The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Sources: AI inference chip startup Etched is raising funds at a ~$20B valuation and is raising capital at a $10B valuation in a separate round led by Sequoia (Wall Street Journal) [55d]
• Sources: Trump Media pitched a monthly fee of as much as $100K for the Truth API, with fast access to Trump's posts, for banks, algorithmic traders, and others (Reuters) [55d]
• Sources: the Trump administration is considering plans for an independent regulator to vet the safety of AI models; the regulator would report to the SEC (Bloomberg) [55d]
• Filings: a group of major music publishers has agreed to end a copyright infringement dispute with X over the use of their music on the social media platform (Blake Brittain/Reuters) [55d]
• The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index sank ~10% for the week, its largest weekly fall in over a year, and is now down ~20% from its late-June all-time high (Reuters) [55d]
• Sources: Valar Atomics, which makes small nuclear reactors intended to power data centers, is in talks to raise $1B at a ~$5B pre-money valuation (The Information) [55d]
• Apple raises iPhone prices in Japan by up to 11%, likely due to the Japanese yen's depreciation against the US dollar over the past year (Joe Rossignol/MacRumors) [56d]
• Amazon apologizes after some AWS users received bills as high as $1.5T due to "an issue with unit pricing within the estimated billing computation subsystem" (Robert Booth/The Guardian) [56d]
• Sources: OpenRouter has discussed a potential sale to a bigger tech company that could value it at billions of dollars, a premium to its $1.3B valuation in May (The Information) [56d]
• Sources: SpaceX is in talks with the DOD about providing the agency with access to data-center capacity worth billions of dollars for running AI models (Wall Street Journal) [56d]
• Apple raises the price of Apple Music, with the individual plan up by $1 to $11.99, and some Apple One bundles, the first price hike for Apple Music since 2022 (Chance Miller/9to5Mac) [56d]
• Sources: Apple and the DOJ are in early discussions about settling a 2024 antitrust lawsuit alleging that Apple violated antitrust laws (Bloomberg) [56d]
• Sources: Meta is in talks to rent computing power from its data centers to Anthropic in a deal that could be worth ~$10B over two years (New York Times) [56d]
• Models like Kimi K3, Grok 4.5, and Muse 1.1 may prevent the dominance of 2-3 frontier labs with 90% inference margins from hurting other AI ecosystem layers (Gavin Baker/@gavinsbaker) [56d]
• Kimi K3 hype shouldn't alarm the US about "losing the AI race" to China as K3 is strong but not frontier-level and likely lacks dangerous cyber capabilities (Transformer) [56d]
• ASML plans to give its ~45K employees globally a €20,000 bonus, issued as a share award vesting in 2030, joining other chip industry companies offering payouts (Sarah Jacob/Bloomberg) [56d]
• AI inference startup General Compute gets a $400M loan from tech investment firm Upper90, seemingly the first deal using inference-specific chips as collateral (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch) [56d]
• Sources: the EU is set to approve the $55B acquisition of EA under its subsidy rules on July 30; the deal includes Saudi Arabia's PIF, Silver Lake, and more (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters) [56d]
• San Francisco sends legal notices to Apple and Google demanding they take down 13 AI apps used to make deepfake nude images; Google says it has deleted the apps (Matt Burgess/Wired) [56d]
• Sources: Apple has sent personal legal warnings to ~40 former employees who now work at OpenAI, asking them to preserve documents and meet with its lawyers (Michael Acton/Financial Times) [56d]
• At the World AI Conference, Xi Jinping touts open-source AI, pledges to help the Global South build AI capabilities, and calls unequal AI access an "injustice" (Reuters) [56d]
• The Alphabet Workers Union sends a layoff protection petition with 4,500+ signatures to Sundar Pichai, calling for guaranteed severance and buyout options (Sanya Mansoor/The Guardian) [56d]
• Sources: Z.ai is on track to achieve an annual recurring revenue of $1B, a first for a Chinese AI company, after achieving its full-year sales target in July (Bloomberg) [56d]
• Sources: Dave Brown, former SVP of AWS Compute, AI, and Platform, will join Meta in the coming weeks, where he will work on the company's data center build-out (Anissa Gardizy/Wall Street Journal) [56d]
• Sources: Tata plans India's first large-scale chip fab in Dholera, Gujarat, mostly using 90nm nodes, a far humbler start than the 28nm node it touted earlier (Bloomberg) [56d]
• During an internal meeting, Satya Nadella criticized Claude Fable 5 for being "editorially controlled", saying its refusal to do "random things" makes no sense (Jordan Novet/CNBC) [56d]
• Source: Demis Hassabis plans to hold meetings with US policymakers in Washington next week about his proposed US-based Standards Body for "Frontier-class" AI (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg) [56d]
• Court doc: a US federal jury says Japanese chipmaker Kioxia owes Viasat $229M for infringing Viasat's flash-memory patent that helps devices use less energy (Blake Brittain/Reuters) [56d]
• Source: Microsoft plans to release an AI security tool this month using models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and itself, as a cost-effective Mythos alternative (Aaron Holmes/The Information) [56d]
• Kalshi is offering wagers on the outcomes of late-stage clinical drug trials and regulatory decisions, launching a pilot of 13 new biotech contracts (Madison Muller/Bloomberg) [56d]
• Sources: Coatue is leading a $3B investment in Databricks that values the data analytics software company at $188B, a 40% increase from its December valuation (Wall Street Journal) [56d]
• US chip, memory, and storage stocks fell sharply on Thursday, with Sandisk down 13%, Seagate 10%, Western Digital 9%, and Intel and Micron 6% each (George Steer/Financial Times) [56d]
• Memo: MLB bans the use of league-provided dugout iPads to access GenAI for in-game strategy calls; sources say at least a third of teams used AI this way (Eno Sarris/The Athletic) [56d]
• Filing: South Korean authorities conducted an on-site search of Chinese chipmaker Montage's offices in connection with potential competition law violations (Nikita Maria Jino/Reuters) [56d]
• Sources: Dassault Systèmes is in talks to buy drug trial software maker ArisGlobal from Nordic Capital for about $2B, extending its push into life sciences (Financial Times) [56d]
• The EU accepts X's plan to meet DSA transparency obligations and give researchers access to data, giving X six months to implement it, following a €120M fine (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters) [56d]