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August 17, 2026, 1:25 PM
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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
More: Nvidia Newsroom, OpenAI, CNBC, Capital Brief, Investor's Business Daily, Barron's Online, Reuters, crypto.news, Axios, Constellation Research, The Decoder, DatacenterDynamics, CoinGape, The Information, and Business Standard
X: @sk7037, @markchen90, @openainewsroom, @nvidianewsroom, @anissagardizy8, @anissagardizy8, @firstadopter, @firstadopter, @firstadopter, and @firstadopter. LinkedIn: Dillon Langley
| Bloomberg: |
More: Financial Times, Columbus Business Journal, The Verge, TechCrunch, LinkedIn, DatacenterDynamics, Business Standard, Reuters, The Information, UPI, HotHardware, Financial Express, Pulse 2.0, Quartz, Axios, Blockonomi, TheEnergyMag, Unite.AI, Capacity, Memeburn, Coinpaper, Seeking Alpha, Anadolu Ajansı …, The American Bazaar, Channel NewsAsia, Techstrong IT, DigiTimes, The Business Times, and Livemint
X: @cryptopunk7213, @amir, @jensenhuang, and @nvidia
| 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, PCWorld, MarTech, The Verge, Spyglass, The Independent, Mashable, Android Authority, Artificial Lawyer, Ubergizmo, The Decoder, Six Colors, Implicator.ai, Information Age, Inc.com, VC Cafe, James Padolsey's Blog, and Forbes
X: @arturovilla, @dbreunig, @seltaa_, @kimmonismus, @bleeding_sun, @trq212, @wesroth, @elder_plinius, @basedjensen, @nickadobos, @kimmonismus, @jessuppi, @_mattata, @hammer_mt, @gnukeith, @alex_verem, @dedene, @lyraintheflesh, and @rasbt
Bluesky: @davidcrespo, @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/ArtificialInteligence, r/technology, and Lobsters
| 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: TechCrunch, Simon Willison's Weblog, The Post Millennial, The Decoder, Fast Company, Feminist Space, Gizmodo, and Digital Trends
X: @kylebrussell. Bluesky: @moonstalker.net, @simonwillison.net, @wadjeteyegames.com, @josephcox, @smtuffy, @jenlucpiquant, @heykellyjensen, @emanuelmaiberg, and @atrubek. Mastodon: @davidgerard@circumstances.run
Forums: Hacker News, r/france, r/classicliterature, r/Anticonsumption, r/technology, r/ABoringDystopia, r/books, and r/Libraries
| 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| Reuters: |
A German regulator says Apple will make changes to ATT after finding it gave Apple's apps more favorable consent prompts than those of third-party developers — Apple will change rules governing how app developers can use personal data for targeted advertising on iPhones and iPads … | 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, San Francisco Business Times, PYMNTS, The Verge, PCMag, Reuters, TechCrunch, Finimize, Quartz, DroneXL, WeRSM, and Blockonomi
X: @jason, @powerbottomdad1, @michaeldell, @dkhos, @keller, and @matthuang
| 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: International Business Times, Coinspeaker, CoinDesk, The Crypto Times, Coinpedia Fintech News, crypto.news, and Cointelegraph
Forums: r/Buttcoin and r/neoliberal
| Natasha Mascarenhas / Bloomberg: |
Groq raised $350M led by Disruptive at a $3.5B valuation, down from $6.9B in September 2025 before Nvidia struck a licensing deal and hired much of its talent — Groq has raised $350 million in funding at a $3.5 billion valuation, roughly half what it was worth nearly a year ago … | Allie Garfinkle / Fortune: |
Voice AI startup Wispr raised a $280M Series B led by Menlo Ventures at a $2B valuation, taking its total funding to $361M, and now has 100K business customers — Tanay Kothari saw Iron Man when he was 10 years old. — It was 2008 and he wasn't entranced with Tony Stark.
More: TechCrunch, SiliconANGLE, Wispr Flow, Reuters, FinSMEs, Cautious Optimism, Menlo Ventures, and Pulse 2.0
X: @alexkolicich, @tankots, @menloventures, and @mrgirish
| Mike Wheatley / SiliconANGLE: |
ETH Zurich spinout Gravis Robotics raised a $200M Series A from SoftBank to scale Gravis Rack, an autonomous control appliance for retrofitting onto excavators — Gravis Robotics AG said today it has bagged $200 million in funding from SoftBank Group Corp. in what is the largest-ever Series A round for a construction robotics startup.
More: Sifted, Forbes, Tech.eu, FinSMEs, Bloomberg, Robotics & Automation News, RuntimeWire, Startup.eu, Inc.com, The Robot Report, and Unite.AI. LinkedIn: Ryan Luke Johns
| 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 …
More: CNBC, Quartz, Business Insider, The Prompt, and TechRadar
X: @davidmytton, @mbrevoort, @talhof8, and @gdb
| 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, Implicator.ai, and RuntimeWire
Forums: Hacker News, r/LocalLLaMA, and Lobsters
| Lawrence Delevingne / Reuters: |
Trump-backed WLF is working with Hong Kong-based AI platform WorldClaw; 43 of the 90 AI models on WorldClaw are from Chinese companies flagged as security risks — President Donald Trump-backed World Liberty Financial is collaborating with a Hong Kong-based venture offering artificial …
More: Quartz, The Crypto Times, Bitcoin Insider, Blockonomi, Reason, and CoinGape. Forums: r/politics
| Mayank Parmar / BleepingComputer: |
Microsoft says the outage affecting GitHub's API, Actions, Pull Requests, and other services has been mitigated, three hours after it first confirmed the outage — 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, The Register, The Economic Times, Livemint, The Verge, Windows Central, Forbes, Cyber Security News, API Evangelist, Tech Times, The Stack, and Notebookcheck
X: @piq9117, @threepointone, @tekbog, @imlunahey, @doodlestein, @jdxcode, @uwukko, @_dylanga, @teknium, @amritwt, @charliermarsh, @darrenjr, @samlambert, and @__tinygrad__
Bluesky: @penbird42, @xor.blue, @drsmith, and @caseynewton
Forums: r/QuebecTI, r/webdev, and r/technology
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