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US data center bans top 500, up from 300+ in late June, as New York and Texas join cities and counties pushing back against data center development (Shane Burke/The Information)

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)

As PC makers start using CXMT RAM chips, Apple is testing them too, but it needs a custom version for its devices, and US rules block Apple from sharing designs (Wall Street Journal)

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

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)

12h

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)

17h

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)

18h

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)

18h

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)

18h

Anthropic says auto mode will be the default in Claude Code for Pro, Max, Team plans, starting on Aug. 14, claiming it's good enough at catching harmful actions (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

22h

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)

23h

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

Anthropic announces a feature that allows different Claude Code sessions to message each other with updates and other information, available on macOS and Linux (Marcus Mendes/9to5Mac)

Filings: Moonshot restructured its China-based entity from a limited liability company to a joint stock company in its first visible step toward a Hong Kong IPO (Financial Times)

The US OCC denies Dutch fintech Bunq's application for a national bank charter, citing the need for more clarity on its business plan to expand in the US (Bloomberg)

Sources: Situational Awareness invested $500M, including $400M this week, into Source Foundry, a startup that plans to develop new AI chip manufacturing tools (Wall Street Journal)

The Clarity Act faces uncertainty after Senate Republicans delayed a vote until after their August recess, pushing it to September, just weeks before midterms (Jasper Goodman/Politico)

Sources: data center operator Switch filed confidentially for a US IPO, and a listing could take place as soon as November; Ben Horowitz is joining its board (Bailey Lipschultz/Bloomberg)

Retailers are updating their websites to rank highly in chatbot results, while making sure purchases are done on their own sites to collect customer data (Arriana McLymore/Reuters)

TMTG interim CEO Kevin McGurn says the company is pulling back from a pair of Crypto.com deals to focus on its media arm and its pending merger with TAE (Sara Fischer/Axios)

Sources: Cursor told staff on Thursday that SpaceX could complete its $60B acquisition as soon as next week and the Cursor brand name will likely be phased out (Grace Kay/The Information)

The US Treasury sanctions Dubai-based unlicensed crypto exchange Shelbit, alleging it processed millions in crypto for IRGC and other Iran-linked groups (Reuters)

Microsoft plans to end support for Manifest V2 extensions in Edge starting this month, following Google Chrome, and for enterprise users in early 2027 (Stevie Bonifield/The Verge)

Munich-based NavVis, which provides enterprises with spatial data on factories, plants, buildings, and more, raised an $85M Series D led by The Jordan Company (Rahul Raj/EU-Startups)

Sources: legal AI startup Harvey is in talks to raise $500M+ at a $15.5B valuation, up from $11B in March, and is generating $350M+ in annualized revenue (The Information)

Cloudflare debuts Kitesurf, a cloud-hosted browser for AI agents built on top of its Workers serverless service, available for free while in beta in Browser Run (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

OpenAI says it has expanded safety testing around its upcoming model Astra as it "cannot rule out" critical cyber capabilities, potentially delaying its launch (Axios)

Singapore-based Multiplier, which acquires accounting firms to boost their growth with AI tools, raised a $35M Series B led by TheGP at a $300M valuation (Maria Armental/Wall Street Journal)

Nielsen agrees to acquire and take digital media monitor DoubleVerify private in an all-cash deal with a ~$2.15B enterprise value, expected to close by Q1 2027 (Brian Steinberg/Variety)

Singapore-based AI infrastructure startup Acrab raised a $130M Series B, bringing its total funding to more than $480M (Mars W. Mosqueda Jr/DealStreetAsia)

Ad measurement company VideoAmp cut ~20% of its staff this week, citing that "AI is a major platform shift"; sources: 50 to 60 were laid off, including the CTO (Nat Ives/Wall Street Journal)

Anthropic updates Claude Fable 5's biology safeguards to reduce false positives, cutting biology-related "fallbacks" by ~85% in testing across product surfaces (Anthropic)

At Black Hat, OpenAI reconstructs the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident and examines its implications for AI security, cyber resilience, and alignment (Black Hat on YouTube)

Take-Two reports Q1 bookings down 3% YoY to $1.39B, vs. $1.38B est., forecasts Q2 and FY 2027 bookings below est., and highlights excitement for GTA VI's launch (Deborah Sophia/Reuters)

Livestream shopping app Whatnot raised a $545M Series G led by Iconiq, Lightspeed, and Avra at a $20B valuation, up from an $11.5B valuation in October 2025 (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)

Athens-based Omilia, which builds self-learning AI agents that work across different customer contact points, raised a $67M Series B led by Expedition Growth (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Sources: the US Commerce Department's BIS is reviewing how Chinese AI companies access Nvidia chips overseas, including by legally renting foreign data centers (Mackenzie Hawkins/Bloomberg)

The White House imposes price floors and a 15% tariff on products made from polysilicon, the raw material used in chips that is primarily produced by China (Reuters)

Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes says he will buy $250M of company shares after strong Q4 results dispelled some fears that AI threatens its business model (Nic Fildes/Financial Times)

SK Hynix plans a $38B chipmaking expansion in South Korea, including building a ~$24.7B DRAM facility in Yongin and a ~$13.3B NAND fabrication plant in Cheongju (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

Analysis: Google DeepMind has lost frontier-model momentum amid leadership and RL talent departures, with Google Cloud emerging as a winner with more compute (SemiAnalysis)