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August 17, 2026, 2:50 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, Washington Examiner, International Business Times, CNBC, Reuters, Capital Brief, Investor's Business Daily, Axios, The Decoder, Constellation Research, Barron's Online, crypto.news, DatacenterDynamics, CoinGape, and The Information
| Bloomberg: |
More: Financial Times, New York Times, Columbus Business Journal, The Verge, Reuters, TechCrunch, LinkedIn, UPI, Business Standard, The Information, DatacenterDynamics, Financial Express, Pulse 2.0, HotHardware, Blockonomi, TheEnergyMag, Unite.AI, Capacity, Quartz, Memeburn, Coinpaper, Axios, Seeking Alpha, The American Bazaar, Anadolu Ajansı …, Channel NewsAsia, DigiTimes, Techstrong IT, and The Business Times
X: @jensenhuang, @nvidia, @amir, and @cryptopunk7213
| 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: The Verge, 9to5Mac, PCWorld, MarTech, Nieman Lab, Android Authority, Artificial Lawyer, The Independent, Mashable, Spyglass, The Decoder, Six Colors, Ubergizmo, Implicator.ai, Information Age, Inc.com, VC Cafe, James Padolsey's Blog, and Forbes
X: @arturovilla, @seltaa_, @wesroth, @dbreunig, @kimmonismus, @bleeding_sun, @trq212, @elder_plinius, @basedjensen, @nickadobos, @kimmonismus, @jessuppi, @_mattata, @hammer_mt, @gnukeith, @alex_verem, @dedene, @lyraintheflesh, and @rasbt
Bluesky: @matthew.flux.community, @hern, @davidcrespo, @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
| Cursor: |
Cursor says it is rolling out its code hosting service Origin in early beta on all paid plans, featuring support for repos, pull requests, GitHub sync, and more — Cursor can now host your code. — Origin begins rolling out today in early beta on all paid plans.
More: Vercel and RuntimeWire
X: @cursor_ai, @benhylak, @vercel_dev, @rasmic, @mattyp, @martin_casado, @poteto, and @cursor_ai
| 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, Ars Technica, Simon Willison's Weblog, iPhone in Canada, Fast Company, Newser, The Post Millennial, The Decoder, Feminist Space, and Gizmodo
X: @thestalwart, @rahll, and @kylebrussell
Bluesky: @josephcox, @simonwillison.net, @smtuffy, @jenlucpiquant, @heykellyjensen, @emanuelmaiberg, @moonstalker.net, @wadjeteyegames.com, and @atrubek. Mastodon: @davidgerard@circumstances.run
| Reuters: |
A German regulator says Apple will make changes to ATT, after finding Apple gave its 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 … | Emma Roth / The Verge: |
YouTube will start counting a view as soon as a video starts to play, from August 24, lining up with the system used by Instagram, TikTok, and its Shorts videos — By tracking views from the instant a video starts to play, YouTube's new counter works more like TikTok, X, and Instagram.
More: TechCrunch, Dexerto, and TOS.gg
| 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, Axios, The Verge, PYMNTS, PCMag, RuntimeWire, Quartz, Finimize, Reuters, DroneXL, TechCrunch, WeRSM, and Blockonomi
X: @keller, @jason, @dkhos, @michaeldell, @powerbottomdad1, and @matthuang
| 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| 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, The Crypto Times, Protos, CoinDesk, Coinspeaker, Coinpedia Fintech News, crypto.news, and Cointelegraph
Forums: r/CryptoCurrency, r/neoliberal, and r/Buttcoin
| James Nani / Bloomberg Law: |
Google wins a bankruptcy auction with a $10M bid to acquire deidentified business data, software code, and more from Spirit Airlines to improve its AI models — Google LLC won a bankruptcy auction for a trove of deindentified business data, software code, and operations records …
More: 9to5Google. X: @deepdishenjoyer, @thezvi, @chrisjbakke, @lizwessel, @abhijaymrana, and @abhijaymrana
| 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 … | 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: Tech.eu, Sifted, Forbes, FinSMEs, Robotics & Automation News, Bloomberg, Inc.com, The Robot Report, RuntimeWire, Unite.AI, and Startup.eu. LinkedIn: Ryan Luke Johns
| 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, Wispr Flow, SiliconANGLE, Reuters, Cautious Optimism, FinSMEs, Menlo Ventures, and Pulse 2.0
X: @tankots, @menloventures, @mrgirish, and @alexkolicich
| Bloomberg: |
Sources: the US DOJ has been investigating a16z for nearly a year over whether its partners are improperly serving on the boards of competing AI companies — Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is the focus of a Justice Department antitrust probe over whether its investment partners …
X: @danprimack, @rmac18, @mattyglesias, @thestalwart, and @bubbleboi
| 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, TechRadar, and The Prompt
X: @davidmytton, @mbrevoort, @talhof8, and @gdb
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