Techmeme RSS Feed

Walmart, which has long resisted contactless Tap to Pay payments, says it will soon start rolling out the tech, which supports Apple Pay, Google Pay, and more (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

39m

Filings: Apple paid Ireland $17B in taxes last year, after an EU court ordered it to pay €13B in back taxes; Apple paid $43B in corporate income taxes globally (Jamie John/Financial Times)

Uber is set to be fined €825M by the Dutch data watchdog over its use of automated systems to deactivate driver accounts, in the second largest fine under GDPR (Financial Times)

Space data center startup Starcloud raised a $250M extension, at a $2.3B valuation, to its March $170M Series A; source: Nvidia invested $25M (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch)

Kakao plans to spin off its chat app-based platform business into a new company tentatively named KakaoAI, which it expects to relist in Korea in 2027 (Reuters)

Filings: China-based chipmaker YMTC's application to list its shares on Shanghai's STAR Market has been accepted, setting the stage for a $4.9B share sale (Reuters)

DeepSeek unveils an experimental multimodal version of its V4 Flash model, saying it nears the performance of Anthropic's Opus 4.8 on multimodal agentic tests (Bloomberg)

Patreon announces new and overhauled features, including changes to its recommendation system to make it easier for smaller creators to get discovered (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

A look at London cab drivers' concerns and pushback against robotaxis, as Waymo and Wayve race to make London their European launch pad for driverless services (Financial Times)

CBRE: NYC becomes the top tech talent market for the first time with 394,300 jobs, beating the Bay Area's 375,730, amid SF job cuts and NYC finance sector hires (Diana Olick/CNBC)

Samsung unveils a $65.1B-$79.5B shareholder return package for 2026, combining dividends and share buybacks, calling it "the largest ever by a Korean company" (Jenny Lee/CNBC)

Sources: Nvidia is in early talks with South Korean AI chip startup Rebellions for a potential deal, including a partnership, an investment, or an acquisition (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

China grants Geely a two-year permit for the country's first private satellite IoT trial, letting Geely offer connectivity to sectors like transport and energy (Ben Jiang/South China Morning Post)

How the memory boom is reshaping Micron's hometown of Boise, Idaho: new millionaires, job growth, traffic, soaring housing costs, and uneven wealth distribution (CNBC)

How crypto, AI, and online betting companies emerged as the biggest industries shaping the 2026 US midterm races, as corporate spending reaches a record $517M (Dawn Kopecki/Reuters)

10h

Brazil announces ~$444.2M in AI investments split between US and Chinese companies, including ~$250.3M for a supercomputing project with Huawei and iFlytek (Marcela Ayres/Reuters)

13h

Source: AI training data startup Micro1's gross annual run rate grew from $100M to $500M in the past eight months, putting net annual run rate at $150M-$200M (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

14h

Nevada approves permits letting Tesla deploy up to 5,000 robotaxis in the Las Vegas area over the next year, while Waymo and Uber are each allowed up to 1,000 (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch)

15h

A NJ teenager drops her lawsuit against Meta, Google, and Snap over alleged social media addiction, without any payment; TikTok previously settled her claims (Diana Novak Jones/Reuters)

15h

A US judge tosses part of the conviction of ex-Google engineer Linwei Ding, who was found guilty of stealing AI trade secrets to benefit two Chinese companies (Tom Hals/Reuters)

16h

OpenAI rolls out an Apple Messages plugin for ChatGPT on macOS, letting ChatGPT read, search, and analyze chats, prepare and send messages, and more (Zac Hall/9to5Mac)

18h

Super Micro says its independent probe found no evidence its CEO or senior management knew of an alleged scheme to smuggle $2.5B worth of Nvidia chips to China (Amanda Gerut/Fortune)

18h

Email: Apple Music tells industry partners that songs tagged as "materially generated using AI" by content providers will be visibly labeled on the service (Kristin Robinson/Billboard)

19h

Filing: in 2025, TikTok posted its first net profit of $702.5M in Europe, Africa, and Latin America on $9.1B in revenue, up 45.7% YoY (Iain Martin/Forbes)

A bankruptcy court delays Google's $10M purchase of Spirit Airlines' data after former flight attendants sought assurances that their info would be removed (Alexander Gladstone/Wall Street Journal)

Waymo says it has built an ASIC chip that will improve its robotaxis' reflexes and navigational skills and help it diversify away from companies like Nvidia (Edward Ludlow/Bloomberg)

Circana: US video game hardware spending fell 29% YoY in July to $282M, the lowest since COVID; unit shipments fell 39% as average console prices hit $542 (Vlad Savov/Bloomberg)

Anthropic-backed enterprise AI venture Ode is acquiring four-year-old AI consultancy Casper for an undisclosed fee; Ode has 100+ staff after buying Fractional (Julia Hornstein/The Information)

Study: 150+ Polymarket wallets may have traded on internal US military information, making $8M overall with a 97.2% average win rate and attracting copycat bets (Douglas Gillison/Reuters)

GTA 6 leaker CyberLeek releases more footage, including a video of a character spelling "leek" with bullet holes in a wall, suggesting direct access to the game (Robert Purchese/Eurogamer.net)

Slack launches Slack Code, adding dedicated, project-specific code channels that let teams collaborate with AI coding agents "like teammates" across all plans (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)

Source: Meta is spending hundreds of millions per year to use trillions of AI tokens weekly via Azure, quietly becoming one of Microsoft's largest AI customers (Brody Ford/Bloomberg)

Sources: Trump officials expect Elon Musk to spend $100M to $200M in the November midterm elections, with a focus on voter turnout in key races, including Texas (Hugo Lowell/Wired)

Australia passes the News Bargaining Incentive, which will tax tech giants 2.5% on their Australian ad revenue unless they strike deals with local news media (Christine Chen/Reuters)

PitchBook: California-based startups have raised ~$366B in 2026 so far across 4,000+ companies, more than triple the total of all other 49 states combined (Paul Kiernan/Wall Street Journal)

Muon Space, which is building a spacecraft platform for orbital data centers and AI computing, raised a $250M Series C, with participation from Google (Yash Roy/Bloomberg)

Stripe's OpenRouter acquisition, its largest yet, is a bet on a future where users turn to a mix of AI models and tokens are the central currency for businesses (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal)

Alibaba reports Q1 revenue up 9% YoY to ~$39.64B, meeting est., and net income down 75% to ~$1.54B due to heavy AI spending and weak domestic retail consumption (Luz Ding/Bloomberg)

Binance launches Agent OS, a platform that lets AI agents analyze markets and execute trades on users' behalf; users set limits on AI agents' access and trades (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

South Korea media: SK Hynix and its union reach a tentative deal on a 6.3% wage hike and paying out 60% of profit-sharing bonuses in shares and 40% in cash (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

Uber, Verne, and Pony.ai launch autonomous rides in Zagreb, making the Croatian capital the first European city where users can book such rides via Uber's app (Anzar Mehraj/Reuters)

London-based Callosum, whose software matches AI tasks with different models and chips, raised a $100M seed from Atomico, the UK Sovereign AI Fund, and others (Bloomberg)

Virginia's Loudoun County hosts 250+ data centers, generating huge tax revenues, as it moves to slow construction in response to pushback from residents (Cecilia Kang/New York Times)

A look at Backstory, an experimental AI image authentication tool from Google DeepMind, offered for testing to journalists, researchers, and other fact checkers (Andrew Deck/Nieman Lab)

China's humanoid robot makers derive much of their revenue from government-backed training centers that sell training data back to them, raising demand concerns (William Langley/Financial Times)

Sources: China is restricting or delaying exports to Taiwan of germanium- and quartz-based materials used in fiber optics, photonics, and chip manufacturing (Nikkei Asia)

How Unitree's Go series, which helped the company dominate the quadruped robot market, drew on openly published US university research funded by the US military (Michael Martina/Reuters)

Pornhub says the UK's new internet age checks have boosted non-compliant porn sites, which occupied seven of the top 10 search results for "free porn" in June (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times)

The EU appears to be shifting from outsized regulatory fines against Big Tech to technical DMA orders that force compliance, such as sharing search data (Jacob Parry/Politico)

President Trump says CFTC Chair Michael Selig is working to bring crypto platform Hyperliquid onshore, lifting shares of HYPE-holder Hyperliquid Strategies ~30% (Bloomberg)