Hey folks!
Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below:
TLDR -
🎢 The Nasdaq gained 1.6% through Thursday, surviving another week of oil and bond-yield whiplash.
🏗️ AI infrastructure spending could reach $10.3T through 2032, pushing the boom’s risks deep into global finance.
🥽 Meta unveiled $1,299 lightweight VR glasses while Google opened preorders for its $899 AI-first laptop.
🧠 OpenAI launched cheaper Sol and Luna models as Google, DeepSeek and Alibaba prepared their next frontier systems.
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
🎢 Markets took the scenic route: Monday’s AI-led rally sent the Nasdaq to a record as oil and bond yields eased, but both climbed again and erased much of the celebration. Through Thursday, the S&P 500 gained 0.7% and the Nasdaq rose 1.6%, while the Dow slipped 0.6%.
🤝 Trump and Xi opened a three-day state visit with a warm tarmac greeting, even as AI competition, critical minerals, trade, Taiwan and Iran crowd the agenda.
🏗️ AI infrastructure could absorb $10.3T through 2032, or 3.6% of annual U.S. GDP; earning a 10% return would require $3.7T in yearly revenue, spreading the boom’s risks into private credit, pensions and sovereign funds.
🌀 Hurricanes Polo and Nolo put both sides of the Pacific on alert: southwestern Mexico faced life-threatening mudslides, while Hawaii’s Big Island could receive 20 to 30 inches of rain through Saturday.
📺 Trump TV launched as a government-run presidential highlight reel amid a network boycott of White House pool coverage, but the media standoff shifted again Thursday when a federal judge restored access for CNN, MS NOW and Politico.
🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
🥽 Meta unveiled $1,299 VR glasses that are five times lighter than the Quest 3, with 5K micro-OLED displays, an external compute puck and IMAX-certified viewing arriving next spring.
💻 Google’s AI-first laptop is here: Googlebook opened at $899 for preorders , complete with an AI cursor, ramble-cleaning dictation, up to 14 hours of battery life and 10 years of updates.
▶️ YouTube added AI feedback, dynamic thumbnails, live dubbing and automated product tagging as microdramas crossed 6.5 billion views in the first half of 2026.
⌚ Apple is exploring a screenless, fabric fitness band that would compete with Whoop, although the still-experimental device would not arrive before 2028.
🩸 Grail moved closer to securing the first FDA approval for a multi-cancer blood test: advisers backed Galleri’s safety 10–0, effectiveness 6–4 and overall benefits 7–2, with one abstention. The final FDA decision is still pending.
Related…. guys the trailer for You Can See Everything dropped and it’s so weirddddd
🤖AI News
☎️ The U.S. and China are discussing an emergency notification system for AI incidents that threaten national security
🛒 Meta’s Muse logged 1.8M North American iOS downloads in its first 12 days (versus ChatGPT’s 1.3M), but Amazon barred Meta’s agent from shopping on its site.
🥔 OpenAI finished pretraining its next major model, code-named “Spud”
🧬 Anthropic says Claude helped identify a previously unknown enzyme system capable of cutting, copying and pasting DNA after 21 hours, 950 agents and 210 million tokens; outside scientists still need to validate the discovery.
🌞 OpenAI launched GPT-6 Sol and Luna at half the price of their 5.6 predecessors; OpenAI says Sol also makes roughly half as many factual mistakes.
🧪 OpenAI and Anthropic nearly reached a legally binding agreement to stress-test each other’s models, a rare moment of cooperation between rivals facing the same escalating agent-safety problem.
🗳️ Anthropic is proposing a special share class that could preserve 50.1% voting control for seven co-founders after an IPO. The company, valued at $965B in May, is reportedly targeting a public valuation of at least $1.5T.
🐋 DeepSeek expects Huawei training chips by the fourth quarter, is training a 2T-parameter model and plans an 8T successor while pursuing $7.5B at roughly a $75B valuation.
🧱 Alibaba unveiled an AI chip with three times its predecessor’s performance, targeted more than 20 gigawatts of data-center capacity by 2032 and teased Qwen models reaching up to 10 trillion parameters.
🧠 Google Gemini 4 has entered early post-training and safety testing, with DeepMind aiming to release it well before year-end after skipping a public Gemini 3.5 Pro launch. Google is already using the model internally in its Antigravity coding tool.
🎙️ ElevenLabs says annualized revenue has reached $600M as investors reportedly value the voice-AI company at $22B; Klarna is now using its agents as first-line phone support for 35M U.S. customers.
🏷️ Enterprise software companies are discounting AI to defend their turf: Microsoft is offering some Copilot buyers 5%-10% off, Figma cut certain AI costs by half and Workday gave select customers a free year.
🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships
M&A
🎬 Paramount–Warner Bros. cleared a major hurdle for its $81B merger by promising $1.5B in added U.S. film production, $47.5M for displaced workers and an editorial-independence board for CBS and CNN.
📊 Databricks acquired Row Zero, a cloud spreadsheet capable of handling more than one million live rows, after its own finance team paired the product with the Genie data agent.
Fundraising
⚛️ Kairos Power secured up to $100M in investment and engineering support from Samsung C&T to build a 50MW reactor for Google by 2030, the first piece of a planned 500MW nuclear fleet.
🏊 Snorkel AI raised $350 million at a $3.5 billion valuation after its annualized revenue run rate surged eighteenfold to $375 million, evidence that training data remains one of AI’s hottest commodities.
🌿 Enveda raised $311 million at a $2 billion valuation to hunt for medicines in plants and microbes, with candidates targeting severe skin disease and post-GLP-1 weight maintenance already in trials.
IPO
💍 Oura is seeking up to $2.2B in its IPO, but nearly three-quarters of the shares are being sold by existing investors; the company itself expects to keep just $6.2M after covering employee-related tax obligations.
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
🪩 Toddler raves are up 93% since 2024, powered by Australian DJ Lenny Pearce’s EDM remixes of nursery-school classics and $162 VIP packages for very small club kids.
🎵 Ella Langley turned “Choosin’ Texas” into the longest-running Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 ever at 23 weeks, powered by 1.26 billion global streams.
Excited for this movie
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