Groq Stayed Independent at Half Its 2025 Valuation
Groq’s valuation fell from $6.9B in September 2025 to $3.5B after Nvidia licensed its inference technology, hired senior leaders and announced a rack containing 256 Groq LPUs.
OpenAI’s 20-Year Ohio Deal Has an Nvidia Backstop
SB Energy’s Ohio arrangement pairs a 20-year, 10GW OpenAI agreement with an Nvidia backstop on part of the completed facility’s value. It makes demand bankable before hardware, power assets and downstream revenue are fully proven.
Anthropic's text watermarking alters word probabilities to leave fingerprints, which could degrade Claude's writing, despite its claim of no impact on quality
When I wrote this week about Anthropic's announcement that all Claude models, worldwide, would soon begin “watermarking” …
Qwen3.8-27B shows an open-weight general purpose model can have a long context, effective tool calling, strong vision ability, and competent code generation
Friday's big release was Qwen 3.8 27B, an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba's Qwen research lab.
Sources: Stripe has finalized a deal to acquire AI model marketplace OpenRouter for $7B+; founded in 2023, OpenRouter reportedly had a $1.3B valuation in May
Stripe Inc. has finalized an agreement to acquire OpenRouter Inc., a startup that helps companies switch between artificial intelligence models …
Dario Amodei defends his policy proposals, warns open weights won't decentralize power, endorses pre-launch vetting, says real accomplishments will earn trust
1/2 Thanks Gavin for an especially thoughtful exchange. I don't usually spend much time on social media but I wanted to engage here because it really brings out the heart of an important conversation....
David Sacks says “Dario Amodei believes frontier AI is too powerful to distribute; we believe it is too powerful to centralize” after Amodei shared policy ideas
Some thoughts on Dario's post: 1. Dario does not actually address Gavin Baker's account of what he said - something he could easily deny if it were inaccurate. 2. Dario claims his critics live in a “b...
Investigation: Amazon is buying huge quantities of rare books, scanning them for AI, and destroying them; a tracked Biblio order went to its Las Vegas facility
We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.
OpenAI signs a 20-year, 10GW data center deal in Ohio with SoftBank's SB Energy; Nvidia agrees to backstop a portion of the value of the completed data center
Agreement with SoftBank's SB Energy caps weeks of negotiations over the largest data-center project announced to date
Chainalysis sues the US government over ICE's ~$94.6M contract to buy forensic software and services from its competitor TRM Labs, calling the deal “arbitrary”
The sealed complaint leaves Chainalysis' specific objections and requested remedy undisclosed as briefing continues.
Microsoft says the outage affecting GitHub's API, Actions, Pull Requests, and other services has been mitigated, three hours after it first confirmed the outage
GitHub is down for some users as a widespread outage is causing errors across the website, API, Actions, Pull Requests, and several other services.
How concerns about AI became an important midterms issue, with candidates adding AI and data center policies to their websites in ~40% of races across the US
Across the United States, political candidates are grappling with an issue that has never before featured widely in American political life: artificial intelligence.
How Anthropic's Claude made a math breakthrough during its unsuccessful 54-hour attempt to solve the Riemann hypothesis, aided by an employee's encouragement
The world's smartest AI models are now superhuman at math. They still respond to moral support and encouragement from mere humans.
YouTube will start counting a view as soon as a video starts to play, from August 24, lining up with the system used by Instagram, TikTok, and its Shorts videos
By tracking views from the instant a video starts to play, YouTube's new counter works more like TikTok, X, and Instagram.
A German regulator says Apple will make changes to ATT, after finding Apple gave its apps more favorable consent prompts than those of third-party developers
Apple will change rules governing how app developers can use personal data for targeted advertising on iPhones and iPads …
French PM Sebastien Lecornu held a crisis meeting on Monday over a June-July cyberattack on France's tax agency impacting 678K individual and business accounts
French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu will hold a crisis meeting Monday to respond to the cyberattack disclosed last week targeting the country's tax collection agency.
Opening arguments begin Tuesday in the state AGs' social media addiction lawsuit against Meta; New Mexico AG says the consequences could be “astronomical”
Hugging Face says developers made 151K+ derivatives based on Qwen models, topping others, making Qwen one of the largest foundations in the open model ecosystem
Russian law enforcement docs: Binance provided Russia with IT specialist Yuri Belenkiy's transaction history and passport number, leading to terrorism charges
Binance last year handed Russian authorities details of cryptocurrency donations to Ukrainian fundraising campaigns that were used …
A profile of Sony CEO Hiroki Totoki, who aims to transform the company into a business focused on music, movies, video games, and the tech that underpins them
AI video generation startup Higgsfield raised $400M from DST, Goldman Sachs, Liberty Global, Intel, and others at a $5.4B valuation, up from $1.3B+ in January
Company founded by former Snap executive Alex Mashrabov targets marketing content for businesses
How US industrial companies like Caterpillar, Cummins, Eaton, and Ford are pivoting their businesses to feed a booming AI data-center market for power equipment
Companies such as Caterpillar and Cummins are pivoting to feed a booming market for once-prosaic power equipment
A look at companies like Inception Point creating AI personas for the media, fashion, film, and music industries that can host podcasts, model clothes, and more
The A.I. personas created by Inception Point AI include, clockwise from top left, Claire Delish, VV Steele, Nigel Thistledown and Lila Walker.Inception Point AILinkedIn:Chris Valentino.
AI film startups are setting up studios in Hollywood, using US and Chinese AI models while touting lower production costs and a way around traditional financing
Amid fears for jobs, some film-makers say AI could enable them bypass studio giants and take more creative risks
Analysis: nine top tech companies including Alphabet and Meta had ~$3T of AI-related off-balance-sheet commitments, far exceeding their ~$600B in reported capex
Massive spending commitments for data-center leases and chips aren't shown on companies' balance sheets
An analysis of 60 of the largest planned US data centers: they could together produce 101.5M tons of CO2 per year, or ~7% of US power sector emissions in 2025
FT analysis finds 60 largest planned facilities could emit equivalent of 27 coal plants or 24mn cars per year
Patients, families, doctors, and nurses are increasingly turning to AI tools, such as Face2Gene, to help identify rare and hard-to-diagnose diseases
Patients, doctors and nurses are turning to the technology for help identifying rare and undiagnosed diseases
African defense tech company Terra Industries, founded in 2024, raised a $52M seed round from 8VC and others, and says it's on track to book $100M in contracts
Google wins a bankruptcy auction with a $10M bid to acquire deidentified business data, software code, and more from Spirit Airlines to improve its AI models
Google LLC won a bankruptcy auction for a trove of deindentified business data, software code, and operations records …
Trump-backed WLF is working with Hong Kong-based AI platform WorldClaw; 43 of the 90 AI models on WorldClaw are from Chinese companies flagged as security risks
President Donald Trump-backed World Liberty Financial is collaborating with a Hong Kong-based venture offering artificial …
How Congressional lawmakers and aides are using AI tools with little oversight to write speeches and news releases, sort constituent mail, and more
Uber and Zipline partner to launch Uber Eats drone deliveries in Dallas and Houston by late 2026, aiming to scale nationwide and hit 1M daily deliveries in 2029
The desire for rapid delivery is “insatiable,” Uber's Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi says
Voice AI startup Wispr raised a $280M Series B led by Menlo Ventures at a $2B valuation, taking its total funding to $361M, and now has 100K business customers
Tanay Kothari saw Iron Man when he was 10 years old. — It was 2008 and he wasn't entranced with Tony Stark.
Pathway, which is developing AI models based on what it calls its “Post-Transformer” BDH architecture, raised a $30M seed at a $500M valuation
ETH Zurich spinout Gravis Robotics raised a $200M Series A from SoftBank to scale Gravis Rack, an autonomous control appliance for retrofitting onto excavators
Gravis Robotics AG said today it has bagged $200 million in funding from SoftBank Group Corp. in what is the largest-ever Series …
Monzo Chair Gary Hoffman is leaving after some of Monzo's biggest shareholders called for his removal following the board removing TS Anil as CEO in December
Malaysia's 6% Q2 GDP growth was powered by 7.5% manufacturing growth, driven by chipmaking, and 6.6% construction growth, supported by data center development
Cursor says it is rolling out its code hosting service Origin in early beta on all paid plans, featuring support for repos, pull requests, GitHub sync, and more
Singapore hopes access to advanced AI models will stop the flow of finance talent to Hong Kong, where financial firms struggle to access the latest US AI models
Close relations with both US and China mean the latest AI models are easily accessible in the city-state
Chinese citizens are more optimistic about AI than Americans because AI is seen as a practical tool in China that disrupts a smaller share of its population
Groq raised $350M led by Disruptive at a $3.5B valuation, down from $6.9B in September 2025 before Nvidia struck a licensing deal and hired much of its talent
Groq has raised $350 million in funding at a $3.5 billion valuation, roughly half what it was worth nearly a year ago …
Sources: Meta and BlackRock's $14B El Paso data center project is not insured against total loss, exposing lenders to credit risks and big potential liabilities
Investors in gigawatt-scale campuses face billions in underinsured risks as insurers balk at cost of full coverage
Alibaba releases weights for Qwen3.8 models under Apache 2.0 license, including Qwen3.8-27B, which it says beats Qwen3.7-Plus and excels in real-world coding
Following the widespread community adoption of the Qwen3.5 and Qwen3.6 series …
Nvidia's $500B funding package announcement for AI infrastructure follows SEC's July guidance that confirmed looser restrictions for data center securitizations
Greg Brockman calls the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident “a watershed moment” and discusses how OpenAI and other organizations can use AI to improve cyber defenses
The OpenAI-Hugging Face incident was a watershed moment for cybersecurity because it gave a peek into how the capabilities …
Sources: Singapore-based Shein is aiming to hit a ~$25B valuation in its Hong Kong IPO, down from its $30B-$40B target earlier in August after investor meetings
Online fast-fashion retailer Shein is eyeing a company valuation of around $25 billion in its Hong Kong IPO …
Sources: the US DOJ has been investigating a16z for nearly a year over whether its partners are improperly serving on the boards of competing AI companies
Sources: Anthropic's revenue run rate reached $65B by the end of July, up from $47B in May and $9B in late 2025
Fields Medalist Timothy Gowers says most famous mathematics problems solved by LLMs so far have almost all been with counterexamples rather than proofs
Timothy Gowers /Gowers's Weblog:
Chip giants participated in startup funding rounds collectively valued at $250B+ YTD; Nvidia leads the sector with a record 59 known rounds, up from 53 in 2025
Anyone with a stock portfolio has invariably noticed that semiconductor companies are on a tear this year.
BlackBerry posted a positive cash position in Q1, its first cash-positive first quarter in any fiscal year since 2017, driven by its QNX and Secusmart products
BNPL lenders like Flex, Zip, and Affirm are now pitching loans for basic household needs; Americans spent $160B through pay-later loans in 2025, up 2x from 2023
Pornhub's parent company, Aylo, will pay $120M to settle two 2021 class action lawsuits in California and Alabama alleging it profited from child abuse material
Sources: Crusoe is in IPO talks with at least four Wall Street banks, including JPMorgan, which is advising on its $3B pre-IPO fundraise set to value it at $35B
Filing: Nvidia agrees to spend up to $105B to support SB Energy's new Ohio data center campus OpenAI is set to lease; Nvidia agrees to invest $1.5B in SB Energy
Nvidia Corp. has agreed to spend as much as $105 billion to support a massive new data center campus in Ohio set to be leased by OpenAI …