019 harassment campaign.
🩺 Hims & Hers was sued by the FTC over allegations it shared sensitive patient data with Meta and Snap through website trackers while misleading users about privacy.

🐢 AI safety slowdown advocates now have momentum inside the house: Axios says more than 1,200 AI-company employees signed “Pacing the Frontier,” while Sam Altman said he discussed slowing development with White House officials as models get more capable.
Overshare: 🕵️ Anthropic: Some shared Claude chats and Artifacts were indexed by Google, including sensitive-looking material.
🌞 OpenAI previewed GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna, with Sol pitched as stronger in coding, biology, and cybersecurity. Plus: 🩺 ChatGPT Health is rolling out to U.S. users 18+ on web and iOS, with medical-record and wellness-app connections. OpenAI says health chats live in a separate protected space and are not used to train foundation models. And: 🧊 OpenAI reportedly found a way to cut inference costs roughly in half.
🌙 Moonshot AI, the Chinese startup behind Kimi, is reportedly seeking more Nvidia Blackwell chips for a much larger Kimi K4 model after Kimi K3 shook up open-source AI.
🧪 Reflection AI, Nvidia-backed U.S. open-source AI startup, has reportedly raised huge sums but has not yet released its model

🛡️ Cyera, a data-security company, agreed to buy Oasis Security for about $1B to manage “non-human identities” like AI agents.
💳 OpenRouter, an AI model-routing startup, is reportedly being discussed as a possible Stripe acquisition near $10B, roughly 70x its recent annualized revenue.
🔐 Okta agreed to buy Permiso Security, an AI identity-security startup, for just under $200M, adding threat detection for AI agents and other non-human cloud identities.
🖥️ Nscale, a British AI neocloud, is buying Anyscale for a reported $1.65B to own more of the AI workload stack around Ray-based orchestration, serving, training, and inference.

🧊 DeepSeek: DeepSeek, the Chinese AI lab, paused a planned $7.4B raise at a reported $74B valuation after a leaked CEO investor-call transcript went viral and Moonshot’s Kimi model stole some thunder. The call, which was held in May, laid out DeepSeek’s strategic priorities and the CEO’s thinking behind them.
🧑‍🔬 Simile, which makes simulated users for product and marketing research, raised $200M at a $2B valuation just five months after a $100M Series A.

🧠 Safe Superintelligence: Ilya Sutskever’s AI lab partnered with Nvidia to scale research, pairing safety rhetoric with a very large compute appetite.
📺 Peacock and YouTube: Peacock will be bundled with YouTube Premium starting in 2027.
🏗️ Meta and BlackRock are partnering on a $14B El Paso data center.
🚘 Lyft and Baidu are entering London’s robotaxi market as testing begins.

🎭 Hadestown opened to $10.2M domestically as a filmed stage production, beating Hamilton’s live-capture debut. Why it matters: The record-setting opening validates theatrical releases as a viable distribution model for certain live stage productions. Context: “Hadestown” opened on Broadway in 2019 and won eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical. It has remained on Broadway ever since, opened in London’s West End in 2024 and has toured North America almost continuously since 2021. The show takes on Greek myths in an American folk and jazz-inspired musical about love, hope and survival.

♟️ Chess: Chess is now a Gen Z scene: Chess.com says active U.S. players hit 6.4M, up from 4M a year ago
🎬 The Odyssey had a high-quality bootleg spread on X, reportedly hitting 2.1M views in about two and a half hours before takedown

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