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August 17, 2026, 7:35 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
Bloomberg:
Filing: Nvidia agrees to spend up to $105B to support SB Energy's new Ohio data center campus OpenAI is set to lease; Nvidia agrees to invest $1.5B in SB Energy
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 …
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.
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.
Jonathan Vanian / CNBC:
Opening arguments begin Tuesday in the state AGs' social media addiction lawsuit against Meta; New Mexico AG says the consequences could be “astronomical”  —  If New Mexico created the blueprint for taking on Meta, California could determine the company's fate when it comes to critical changes at Facebook and Instagram.
David Sacks / @davidsacks:
David Sacks says “Dario Amodei believes frontier AI is too powerful to distribute; we believe it is too powerful to centralize” after Amodei shared policy ideas  —  Some thoughts on Dario's post: 1. Dario does not actually address Gavin Baker's account of what he said - something he could easily deny if it were inaccurate. 2. Dario claims his critics live in a “bubble” where all regulation equals regulatory capture. He calls this an overly
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
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.
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 …
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 …
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.
Alan Neuhauser / Axios:
Sources: Crusoe is in IPO talks with at least four Wall Street banks, including JPMorgan, which is advising on its $3B pre-IPO fundraise set to value it at $35B  —  Crusoe, a data center developer and power supplier, is in IPO talks with at least four Wall Street banks, Axios Pro has learned.
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 …
Tobias Burns / CNBC:
Nvidia's $500B funding package announcement for AI infrastructure follows SEC's July guidance that confirmed looser restrictions for data center securitizations  —  Recent Securities and Exchange Commission guidance is underpinning the debt-fueled data center buildout to support artificial intelligence.
More: Quartz
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 …

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This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 7:35 PM ET, August 17, 2026.

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From Mediagazer

Winston Cho / The Hollywood Reporter:
Filing: the US DOJ says states suing to block the WBD deal must post a “proper bond” to cover potential damages, backing Paramount's request for a $1.88B bond

Selome Hailu / Variety:
Nielsen: NBC's telecast of the Emmys drew 6.7M viewers on Monday night, down 9% from 2025's 7.4M on CBS, which was the awards show's best performance since 2021

Brian Steinberg / Variety:
Nielsen: 60 Minutes' season premiere drew 7.94M viewers, down 21% from 10.02M for last season's premiere; viewers between the ages of 25 and 54 fell 33%

More News

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
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
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

Earlier Picks

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
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
James Fontanella-Khan / Financial Times:
AI video generation startup Higgsfield raised $400M from DST, Goldman Sachs, Liberty Global, Intel, and others at a $5.4B valuation, up from $1.3B+ in January
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
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