The Brutalist Report - techmeme
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- A deep dive into Meta's Hyperion data center campus in Louisiana, expected to reach 5 GW of compute capacity; source: Meta plans to spend $200B+ on the project (Riley Griffin/Bloomberg) [57d]
- Procurement records: the FBI seeks a vendor that can provide access to automated license plate readers nationwide; Flock and Motorola are among the few options (Joseph Cox/404 Media) [57d]
- A CISA contractor maintained a now-offline GitHub repo that exposed credentials to AWS GovCloud accounts and CISA systems; CISA is investigating the situation (Brian Krebs/Krebs on Security) [57d]
- Internal memo: Meta is reassigning 7,000 workers to four new units focused on building AI tools, two days before it is set to lay off 10% of its workforce (Eli Tan/New York Times) [57d]
- Sources: AI chip designer Tenstorrent has drawn takeover interest from Intel and Qualcomm; Tenstorrent could be valued at more than $5B in a potential deal (Bloomberg) [57d]
- Anthropic last week began letting Mythos users share cybersecurity threats with others who may face similar vulnerabilities, modifying its previous stance (Amrith Ramkumar/Wall Street Journal) [57d]
- Musk v. Altman: Elon Musk says the judge and jury "never actually ruled on the merits of the case, just on a calendar technicality" and he will file an appeal (Elon Musk/@elonmusk) [57d]
- Akamai is seeking to raise $2.6B in a convertible bond offering, and plans to use $350M of the offering to buy back its common stock from buyers of the bonds (David Morris/Bloomberg) [57d]
- Cloudflare tests Mythos against 50+ repositories, highlights its ability to chain bugs into a single exploit, and details a vulnerability discovery harness (Grant Bourzikas/Cloudflare) [57d]
- Anthropic acquires NYC-based Stainless, which generates SDKs from APIs, and plans to wind down its hosted products, after reportedly discussing a $300M+ deal (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch) [57d]
- X quietly limits users who didn't pay for verification to "50 original posts and 200 replies per day", down from 2,400 posts per day (Jackson Chen/Engadget) [57d]
- Uber increases its stake in Delivery Hero to 19.5%, up from 7% in April, and says it "has no intent to acquire 30% or more" of Delivery Hero's voting rights (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg) [57d]
- Seagate shares drop 9%+, leading a group-wide sell-off after comments from its CEO raised concerns it won't be able to meet demand fueled by the AI buildout (CJ Haddad/CNBC) [57d]
- Sigma, which sells a cloud-native analytics platform that sits on top of data warehouses, raised an $80M Series E led by Princeville Capital at a $3B valuation (Cristian Dina/The Next Web) [57d]
- Musk v. Altman jury unanimously rejects Elon Musk's claims against Sam Altman (CNBC) [57d]
- Cursor releases Composer 2.5, saying it's better at sustained work on long-running tasks and follows complex instructions more reliably; it's built on Kimi K2.5 (Cursor) [57d]
- NextEra's $67B deal to buy Dominion, the largest utility merger in US history, signals a new era of utility consolidation to accommodate AI-driven power demand (Emily Forgash/Bloomberg) [57d]
- Sony is hiking the starting price of one-month and three-month PlayStation Plus subscriptions in "select regions", blaming "ongoing market conditions" (Jay Peters/The Verge) [57d]
- Nasdaq-listed Bitcoin Depot, North America's largest bitcoin ATM operator, files for bankruptcy, blaming "increasingly stringent compliance obligations" (Omkar Godbole/CoinDesk) [57d]
- Internal chats: in March, xAI offered employees $420 in exchange for completed tax filings as training data for Grok, but the bonuses haven't been paid out (Carmen Arroyo/Bloomberg) [57d]
- Amazon's Alexa+ now produces AI-generated "podcasts" on various topics in the US, featuring chats between two AI "co-hosts", using content from media outlets (Todd Spangler/Variety) [57d]
- Arkham: Iran's largest crypto exchange, Nobitex, processed $2.3B+ since 2023 via Tron and BNB Chain, including $23M+ since the Iran war started in February (Reuters) [57d]
- Iranian media: Iran launches "Hormuz Safe", a Bitcoin-backed insurance service for shipping companies transiting the Strait of Hormuz; ~1,500 ships are trapped (Golnar Motevalli/Bloomberg) [57d]
- The Vatican says Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah will join Pope Leo on May 25 to launch the pope's first encyclical, setting out his views on the AI age (Flavia Rotondi/Bloomberg) [57d]
- Decart, which offers real-time generative video and GPU optimization tech, raised $300M at a ~$4B valuation, up from $3.1B after raising $153M in August 2025 (Robbie Whelan/Wall Street Journal) [57d]
- Strategy acquired 24,869 bitcoin for ~$2.01B at an average price of $80,985 between May 11 and May 17, taking its holding to 843,738 BTC, or 4% of total supply (James Hunt/The Block) [57d]
- Sources: internal competition among Google staff and researchers for TPUs intensified as it prioritizes cloud customers and flagship AI products over research (Julia Love/Bloomberg) [57d]
- Dust, which helps enterprises design and deploy specialized AI agents that work alongside humans, raised a $40M Series B led by Abstract and Sequoia (Chris Metinko/Axios) [57d]
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