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An overview of macro tech trends: capex explosion, unprecedented surge in chip demand, supply chain bottlenecks, model commoditization, AI automation, and more (Benedict Evans)

Sources: Analog Devices, one of the largest analog chip makers, is in talks to buy Empower, which makes chips used to regulate voltage, for $1.5B in cash (Bloomberg)

Vitalik Buterin says AI-assisted "formal verification" could help secure blockchain networks, smart contracts, and cryptographic systems against software flaws (Jason Nelson/Decrypt)

Blackstone announces a JV with Google to create a US company that will offer customers access to Google's TPUs, and makes an initial equity commitment of $5B (Wall Street Journal)

A deep dive into Meta's Hyperion data center campus in Louisiana, expected to reach 5 GW of compute capacity; source: Meta plans to spend $200B+ on the project (Riley Griffin/Bloomberg)

Procurement records: the FBI seeks a vendor that can provide access to automated license plate readers nationwide; Flock and Motorola are among the few options (Joseph Cox/404 Media)

A CISA contractor maintained a now-offline GitHub repo that exposed credentials to AWS GovCloud accounts and CISA systems; CISA is investigating the situation (Brian Krebs/Krebs on Security)

In a town hall, PlayStation studio business CEO Hermen Hulst told staff that the company's narrative single-player games will now be PlayStation exclusive (Jason Schreier/@jasonschreier.bsky.social)

Internal memo: Meta is reassigning 7,000 workers to four new units focused on building AI tools, two days before it is set to lay off 10% of its workforce (Eli Tan/New York Times)

Sources: AI chip designer Tenstorrent has drawn takeover interest from Intel and Qualcomm; Tenstorrent could be valued at more than $5B in a potential deal (Bloomberg)

Anthropic last week began letting Mythos users share cybersecurity threats with others who may face similar vulnerabilities, modifying its previous stance (Amrith Ramkumar/Wall Street Journal)

Musk v. Altman: Elon Musk says the judge and jury "never actually ruled on the merits of the case, just on a calendar technicality" and he will file an appeal (Elon Musk/@elonmusk)

Akamai is seeking to raise $2.6B in a convertible bond offering, and plans to use $350M of the offering to buy back its common stock from buyers of the bonds (David Morris/Bloomberg)

Cloudflare tests Mythos against 50+ repositories, highlights its ability to chain bugs into a single exploit, and details a vulnerability discovery harness (Grant Bourzikas/Cloudflare)

Anthropic acquires NYC-based Stainless, which generates SDKs from APIs, and plans to wind down its hosted products, after reportedly discussing a $300M+ deal (Kirsten Korosec/TechCrunch)

X quietly limits users who didn't pay for verification to "50 original posts and 200 replies per day", down from 2,400 posts per day (Jackson Chen/Engadget)

Uber increases its stake in Delivery Hero to 19.5%, up from 7% in April, and says it "has no intent to acquire 30% or more" of Delivery Hero's voting rights (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

Seagate shares drop 6.87%, leading a group-wide sell-off after comments from its CEO raised concerns it won't be able to meet demand fueled by the AI buildout (CJ Haddad/CNBC)

Sigma, which sells a cloud-native analytics platform that sits on top of data warehouses, raised an $80M Series E led by Princeville Capital at a $3B valuation (Cristian Dina/The Next Web)

Musk v. Altman: the jury unanimously rejects Elon Musk's claims against Sam Altman, finding that the claims were filed outside of the statute of limitations (CNBC)

Cursor releases Composer 2.5, saying it's better at sustained work on long-running tasks and follows complex instructions more reliably; it's built on Kimi K2.5 (Cursor)

NextEra's $67B deal to buy Dominion, the largest utility merger in US history, signals a new era of utility consolidation to accommodate AI-driven power demand (Emily Forgash/Bloomberg)

Sony is hiking the starting price of one-month and three-month PlayStation Plus subscriptions in "select regions", blaming "ongoing market conditions" (Jay Peters/The Verge)

Nasdaq-listed Bitcoin Depot, North America's largest bitcoin ATM operator, files for bankruptcy, blaming "increasingly stringent compliance obligations" (Omkar Godbole/CoinDesk)

Internal chats: in March, xAI offered employees $420 in exchange for completed tax filings as training data for Grok, but the bonuses haven't been paid out (Carmen Arroyo/Bloomberg)

Amazon's Alexa+ now produces AI-generated "podcasts" on various topics in the US, featuring chats between two AI "co-hosts", using content from media outlets (Todd Spangler/Variety)

Arkham: Iran's largest crypto exchange, Nobitex, processed $2.3B+ since 2023 via Tron and BNB Chain, including $23M+ since the Iran war started in February (Reuters)

Iranian media: Iran launches "Hormuz Safe", a Bitcoin-backed insurance service for shipping companies transiting the Strait of Hormuz; ~1,500 ships are trapped (Golnar Motevalli/Bloomberg)

The Vatican says Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah will join Pope Leo on May 25 to launch the pope's first encyclical, setting out his views on the AI age (Flavia Rotondi/Bloomberg)

Decart, which offers real-time generative video and GPU optimization tech, raised $300M at a ~$4B valuation, up from $3.1B after raising $153M in August 2025 (Robbie Whelan/Wall Street Journal)

Strategy acquired 24,869 bitcoin for ~$2.01B at an $80,985 average price from May 11 to May 17, taking its holdings to 843,738 BTC, or 4%+ of the total supply (James Hunt/The Block)

Sources: competition for Google's TPUs among its employees and researchers intensified as it prioritizes cloud customers and flagship AI products over research (Julia Love/Bloomberg)

Dust, which helps enterprises design and deploy specialized AI agents that work alongside humans, raised a $40M Series B led by Abstract and Sequoia (Chris Metinko/Axios)

Steve Bannon and 60+ Trump allies sign a Humans First-led letter urging Trump to mandate government testing and approval of powerful AI models before release (Ashley Gold/Axios)

How gambling companies like FanDuel and DraftKings, as well as Meta and a16z's founders, are pouring millions into state-level election campaigns via super PACs (Emily Birnbaum/Bloomberg)

Eric Schmidt faced loud boos during his University of Arizona commencement speech while discussing "rational" fears over the impact of AI and automation on jobs (Lauren Edmonds/Business Insider)

Baidu reports Q1 revenue down 1.1% YoY to ~$4.7B, above ~$4.5B est., and net income down 55% YoY to ~$506.6M, above ~$462.5M est., amid a slow AI payoff (Tracy Qu/Wall Street Journal)

A college senior at Stanford describes how AI has changed classes: cheating using AI "has become omnipresent" with students "fudging just about everything" (Theo Baker/New York Times)

How Amazon, which took a measured tone on AI, went from an AI also-ran to a real contender, thanks to $200B in spending, a bet on custom chips, and savvy deals (Tim Higgins/Wall Street Journal)

Polymarket and Kalshi continue to operate in India despite an April 25 government advisory, addressed to VPN providers, labeling prediction markets as "illegal" (Bloomberg)

After EV maker Fisker's collapse, ~4,000 car owners formed a nonprofit to keep their cars working by reverse-engineering software and building open-source tools (Fred Lambert/Electrek)

In his weekly Linux kernel post, Linus Torvalds says "AI tools are great" but duplicate bug reports have made the security list "almost entirely unmanageable" (Simon Sharwood/The Register)

A look at the new class of jobs created by AI companies: AI storytellers, forward deployed engineers, AI accelerators, AI philosophers, AI gig workers, and more (Brent D. Griffiths/Business Insider)

Companies running bug bounty programs are tightening background checks and building AI agents to triage a flood of low-quality reports generated by AI (Jamie John/Financial Times)

How the AI industry's intense pressure to keep up and its financial rewards are creating "walls of resentment" between Silicon Valley workers and their spouses (Alessandra Ram/Wired)

Security researcher Peter G. Neumann, who criticized the industry's lax attitudes toward computer security and digital privacy, died on May 17 at the age of 93 (John Markoff/New York Times)

Microsoft says it's retiring Teams' Together Mode, debuted in 2020, and plans to simplify meeting layouts and focus on video quality, stability, and performance (Terrence O'Brien/The Verge)

Pwn2Own Berlin 2026: participants earned a total of $1,298,250 for 47 vulnerabilities, with successful exploits of AI products like Codex, Cursor, and LM Studio (Eduard Kovacs/SecurityWeek)

Sources: Anthropic agrees to brief the Financial Stability Board on global financial system vulnerabilities found by Mythos, following a request by FSB's Chair (Financial Times)

Samsung's shares jumped as much as 6.7% after the company resumed talks with its union and a court partially granted an injunction against illegal union actions (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)