The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Finnish quantum computing company IQM closed up 2% in its Nasdaq debut Thursday after going public via a SPAC merger at a ~$1.9B valuation (Anna Heim/TechCrunch) [9d]
Sources: Crusoe is in active talks to raise ~$3B in a funding round expected to value the company in the ~$30B range, up from a ~$10B valuation in October (Bloomberg) [9d]
At a town hall, Mark Zuckerberg said Meta's AI agent development has not accelerated as expected and its reorganization was not as "clean" as it could have been (Katie Paul/Reuters) [9d]
Source: crypto payments and settlement startup Mesh is raising funding led by Binance at a ~$2B valuation, six months after raising $75M at a $1B valuation (Lucinda Shen/Axios) [9d]
Travel app Hopper agrees to a $35M FTC settlement over allegations the company misled users by imposing hidden fees and misrepresenting the total costs (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch) [9d]
Internal memo: Tesla plans to impose a $200-per-week limit for staff's AI spending beginning July 6; the tally excludes beta versions of xAI products (Grace Kay/The Information) [9d]
Sources: ElevenLabs held early talks with investors on a secondary share sale for staff that would value the startup at ~$22B; it was valued at $11B in February (Bloomberg) [9d]
UK-based StirlingX, which develops secure data intelligence systems for defense and critical infrastructure, raised a $20M Series A, following a $11M seed (Cate Lawrence/Tech.eu) [9d]
Memo: Microsoft is merging the consumer and enterprise versions of its Copilot chatbots into a single app featuring AI agents dubbed AutoPilot and coding tools (The Information) [9d]
Tripo AI, which is developing 3D foundation models and world models for use in games, raised $150M, a month after it said it raised $200M (Dean Takahashi/GamesBeat) [9d]
Emails disclosed in a court filing detail the uneasy back-and-forth between Dario Amodei and DOD's Emil Michael and how Anthropic's relationship with DOD soured (Wall Street Journal) [9d]
Sources: Palmer Luckey's Erebor Bank is in talks to raise money at an $8B+ valuation, up from $4.35B in 2025; its deposits grew from $1.1B in March to $4B now (Bloomberg) [9d]
Kling AI, the Kuaishou AI video generator spin-off, raised $2B at a $15B pre-money valuation and says the round could extend to as much as $3B (Zheping Huang/Bloomberg) [9d]
Sources: Anthropic has initiated early-stage development of a custom AI server chip and held preliminary discussions with Samsung about manufacturing the chip (Qianer Liu/The Information) [9d]
Global VC funding hit a record $510B in H1 2026, with OpenAI and Anthropic accounting for $217B, or 43% of the total; in Q2, VCs put $205B into 5K+ startups (Gené Teare/Crunchbase News) [9d]
Microsoft establishes an organization with 6,000 staff specializing in engineering, corporate training, and management to support businesses with AI deployments (Todd Bishop/GeekWire) [9d]
Sam Altman proposes a "US-led international forum" to establish AI standards, provide analysis of capabilities and risks, and make AI available to allies (Sam Altman/Financial Times) [9d]
SoftBank and its telecom unit launch SB Neo to offer AI chips and cloud services to big companies, aiming to provide 10GW of capacity in the US by 2030 (Min-Jeong Lee/Bloomberg) [9d]
Z.ai launches ZCode, an "Agentic Development Environment" optimized for its new GLM-5.2 model; Z.ai's GLM Coding Plan costs from $16.20 to $144 per month (Michael Nuñez/VentureBeat) [9d]
Filings: President Trump purchased up to $5M each in Broadcom, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia stocks on July 23, the same day as his AI action plan (New York Times) [9d]
Amazon says Leo reached 396 satellites in low-Earth orbit following a recent launch, which is "enough to support continuous service across initial latitudes" (Thomas Ricker/The Verge) [9d]
German software giant SAP says it is encouraging workers to invent new, more valuable jobs aided by AI, in a bid to avoid layoffs; SAP cut ~10K staff in 2024 (Jim Tankersley/New York Times) [9d]
The US DOJ says Peter Stokes, a 19-year-old dual US-Estonian citizen, was extradited from Finland to face charges of participating in Scattered Spider hacks (Joe Warminsky/The Record) [9d]
President Trump says Micron will invest $250M in Trump Accounts; Micron says it will come via an employee matching program and a $250 deposit in some US states (New York Times) [10d]
Cloudflare sets a September 15 deadline for AI companies to differentiate their web crawlers into search, AI training, and AI agents or face being blocked (Samantha Elkins/NBC News) [10d]
Germany-based Quantum Systems, which sells surveillance drones used by Ukraine, raised $1.2B led by Blackstone, Noteus, Airbus, and Advent at an ~$8B valuation (Yazhou Sun/Bloomberg) [10d]
An interview with Amazon SVP of Devices Panos Panay on designing custom chips for Echo and Fire TV devices, experimenting with AI-enabled gadgets, and more (Arjun Kharpal/CNBC) [10d]
The European Court of Justice rules that Google's earlier defeat against a €4.1B European Commission penalty over abusing Android market power should stand (Bloomberg) [10d]
A look at the CSOP SK Hynix Leveraged ETF, which trades in Hong Kong and has ballooned into a $13B fund, becoming the world's largest single-stock leveraged ETF (Bloomberg) [10d]
A survey of US adults finds 56% support banning social media for under-16s, while 21% oppose; majorities across demographic and partisan groups support a ban (Pew Research Center) [10d]
Nansen: about two-thirds of Trump's memecoin investors are currently in the red, and 85% of World Liberty's $WLFI buyers on the secondary market are underwater (Wall Street Journal) [10d]
UK lawyers say the tide of AI-assisted employment claims is straining an already overloaded employment tribunal system, whose backlog has doubled in two years (Delphine Strauss/Financial Times) [10d]
CarbonSix, which is developing AI automation and robotic intelligence tech for manufacturing, raised a $40M Series A co-led by DSC Investment and LB Investment (FinSMEs) [10d]
Indian IT company Persistent Systems offers to acquire its Germany-based peer Nagarro for $1.45B; Indian IT companies are ramping up M&A as AI reshapes growth (Sayan Chakraborty/Nikkei Asia) [10d]
An EU draft proposal dated June 30 shows the bloc is weighing weaker climate impact rules for gas-powered data centers, after heavy lobbying from tech groups (Financial Times) [10d]
Nvidia promises to financially backstop young cloud providers like Firmus that rent out its AI chips, in exchange for a revenue share through a new program (Phoebe Liu/The Information) [10d]
Sources: OpenAI has discussed giving a 5% stake to the US government as the company seeks to clear political obstacles by securing buy-in from the Trump admin (Financial Times) [10d]
Sources: data center operator Switch seeks a ~$2B funding round valuing the company at ~$50B, including debt, led by a $400M investment from Andreessen Horowitz (Bloomberg) [10d]
Sources: Apple has told suppliers to prepare to produce ~10M foldable iPhones in 2026, up from 7M-8M previously, and 80M iPhones in total across new models (Nikkei Asia) [10d]
Sources: Apple is in negotiations to buy chips from CXMT and YMTC, two Chinese semiconductor makers on a Pentagon blacklist, for use in devices sold in China (Bloomberg) [10d]
X launches Live Studio, an updated livestreaming hub within Creator Studio with a simplified desktop setup, chat control options, custom thumbnails, and more (Andrew Hutchinson/Social Media Today) [10d]
India-based short video app ShareChat's parent company Mohalla Tech plans to raise up to $400M in an IPO in 2027; ShareChat has ~65M micro-drama viewers monthly (Sankalp Phartiyal/Bloomberg) [10d]
Amazon's emissions rose 16%+ YoY in 2025, driven by data center construction and delivery fuel, while Google's "ambition-based" emissions jumped 18% YoY in 2025 (Bloomberg) [10d]
Sources: the White House is in advanced talks with AI companies on voluntary standards and release timelines for new models to be announced as soon as next week (George Hammond/Financial Times) [10d]