This Week in Tech (Week Ending Jul 24, 2026)
Hey folks!
Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
🛢️ Oil jumped above $100/barrel as the Iran war and Red Sea tanker attacks rattled markets; the S&P fell 1.2% and the Nasdaq dropped 2.2%.
🍁 Canada tariffs got a fresh 50% hike on about $20B of goods, including wine, hockey sticks, and cement.
🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
🎬 Meta made an AI optimism ad using David Bowie’s “Five Years,” a song about humanity learning it has five years left before apocalypse. 🤦♀️🤦♀️
🤦♀️📱 X rebuilt its Android app from scratch after a year-long effort, promising faster loading, scrolling, and notifications.
☁️ Google Cloud revenue jumped 82% to $24.8B, giving Alphabet cover for another giant AI capex bump. The cloud is now both the growth story and the utility bill.
🚕 Waymo robotaxis had 68% fewer police-reportable crashes per mile than human drivers in an IIHS study.
🚪 Tesla may face new U.S. vehicle-exit rules after incidents where people were trapped in cars with electronic door handles
🧮 AlphaSense, an AI-powered market research/search company for banks and enterprises, topped $700M ARR and is taking IPO steps.
💳 Stripe generated $3.2B in free cash flow in 2025 as AI companies drove more usage-based payments
Layoffs: 🎨 Patreon cut 20% of staff, or 93 people, while insisting AI is not replacing creators or employees.
🤖AI News
🧬 AI drug development is reportedly compressing preclinical pharma costs and timelines by as much as 70%, per a TD Cowen survey.
🇨🇳 Chinese open-weight models split Silicon Valley: OpenAI and Anthropic want scrutiny, while 179 founders/startups urged Washington not to block foreign open-source AI models.
🧨❗️ OpenAI said pre-release models escaped a testing environment and breached Hugging Face infrastructure during a cyber challenge.
Meanwhile, 🧑⚕️ OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT Health to U.S. adults after health queries hit 300M/week. It can connect to medical records
📚 Anthropic got final approval for its $1.5B copyright settlement with authors and publishers, paying about $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works.
🧠 Anthropic added another $20M to its AI policy push, bringing its election-cycle spending to $40M.
💽 Etched, an AI chip startup focused on faster inference, hit a $10.3B valuation after reportedly booking $1B in orders.
🏗️ OpenAI is now expected to spend $750B on AI infrastructure through 2030, including a 3.2GW Georgia data-center campus.
🧭 Cursor is launching a model router that picks the best AI model per coding task, with one test showing similar satisfaction to Claude Fable at 60% lower cost.
🔌 MCP, the protocol that helps AI agents connect to tools and data, is getting a stateless session update that should make large-scale integrations easier and cheaper to run.
🛰️ SpaceX is in talks to provide the Pentagon with billions of dollars of data-center capacity for AI models.
🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships
M&A
💳 PayPal received a roughly $53B joint takeover bid from Stripe and Advent, about a 30% premium to its recent stock price.
🎬 Paramount-Warner Bros. hit a 14-day judicial pause on its proposed $110B merger after 12 state AGs sued over competition concerns.
🎵 SoundCloud bought Nina Protocol, a decentralized music platform that had shut down in May.
💳 Stripe is reportedly in talks to buy OpenRouter, an AI model-routing startup, for close to $10B.
🤖 Sierra, Bret Taylor’s AI customer-support startup, bought Takeoff to expand into long-horizon agents for tasks like refinancing or specialist searches.
Fundraising
🧱 Databricks is raising $3B at a $188B valuation, up 40% from December. The money is going toward GPU capacity because open-source model demand has apparently eaten the pantry.
🔐 AegisAI, a startup from former Google security execs, raised $36M to fight AI-generated spear phishing with AI agents.
🧠 Etched, an AI chip startup, is in talks for a $20B valuation in a round led by Jane Street, plus a separate $10B valuation round led by Sequoia
🧑⚕️ OpenEvidence, an AI medical search tool for doctors, is weighing funding at a $20B valuation after nearing $300M in annualized revenue.
🐺 Colossal Biosciences, the de-extinction startup, is reportedly in talks to raise at a $20B-$30B valuation.
🤖 Atoms, Travis Kalanick’s robotics holding company, raised $1.7B led by a16z after rolling up CloudKitchens and automation startup Pronto.
Partnerships
🤝 AMD agreed to invest up to $5B in Anthropic, while Anthropic will start using AMD AI chips next year.
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
🥀 “Sad Girl Summer” is apparently the season’s pop weather system, with Olivia Rodrigo, Gracie Abrams, Phoebe Bridgers, Ariana, and Charli all leaning melancholy.
🇪🇸 Spain won the World Cup. World Cup final viewership hit 62.8M U.S. viewers, the biggest soccer telecast in U.S. history.
🎤 Snoop Dogg is getting a Universal biopic, with Jonathan Daviss starring and an August 6, 2027 release date.
🍰Get this guy a cooking show! The latest viral cooking tip tiktok features an incredible delivery on how to get the best moist box cake ever
🏹 The Odyssey became Christopher Nolan’s biggest-ever global opening with a $264.1M debut. Apparently people are reselling IMAX tickets for over $1,000. 😱 But what has most ppl talking are the promo appearances - including Tom Holland being the first person ever to vomit on Hot Ones 🍗🔥poor thing!
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