The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Texas halts approval of data center grid connections until audits are performed; projects representing 474+ GW are in the queue, over 5x the grid's peak demand (The Texas Tribune) [38d]
Amazon becomes the fifth company to reach a $3T market cap, joining Nvidia, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Apple; its stock closed up 4.58% on Monday (Jeran Wittenstein/Bloomberg) [38d]
Snap reports Q2 revenue up 19% YoY to $1.6B, vs. $1.54B est., DAUs up 5% to 493M, vs. 487M est., forecasts Q3 revenue above est.; SNAP jumps 10%+ after hours (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC) [38d]
Palantir reports Q2 revenue up 93% YoY to $1.94B, vs. $1.8B est., US commercial revenue up 149%, and raises FY 2026 revenue guidance; PLTR jumps 9%+ after hours (Samantha Subin/CNBC) [38d]
Samsung says it's restricting app registrations and removing apps with SDKs that can turn smart TVs into residential proxy exit nodes, after a similar ban by LG (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch) [38d]
Court docs: an FBI agent has been charged with amassing ~$1M worth of cryptocurrency, largely by making unauthorized withdrawals from a criminal target overseas (Devlin Barrett/New York Times) [38d]
US satellite internet provider Hughesnet files for Chapter 11 after losing subscribers to Starlink and plans to focus on business and government customers (Michael Kan/PCMag) [38d]
Leaked doc: Microsoft plans to bring Xbox 360 games to PC, and the games will be able to run on the next-gen Project Helix console, "Xbox PCs", and handhelds (The Verge) [38d]
The White House says it has met its deadline to establish a voluntary framework for evaluating advanced AI models; it did not provide details of the framework (Maria Curi/Axios) [39d]
China has revised regulations to tighten protection of chip layout designs, including punitive damages for serious infringement, taking effect on October 15 (Eduardo Baptista/Reuters) [39d]
Valar, which is making small modular nuclear reactors to power data centers, raised a $1B Series B led by Sequoia at a $6B post-money valuation (Bloomberg) [39d]
Mariana Minerals, which builds and operates mines using its MarianaOS software platform, raised a $310M Series B, bringing its total funding to $400M (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune) [39d]
India proposes extending tax exemptions until 2041 for foreign companies that provide machinery to contract manufacturers, something Apple had lobbied for (Reuters) [39d]
Sources: the Trump administration invites staffers from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others to the White House on Tuesday to review the AI oversight framework (The Information) [39d]
UK court filing: in July, Apple launched a new legal challenge against the UK government's attempt to create a "backdoor" to access encrypted customer data (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times) [39d]
Zenity, which develops a platform for securing AI agents, raised a $125M Series C led by Norwest Venture Partners, taking its total funding to ~$185M (Meir Orbach/CTech) [39d]
Visa plans to acquire Israeli company BioCatch, which uses AI to detect fraud and distinguish legitimate users from attackers in real time, for $2.4B in cash (Katherine Hamilton/Wall Street Journal) [39d]
Horizon3, whose AI penetration testing platform NodeZero helps find and exploit attack paths in production systems, raised a $250M Series E at a $2B valuation (Kate Park/TechCrunch) [39d]
Michael Saylor's Strategy sold 1,638 bitcoin for ~$104.7M, reducing its holdings to 842,138, or ~4% of total supply, with a $10.9B paper loss at current prices (James Hunt/The Block) [39d]
June, which aims to help enterprise AI deployment by finding bottlenecks and building agents, emerges from stealth with $20M led by Marc Benioff's Time Ventures (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch) [39d]
The EU's AI Act enforcement powers take effect, letting it evaluate AI models before regional release, restrict market access, fine model providers, and more (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC) [39d]
Source: Dario Amodei expressed concern about staff coming to Anthropic for the money rather than the mission, as Anthropic, OpenAI, and others battle for talent (Axios) [39d]
Sources: South Korean AI chip designer DeepX raised a ~$29M Series D at a ~$2.2B valuation, and is in talks to raise ~$209M at a ~$2.4B valuation by September (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg) [39d]
Alibaba prices Qwen3.8-Max at $2 per 1M input tokens and $6 per 1M output tokens via its API, below Kimi K3's $3/1M input tokens and $15/1M output tokens (Henry Siu/The Information) [39d]
Artificial Analysis: DeepSeek's V4-Flash costs $0.14/1M input and $0.28/1M output tokens, or $0.03 per test, far below Kimi K3's $0.86 and GPT-5.6 Sol's $1.86 (Eduardo Baptista/Reuters) [39d]
Ofcom Chair Ian Cheshire says he is overseeing a "wide-ranging" review aimed at refitting the regulator to new duties overseeing Big Tech and enforcing the OSA (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times) [39d]
YouTuber Hank Green faces online criticism after using ChatGPT to help research a script, and says his LLM usage "is not healthy for me or good for the world" (Anthony Ha/TechCrunch) [39d]
London-based AI chip startup Olix raised $312M led by Fundomo, with participation from Arm, at a $3.3B valuation, up from $1B+ after raising $220M in February (Tim Bradshaw/Financial Times) [39d]
A profile of Nanit, a maker of AI-equipped baby cameras for hyper-detailed tracking, which says it has 1M daily users and $100M+ in annual revenue (Sapna Maheshwari/New York Times) [39d]
An analysis of US police and court records finds 50+ officers were charged or accused of misusing license-plate readers like Flock's, including for stalking (Washington Post) [39d]
A look at the growing tensions over AI data centers in London, Europe's biggest data center hub, as housing, power, and water come under increasing strain (Francesca Perry/Financial Times) [39d]
Indeed: UK employers are creating jobs for senior staff in software engineering and IT, where AI enhances the value of experience, while cutting back elsewhere (Irina Anghel/Bloomberg) [39d]
Japanese startups are racing to enter defense drone production, as Tokyo seeks to cut reliance on Chinese industrial drones, which control 91% of Japan's market (Mitsuru Obe/Nikkei Asia) [39d]
A detailed recap of the real-world target hacks by OpenAI's and Anthropic's models, exposing failures in AI alignment training and meaningful supervision (Zvi Mowshowitz/Don't Worry About the Vase) [39d]
An unsecured police dashboard exposed China's extensive tracking of foreigners, aggregating data from surveillance cameras, facial recognition tools, and more (New York Times) [39d]
A look at Central Asia's emerging data center race, led by Uzbekistan's 6MW TAS-1 due by year-end and Kazakhstan's 125MW facility with 100K Nvidia chips by 2027 (Yevgeniya Mikhailidi/Nikkei Asia) [39d]
Alibaba says its 2.4T-parameter Qwen3.8-Max tops Kimi K3 on some benchmarks, and plans to release the open weights of Qwen3.8-Max and Qwen3.8-27B next week (Luz Ding/Bloomberg) [39d]
Two independent teams used GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra on the same quantum cryptography problem, filing papers 3 hours apart, raising questions about scientific credit (Peter Hall/Scientific American) [39d]
A look at the US open-weight AI model ecosystem, as VCs question the revenue potential of open-weight startups like Arcee, Reflection AI, and Poolside (Wall Street Journal) [39d]
Robinhood's prediction markets revenue surged 10x+ YoY to $156M in Q2, topping stock and crypto for the first time as speculators shift to real-world event bets (Yueqi Yang/The Information) [39d]
Four US states rolled back or paused data center tax incentives, and nine others are weighing repeal measures, potentially adding 7% or more to equipment costs (Ann Davis Vaughan/The Information) [39d]