This Week in Tech (Week Ending May 22, 2026)

May 22, 2026

Hey folks!

Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below!

🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends

📈 Earnings season has been a blockbuster so far. Corporate profits have driven the S&P 500 to fresh records, muffling some of Wall Street’s worries about the economic fallout of the war in Iran. The artificial-intelligence giants’ $725 billion spending spree has helped. Consumers are feeling gloomy, but they’re continuing to spend. Households expect inflation and the job market to worsen this year, though retail sales remain robust.
🦠An Ebola outbreak in central Africa could last for months. “I’m deeply concerned about the scale and speed of the epidemic,” one W.H.O. official said.
🇨🇺The Justice Department charged Raúl Castro, the 94-year-old former president of Cuba and brother of Fidel Castro, with murder and a conspiracy to kill U.S. citizens. The accusations stem from the 1996 downing of two civilian planes.
💰Borrowing costs for governments around the world — including the U.S. — are nearing multi-decade highs as investors bet that the war with Iran will keep inflation elevated for longer

Google is transforming Search from a list of links into an AI-powered experience filled with conversational answers, autonomous agents, and interactive interfaces — a shift that could further reduce traffic to publishers across the web. At the Google I/O event, Google also announced a new video model, Gemini Omni, and an expanded lineup of AI shopping tools.
Uber lifted its stake in Germany-based food delivery firm Delivery Hero to 19.5%, with options to go to 25%, a sign the ride-hailing and delivery firm may be contemplating expanding further in Europe.
Nvidia’s revenue grew 85% to $81.6 billion in the three months that ended April 26, the company said Wednesday. That’s 12 percentage points higher than the blistering growth the AI chip designer reported in the January quarter. It also projected revenue would grow 95% in the current fiscal quarter, suggesting that the AI boom is far from peaking and its Blackwell-series chips are hitting their stride.
Layoffs: Intuit to lay off over 3,000 employees to refocus on AI

⭐️Elon Musk lost in his lawsuit against OpenAI, delivering a major victory to CEO Sam Altman in Silicon Valley’s biggest grudge match.
OpenAI announced one of its general-purpose reasoning models autonomously cracked a famous geometry problem that stumped mathematicians for 80 years.
Anthropic’s explosive growth has the company on track for its first profitable quarter, with revenue projected to more than double to $10.9 billion in Q2. Anthropic expects to generate $559 million in operating profit at the end of the June quarter, becoming profitable on an operating basis for the first time.
The White House’s Office of the National Cyber Director hosted a briefing Tuesday for companies including OpenAI, Anthropic and Reflection AI on a planned executive order on AI that will empower intelligence and other government agencies to review advanced models before the models are released. The executive order aims to establish a voluntary framework for developers of frontier models to inform the government about planned new AI releases.
Figma added an AI assistant to its collaborative canvas.
🤖 Andrej Karpathy, one of the world’s best-known AI researchers and a founding member of OpenAI, is joining rival Anthropic in a major coup

Analog Devices is in advanced talks to buy startup Empower Semiconductor for about $1.5 billion, in a deal that reflects demand for technology that can manage the intense energy needs of AI chips.
Anthropic acquired Stainless, a dev tools startup used by OpenAI, Google and Cloudflare
OpenAI bought Weights.GG, a small startup that made an AI voice-cloning tool called Replay, in January
James Murdoch is buying Vox Media’s podcast network.
Everlane will sell itself to Shein, a Chinese discount e-retail giant.
SpaceX and Cursor expect to proceed with their planned acquisition 30 days after SpaceX begins trading publicly

Mercury, a Fintech startup, said it raised $200 million at a $5.2 billion valuation shortly after receiving conditional approval from regulators for a bank license.

SpaceX has finally made the contents of its IPO filing public, weeks ahead of what is expected to be the largest IPO ever. But the prospectus shows just how much the IPO depends on expectations for future growth and investor servility to Musk — not the current underlying business. SpaceX is wildly unprofitable, reporting a $4.9 billion net loss on $18.67 billion in consolidated revenue for 2025.
Rumor has it OpenAI has been working with bankers to prepare to file for an initial public offering in the coming days or weeks.

Anthropic will pay xAI $1.25 billion per month for compute. That deal, which would be worth about $40 billion through May 2029, would be one of the largest AI infrastructure deals on record, and help juice SpaceX’s suddenly slowing revenue growth.

🛁 Hoarders rejoice: The Container Store and Bed Bath & Beyond dual branded stores are rolling out nationwide and the stores will honor old Bed Bath coupons. The company is even running a contest to see who has the oldest coupon.
Juicy: Theo Baker, a Stanford history major and soon-to-be graduate, is out today with an exposé of the sometimes comical, at times seemingly corrupt, efforts by tech funders to seduce undergraduates who smell like future moguls and geniuses, and vice versa.
📺 An Ella Enchanted TV series executive-produced by Anne Hathaway is in the works at Disney+.
✨A touch of whimsy: Etsy searches for “whimsical jewelry,” “whimsical décor,” and “whimsy-related items” are up at least 50% year over year, which Etsy trend expert Dayna Isom Johnson calls “everyday escapism.”
🇹🇼 “Taiwan Travelogue,” a love story depicted as a rediscovery from the 1930s, won the International Booker Prize, the major British award for fiction translated into English. It’s the first book originally in Mandarin to win the prize, and the first by a Taiwanese author.

This is what $181 million can buy you: an 11-foot-long “drip” painting that Jackson Pollock made in 1948 sold this week, breaking auction records.

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