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August 17, 2026, 11:10 AM
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| Anissa Gardizy / Wall Street Journal: |
OpenAI signs a 20-year, 10GW data center deal in Ohio with SoftBank's SB Energy; Nvidia agrees to backstop a portion of the value of the completed data center — Agreement with SoftBank's SB Energy caps weeks of negotiations over the largest data-center project announced to date| Bloomberg: |
Filing: Nvidia agrees to spend up to $105B to support SB Energy's new data center campus in Ohio set to be leased by OpenAI; Nvidia invests $1.5B in SB Energy — Nvidia Corp. has agreed to spend as much as $105 billion to support a massive new data center campus in Ohio set to be leased by OpenAI … | John Gruber / Daring Fireball: |
Anthropic's text watermarking alters word probabilities to leave fingerprints, which could degrade Claude's writing, despite its claim of no impact on quality — When I wrote this week about Anthropic's announcement that all Claude models, worldwide, would soon begin “watermarking” …
More: 9to5Mac, The Verge, Artificial Lawyer, The Decoder, Inc.com, Information Age, Implicator.ai, Android Authority, VC Cafe, James Padolsey's Blog, and Forbes
X: @dbreunig, @arturovilla, @seltaa_, @kimmonismus, @bleeding_sun, @trq212, @wesroth, @elder_plinius, @basedjensen, @nickadobos, @kimmonismus, @jessuppi, @_mattata, @hammer_mt, @gnukeith, @alex_verem, @dedene, @lyraintheflesh, and @rasbt
Bluesky: @hern, @binaryape, @metacurity.com, @carnage4life, @jrobertlennon.com, @zzypt, @adamfishercox.com, @nymag.com, @frankpasquale, and @gruber.foo. Mastodon: @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org
Forums: Hacker News, r/technology, and Lobsters
| Wall Street Journal: |
Analysis: nine top tech companies including Alphabet and Meta had ~$3T of AI-related off-balance-sheet commitments, far exceeding their ~$600B in reported capex — Massive spending commitments for data-center leases and chips aren't shown on companies' balance sheets
X: @patrickmoorhead, @greg_ip, @asharma, and @c_barraud
| Emanuel Maiberg / 404 Media: |
Investigation: Amazon is buying huge quantities of rare books, scanning them for AI, and destroying them; a tracked Biblio order went to its Las Vegas facility — We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.
More: The Decoder, Fast Company, Gizmodo, and Digital Trends
Bluesky: @simonwillison.net, @wadjeteyegames.com, @atrubek, @jenlucpiquant, @heykellyjensen, @smtuffy, @josephcox, and @emanuelmaiberg. Mastodon: @davidgerard@circumstances.run
Forums: Hacker News, r/books, r/Libraries, r/ABoringDystopia, r/Anticonsumption, and r/technology
| Bloomberg: |
Sources: Stripe has finalized a deal to acquire AI model marketplace OpenRouter for $7B+; founded in 2023, OpenRouter reportedly had a $1.3B valuation in May — Stripe Inc. has finalized an agreement to acquire OpenRouter Inc., a startup that helps companies switch between artificial intelligence models …
More: TechCrunch, Stratechery, Axios, PYMNTS, Quartz, The Next Web, The Information, Blockonomi, New York Times, Implicator.ai, Pulse 2.0, Proactive, Forkast, Silicon Republic, Neowin, Tech Funding News, crypto.news, Tech Times, Verdict, SiliconANGLE, The Paypers, The Decoder, RuntimeWire, and DigiTimes
X: @anshublog, @jelanifuel, @asvanevik, @mattmickiewicz, @maxleiter, @ns123abc, @alvinfoo, @aleabitoreddit, @iankar_, @badlogicgames, @kenwattana, @kushalbhagia, @thisiskp_, @astridwilde1, @dogetoshi, @deedydas, @tugot17, @sundeep, @thezachmueller, @rleshner, @krrishd, @sergegatari, @cyrusasg, @kimmonismus, @kenwattana, @danlynch, @cremieuxrecueil, @shomikghosh21, @trace_cohen, @victormustar, @himanshustwts, @andrew_n_carr, @rohanpaul_ai, @andrewcurran_, @nmasc_, and @firstadopter. LinkedIn: Guillaume Lebedel. Bluesky: @hunterwalk.com. Mastodon: @carnage4life@mas.to
Forums: Hacker News, r/hermesagent, r/SillyTavernAI, and r/openrouter
| Mayank Parmar / BleepingComputer: |
Microsoft says GitHub is down worldwide, with its website, API, Actions, Pull Requests, and other services impacted; GitHub confirmed the outage at 13:40 UTC — GitHub is down for some users as a widespread outage is causing errors across the website, API, Actions, Pull Requests, and several other services.
More: GitHub Status, Notebookcheck, and Tech Times
X: @tekbog, @jdxcode, @uwukko, @amritwt, @__tinygrad__, @_dylanga, @darrenjr, @imlunahey, @doodlestein, and @teknium
Bluesky: @xor.blue, @drsmith, and @caseynewton
| Kelly Cloonan / Wall Street Journal: |
Uber and Zipline partner to launch Uber Eats drone deliveries in Dallas and Houston by late 2026, aiming to scale nationwide and hit 1M daily deliveries in 2029 — The desire for rapid delivery is “insatiable,” Uber's Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi says
More: Uber, The Verge, PCMag, Reuters, TechCrunch, Finimize, WeRSM, and Blockonomi
X: @jason, @powerbottomdad1, @michaeldell, @matthuang, @keller, and @dkhos
| Greg Brockman: |
Greg Brockman calls the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident “a watershed moment” and discusses how OpenAI and other organizations can use AI to improve cyber defenses — The OpenAI-Hugging Face incident was a watershed moment for cybersecurity because it gave a peek into how the capabilities … | Anton Zverev / Reuters: |
Russian law enforcement docs: Binance provided Russia with IT specialist Yuri Belenkiy's transaction history and passport number, leading to terrorism charges — Binance last year handed Russian authorities details of cryptocurrency donations to Ukrainian fundraising campaigns that were used …
More: Cointelegraph, CoinDesk, The Crypto Times, Coinpedia Fintech News, and crypto.news. Forums: r/neoliberal
| Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog: |
Qwen 3.8 27B shows an open-weight general purpose model can have a long context, effective tool calling, strong vision ability, and competent code generation — Friday's big release was Qwen 3.8 27B, an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba's Qwen research lab.
More: CNBC, Wccftech, Quartz, RuntimeWire, Implicator.ai, and Run Qwen3.8 locally …
Forums: Hacker News and r/LocalLLaMA
| Ezra Reguerra / Cointelegraph: |
Chainalysis sues the US government over ICE's $94.6M contract to buy forensic software and services from its competitor TRM Labs, calling the deal “arbitrary” — The sealed complaint leaves Chainalysis' specific objections and requested remedy undisclosed as briefing continues.| Lawrence Delevingne / Reuters: |
Trump-backed WLF is collaborating with Hong Kong-based AI platform WorldClaw; 43 of its 90 AI models are developed by Chinese entities flagged as security risks — President Donald Trump-backed World Liberty Financial is collaborating with a Hong Kong-based venture offering artificial … | Robert Booth / The Guardian: |
AI film startups are setting up studios in Hollywood, using US and Chinese AI models while touting lower production costs and a way around traditional financing — Amid fears for jobs, some film-makers say AI could enable them bypass studio giants and take more creative risks
More: The Decoder. X: @promise_ai. Bluesky: @nic221, @vincentoconnell.co.uk, @ghostofirony, @michaelz79, and @brianruh
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