Hey folks!
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.
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
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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