The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Filing: Shein will debut on the Hong Kong exchange on Sept. 1, seeking up to $1.8B in its IPO with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan as joint sponsors (Julia Fioretti/Bloomberg) [18d]
Sam Altman says AI could end up controlled by a few powerful players, partly because AI fears could push people to trade "a lot of liberty for safety" (Truman Dickerson/Business Insider) [18d]
Greg Abbott says data center companies "dug their own grave" by moving into communities without first gaining support, signaling growing Republican backlash (Axios) [18d]
Sources: Hugging Face has been exploring a sale that could value it at $13B+, up from $4.5B in 2023, and has been working with a bank to gauge bidders' interest (Katie Roof/Business Insider) [18d]
Ramp data: Fable 5, launched in June, has plateaued at ~11% of spending on Anthropic tools, as companies shift to cheaper models; Opus 5 surpassed Fable 5 (George Hammond/Financial Times) [18d]
Alibaba plans to raise ~$10B in a follow-on share offering to fund AI investments; sources: it plans to offer 710M shares at a 3.6% discount to Friday's close (Reuters) [18d]
Sources: foldable iPhone feels durable, fits well in a pocket, has useful iPad-like app layouts, excels as a camera viewfinder but lacks telephoto and Face ID (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [18d]
The careers of Z.ai's Tang Jie and Moonshot AI's Yang Zhilin, once teacher and pupil at Tsinghua University, show that China's AI leap is no sudden development (Raffaele Huang/Wall Street Journal) [19d]
A profile of Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who is presiding over US state AGs' social media addiction lawsuit against Meta and oversaw the Musk v. Altman trial (Jeffrey Kopp/CNBC) [19d]
The popularity of risky leveraged chip ETFs in South Korea prompted regulators to cap individual exposure and mandate a weeklong investor education course (Financial Times) [19d]
Sources: Flipkart Minutes, the quick commerce service of Walmart's Flipkart, is now delivering 1.1M-1.2M orders per day, up from ~390K-400K in November 2025 (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) [19d]
Semiconductor cram schools are flourishing in Seoul as applications to Samsung and SK Hynix surge, fuelled by record earnings and eye-catching worker bonuses (Financial Times) [19d]
Sources: Nvidia plans to use its $6B deal with Poolside to build an open-weight AI model to compete with Chinese models like DeepSeek and Kimi (Robbie Whelan/Wall Street Journal) [19d]
Sources: Iran-linked hackers shut down a small UK power plant for four days, coinciding with a wave of Iran-affiliated attacks on US water utilities (Telegraph) [19d]
Sources and documents detail how Tether's plan to build two bitcoin mining sites in Uruguay fell apart amid a dispute with state utility UTE over power supply (Reuters) [19d]