← Back to news

T

Techmeme RSS Feed

Airbnb reports Q2 revenue up 17% YoY to $3.6B, Nights and Seats Booked up 10% to 148.3M, above est., lifts 2026 revenue forecast; ABNB jumps 10%+ after hours (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

AMD acquires Toronto-based Taalas, which integrates model weights directly into silicon to boost inference performance, for an undisclosed sum (Tobias Mann/The Register)

Sources: OpenAI's new device, slated for 2027, is a hockey puck-sized smart speaker with moving parts that help give it personality, likely costing $300+ (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Gravity, which places text-based ads within AI chatbots, raised a $30.5M Series A co-led by Lightspeed and Committed, taking its total funding to $38.5M (Lara O'Reilly/Business Insider)

Docs: US data labeling companies, like Surge AI and Mercor, that sell training datasets to US AI labs and the government are also selling them to Chinese labs (Anna Tong/Forbes)

Figma CEO Dylan Field forfeits ~$46M in stock awards to revive investor confidence amid AI disruption fears; FIG is down ~77% from its peak more than a year ago (Brody Ford/Bloomberg)

Scientists trained AI on genetic sequences to design viruses not found in nature, yielding 16 viable viruses that can infect bacteria but don't threaten humans (Carl Zimmer/New York Times)

Sources: Panthalassa, which aims to power data centers in the ocean using energy generated by waves, is raising $225M at a ~$2B valuation, up from $1B in May (Julia Hornstein/The Information)

Sources: Nscale told potential backers it generated $100M+ in Q2 revenue, up from ~$37M in Q1, and has ~$51B in contracts, ahead of a possible September US IPO (Bailey Lipschultz/Bloomberg)

Suno says it will adopt new audio watermarking tech, fingerprinting tech, transparency tools, and a new download policy to limit the spread of spammy AI music (Terrence O'Brien/The Verge)

Google and data: hackers used phone calls, phishing websites, and "meticulous" tactics to target dozens of US PE firms and other businesses over the past month (Reuters)

OpenAI updates the default model for free users to GPT-5.6 Luna, adds unlimited text chats for free users, rolls out an improved GPT-5.6 Sol version, and more (Herb Scribner/Axios)

OpenAI debuts Agent Plugins, an open standard for bundling skills and MCP servers, and says Amazon, Cursor, Microsoft, and Vercel are on its steering committee (Zac Hall/9to5Mac)

Western Digital falls 10%+ after issuing guidance that didn't quite match those of Seagate; Q4 revenue rose 44% YoY to $3.75B, above a $3.7B estimate (Nate Wolf/Barron's Online)

Google DeepMind says its WeatherNext model can accurately predict a storm's track and intensity using lower-resolution weather data, and open sources the model (Victoria Turk/Wired)

Sources: Nvidia is considering lower-memory versions of its Rubin Ultra GPU due to potential issues securing enough HBM, and has tested at least three versions (The Information)

Sources: Stripe recently entered exclusive talks to buy OpenRouter in a cash-and-stock deal that would value the startup for close to $10B (The Information)

Demis Hassabis stepping down as Google DeepMind CEO may weaken the UK tech scene, marking an end for Hassabis' effort to keep his native UK as an AI stronghold (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg)

Datadog drops 15%+ after forecasting weaker full-year sales due to reduced usage from its largest client, a leading AI company; Q2 revenue rises 36% to $1.12B (Katherine Hamilton/Wall Street Journal)

WindBorne, which deploys weather balloons to collect data for its AI weather forecasting models, raised a $37M Series B at a $250M post-money valuation (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch)

SpaceX and Tesla plan to initially invest $16.8B to build Terafab in Grimes County, Texas; combined demand from SpaceX and Tesla is forecast to top 1 TW (Reuters)

Sources: DeepSeek has resumed its funding round, seeking $8B at a $74B valuation, after pausing talks following the leak of Liang Wenfeng's remarks to investors (Bloomberg)

Meta's Muse Spark 1.2 scores 54 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, putting Meta next to SpaceXAI in a tie for third place amongst US labs (Artificial Analysis)

Filing: DeepSeek has invested ~$20.8M in Unitree Robotics' Shanghai IPO and agreed to jointly develop AI models for humanoid machines (Eduardo Baptista/Reuters)

Ooredoo, Nvidia, Nokia, and Indosat launch Zankore, Indonesia's first dedicated AI compute and neocloud platform; Ooredoo, which owns a 49% stake, commits $800M (Melissa Hancock/Fortune)

Chainalysis: violent crypto attacks stole $30M+ in H1 2026, on track to exceed 2025's $58M total; France is the primary hotspot with 30 publicly known cases (Naga Avan-Nomayo/The Block)

Google is expanding its Gemini-powered Ask Maps feature in English to 130+ countries and adds agentic food ordering, hotel booking, and attraction searching (Jada Jones/ZDNET)

Rockstar says it will show an "extended look" at Grand Theft Auto VI on August 27, premiering on Netflix at 3pm ET before streaming on YouTube at 9pm ET (Andrew Webster/The Verge)

Lumilens, which is building data center optical-interconnection tech to replace wires with light, raised $700M at a $5.5B valuation, for $900M in total funding (Anissa Gardizy/Wall Street Journal)

Filing: Hangzhou-based Unitree Robotics prices its Shanghai IPO at ~$22/share, aiming to sell 40.4M shares to raise $904M; Unitree shipped 5,500+ robots in 2025 (Bloomberg)

Defense tech company Hadrian raised a $1.37B Series D at an $8B valuation to expand its factories and Opus software platform, after a $260M Series C in 2025 (Colin Demarest/Axios)

China launches a formal national security review of Palo Alto Networks products sold in the Chinese market, citing a need to protect critical infrastructure (Alan Wong/Bloomberg)

SoftBank reports Q1 net profit down 18% YoY to ~$2.2B, above ~$761M est., an ~$8.2B gain on its Intel stake, and Vision Fund up $1.7B due to its ByteDance stake (Arjun Kharpal/CNBC)

Google centralizes its AI leadership at Mountain View in a bid to catch its rivals; Sebastian Borgeaud, who led a major AI coding effort, moved from the UK (Bloomberg)

Nintendo reports Q1 revenue down 10% YoY to ~$3.3B, above $2.8B est., net income of ~$933M, above ~$495M est., and Switch 2 sales down 34.4% YoY to 3.82M (Jenny Lee/CNBC)

Sources: some Google researchers have grown frustrated over AI compute access for ambitious projects while Google Cloud sells TPUs to customers like Anthropic (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC)

A look at Sequoia's revamped strategy under new stewards Alfred Lin and Pat Grady, including bold AI bets; sources: Sequoia recently closed $10B in new funding (Bloomberg)

DeepSeek says it plans to implement substantial price increases across its services; V4 Flash currently costs $0.14/1M input and $0.28/1M output tokens (Bloomberg)

Filing: OpenAI says "Apple should not be permitted to use a baseless and pretextual lawsuit to make up for its failures to integrate AI into its products" (Megan Morrone/Axios)

OpenAI files a motion to dismiss Apple's lawsuit accusing the AI company of stealing trade secrets, saying that the iPhone maker's allegations are meritless (Bloomberg)

An interview with TMTG interim CEO Kevin McGurn on the paid API for high-speed access to Truth Social posts, the pending $6B TMTG-TAE merger, and more (Financial Times)

A researcher with access to North Korean hackers' servers says their operations have impacted 1,640 companies across 57 countries over the past 22 months (Wired)

PitchBook: AI voice startups raised $7B in Q1 2026, up from $1B in Q1 2025, as OpenAI and Google bet on voice as the main interface for next-gen AI agents (Cristina Criddle/Financial Times)

How Trump's push for data centers is driving a boom in gas power plants, and a look at Meta's El Paso data center, which will have 813 gas-burning generators (Hiroko Tabuchi/New York Times)

Sources detail Intel's turnaround under Lip-Bu Tan as AI demand for CPUs boosts business; Intel's deal to make Arm's AI data center chip fell through in 2024 (Michael Acton/Financial Times)

TikTok's US entity says it is closing its Nashville office, which held some of its content moderation team; filing: TikTok laid off 250 employees at the office (Emmett Lindner/New York Times)

Analysis: Grokipedia appears not to have updated any articles since April 24, when it stopped processing human-suggested edits; xAI launched it in October 2025 (Lawfare)

Cloudflare open sources a new version of Cloudflare OS, a browser-accessible AI agentic workspace for enterprises that lets employees build custom micro-apps (Kyt Dotson/SiliconANGLE)

AppLovin reports Q2 revenue up 53% YoY to $1.92B, below $1.94B est., and forecasts Q3 revenue within estimates; APP drops 16% pre-market and is down 38% YTD (Kelly Cloonan/Wall Street Journal)

Nikita Bier steps down as X's head of product after starting the role in July 2025, saying "running this app is a 24/7 job", and will continue as an adviser (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch)