The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Sources and docs detail defense tech startup Shield AI's struggles to overcome years of technical hitches and safety concerns with its V-BAT autonomous drone (David Jeans/Reuters) [38d]
Marvell and Flex, a contract manufacturer for electronics, will join the S&P 500; MRVL jumps 6%+ after hours after closing down 16.74% amid a broader sell-off (Kif Leswing/CNBC) [38d]
Source: OpenAI and White House are discussing a government stake in the company, to seed something like the "Public Wealth Fund" that OpenAI outlined earlier (CNBC) [38d]
Sources: Apollo and Blackstone finalized a $35B package for Anthropic to lease TPUs; Broadcom is backstopping payments on the debt's largest senior portions (Bloomberg) [38d]
Trump signs a national security memorandum seeking to "accelerate the use of AI across intelligence and warfighting domains in line with American values" (Reuters) [38d]
US-traded chipmakers plunged on Friday, after Broadcom missed expectations; Nvidia fell 6.19%, Micron fell 13.25%, AMD fell 10.86%, and Broadcom 7.92% (Noel Randewich/Reuters) [38d]
Bitcoin falls below $60K, its lowest level since October 2024, amid a record streak of bitcoin ETF outflows following Strategy's bitcoin sale (CNBC) [38d]
Sources: AI coding startup Lovable is in talks to raise funding at a $12B valuation, up from $6.6B in December 2025 (Rashi Shrivastava/Forbes) [38d]
Filing: Google has agreed to pay SpaceX $920M a month for access to Nvidia chips as part of a cloud-services deal that runs through mid-2029 (Lynn Doan/Bloomberg) [38d]
Sources: Revolut is looking to run a secondary share sale that would value it at $115B, after receiving a UK bank license and applying for a charter in the US (Bloomberg) [38d]
President Trump says he is weighing proposals for the US government to partner with major AI companies, and will soon discuss the idea with their executives (Bloomberg) [38d]
Sources: Meta is exploring a stock offering to raise tens of billions of dollars to fund AI capital expenditures, following Google's record $85B share deal (Financial Times) [38d]
Sources say xAI used Claude models for distillation and training, including using personal accounts and the intermediary service Blackbox AI after being cut off (Grace Kay/The Information) [38d]
The largest US banks plan to launch a tokenized deposit network in 2027 to connect traditional payment rails with the infrastructure that digital assets run on (Wall Street Journal) [38d]
Over 20 EU news publishers file a claim seeking €640M+ from Google following an EU decision that lets anyone harmed by Google's ad market abuse seek damages (Charlotte Tobitt/Press Gazette) [38d]
The NY State legislature passes a one-year moratorium on new large data centers, the first statewide ban of its kind if Governor Kathy Hochul signs it into law (Lauren Feiner/The Verge) [38d]
Filing: Reid Hoffman, who has served on Microsoft's board since 2017, will not stand for re-election at the company's 2026 annual meeting (Todd Bishop/GeekWire) [38d]
Sources: SpaceX prepares the largest retail allocation ever attempted in a megacap IPO, seeking to reserve as much as 25% of its $75B float for retail investors (Financial Times) [38d]
In an internal message, Satya Nadella rebuked an internal memo that said Microsoft needs to "make people addicted" to its new AI agent product called Scout (Aaron Holmes/The Information) [38d]
Allen Control Systems, which makes AI-powered gun turrets for shooting down drones, raised a $200M Series B led by Smash Capital at a $2.2B post-money valuation (Dan Primack/Axios) [38d]
Blackstone-backed data center operator AirTrunk commits to investing $30B in India by 2030, with plans to develop 5GW of new data center capacity in the country (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) [38d]
What to expect at WWDC 2026: an overhauled Siri, a Siri app, a slew of new AI capabilities, OS updates focused on reliability and responsiveness, and more (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [38d]
Sources: US officials discussed the government taking stakes in major AI companies after Sam Altman pitched the idea; Altman met Bernie Sanders on Wednesday (Wall Street Journal) [38d]
A research team that includes Huawei says it successfully used Huawei's Ascend 910C chips for DeepSeek V4 Pro model's post-training, amid increased US sanctions (Coco Feng/South China Morning Post) [38d]