The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

• Applied Materials reports Q3 revenue up 25% YoY to $9.12B, vs. $8.99B est., net income up 43% to $2.54B, and forecasts Q4 revenue above estimates (Elias Schisgall/Wall Street Journal) [28d]
• Charter receives final state approval to buy Cox for $21.9B after making concessions to California regulators, including low-cost internet for some households (Patience Haggin/Wall Street Journal) [28d]
• Epic v. Apple: Apple proposes commissions on US linked-out purchases of 15% for standard apps, 10% for partner programs and renewals, 5% for Small Business apps (Marcus Mendes/9to5Mac) [28d]
• A judge orders Kalshi to stop offering most of its prediction contracts in Washington state, after finding it likely violated state gambling-related laws (J.J. McCorvey/Bloomberg) [28d]
• Sources: OpenAI is on track to generate annualized revenue of $40B+ based on its current performance, roughly doubling its run rate from the end of 2025 (Bloomberg) [28d]
• A profile of Camilla Clark, quiet adviser to husband Dario Amodei and behind-the-scenes player at Anthropic; she once pitched a porn startup to Jeffrey Epstein (The Information) [28d]
• Reddit will join the S&P 500 on August 18, becoming only the second pure-play social media company in the index after Meta; RDDT jumps 10%+ after hours (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC) [28d]
• OpenAI launches Computer History, an opt-in feature that turns recent computer activity on macOS into memories and a timeline that ChatGPT and Codex can use (Frederic Lardinois/The New Stack) [28d]
• Netflix is closing game studios Night School Studio, which it acquired in 2021, and Moonloot, and is also cutting jobs from its internal games team (Stephen Totilo/Game File) [28d]
• Anthropic details multiagent experiments showing Claude agents can wage a "turf war" over incompatible goals, fail to coordinate, collude on prices, and more (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch) [28d]
• Sources: Silver Lake is in talks to acquire HR and financial management software maker Workday, which has a market value of ~$43B; WDAY jumps 18%+ (Milana Vinn/Reuters) [28d]
• Tether says KPMG completed Tether's first full audit and found its 2025 financial statements fairly presented its financial position in all material respects (Krisztian Sandor/CoinDesk) [28d]
• Sources: Vantage Data Centers, a major hyperscale developer, is exploring options including a sale or an IPO at a valuation of about $100B as soon as next year (Reuters) [28d]
• US-based robot vacuum maker Matic rolls out a firmware update that lets users control its $1,245 vacuum with voice commands in more than 70 languages (Chris Welch/Bloomberg) [28d]
• OpenAI previews Ultrafast, an API tier powered by Cerebras that runs GPT-5.6 Sol up to 14× faster and generates up to 750 output tokens per second (Zac Hall/9to5Mac) [28d]
• Google unveils Gemini 3.7 Flash, its "most intelligent workhorse model" for coding and agents, pricing it at $0.75/1M input and $3.75/1M output tokens at launch (Tulsee Doshi/Google) [28d]
• X makes the source code for its For You timeline available on GitHub and adds tools to let users see if X's ranking systems "shadowbanned" them (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [28d]
• Ramp's July AI index: Anthropic's market share hit 43.5%, widening its lead over OpenAI; Fable 5 is only 6% of tokens businesses bought, likely due to high cost (Ara Kharazian/Ramp) [28d]
• OpenAI hires Dali Rajic, COO of Alphabet's Wiz, as chief revenue officer, replacing ex-Slack CEO Denise Dresser, who was hired in December 2025 and will leave (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg) [28d]
• HPE secures court approval for its settlement with the US DOJ over its takeover of networking company Juniper, defeating a challenge by Democratic state AGs (Josh Sisco/Bloomberg) [28d]
• Tech hardware companies report the highest US CBP tariff refunds at $2.5B across six companies, including $2.2B in refunds to Apple alone; Amazon received $640M (Wall Street Journal) [28d]
• Sources: AMD plans to raise as much as $5B in what could be the chipmaker's biggest-ever investment-grade bond sale, as it ramps up spending to meet AI demand (Brian W Smith/Bloomberg) [28d]
• DeepSeek raises prices, adding dynamic pricing, ahead of a potential IPO; V4-Flash output tokens go from $0.28/1M to $1.32 during peak hours and $0.66 off-peak (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg) [28d]
• Databricks closed a $5B funding round at a $190B valuation, six months after raising $5B at a $134B valuation, and says it has crossed $7B in revenue run rate (Samantha Subin/CNBC) [29d]
• Microsoft begins merging its consumer and commercial Copilot apps into a single app, with a mobile and web rollout in mid-August and desktop in mid-September (Todd Bishop/GeekWire) [29d]
• Inside SK Hynix's $720B Yongin Cluster, which it calls the world's largest network of memory factories and is set to go into production in February 2027 (Katie Tarasov/CNBC) [29d]
• Flock CEO Garrett Langley acknowledges the company "got this one wrong" and is assuming greater responsibility for preventing US law enforcement misuse (Lauren Feiner/The Verge) [29d]
• Flock says it will now require US law enforcement to attach a criminal case number to license plate searches, after a WaPo investigation into police misuse (Washington Post) [29d]
• Didi reports Q2 revenue up 11% YoY to ~$9.3B, net income of ~$128M, after two consecutive quarterly losses, China mobility transaction value up 9.5% to ~$13.4B (Luz Ding/Bloomberg) [29d]
• Accelerant, which uses data analytics to connect insurance underwriters with risk capital partners, agrees to go private with Thoma Bravo in a $4.4B deal (Katherine Hamilton/Wall Street Journal) [29d]
• JD.com reports Q2 revenue down 2.9% YoY to ~$51.4B and net income of ~$1.1B, above ~$964M est., driven by JD Retail profitability and narrowing food losses (Luz Ding/Bloomberg) [29d]
• SMIC reports Q2 revenue up 36% YoY to ~$3B, net profit up 3x+ to ~$479.2M, above ~$283.1M est., and a 25.3% gross margin, driven by strong mature-node orders (Sherry Qin/Wall Street Journal) [29d]
• Filings and sources: Microsoft shuttered 15+ branch offices and joint ventures in China in the past five years, amid China's push for domestic software (Reuters) [29d]
• CXMT overtakes Tencent to become the most valuable Chinese company, with a ~$524B market cap, above Tencent's $510B; CXMT's Shanghai shares jumped 460%+ at IPO (Bloomberg) [29d]
• Amsterdam-based Adyen reports H1 2026 net revenue up 19% YoY to €1.3B, processed volumes up 24% YoY to €803.8B, and EBITDA of €641.5M; ADYEN.AS rises 12%+ (Adam Whittaker/Wall Street Journal) [29d]
• Sources: Anthropic investors expect it to float at a $2T+ valuation after an October IPO and to hit $100B to $120B in annualized revenue by the end of 2026 (Financial Times) [29d]
• DeepSeek launches V4-Pro, its most advanced model that rivals Kimi K3 on some benchmarks at much lower prices, costing $0.44/1M input and $0.87/1M output tokens (Juro Osawa/The Information) [29d]
• Sources: Demis Hassabis pitched a new independent industry AI safety entity, modeled on the IAEA, to top Trump officials before stepping down as DeepMind CEO (Wall Street Journal) [29d]
• Meta says it removed 750,000+ Australian accounts believed to belong to under-16s to comply with the social media ban, including 462,000 Instagram accounts (Newley Purnell/Bloomberg) [29d]
• In Q2 2026, server-led eSSDs reached 48% of NAND flash shipments as AI workloads shifted from training to inference, driving 5x YoY industry revenue growth (Counterpoint Research) [29d]
• A look at workers in India who are paid extra to wear devices that capture first-person video of factory and other work tasks for use as AI robot training data (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg) [29d]
• Counterpoint: China's YMTC accounted for 14% of NAND flash shipments in Q2, behind Samsung's 25% and SK Hynix's 22%, but ahead of Micron and Kioxia (Howard Liu/South China Morning Post) [29d]
• Lenovo reports Q1 revenue up 43% YoY to $26.94B, its highest quarterly revenue growth in five years, as AI-related revenue rose 60% YoY to $9.3B, 35% of total (Laurie Chen/Reuters) [29d]
• Over 30 crypto companies, including Coinbase and Block, say frontier AI safety guardrails hinder legitimate security work while attackers use stronger tools (Shaurya Malwa/CoinDesk) [29d]
• Mathematicians say a neurosurgery resident used ChatGPT, powered by GPT-5.6, to solve Crouzeix's conjecture, a major open problem in numerical linear algebra (Alex Townsend) [29d]
• Taiwan says it detected AI-assisted cyberattack campaign from overseas targeting government agencies last month, but affected agencies successfully "handled" it (Reuters) [29d]
• Wealth managers are cutting fees and hiring staff in Silicon Valley to win over OpenAI and Anthropic workers before IPOs mint a new class of millionaires (Financial Times) [29d]
• Rapidly advancing AI tools have created investor uncertainty and fear around the SaaS business model and the private equity and credit built on top of it (Bloomberg) [29d]
• Research: over 53M people in China worked as food delivery or ridesharing drivers as of 2025, up 10M in two years, amid accelerating automation in manufacturing (Financial Times) [29d]
• London- and Boston-based Mindgard, which offers automated AI security and red-teaming tools to help organizations secure AI systems, raised a $30M Series A (Ionut Arghire/SecurityWeek) [29d]
• Foreign investment in Japan's chip industry has reached ~$37B, as government subsidies attract companies working on logic and memory chips and image sensors (Shuhei Ochiai/Nikkei Asia) [29d]
• President Trump signs a memo letting the US government partner with private firms to conduct cyberattacks abroad against criminal groups targeting Americans (Patrick Howell O'Neill/Bloomberg) [29d]
• Sources: legal AI startup Legora is in early talks to raise funds at a $10B+ valuation, up from $5.6B four months ago; its ARR rose 50% QoQ to $150M in Q2 (Financial Times) [29d]
• Yuno, a payments infrastructure provider for processing transactions globally, raised a $45M Series B led by Global PayTech with a16z and others participating (Maria Clara Cobo/Bloomberg) [29d]
• Sources: Anthropic is in talks to buy Decart, which offers real-time generative video and GPU optimization tech, for about $6B (Bloomberg) [29d]
• Sources: former Google exec Jeff Dean is in talks for $1B in funding at a ~$10B valuation for his new science and engineering-focused AI startup, Discovery Loop (Business Insider) [29d]