The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Startups from the pre-ChatGPT era face a reckoning in private markets; PitchBook: half of US unicorns haven't raised in three years, 220+ are "fallen unicorns" (Hugh Son/CNBC) [42d]
• Alphabet is raising $80B in equity offerings, including a $10B investment deal with Berkshire Hathaway, to help raise money for its AI spending plans (Nick Turner/Bloomberg) [42d]
• HPE reports Q2 revenue up 40% YoY to $10.7B, vs. $9.74B est., Server revenue up 33%, forecasts revenue for FY26 and FY27 above est.; HPE jumps 30%+ after hours (Brody Ford/Bloomberg) [42d]
• Gigascale Capital, a climate tech VC firm co-founded by former Meta CTO Mike Schroepfer, closed a $250M fund to back early-stage startups supporting the AI boom (Michelle Ma/Bloomberg) [42d]
• Researchers find several packages in the @redhat-cloud-services npm namespace shipped malware targeting credentials for GitHub Actions, AWS, GCP, and others (Rohan Prabhu/Step Security Blog) [42d]
• Hackers say they used Meta's AI support chatbot to change emails tied to Instagram accounts amid a wave of high-profile account takeovers; Meta fixed the issue (Jason Koebler/404 Media) [42d]
• Source: Salesforce has a stake in Anthropic worth ~$5B; Salesforce first invested about $50M in an early 2023 round and has continually invested in rounds since (Brody Ford/Bloomberg) [42d]
• IBM shares jump 9%+ after a six-month old video of Trump praising CEO Arvind Krishna was recirculated on X; IBM had surged ~40% in a little over two weeks (Matthew Griffin/Bloomberg) [42d]
• Stockholm-based Endra, which automates the design of plumbing and electrical wiring in new buildings, raised $50M led by a16z (Lucinda Shen/Axios) [42d]
• Anthropic says it has confidentially filed for an IPO, joining OpenAI and SpaceX in preparing to go public this year (Mike Isaac/New York Times) [42d]
• Anthropic says it has confidentially filed for an IPO with the SEC (Anthropic) [42d]
• New York City-based Mecka AI, which trains robots with human data sourced from body sensors and iPhones, raised $60M, including a $25M Series A (Ben Weiss/Fortune) [42d]
• Sekai, which lets users create mini apps through text prompts, raised a $20M Series A co-led by Khosla Ventures and Connect Ventures, after a $6M seed in 2025 (Kerry Flynn/Axios) [42d]
• Box says it created 13 new AI-focused roles, like AI architect and AI solutions manager, and plans to grow its staff to 3,000 by early 2027, up from 2,900 (Kalley Huang/New York Times) [42d]
• Bernie Sanders says the wealth AI creates "must benefit humanity", calling for a sovereign wealth fund that would hold ownership stakes in the top AI companies (Bernie Sanders/New York Times) [42d]
• Sources: at Build, Microsoft plans to unveil a Copilot "super app", a new reasoning AI model developed by Microsoft AI, and lots of Windows developer features (Tom Warren/The Verge) [42d]
• Florida AG James Uthmeier sues OpenAI and Sam Altman, seeking to hold Altman personally liable for deceptive trade practices, negligence, and public nuisance (NBC News) [42d]
• Strava is adding a $11.99 monthly fee for developer API access and moving public profiles and fitness club listings behind authentication to combat AI scraping (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [42d]
• Internal documents: Chinese company Geedge is working to build AI tools to predict those who could pose a political risk, but US chip controls hampered its work (Julian E. Barnes/New York Times) [42d]
• Palo Alto Networks says Mythos found 24+ critical bugs, burning $1M+ of tokens, subsidized by Anthropic; some companies say they plan to boost Mythos spending (Aaron Holmes/The Information) [42d]
• SEC filing: quantum computing company Quantinuum upsizes its IPO, selling 26.5M shares for $53 to $55 each to raise up to $1.46B at an up to $14.3B valuation (Liana Baker/Bloomberg) [42d]
• African e-mobility startup Spiro, which owns 100K+ electric bikes, raised $215M at a near-$1B valuation, after raising $100M in 2025 and $50M debt in 2026 (Loni Prinsloo/Bloomberg) [42d]
• SEC filing: SpaceX will reserve up to 5% of its Class A shares for select employees and executives' friends and family; 60%+ of shares have an extended lock-up (Charles Capel/Bloomberg) [42d]
• SEC filing: Strategy sold 32 bitcoin between May 26 and May 31 for ~$2.5M at an average net price of $77,135 per coin, its first disclosed bitcoin disposal (Shaurya Malwa/CoinDesk) [42d]
• Google plans to open its first physical Google Store outside of the US, in Tokyo's Omotesando district "this summer", marking Google's 11th physical store (Damien Wilde/9to5Google) [42d]
• French private equity firm Ardian partners with data center group Verne to build an up to €5B AI "gigafactory" outside Paris, targeting 500MW in total capacity (Financial Times) [42d]
• Israeli networking company DriveNets raised a $410M Series D led by Bessemer and Atreides at an $8.5B valuation, taking its total funding to ~$1B (Meir Orbach/CTech) [42d]
• Wirescreen analysis of 3,800 Chinese military procurement records finds 500+ instances since 2019 where the PLA sought Nvidia chips, including the A100 and A800 (New York Times) [42d]
• Sources: Anthropic plans to let the EU's cyber agency ENISA join Project Glasswing, giving it access to Mythos; EU officials went to the US to ask for access (Gian Volpicelli/Bloomberg) [42d]
• Chinese AI developer MiniMax launches M3, a new coding model that it says rivals Opus 4.7, costing $0.12 per 1M input tokens, compared with $5 for Opus 4.7 (Juro Osawa/The Information) [42d]
• Binance launches trading for 7,000+ US stocks and ETFs for non-US users, with zero commissions and fractional share purchases, as part of its "super app" push (Jeff John Roberts/Fortune) [42d]
• A look at the Seckinger school cluster in Georgia, including the US' "first AI-themed educational institution", as parents say AI integration is often sparse (New York Times) [42d]
• Nasdaq, FTSE, and other index providers are aggressively shortening entry timelines to accommodate SpaceX's $75B IPO, as Elon Musk targets retail investors (Bloomberg) [42d]
• Q&A with Bill Gurley on Anthropic staffers believing "they can create God, and that by creating God, they are like this Prometheus kind of species", and more (@theallinpod) [42d]
• Q&A with Brian Chesky on running Airbnb in "founder mode", differences between "founder mode and hustle culture", AI customer service, listing hotels, and more (Jordyn Holman/New York Times) [42d]
• Meituan reports Q1 revenue up 5.6% YoY to ~$13.5B, above ~$13.4B est., and a ~$1B net loss, its third straight quarter of losses amid a food delivery price war (Tracy Qu/Wall Street Journal) [42d]
• Jensen Huang says Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX are among the first big users for Nvidia's new Vera CPUs, which are 1.8x faster for AI workloads than x86 chips (Ian King/Bloomberg) [42d]
• SoftBank becomes Japan's biggest company by market value after hitting an all-time high, overtaking Toyota, which has been the country's largest for 20+ years (Financial Times) [42d]
• Coinbase launches direct Indian rupee deposit and withdrawal rails via the Immediate Payment Service, aiming to remove its reliance on P2P and intermediaries (Omkar Godbole/CoinDesk) [42d]
• Netherlands-based Invisix, which is developing advanced chipmaking measurement tools, raised a €20M seed, with the participation of a "tier-one" chipmaker (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu) [42d]
• Grab says it commits to "Taiwan's data security and public trust", after reports of Grab's collaborations with China's Huawei and Alibaba sparked concerns (Kentaro Takeda/Nikkei Asia) [42d]
• A look at Operation Jailbreak, a US Army-led hackathon where nine defense firms use AI to integrate weapons systems, drawing on Ukraine interoperability lessons (Demetri Sevastopulo/Financial Times) [42d]
• A look at Pangram, considered the gold standard for detecting AI writing, and the dangers of its claimed 1 in 10,000 false-positive rate when used at scale (Matteo Wong/The Atlantic) [42d]
• Nvidia unveils DGX Station, a desktop Windows PC powered by its GB300 Grace Blackwell chip with up to 748 GB of memory, capable of running 1T-parameter models (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE) [42d]
• Nvidia says its Vera Rubin computing platform is ramping into "full production", with first systems expected to ship in the fall, after a March announcement (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE) [42d]
• Nvidia unveils Cosmos 3, an open physical AI foundation model, to help robots and autonomous cars better understand the real world with limited training data (Ina Fried/Axios) [42d]
• Nvidia unveils Isaac GR00T, an open humanoid reference design powered by its Jetson Thor chip, combining a Unitree H2 Plus robot and Sharpa five-fingered hands (Stephen Nellis/Reuters) [42d]
• LG shares jumped 300%+ this year, after largely sitting out South Korea's chip-rally in 2025, as LG seeks to expand into physical AI businesses such as robots (Sangmi Cha/Bloomberg) [43d]
• Runway, the AI startup most recently valued at $5.3B, plans to make London its European headquarters and invest $200M+ into the UK's AI ecosystem by 2028 end (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC) [43d]
• Jensen Huang says Microsoft and Nvidia will "reinvent the PC", starting with 30+ laptops and 10 desktops coming in the fall from Dell, HP, Lenovo, and others (Katie Tarasov/CNBC) [43d]
• Nvidia says RTX Spark offers up to 20 CPU cores and a Blackwell GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores, capable of "100 FPS 1440p gaming" or running 120B-parameter models (Jeffrey Kampman/Tom's Hardware) [43d]
• Microsoft unveils the Surface Laptop Ultra, with an Nvidia RTX Spark SoC, a 15" mini-LED touchscreen, and up to 128GB of unified memory, coming this fall (Sean Hollister/The Verge) [43d]
• Nvidia announces the RTX Spark, an Arm-based consumer PC chip family that it says is "the most efficient PC chip ever built", made in partnership with MediaTek (Sean Hollister/The Verge) [43d]
• Intel details its Crescent Island data center GPUs based on the Xe3P architecture, described as "built for agentic AI"; they use LPDDR5X memory instead of HBM (Jeffrey Kampman/Tom's Hardware) [43d]
• Intel teases its Xeon 7 Diamond Rapids CPUs, built on 18A-P node, with PCIe 6.0, and 50% more cores and twice the memory bandwidth vs. Xeon 6, launching in 2027 (Jake Roach/Tom's Hardware) [43d]
• Intel unveils six Xeon 6+ data center CPU SKUs, says the 6990E+ has 30% better single-thread performance and up to 30% more energy efficiency than AMD Epyc 9965 (Jake Roach/Tom's Hardware) [43d]
• TSMC's rally in Taiwan has outpaced its US-listed shares this year, narrowing its ADR premium to 13.7%, a two-year low, driven by local investor optimism (Charlotte Yang/Bloomberg) [43d]
• China issues new investment rules, expanding regulator powers to scrutinize overseas deals involving Chinese investors, tech, and data, effective from July 1 (Eduardo Baptista/Reuters) [43d]
• Beijing-based Vast, which uses AI models to generate 3D assets from text and image prompts, raised ~$200M at a $1B+ valuation, and says it has 20M global users (Bloomberg) [43d]
• Solstice, which uses clinical and compliance documents and AI to accelerate advertising approvals for pharma clients, raised a $21M Series A (Brock E.W. Turner/Axios) [43d]
• Daloopa, which structures financial data from filings, transcripts, investor decks, and other public sources for investment firms, raised a $47M Series C (Ryan Lawler/Axios) [43d]
• Dell introduces the $699+ Dell XPS 13, starting with 8GB of RAM, a six-core Intel Core 5 320 chip, and a 13.4-inch touchscreen, rivaling the MacBook Neo (Antonio G. Di Benedetto/The Verge) [43d]
• AMD unveils the $330 Ryzen 7 7700X3D CPU, relaunches the 5800X3D as a $349 10th-anniversary edition, and plans to support the AM5 motherboard socket until 2030 (Sean Hollister/The Verge) [43d]
• Twitch rolls out Dual Format, a feature that lets creators stream horizontally and vertically simultaneously, and 2K streaming for partners and affiliates (Cheyenne MacDonald/Engadget) [43d]