The Brutalist Report - tech
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- Helsinki-based Verda, formerly Datacrunch, which aims to become Europe's first AI cloud hyperscaler, raised €100M in debt and equity (Mimi Billing/Sifted) [15m]
- Meta and Amazon reach a multi-billion, multiyear deal for Meta to rent hundreds of thousands of Amazon's Graviton chips for its AI efforts (Matt Day/Bloomberg) [1h]
- Meta announces a deal to use "tens of millions" of Amazon's Graviton chips to help deliver its next generation of AI models, amid a shortage of Nvidia chips (Ina Fried/Axios) [1h]
- Huawei plans to spend up to $11.7B over five years to boost compute for training and testing autonomous cars, with ~$2.64B for autonomous driving R&D in 2026 (Daniel Ren/South China Morning Post) [2h]
- Sources: China recently told tech companies, including ByteDance and Moonshot AI, to reject US capital without state approval, after Meta's Manus acquisition (Bloomberg) [3h]
- Alibaba says its Qwen AI models will be integrated into BYD, Volkswagen, and other cars, letting users buy food and tickets via voice commands on select models (Evelyn Cheng/CNBC) [3h]
- As part of the Cohere-Aleph Alpha deal, Aleph Alpha backer Schwarz Group plans to invest $600M in Cohere's Series E, which a source says is set to close in 2026 (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC) [4h]
- Norway plans to ban children from using social media until they turn 16; the government says it will introduce a bill in parliament by the end of 2026 (Terje Solsvik/Reuters) [4h]
- Canada's Cohere and Germany's Aleph Alpha agree to a merger deal valuing the combined group at ~$20B to work on sovereign AI; both governments support the deal (Financial Times) [6h]
- EY survey of 18,000 people across 23 countries: ~49% of consumers have used AI over the past six months to support their savings and investment decisions (Emma Dunkley/Financial Times) [7h]
- Tracxn: global edtech funding fell from $16.7B in 2021 to $2.6B in 2025, while the number of startups launched dropped from 10,491 in 2021 to just 645 in 2025 (Ananya Bhattacharya/Rest of World) [7h]
- Sources: India is piloting 10 schemes to test whether its CBDC, the e-rupee, can deliver welfare payments more efficiently, as it looks to boost e-rupee usage (Reuters) [7h]
- DeepSeek V4 Pro costs $1.74/1M input tokens and $3.48/1M output tokens, while V4 Flash costs $0.14/1M and $0.28/1M; both models are the cheapest in their class (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog) [7h]
- Staffing experts say India's IT sector is seeing a rise in replacement hiring as companies adapt to Gen Z staff leaving jobs faster than previous generations (Tanya Pandey/The Economic Times) [7h]
- Sources: Cursor hit $2.7B in annualized sales in March, up ~14x from a year ago, and reported a ~$900M loss in its last fiscal year on $770M in total revenue (The Information) [7h]
- China's top market regulator says it is launching a six-month crackdown on the country's online ad sector, targeting malpractices including the misuse of AI (Ben Jiang/South China Morning Post) [7h]
- The AI boom has pushed the market cap of Shenzhen-listed Zhongji Innolight, a leading optical communications device maker, close to $146B, a record high (Bloomberg) [8h]
- DeepSeek V4 Pro has 1.6T total parameters, its largest model by the metric, and V4 Flash has 284B parameters; both models have a context window of 1M tokens (Vincent Chow/South China Morning Post) [8h]
- Huawei says its Ascend supernode based on the Ascend 950 AI chips will fully support DeepSeek V4, as DeepSeek launches a preview of its V4 model (Reuters) [8h]
- DeepSeek releases its new flagship models V4 Pro and V4 Flash in preview, saying V4 Pro trails the performance of state-of-the-art models by about 3 to 6 months (Bloomberg) [8h]
- S-1 excerpts: SpaceX warns multiple investigations into sexually abusive AI imagery created with xAI's Grok may hurt the company's global market access (Reuters) [9h]
- Q&A with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian on building infrastructure for AI agents, balancing internal needs and the demands of customers like Anthropic, and more (Ben Thompson/Stratechery) [10h]
- Trump threatens to "put a big tariff on the UK" if it does not drop its digital services tax, which he views as unfairly targeting US tech companies (Connor Stringer/Telegraph) [10h]
- SAP reports Q1 revenue up 6% YoY to €9.56B, vs. €9.53B est., non-IFRS operating profit up 17% to €2.87B, cloud revenue up 19% to €5.96B; SAP up 10%+ after hours (Reuters) [11h]
- No new articles in the Past 12 Hours.
- CoinDesk 20 performance update: Aptos (APT) gains 3.5%, leading index higher [45m]
- Bitcoin, dollar move in near-perfect opposition. It hasn't been this extreme in almost 4 years. [2h]
- Bitcoin stalls below at $77,500 as volatility cools, traders unwind leverage [3h]
- Michael Saylor says the bitcoin winter is over. Some experts agree, with caveats. [4h]
- India pushes e-rupee through welfare pilots as BRICS digital currency plan takes shape [4h]
- U.S. government sits on $26.5 billion gain from Intel stake, as shares surge 22% [4h]
- Bitcoin-holder Metaplanet raises $50 million to buy more BTC [6h]
- Morgan Stanley is positioning itself as the reserve manager for the stablecoin industry [7h]
- Bitcoin ETFs just pulled $2 billion in 8 days while short-term holders quietly started selling [7h]
- Bitcoin rally is stalling as Japanese inflation adds to Iran war–driven market jitters [9h]
- Wisconsin joins prediction market fight, suing Kalshi, Coinbase, Polymarket, Robinhood and Crypto.com [9h]
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