Thirty-Six Billion
In August 2025, the Trump administration converted Intel's CHIPS Act position into a 10% equity stake for $8.9 billion, over Intel's own SEC warnings of "adverse reactions" and Stratechery's published verdict that the deal was "a terrible idea." Eight months later, after a Q1 print drove Intel up 23.6% in a single day — the company's best one-day move since October 1987 — that 10% stake is worth $36 billion. A 304% return in eight months. By any reasonable benchmark, it is the best trade the federal government has placed in any sector in modern memory. The criticism survives the trade. It now has to coexist with the trade.
Anthropic says Google is committing to invest $10B now in cash at a $350B valuation and will invest another $30B if Anthropic hits performance targets
Google will invest $10 billion in Anthropic PBC, with another $30 billion potentially to follow, strengthening the relationship between …
Maine's governor vetoes a bill that would have led to US' first state pause on data centers, citing its failure to exempt a project in a distressed mill town
Gov. Janet Mills said she rejected what would have been the nation's first moratorium on data centers because it failed to exempt a project in a distressed mill town.
Trump hosted a gala luncheon for leading $TRUMP holders, where he spoke about his pro-crypto policies, but avoided the memecoin's declining value
The president's address touched on everything from the war in Iran to his policies supporting the crypto industry
An overview of Elon Musk's $134B lawsuit against Sam Altman, scheduled to begin on Monday, accusing Altman of reneging on a vow to keep OpenAI nonprofit
A yearslong legal brawl between Elon Musk, the world's richest man, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman heads to court in Northern California …
Intel's upbeat outlook suggests CEO Lip-Bu Tan is making progress on a turnaround, having strengthened the company's balance sheet and now improving operations
Intel's Strong AI-Fueled Forecast Tops Estimates — Intel Corp. shares hit a record high after the chipmaker delivered …
Report: Samsung co-CEO TM Roh told company leaders that the mobile division MX could report its first ever annual loss this year, amid RAM and storage shortages
As AI continues to eat up the market's RAM output, smartphones are in crisis as costs continue to skyrocket.
Anthropic details Project Deal, a marketplace experiment where Claude models bought, sold, and negotiated personal belongings on behalf of Anthropic employees
At Anthropic, we're interested in how AI models could begin to affect commercial exchange. (You might recall Project Vend …
Thrive is taking a stake in the San Francisco Giants via a new venture that will invest in franchises and cultural institutions that can't be replicated by AI
It's the first investment from the firm's new strategy focused on long-term investments in franchises and cultural institutions that can't be replicated by AI
Citizen Lab details two spying campaigns that abuse weaknesses in the SS7 and Diameter protocols across 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G networks to track people's locations
Security researchers have uncovered two separate spying campaigns that are abusing well-known weaknesses in the global telecoms infrastructure to track people's locations.
Europe's dependence on US companies in tech and finance is in no small part its own fault after overregulation left European businesses too weak to compete
It wasn't long after blue jeans, Hollywood blockbusters and Big Macs crossed the Atlantic last century that some worrywarts started fretting …
A look at “Stanford inside Stanford”, where VCs pursue 18- and 19-year-old students, offering mentorship and funding in a bid to convert promise into profit
Silicon Valley venture capitalists are wining and dining 18-year-olds. — When i was a freshman at Stanford University …
Sources: WH pushed out the Center for AI Standards and Innovation's head, Collin Burns, after just four days on the job due to his previous work with Anthropic
The Department of Commerce had picked Anthropic researcher Collin Burns to lead the Center for AI Standards and Innovation. — Summary
A $16B financing for a giant Oracle data center in Michigan has closed, with BofA selling $14B in bonds; Oracle plans to use the campus to power apps for OpenAI
A $16 billion financing for a giant Oracle Corp. data center in Michigan has wrapped after months of stop-and-start negotiations with investors.
Adyen plans to acquire Talon.One, a platform for loyalty and incentives that serves more than 300 global merchants, for €750M, expected to close in H2 2026
Adyen plans to acquire Talon.One, a platform for loyalty and incentives that serves more than 300 global merchants …
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
How the Vatican is moving faster than most legacy institutions to shape AI rules and guardrails, with an AI framework, banning use of AI to write homilies, more
The Vatican is racing to build digital defenses for the artificial intelligence era — and quietly positioning itself as a global referee of what's real.
The Wire by Acutus, an AI-generated site with articles attacking AI industry critics, appears to be funded by the OpenAI-backed super PAC Leading The Future
The reporters at this news site are AI bots. OpenAI's super PAC appears to be funding it.
Analysis: Taiwan's stock market value has surpassed the UK's at ~$4.3T, with South Korea close behind, driven by massive gains in TSMC, Samsung, and SK Hynix
The artificial intelligence boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one.
Sam Altman apologizes to a Canadian town for not alerting police to the activity of a mass shooting suspect when her ChatGPT account was suspended
Sam Altman said AI company will work more closely with governments to prevent future tragedies — OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman apologized …
LinkedIn profile review shows Thinking Machines Lab has been hiring more researchers from Meta than from any other employer; TML's headcount now stands at ~140
Weiyao Wang spent eight years at Meta — his first job out of college — helping build multimodal perception systems and contributing …
X launches its standalone messaging app XChat on the App Store, saying it supports end-to-end encryption and has no ads
The US CFTC sues New York, accusing the state of invading its authority to regulate prediction markets by filing lawsuits against Coinbase and Gemini
Nvidia stock jumps 4.3% to close at a record for the first time since Oct., pushing Nvidia's market cap past $5T, as a rally in Intel pushed chipmakers higher
Diplomatic cable: US State Department has ordered a global push to bring attention to alleged distillation of US models by Chinese labs, including DeepSeek
Lawmakers and lobbyists say the Trump administration has lobbied against legislation that would regulate AI in at least six Republican-led states
‘I am disappointed that states are being told to wait to address this critical issue,’ one GOP state senator said
Instacart co-founder Apoorva Mehta launches Abundance, a hedge fund that aims to have AI agents run the entire fund, with $100M in seed funding
Instacart co-founder Apoorva Mehta launched a hedge fund that relies on an army of artificial intelligence agents, one of the few using …
A profile of Strider, an intelligence firm that leverages agentic AI and public records to help the US Air Force, NATO, and others identify foreign state actors
Trump's economic crackdown on China's US interests is creating opportunities for a Utah-based intelligence firm
A look at Tin Can's $100 retro-style, Wi-Fi-enabled landline phone, and how some schools are seeding the device to students in an attempt to curb smartphone use
The Tin Can has gone viral over the past year, mostly through word of mouth. Now schools want to get even more of them in students' homes.
France's forecasting office refers suspected weather sensor tampering at Paris airport to police, after detecting unusual readings alongside Polymarket betting
Brazil's Finance Minister Dario Durigan says the country has blocked prediction market platforms and tightened derivatives rules to curb “bet-like” products
Meta and Amazon reach a multibillion-dollar, multiyear deal for Meta to rent hundreds of thousands of Amazon's Graviton chips for its AI inference needs
Sources: JPMorgan and other banks struggled to spread the risk of billions in loans they made to build data centers leased to Oracle in Texas and Wisconsin
The DOJ joins xAI in its legal challenge to a new Colorado law that seeks to prevent discrimination by AI tools in employment and other areas
India's central bank cancels Paytm Payments Bank's banking license, after imposing business curbs over non-compliance with rules in January 2024
ComfyUI, which gives creators granular control over image, video, and audio outputs from diffusion models, raised $30M at a $500M valuation
Intel stock closes up 23.6%, its best performance since October 1987, as Intel shows signs of renewed growth amid the AI boom; the stock is up 124% YTD
The value of US government's stake in Intel has increased fourfold to ~$36B, since an August 2025 announcement that the US will buy a stake worth $8.9B
The value of the US government stake in Intel Corp. has increased fourfold to hit a value of about $36 billion after the chipmaker's …
Series, founded by two seniors at Yale to build an AI-powered social network on iMessage, raised a $5.1M pre-seed from Reddit CEO Steve Huffman and others
Source: Meta has a system in India to “automatically restrict content, at scale” to meet local law, massively expanding the country's censorship powers
Sources: AI startups are struggling to access Nvidia GPUs as Microsoft and other cloud providers divert supply to internal teams and large customers like OpenAI
Helsinki-based Verda, formerly Datacrunch, which aims to become Europe's first AI cloud hyperscaler, raised €100M in debt and equity
Sources: Stanford University professor James Zou aims to raise ~$100M at a ~$1B valuation for Human Intelligence, which aims to use AI to study physiology
A US judge dismisses Elon Musk's fraud claims in his OpenAI lawsuit, at Musk's request to streamline the case, but plans to proceed to trial on other claims
Jonathan Stempel /Reuters: