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Techmeme

Anthropic, Macquarie, and Singapore's GIC form Theseus Infrastructure to develop AI computing sites; Anthropic will cover consumer electricity price hikes (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg)

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Google adds Venmo as a payment option on Google Play for games, apps, add-ons, subscriptions, and more in the US, adding to support for PayPal and Cash App (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

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Intel announces a $15B common stock offering, with proceeds going to general corporate purposes like "maintaining a strong balance sheet"; INTC falls 3%+ (Sarah Frier/Bloomberg)

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South Korea plans to launch a ~$3.5B chip fund for promising materials, parts, equipment, and fabless companies, and speed the development of domestic chip hubs (Reuters)

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Sources: Palmer Luckey's Erebor, a lender that aims to fill the gap left by Silicon Valley Bank, is in advanced talks to raise ~$1.5B at an $8B valuation (Financial Times)

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Sources: the AI-driven memory chip shortage kicks off a rush of DC lobbying; many US officials appear unsympathetic to Apple's desire to buy Chinese chips (New York Times)

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As AI salaries intensify competition in San Francisco's rental market, CoStar says average asking rent is up 18% in under two years to $3,728/month, passing NYC (Wall Street Journal)

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Q&A with Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour on his vision to "financialize everything", sports betting, Kalshi's "philosophical misalignment" with Polymarket, and more (Jordyn Holman/New York Times)

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The UK's Report Remove service receives 420 reports from under-18s of explicit images digitally faked or manipulated to depict them in H1, exceeding 2025's 397 (Dan Milmo/The Guardian)

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Meta says Muse Glimmer has 30B parameters and is "small enough" to need only one GPU; Meta plans a $1B fund to invest in US communities near its data centers (Vlad Savov/Bloomberg)

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Mark Zuckerberg criticizes "closed" AI model makers, says AI labs are espousing a "discourse ... so filled with doom", and defends distillation as a principle (Jamie John/Financial Times)

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Meta releases Muse Glimmer, an open-weight model, and plans to launch an open-weight version of its most advanced model, Muse Spark 1.2, in the coming weeks (Meghan Bobrowsky/Wall Street Journal)

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Mark Zuckerberg proposes a positive AI philosophy centered on individual empowerment, predicts personal superintelligence could increase employment, and more (Mark Zuckerberg/Meta)

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Smart Analytics: Chinese humanoid robot makers were 97%+ of global shipments in H1 2026, reaching ~19,100 unit shipments globally, up from 5,100 in H1 2025 (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)

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Sources: the UK FCA is consulting industry participants, including major banks, on a regulatory framework for tokenized gold; London dominates the global market (Financial Times)

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Sources: Nvidia chips remain the norm for Chinese AI labs training LLMs, as switching from its CUDA platform to Huawei's CANN requires major code rewriting (South China Morning Post)

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Q&A with historian Jill Lepore on her new book The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, tech leaders misreading science fiction warnings as manuals, and more (Anthony Ha/TechCrunch)

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A profile of Founders Pledge, which has recorded $4B in pledges from founders so far in 2026, as the AI industry now accounts for a third of its lifetime total (Joel Khalili/Wired)

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Revelio Labs: short-term AI training programs made up ~33% of the professional certificate market in 2026, up from just 2% in 2022 before ChatGPT launched (Liam Knox/Bloomberg)

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How credit card issuers and reservation apps like OpenTable and Amex-owned Resy fragment restaurant reservations, wiring the best tables into premium card perks (Wall Street Journal)

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A look at London's King's Cross, which transformed from a seedy area into an AI hub after DeepMind arrived in 2016, and now hosts OpenAI, Meta, Wayve, and more (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch)

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Chinese AI labs account for nine of Artificial Analysis' top 10 text-to-video models, gaining global adoption and potentially an edge in building world models (Catherine Thorbecke/Bloomberg)

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Sources: the UK Royal Navy removed internet connectivity from its drones' cameras, after finding they sent "heartbeat communications" to an IP address in China (Richard Holmes/Telegraph)

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Sources: Sony and TSMC plan a $6.3B JV, owned ~60% by Sony and ~40% by TSMC, to mass produce next-gen image sensor chips in Japan's Kumamoto as early as 2029 (Nikkei Asia)

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Sources: as Spotify tests a skip ahead button that lets some Premium users skip publisher-sold podcast ads and filler content, audio networks raise concerns (Max Tani/Semafor)

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Sources: Chinese regulators have told banks to back tech companies, but lenders still prefer stable cash flows and profitability over loss-making tech startups (Bloomberg)

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Moore Threads reports H1 revenue up 147% YoY to ~$258M, a net loss of $1.72M, and plans a Hong Kong listing, after its stock rose 420%+ since its Shanghai IPO (Bloomberg)

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Tel Aviv-based QuantHealth, a provider of AI clinical trial simulation software, raised a $45M Series B led by Qumra Capital, taking its total funding to ~$70M (Cailey Gleeson/Fierce Healthcare)

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An Australian user's OpenClaw agent running Claude exploited a gym API flaw and kicked another member off, after the user asked it to move him up the waitlist (ABC)

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After New York and Texas added statewide data center restrictions, 500+ US towns and counties have passed bans or restrictions, up from 300+ in late June (Shane Burke/The Information)

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A look at Chinese state-owned investment bank CICC, which sponsored multibillion-dollar listings of China's tech champions, including CXMT and Zhongji Innolight (Financial Times)

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Sources: Apple is testing CXMT's RAM chips, but needs to share technical details with CXMT to make custom versions, which is blocked by US tech transfer rules (Wall Street Journal)

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An in-depth look at OpenAI's model training, dangerous decisions, and cluelessness before the Hugging Face hack; despite delaying Astra, OpenAI doesn't get it (Zvi Mowshowitz/Don't Worry About the Vase)

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A look back at "Move 37", a watershed AI moment from AlphaGo's 2016 Go victory, as math witnesses similar breakthroughs where AI makes surprising discoveries (Ben Cohen/Wall Street Journal)

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Google's AI shakeup suggests it may be prioritizing AI diffusion over frontier-model leadership, betting on AI compute as a bigger economic opportunity (Tim O'Reilly/Asimov's Addendum)

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Rights groups warn Turkey's new cybersecurity law, which took effect in July, gives the presidency sweeping powers over online services operating in the country (John Paul Rathbone/Financial Times)

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Cape Town-based Moment, a provider of digital payments and billing tools for businesses across Africa, raised a $22M Series A, taking its total funding to $55M (FinTech Global)

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Data Insight: Russia's largest online retailer Wildberries, which owes Russian banks $10B+ in loans, has lost as much as $5B in inventory to Ukrainian attacks (Wall Street Journal)

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Anthropic says auto mode will be the default in Claude Code for Pro, Max, and Team plans from Aug. 14, claims it can catch harmful actions better than humans (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

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A look at "Spiralism", a quasi-spiritual movement that grew in 2025 from human-AI conversations after sycophantic GPT-4o updates and expanded ChatGPT memory (Hayden Field/The Verge)

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A profile of Russia's A7, a payment network that helps Russia bypass Western sanctions, handling ~20% of payments in Russian foreign trade, or $100B+ annually (Alexander Osipovich/Wall Street Journal)

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Amazon is backing a 7.65 GW gas plant for an off-grid TX AI data center, potentially the largest single US emissions source, at odds with its 2040 net-zero goal (Hiroko Tabuchi/New York Times)

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South Korea's AI-driven chip industry boom is reordering the country's society, changing expectations around fairness, careers, and even culture and dating (Bloomberg)

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How Amazon and Gilroy, California, quietly negotiated a $2B data center project that AWS applied to build in 2020, without any public meetings or votes (Zusha Elinson/Wall Street Journal)

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A profile of Tatyana Kim, founder of Russia's largest online retailer Wildberries, which has lost an estimated third of its warehouse space to Ukrainian attacks (New York Times)

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Ukrainian attacks on warehouses of Russia's largest online retailer Wildberries are affecting tens of thousands of small businesses that rely on the platform (Reuters)

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Analysis: South Korea and Taiwan each surpassed Japan in total exports for the first time in H1 2026, as AI demand drove explosive growth in chip exports (Nikkei Asia)

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X announces the Original Content Rewards Program and will discontinue Revenue Sharing on Sep. 7, saying existing Revenue Sharing members can apply for access (@xcreators)

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Sources: Nvidia agrees to invest $2B in Lancium, the power infrastructure developer of the Stargate campus in Texas, plus $1B more if it hits certain thresholds (The Information)

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Analysis: SpaceX is on track to build ~10 GW of compute capacity by 2027's end, with 6 GW-8 GW in 2027 alone, which could drive $300B in annual revenue run-rate (SemiAnalysis)

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