The Information: Sources: Google is paying ~100 digital publishers for how much their content contributes to AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini in a pilot; payments vary widely — Google has been paying roughly 100 digital publishers for how much their content contributes to AI-powered answers to search and other products …
The Information: Sources: Tesla ramped up Optimus production to several hundred units per week but faces hurdles with its hands, automation equipment, and supplier constraints — Tesla has ramped up production of its Optimus humanoid robot roughly tenfold in recent months, but the company is still struggling …
The Information: Sources: AI chip startup DensityAI, founded by ex-Tesla Dojo team members, is in talks to raise hundreds of millions of dollars at a $10B valuation — DensityAI, an AI chip startup founded just a year ago by former leaders of Tesla's Dojo supercomputer program, is in advanced talks …
The Information: Sources: Anthropic asks shareholders to approve a Palantir-style structure granting its seven co-founders 50.1% of voting power if three retain minimum stakes — Anthropic is asking shareholders to approve a new corporate structure that would award CEO Dario Amodei and his six cofounders …
The Information: Sources: Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic plan to launch an AI safety standards body without government oversight in late 2026 or 2027, and are considering CEOs — Google, OpenAI and Anthropic are pushing forward with a plan to create a new AI safety-focused standards body on their own …
Juro Osawa / The Information: Source: Beijing-based Naive AI, which plans to release its first AI model as early as this month, is now valued at $1.4B after raising $400M in three rounds — A secretive Chinese AI model startup founded in February by a Tsinghua University professor is now valued at more than $1.4 billion …
The Information: Sources: Apple is developing enterprise AI servers powered by two or four M8 Ultra chips, set for 2029, and is considering integrating Nvidia's NVLink Fusion — Apple has been working on plans for an enterprise server using its own chips that could incorporate networking equipment from Nvidia …
The Information: Sources: ByteDance's H1 2026 net profit dropped by a single-digit percentage YoY to $20B and revenue rose ~30% to $120B; its 2025 revenue rose 29% to ~$200B — ByteDance's net profit in the first half of this year declined by a single-digit percentage to $20 billion, as the Chinese tech giant ramped …
Ann Davis Vaughan / The Information: How hyperscalers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are siding with consumers on data center power costs and sweetening offers for communities to gain support — Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle and other AI data center developers are sweetening financial offers to municipalities and regulators to gain approval for new facilities.
The Information: Sources: China Securities Regulatory Commission is informally tightening IPO approvals for humanoid startups after a volatile debut by industry leader Unitree — Chinese regulators are tightening the approval for humanoid startups seeking to go public after a volatile debut …
The Information: Sources: CXMT has begun producing HBM3E memory chips in small quantities and plans to expand production in 2027, a major advance for China's chip industry — China's leading memory-chip maker, ChangXin Memory Technologies, has begun producing advanced high-bandwidth memory in small quantities …
Ann Davis Vaughan / The Information: Elon Musk says SpaceX is “doing in-house casting” for blades and vanes, which can accelerate natural gas turbines “coming online by up to 18 months” — Elon Musk intends to bypass the power supply chain for AI data centers in a way others assumed was impossible, by making highly complex components himself.
Julia Hornstein / The Information: Anthropic-backed enterprise AI venture Ode is acquiring four-year-old AI consultancy Casper for an undisclosed fee; Ode has 100+ staff after buying Fractional — A joint venture established by Anthropic and Wall Street firms such as Blackstone has made its first acquisition since its July launch …
Kevin McLaughlin / The Information: Google Cloud is deploying context-creating AI agents within its tools to automate tasks handled by forward-deployed engineers; Google is hiring hundreds of FDEs — Following the playbook Palantir pioneered, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and Amazon are investing billions of dollars to hire …
The Information: Sources: Nvidia in talks to invest up to $3B in SoftBank-backed data center developer SB Energy that aims to IPO soon and is behind a huge OpenAI campus in Ohio — Nvidia is in talks to invest as much as $3 billion in SB Energy, the Softbank Group-backed developer of a massive planned Ohio …
Alix Coutures / The Information: Sources: Mercor and other firms gathering data for AI labs are driving demand to buy or license internal datasets from startups shutting down or being acquired — Eight days after AI agent startup Warmly in late June agreed to be acquired by HubSpot, CEO Maximus Greenwald found an unusual email in his inbox.
The Information: Sources: Microsoft plans to unveil its next-gen AI chip, the Maia 300, potentially as soon as September, and is in talks with TSMC to make 300K+ chips for 2027 — Microsoft is planning to significantly increase production of its internally designed next-generation AI chips next year in hopes …
The Information: 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 — Nvidia has agreed to invest $2 billion into Lancium, the power infrastructure developer behind the OpenAI and Oracle AI campus in Texas …
The Information: Sources: ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming told employees at an all-hands last month that the company will not use model distillation to accelerate capabilities — ByteDance won't resort to distillation as a shortcut to advancing its AI model capabilities, even if that means …
Qianer Liu / The Information: Sources: TSMC is developing advanced AI chip packaging tech, internally called “EMIB-like”, similar to Intel's Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge technique — Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is developing an advanced chip-packaging technology similar to what Intel already offers …
The Information: Source: OpenRouter was recently generating ~$140M in annualized revenue, or ~$12M per month, up nearly 3x since April, making Stripe's $10B offer a big premium — If Stripe ends up buying three-year-old startup OpenRouter for close to $10 billion, the payments firm would be paying …
The Information: Sources: Moonshot is seeking access to more Nvidia Blackwell chips to prepare for Kimi K4's development, after training K3 on Nvidia chips, including Blackwell — Beijing-based startup Moonshot AI, flush from the breakout success of its recently released model, Kimi K3 …
The Information: Sources: A Chinese state-backed company has begun manufacturing DUV machines, a key step in Beijing's drive to reduce its reliance on foreign chipmaking tech — A Chinese state-backed company has begun manufacturing one of the key pieces of equipment used in chip manufacturing for the first time …
Aaron Holmes / The Information: Palo Alto Networks says Mythos found 24+ critical bugs, burning $1M+ of tokens, subsidized by Anthropic; some companies say they plan to boost Mythos spending — When Palo Alto Networks earlier this year began testing Anthropic's Claude Mythos to comb through its own source code, it didn't take long to see the future of cybersecurity.
Jyoti Mann / The Information: Internal memo: Meta plans to start testing an AI pendant in 2027, release new AI glasses next month, start a “Wearables for Work” unit for enterprises, and more — Meta Platforms plans to start testing an AI pendant in the next year as part of an ambitious roadmap …
The Information: Sources: ByteDance has partnered with chipmaker InnoStar to develop an AI inference chip modeled after Groq's LPUs, which are built to run AI models at low cost — TikTok owner ByteDance is developing a new chip to run artificial intelligence models as part of an aggressive expansion of its homegrown AI infrastructure.
Aaron Tilley / The Information: Sources: at WWDC, Apple is likely to showcase how 15 years of designing chips gives it an advantage in running AI locally, and will use a distilled Gemini model — At Apple's annual developer conference next month, the star of the show will be a series of long-delayed artificial intelligence upgrades to the iPhone.
Michael Roddan / The Information: Polymarket is making it harder to use VPNs to access its service, blocking some IPs and suspicious accounts, and is asking some customers to identify themselves — In Russia, making bets on Polymarket isn't permitted by the popular online prediction market's rules.
The Information: Sources: Anthropic is in talks to rent servers powered by Microsoft-designed chips; source: Anthropic has steadily increased its Azure usage since November 2025 — Anthropic is in talks to rent servers powered by Microsoft-designed AI server chips as it seeks more computing power …
Cory Weinberg / The Information: OpenAI stands to hold ~$2.6B in combined CoreWeave and Cerebras stock that it acquired by committing to buy cloud services and chips, and to lend Cerebras money — Chipmaker Cerebras brought in one of the greatest pitchmen in tech, Sam Altman, to appear in a video to promote its $5.5 billion initial public offering.
The Information: Sources: Kuaishou plans to spin off its Kling AI video unit for an IPO in 2027 and is seeking a $20B valuation in pre-IPO funding talks with potential investors — Chinese social media giant Kuaishou Technology is planning to spin off its Kling AI video business ahead of an initial public offering next year …
The Information: Source: Mistral AI and TML's founding member Devendra Chaplot, who was considered a marquee hire when he joined xAI in March, exited xAI after roughly a month — Cursor is already starting to make its presence known at SpaceX's AI unit, just weeks after Elon Musk's firm got an option to buy the coding startup for $60 billion.
The Information: Sources: DeepSeek seeks to raise ~$7.3B in its first-ever funding round at a $50B+ valuation, with CEO Liang Wenfeng making a personal investment of ~$2.9B — Liang Wenfeng, billionaire founder and CEO of DeepSeek, is planning to write the biggest check for the startup's first-ever funding round …
Juro Osawa / The Information: Sources and memos: Tencent employees used Claude Code to assist them with evaluating and fine-tuning the company's new Hy3 model to improve its performance — Chinese tech giant Tencent's latest AI model has generated positive reviews from developers. But the company probably owes some of that success to Anthropic.
The Information: OpenView: by 2025's end, 79 of 500 tracked software companies, like HubSpot, Adobe, and Salesforce, adopted usage-based AI fees, more than double that of 2024 — Dozens of enterprise software firms have shifted away from charging customers flat, per-user subscription fees as AI threatens their seat-based pricing model.
Eli Rosenberg / The Information: 33% of S&P 500 companies provided security perks for execs in 2025: Jensen Huang's security cost rose from $690K in 2023 to $3.5M in 2025, Zuckerberg spent $22M — Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang cuts a distinctive image, habitually clad in one of his many leather jackets.
The Information: Sources: Cursor hit $2.7B in annualized sales in March, up ~14x from a year ago, and reported a ~$900M loss in its last fiscal year on $770M in total revenue — Weeks before Cursor agreed to a $60 billion potential takeover from SpaceX, the hot AI coding startup set out to raise billions of dollars.
The Information: Sources: Tencent and Alibaba are in talks to invest in DeepSeek at a $20B+ valuation, partly benchmarked against Moonshot's pending round at an $18B valuation — Chinese tech giants Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group are in talks to invest in DeepSeek, the AI upstart that recently started fundraising …
The Information: Draft of SpaceX's confidential IPO prospectus: Elon Musk increased his stake in SpaceX last year by purchasing $1.4B of stock from current and former employees — Elon Musk increased his stake in SpaceX last year by purchasing $1.4 billion of stock from current and former employees …
Erin Woo / The Information: Sources: Google has created strike team to improve its coding models; Sergey Brin told DeepMind staffers that they must aggressively pivot to catch up on agents — Google has assembled a strike team of researchers and engineers to improve its AI coding models, according to three people …
The Information: Sources: Polymarket is in talks to raise $400M at a ~$15B post-money valuation, up from $9B in October 2025, but below Kalshi's $22B valuation from March 2026 — The predictions site Polymarket is talking to investors about raising $400 million in funding at a valuation of about $15 billion including …
Qianer Liu / The Information: Sources: Google is in talks with Marvell Technology to develop a memory processing unit that works alongside TPUs, and a new TPU for running AI models — Google is in talks with Marvell Technology to develop two new chips aimed at running AI models more efficiently, according to two people with direct knowledge of the discussions.
Abram Brown / The Information: A look at Dylan Patel's SemiAnalysis, an AI newsletter and research firm that expects $100M+ in 2026 revenue from subscriptions and AI supply chain research — For Dylan Patel, founder of SemiAnalysis, an influential AI industry newsletter and research firm, Nvidia deserves the kind …
Erin Woo / The Information: Sources: Google is negotiating a deal with the US DOD that would let the Pentagon deploy Gemini AI models in classified settings, reversing its previous stance — Google is negotiating an agreement with the Department of Defense that would allow the Pentagon to deploy Google's Gemini AI models …
Michael Roddan / The Information: Polymarket is auditing its Builders Program, which gives up to $2.5M in grants, after concerns that some participating startups are facilitating insider trading — Polymarket was already under pressure to curb insider trading when it launched a program late last year to support startups that sent trades to its prediction market.
Aaron Holmes / The Information: Microsoft says it is “exploring the potential of technologies like OpenClaw in an enterprise context”, including a team of always-on agents within Microsoft 365 — As Microsoft faces growing competition for business customers from Anthropic, it is developing new features …
Stephanie Palazzolo / The Information: Chapter, which uses AI to help seniors enroll in Medicare, raised a $100M Series E, doubling its valuation to $3B and bringing its total funding to $285M — Meta Platforms' Wednesday release of Spark, the first model in its broader Muse model family, doesn't blow other frontier models out of the water …
Sri Muppidi / The Information: Documents: OpenAI expects ads to generate ~$2.4B in revenue in 2026, ~$11B in 2027, and ~$102B in 2030, or 36% of its total revenue for 2030 — OpenAI's advertising effort is so new that the company is still working out the kinks in it. That hasn't stopped it from setting ambitious aims for the business …
The Information: Sources: Sam Altman has excluded OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar from some key financial meetings; Friar began reporting to Fidji Simo instead of the CEO in August 2025 — Sam Altman has committed OpenAI to spend $600 billion in the next five years and privately said he wants to go public as soon …
Katie Roof / The Information: Sources: Supabase is in talks to raise ~$500M at a ~$10B valuation, roughly doubling its October 2025 valuation; GIC is expected to lead the funding round — Singapore's GIC is in talks to lead an investment in database startup Supabase at a valuation of about $10 billion …