The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Microsoft will start disclosing Azure quarterly revenue as part of a shift in its reporting structure, under which Azure revenue grew 42% YoY to $29.42B in Q4 (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [8d]
Uber launches London's first commercial robotaxi service; the vehicles use Wayve's autonomous driving tech and will initially have human safety drivers (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge) [8d]
Sources: Palo Alto Networks paid $500M in cash and stock to acquire agentic IT support startup Console; PitchBook: Console was valued at $157M before the sale (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch) [8d]
Sources: Thoma Bravo-backed Proofpoint is in talks to acquire cybersecurity company Varonis; Varonis rose 10.4% on Wednesday, giving it a market value of ~$5.4B (Ryan Gould/Bloomberg) [8d]
Muse Spark 1.3 with max reasoning, in limited preview for partners, scores 62 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, behind only Fable 5.1 and Opus 5 (@artificialanlys) [8d]
HPE reports Q3 revenue up 34% YoY to $12.2B, vs. $11.9B est., forecasts FY 2026 and FY 2027 sales growth above est., signs a $3.5B server deal with a cloud firm (Dina Bass/Bloomberg) [8d]
Broadcom reports Q3 revenue up 86% YoY to $29.59B, vs. $29.36B est., AI semiconductor revenue up 221% to $16.7B, and forecasts Q4 revenue below estimates (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [8d]
Snowflake reports Q2 revenue up 35% YoY to $1.55B, vs. $1.48B est., and forecasts Q3 and FY 2027 product revenue above estimates; SNOW jumps 22%+ after hours (MarketWatch) [8d]
Letter: OpenAI told two House Democrats that its engineers are developing "automated shutdown capabilities" for AI systems (Courtney Rozen/Reuters) [8d]
Mark Zuckerberg says Meta's Watermelon model and Muse Spark open weights are "coming soon" (Mark Zuckerberg/@finkd) [8d]
Meta rolls out Muse Spark 1.3 in Muse Code and Meta's API, saying it significantly improves coding and agentic performance, at the same price as its predecessor (Ina Fried/Axios) [8d]
Uber is shutting down services in Nigeria and Uganda from September 2 after a global review of its operations; it launched in Nigeria in 2014 and Uganda in 2016 (Bloomberg) [8d]
X says US payouts for its Original Content Rewards and Subscriptions will now be handled through X Money (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [8d]
Thyme Care, which focuses on filling gaps in cancer treatment through a virtual navigation platform, raised a $125M Series E at a $2B+ valuation (Ian Thomas/CNBC) [8d]
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says "we trust Anthropic" as they are "back on the right side" with the administration and that "they've done what we asked" (Maria Curi/Axios) [8d]
Huskeys, which uses agentic AI to help companies block AI-driven attacks, raised a $27M Series A led by Blackstone Innovations Investments at a $100M+ valuation (Maria Armental/Wall Street Journal) [8d]
The US Army awards $192M in contracts to Palantir and Anduril to produce eight TITAN AI-powered mobile ground stations, to be delivered over the next 18 months (Barratt Dewey/Tectonic Defense) [8d]
MrBeast, whose YouTube channel recently hit 500M subs, will feature Gemini, Google Health, and the Fitbit Air in his videos as part of a multi-year Google deal (Stevie Bonifield/The Verge) [8d]
Google launches Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber for partners in its new Fairwind Program, and says Gemini 3.8 Flash beats Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol on some benchmarks (Google) [8d]
Google launches Gemini 3.8 Flash, three weeks after 3.7 Flash launch, for an introductory price of $0.75/1M input and $3.75/1M output tokens until December 31 (Abner Li/9to5Google) [8d]
Austin-based HiddenLayer, which makes security tools to protect AI models, agents, and workflows, raised a $100M Series B led by Delta-v Capital (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch) [8d]
The Trump administration files a brief supporting OpenAI in its dispute with NYT, saying training LLMs on copyrighted works generally constitutes fair use (Blake Brittain/Reuters) [8d]
Adobe launches Adobe for Slack, making 70+ creative and productivity tools, including Firefly, Photoshop, and Express, available via Slackbot prompts (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [8d]
A US federal judge rules that Google does not have to sell off its ad exchange and instead must make its ad tech tools work with those operated by rivals (Leah Nylen/Bloomberg) [8d]
Conveo, which uses AI to conduct customer interviews in 15 languages and analyzes transcripts for market insights, raised a $50M Series A led by DST Global (Chris Metinko/Axios) [8d]
Wonderful, which helps enterprises deploy AI, raised a $550M Series C led by Insight at a $5B valuation; investors also paid $170M for shares from employees (Yuliya Chernova/Wall Street Journal) [8d]
OpenAI is facing a new round of lawsuits from witnesses and victims of the February mass shooting in a Canadian town; the suspect spent days talking to ChatGPT (Georgia Wells/Wall Street Journal) [8d]
New Jersey-based Aitan, which offers "robotic sovereignty as a service" and "edge AI weapon systems", emerges from stealth with $41M led by Deep33 and Dell (Colin Demarest/Axios) [8d]
Valencia-based iPronics raised $125M co-led by Maverick Silicon and Light Street, with participation from Nvidia, to develop optical circuit switch tech (Stephen Nellis/Reuters) [8d]
Survey: 27% of Americans say they turn to AI chatbots like ChatGPT for personal, emotional, or social queries, rising to nearly 40% among adults under 50 (Washington Post) [8d]
The EU General Court dismisses Opera's challenge against the European Commission's decision to exempt Microsoft Edge from DMA gatekeeper regulations in 2024 (Reuters) [8d]