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How the data center boom is exposing weaknesses in US power grids, and a look at what fixes the electricity infrastructure may need to become fit for the future (Chris Gillett/Works in Progress Magazine)

Syntun: online sales during China's 618 shopping festival grew 4% YoY, a drop from 15.2% growth in 2025, amid China's persistent consumer spending slowdown (Evelyn Cheng/CNBC)

Eli Lilly plans to use its $7.3B cash reserve to fund an "App Store" for biotech scientists after launching a data center with 1,016 Blackwell chips in 2025 (Patrick Temple-West/Financial Times)

OpenAI debuts at Cannes Lions, pitching its new ChatGPT ad business and Codex to marketers, as it tries to build a multibillion-dollar business ahead of its IPO (Financial Times)

A US NLRB judge ruled that Amazon violated federal law by not recognizing the Teamsters union at a SF warehouse and must collectively bargain with the workers (Josh Eidelson/Bloomberg)

Real estate professionals are increasingly using AI-powered virtual staging tools like Stuccco and BoxBrownie to create misleading house and apartment listings (Gaby Del Valle/The Verge)

Sources: Qualcomm is in advanced talks to acquire Modular in a transaction valuing the AI chip startup at ~$4B, up from a $1.6B valuation in September 2025 (Bloomberg)

Filing: Oracle's global workforce fell by 21,000 employees in the past 12 months to 141,000 as of May 31; the company says AI adoption has led to reductions (Brody Ford/Bloomberg)

President Trump signs two executive orders aimed at speeding the development of advanced quantum computers and mitigating the security threats they present (Amrith Ramkumar/Wall Street Journal)

Meta says it is pausing its employee input tracking program after internal security issues exposed potentially sensitive data meant to train AI models (Wired)

Air Space Intelligence won an $875M, 12-year FAA contract to develop AI tools that map flight trajectories and identify areas of congestion to reduce delays (Allyson Versprille/Bloomberg)

Sakana AI launches Fugu, a multi-agent orchestration system accessible through a single model API, claiming Fugu Ultra matches Fable and Mythos on benchmarks (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)

Sources: Vimeo owner Bending Spoons seeks to raise ~$1.62B in a US IPO, selling 58M shares at $26 to $28 each, hitting a $19B valuation at the top of the range (Echo Wang/Reuters)

Valve Steam Machine review: small and quiet, runs PC games well on a TV, but nearly twice the price of a PS5 for PS5 performance and needs manual configuration (Sean Hollister/The Verge)

Valve's Steam Machine, its new living room Linux PC, will start at $1,049 for the 512GB base model without a controller, and will go on sale starting June 29 (Jay Peters/The Verge)

OpenAI unveils an updated GPT-5.5-Cyber model, launches the Patch the Planet initiative in partnership with Trail of Bits to fix open source bugs, and more (Lily Hay Newman/Wired)

Alphabet shares close down 5% on Monday following the departure of Google DeepMind VP John Jumper, the company's second top AI executive to leave in a week (Bloomberg)

Sources: marketing tech startup AppsFlyer raised a $1B Series E at a $2.7B post-money valuation; Moloco, Google, Meta, and Unity acquire minority stakes (Kerry Flynn/Axios)

SpaceX announces an offering of senior unsecured notes and discloses it has ~$100.8B in cash; SPCX closes down 16.43% in its third consecutive losing session (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

SpaceX signs a computing deal worth up to $6.3B with Reflection AI for access to Nvidia GB300s at Colossus 2; Reflection will pay $150M per month through 2029 (Deirdre Bosa/CNBC)

Groq raised $650M led by Disruptive and Infinitum after its Nvidia deal, aiming to hit 200 MW in capacity by the end of 2027, following a $750M raise in 2025 (Zsana Hoskins/Bloomberg)

Instagram is testing horizontal video on Instagram for TV, plans to experiment with longer-form storytelling and episodic series, and launches on Samsung TV (Katie Kilkenny/The Hollywood Reporter)

Crypto trading app Fomo raised a $75M Series B led by Index at a $550M valuation, taking its total funding to ~$94M, and claims to add 3,500 new users per day (Ben Weiss/Fortune)

Google invests in independent movie studio A24 as part of a new AI partnership; sources say Google is investing ~$75M, roughly equal to Thrive's 2024 investment (Ben Fritz/Wall Street Journal)

Upscale, which is building AI networking infrastructure to rival Cisco, raised a $190M Series A-1 at a $2B valuation, up from $1B after raising $200M in January (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)

Nvidia unveils Halos, a safety-focused OS developed from autonomous vehicle tech and designed to run on IGX Thor hardware for humanoid robots, and opens a lab (Ian King/Bloomberg)

In a joint statement, Five Eyes agencies warn AI models capable of taking down governments and businesses are mere months away, urging leaders to "act now" (Sarah Basford Canales/The Guardian)

Meta invests $900M into Indian fintech Cred for a ~20% stake, and plans to appoint Cred founder Kunal Shah as the leader of WhatsApp, replacing Will Cathcart (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg)

UK-based AI law firm Garfield, which received regulatory approval in 2025, wins a case in the English courts for the first time; the case focused on unpaid fees (Suzi Ring/Financial Times)

NYC-based Prosper AI, whose healthcare AI tool is designed to answer patient phone calls, raised a $30M Series A led by a16z, taking its total funding to $35M (Brock E.W. Turner/Axios)

Electric bike rental company Lime is seeking to raise up to $180.9M in its US IPO, offering 6.7M shares at $24 to $26 each, giving it an up to $1.7B valuation (Jordan Fitzgerald/Bloomberg)

Chevron signs a 20-year deal with Microsoft to provide natural-gas power for a proposed West Texas data center, which could be one of the biggest in the US (Kevin Crowley/Bloomberg)

Netherlands-based Nearfield Instruments, which makes atomic force microscopes to measure chip features, raised $380M led by Fidelity at a $1.6B valuation (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)

JD.com founder Richard Liu says robots will replace the company's 700K delivery workers "sooner or later", and it will help retrain them in robot maintenance (Financial Times)

Analysis: Taiwanese car display chip maker Himax, which makes driver integrated circuits for Ferrari, VW, and others, nets its founders a $1B combined net worth (Bloomberg)

SK Hynix overtakes Samsung to become South Korea's most valuable company, closing up 5.6% for a ~$1.4T market cap; South Korea's Kospi index is up 117% YTD (Kimberley Kao/Wall Street Journal)

Getty Images signs a licensing deal with OpenAI, letting its image library appear in ChatGPT's search and discovery features; GETY jumps 120%+ and is up 5%+ YTD (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg)

Bain says it uses AI coding tools to recreate pieces of target companies' software, making hundreds of rough prototypes in recent years as part of due diligence (Ryan McMorrow/Financial Times)

S&P and IBM: 22.4% of global cyberattacks in 2024 hit Japan, the most targeted country, as it tries to improve its legacy IT systems against AI-powered threats (Catherine Thorbecke/Bloomberg)

Satya Nadella says the public wouldn't tolerate a few AI labs "doing all of the learning for the world", as Microsoft moves to provide low-cost models and tools (Wall Street Journal)

A look at JD Vance's "AI doctrine", which combines pro-innovation VC principles, worker protections, and concerns about power concentration in dominant AI labs (Vivian Salama/The Atlantic)

A profile of Sarah Polcz, the UC Davis law professor that Bernie Sanders' team consulted while developing his AI sovereign wealth fund proposal (Eli Rosenberg/The Information)

Analysis: Anthropic may have talked itself into an export ban, as its 2026 official statements and posts used AI risk-related terms 8x more often than OpenAI (Clara Murray/Financial Times)

PitchBook: defense tech companies making drones, battlefield AI, and more raised $12.3B across 175 deals in 2026 so far, up from a $9.95B from 158 deals in 2025 (Financial Times)

Tencent starts testing its new Xiaowei AI assistant powered by WeLM and DeepSeek models in its WeChat app in China, in an effort to catch up in the AI race (Luz Ding/Bloomberg)

Source: Morgan Stanley is pitching data center developers to use leveraged loans rather than bonds, and estimates ~$15B will be issued in 2026 in such loans (Dakin Campbell/The Information)

WiseTech's shares fell 11% after Australian police probed co-founder Richard White over sex exploitation claims; WiseTech shares are down ~67% in the past year (Sydney Morning Herald)

Sources: ByteDance shares are trading at a $600B+ valuation in gray markets; an IPO is unlikely and its growth continues to benefit its Chinese and US backers (Henny Sender/Nikkei Asia)

China adds ten US companies, including MP Materials and Teal Drones, to export controls and bars government purchases from 46 US companies, including Anduril (Wataru Suzuki/Nikkei Asia)

Shenzhen-listed Apple supplier Lingyi iTech seeks to raise $1.1B in a June 26 Hong Kong debut, as the electronic parts maker expands into AI hardware and robots (Iris Deng/South China Morning Post)