The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

The Trump administration plans to require most green card applicants to return to their home countries to apply, which could adversely impact tech workers (Peter Wells/Financial Times) [52d]
Google files its appeal of the US federal ruling deeming it an illegal search monopolist, arguing it "prevailed in the marketplace fair and square" (Lauren Feiner/The Verge) [52d]
China's Wingtech files a lawsuit against Nexperia, saying its control over the Dutch chipmaker remained restricted, and seeks ~$1.2B for economic losses (Reuters) [52d]
The US Ambassador to Canada accuses Canada of imposing trade barriers by requiring that US streamers contribute 15% of Canadian revenue to local programming (Paul Vieira/Wall Street Journal) [52d]
President Emmanuel Macron says France will invest an additional €1B for quantum computing research and a further €550M in state funding for semiconductors (France 24) [52d]
Sources: WH approved a $9B request to acquire advanced AI chips for spy agencies; Anthropic is finalizing a classified contract for NSA to keep using its tools (New York Times) [52d]
Qualcomm stock closed up 11.6% on Friday and is now up 75% in the past month, as the company increasingly becomes a key player in AI devices (Katie Tarasov/CNBC) [52d]
Google's AI Overviews are failing to provide search summaries for specific command-style terms including "disregard", "ignore", and "skip" (Jay Peters/The Verge) [52d]
Sources: the SEC has delayed the release of a plan for an "innovation exemption" that would allow crypto firms to trade tokenized versions of US stocks (Scott Patterson/Bloomberg) [52d]
Reddit stock fell 5%+ on Friday after Meta launched a standalone app for online forums, called Forum; Reddit's stock is now down almost 40% this year (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC) [52d]
Google rolls out a Google Wallet redesign, including "dynamic quick access" for favourites, a "View more" floating action button, and more (Abner Li/9to5Google) [52d]
Activision shareholders reach a $250M settlement over allegations that Microsoft and Activision underpaid them during Microsoft's 2023 acquisition of Activision (Tom Hals/Reuters) [53d]
How the global memory chip crunch, driven by AI demand, is hurting China's car industry, squeezing automakers already hit by a price war and razor-thin margins (Nikkei Asia) [53d]
Memo: Yusuf Mehdi, a 35-year Microsoft veteran who has been its consumer chief marketing officer since 2023, will leave the company after the next fiscal year (Todd Bishop/GeekWire) [53d]
Farther Finance, which is building an AI-enabled wealth management platform for financial advisors, raised a $150M Series D at a $1B+ post-money valuation (Ryan Lawler/Axios) [53d]
Zero2IPO Research: Chinese AI startups raised $16.2B in Q1 2026, up 185% YoY, led by top AI labs including Moonshot, Z.ai, and MiniMax (Karen Tian/South China Morning Post) [53d]
Memo: Yusuf Mehdi, a 35-year Microsoft veteran who has been its commercial chief marketing officer since 2023, will leave the company after the next fiscal year (Ashley Stewart/Business Insider) [53d]
Sources: DeepSeek execs told potential investors in its ongoing $10B round that it will prioritize groundbreaking AI research over short-term commercialization (Lulu Yilun Chen/Bloomberg) [53d]
Italian police dismantle a piracy network that streamed paid content from Netflix and others via an app called Cinemagoal with annual subscriptions of €40-€130 (Ana-Maria Stanciuc/The Next Web) [53d]
Republican House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer says he requested information from Kalshi and Polymarket on their efforts to prevent insider trading (Justin Papp/CNBC) [53d]
Driverless car startup Bliq.ai says it has received approval for fully driverless road operations in Estonia, the first authorization of its kind in the EU (Cate Lawrence/Tech.eu) [53d]
Sources and documents detail Satya Nadella's effort to revamp Microsoft's senior leadership, creating a startup-style operating model to compete in the AI race (Ashley Stewart/Business Insider) [53d]
US and Canadian authorities arrest 23-year-old Jacob Butler, known online as "Dort", for allegedly operating the Kimwolf DDoS botnet, which infected ~2M devices (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer) [53d]
Meta releases Forum, a Reddit-like standalone app for Facebook Groups, with a feed showing Group conversations and an AI-powered "Ask" feature, on iOS (Mariella Moon/Engadget) [53d]
Sources and data: billions in crypto went through Binance to Iranian regime-linked networks in the two years before the US-Iran war; Binance denies wrongdoing (Wall Street Journal) [53d]
AMD CEO Lisa Su projects the CPU market will grow over 35% annually through 2031, up from 3% to 4% historically, driven by AI inference and agentic AI demand (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia) [53d]
Lenovo reports Q4 revenue up 27% YoY to $21.6B, above $18.7B est., net profit up 479% to $521M, above $271M est., as the PC maker pushes into AI server markets (Reuters) [53d]
Sources: Nintendo asked partners and suppliers to assemble ~20M Switch 2 consoles by March 2027, ~20% above the 16.5M public sales outlook issued in early May (Takashi Mochizuki/Bloomberg) [53d]
Meta, Broadcom, Applied Materials, GlobalFoundries, and Synopsys launch a $125M "Semiconductor Hub" at UCLA to advance AI chip research and more (CJ Haddad/CNBC) [53d]
Sources: David Sacks told President Trump that federal reviews of AI models before release would slow down innovation and hurt the US in its AI race with China (Politico) [53d]
Sources: last-minute calls with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, David Sacks, and others helped persuade President Trump not to sign the highly anticipated AI EO (Washington Post) [53d]
Sources: Trump delayed signing the AI EO because "he just hates regulation"; he spoke with Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and David Sacks just prior to the delay (Axios) [53d]
Socket: TeamPCP, the gang claiming GitHub's repositories breach, also executed 20 "waves" of supply chain attacks recently, compromising 500+ pieces of software (Wired) [53d]
Shares of quantum computing companies surged Thursday after the US government awarded grants and took equity stakes: D-Wave closed up 33%, Rigetti 30%, IBM 12% (Chloe Taylor/CNBC) [53d]
Sources: Bungie plans a significant number of layoffs as it ends development on Destiny 2 and has no new project lined up for the game's development team (Jason Schreier/Bloomberg) [53d]