The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Sources: Nvidia has reworked a deal to finance an OpenAI Ohio data center campus so that it would initially guarantee only half of its planned $250B backstop (Anissa Gardizy/Wall Street Journal) [27d]
SpaceX closes its $60B acquisition of Cursor, two months after SpaceX formally announced it had agreed to acquire the startup (Bloomberg) [27d]
Z.ai says GLM-5.3 scores 84.5% on CyberGym, vs. Mythos 5's 83.8%, and its most sensitive cybersecurity functions will only be available to verified users (Reuters) [27d]
Filing: Nvidia has a nearly $21B stake in SpaceX and a $30B stake in Intel; Nvidia invested as much as $2B in xAI in 2025 and $5B in Intel (Lynn Doan/Bloomberg) [27d]
Docs: Anthropic told investors it generated $11.5B+ in revenue, with positive adjusted operating income, in Q2, up from $787M in Q2 2025 and $4.73B in Q1 2026 (Bloomberg) [27d]
Amazon adds a clause in its user agreement that seeks to prevent shoppers from filing class-action lawsuits against it, after removing a similar clause in 2021 (Spencer Soper/Bloomberg) [27d]
The US OCC conditionally approves a bank charter application for Trump family's World Liberty Financial, allowing it to directly issue its USD1 stablecoin (Reuters) [27d]
Investor letter: Thrive's 2022 early-stage $516M fund that invested in OpenAI and SpaceX was worth $3.7B+ as of the end of June, net of fees and other charges (Natasha Mascarenhas/Bloomberg) [27d]
Sources: PayPal is in talks to sell itself to a group including Stripe and Advent, which proposed paying $60.50/share in July; PayPal is seeking a higher price (Wall Street Journal) [27d]
Risk report: Anthropic raises misalignment risk estimate from very low to low and says it doesn't plan to release a stronger internal model called "Model 2" (Madison Mills/Axios) [27d]
Source: OpenAI CFO told investors that enterprise business now generates more revenue than ChatGPT-led consumer business; enterprise customers grew 32% in July (Kate Rooney/CNBC) [27d]
Nevada granted Tesla a robotaxi permit, but capped the fleet at 10 vehicles, not 5,000 that Tesla sought, banned airport pickups, and ordered other restrictions (Joann Muller/Axios) [27d]
Google adds a toggle in Gemini and Flow to remove visible watermarks from AI-generated images, videos, and music; SynthID watermarks and C2PA metadata remain (Emma Roth/The Verge) [27d]
Apple officially opens ad bookings for businesses on Apple Maps ahead of an upcoming full rollout across the US and Canada (Ryan Christoffel/9to5Mac) [27d]
Alibaba releases weights for Qwen3.8 models under Apache 2.0 license, including Qwen3.8-27B, which it says beats Qwen3.7-Plus and excels in real-world coding (@alibaba_qwen) [27d]
In Q2, "other income", mostly from investment gains, at Amazon and Alphabet totaled ~$121B after taxes and made up 66% and 71%, respectively, of profits (Jonathan Weil/Wall Street Journal) [27d]
Source: Greg Brockman is "in founder mode" and getting more involved across every level of OpenAI to build out a leadership team ahead of an expected IPO (Madison Mills/Axios) [28d]
France's top court blocks a bill banning social media for under-15s, citing freedom of expression; Macron asks his government to re-work the bill (Reuters) [28d]
Sources: stablecoin payments company RedotPay delays plans for a US IPO to 2027 or later, as it seeks regulatory approvals and deals with legal issues (Bloomberg) [28d]
Chip equipment maker Lam Research plans to invest $3B+ over five years to expand its global R&D network, aiming to increase its experiment capacity by 50%+ (Anzar Mehraj/Reuters) [28d]
DeepSeek releases DeepSeek Harness under the MIT license in developer preview, touting a design where "every capability is a plugin" that can be swapped out (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat) [28d]
Sources: Alibaba is nearing a deal to sell its Lingxi Games to PE firm Trustar Capital at a potential $1.5B+ valuation, as Alibaba continues its reorganization (Bloomberg) [28d]
Epic v. Google: in a compliance hearing, a judge orders Google to remove "anticompetitive friction" for installing third-party app stores from its Play Store (Sean Hollister/The Verge) [28d]
Sources: JPMorgan Chase terminated its banking relationship with Polymarket in 2025 over regulatory concerns, though it still maintains some ties to the company (Financial Times) [28d]
Blackbird and Airtree revalue Canva at $34.9B, down from $42B in 2025, as it struggles in the AI era; Canva's internal valuation falls to $31B, down from $38.9B (Australian Financial Review) [28d]
Z.ai debuts GLM-5.3, using the same base model as GLM-5.2 with scaled post-training for stronger coding and cyber skills, with weights due in two weeks (Z.ai) [28d]
A look at Quincy, a rural Washington farming town of 8,500 that benefited from a data center boom as its poverty rate fell from 29.4% in 2012 to 6.2% in 2024 (Nathaniel Meyersohn/CNN) [28d]
The White House announces new tariffs on drones and components, including a 100% levy on "particularly sensitive" models, aiming to cut reliance on Chinese tech (Demetri Sevastopulo/Financial Times) [28d]
Sources: Apple trained a China-specific LLM with Alibaba's support, which would make Apple the first foreign company to offer a proprietary AI model in China (Reuters) [28d]
SMIC co-CEO Zhao Haijun says the company raised prices following negotiations with customers in Q1, and that it will charge more for wafers processed in Q3 (Reuters) [28d]
Sources: the CFTC has launched a probe into prediction markets' "mention markets", prompting Kalshi to remove bets on word choices from sports-related offerings (Bobby Allyn/NPR) [28d]
Pony AI plans to deploy 2K+ robotaxis across Europe in partnership with Uber and add four more European cities, after Zagreb, with a later Middle East expansion (Bloomberg) [28d]
A profile of Amy Kremer, a pro-Trump activist who helped organize the January 6 rally and currently chairs the grassroots anti-data center group Humans First (Veronica Irwin/Transformer) [28d]
Current and former OpenAI employees say pressure to quickly ship products left less time for safety, contributing to incidents like the rogue agent hack (Maxwell Zeff/Wired) [28d]