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August 17, 2026, 1:50 PM
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Mediagazer
memeorandum
WeSmirchTop News
| 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, Reuters, Barron's Online, crypto.news, Axios, The Decoder, Constellation Research, 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, Financial Express, HotHardware, Pulse 2.0, Axios, Quartz, Blockonomi, TheEnergyMag, Unite.AI, Capacity, Memeburn, Coinpaper, Seeking Alpha, Anadolu Ajansı …, The American Bazaar, Channel NewsAsia, Techstrong IT, DigiTimes, and The Business Times
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, The Verge, MarTech, Spyglass, The Independent, Android Authority, Artificial Lawyer, Mashable, Ubergizmo, The Decoder, Six Colors, Implicator.ai, Information Age, Inc.com, VC Cafe, James Padolsey's Blog, and Forbes
X: @arturovilla, @seltaa_, @dbreunig, @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, Newser, The Post Millennial, The Decoder, Fast Company, Feminist Space, Gizmodo, and Digital Trends
X: @kylebrussell. Bluesky: @moonstalker.net, @simonwillison.net, @josephcox, @smtuffy, @jenlucpiquant, @heykellyjensen, @emanuelmaiberg, @wadjeteyegames.com, and @atrubek. Mastodon: @davidgerard@circumstances.run
Forums: Hacker News, r/france, r/classicliterature, r/Anticonsumption, r/technology, r/ABoringDystopia, r/books, r/Libraries, and Slashdot
| 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 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 … | 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, The Verge, PYMNTS, PCMag, Axios, Finimize, Reuters, TechCrunch, Quartz, DroneXL, WeRSM, and Blockonomi
X: @jason, @dkhos, @michaeldell, @powerbottomdad1, @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, Protos, Coinspeaker, CoinDesk, The Crypto Times, Coinpedia Fintech News, crypto.news, and Cointelegraph
Forums: r/CryptoCurrency, 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 … | 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
| 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, FinSMEs, Cautious Optimism, Menlo Ventures, and Pulse 2.0
X: @alexkolicich, @tankots, @menloventures, and @mrgirish
| 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.| 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
| 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
| 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
| Simon Foy / Financial Times: |
Monzo Chair Gary Hoffman is leaving after some of Monzo's biggest shareholders called for his removal following the board removing TS Anil as CEO in December — Digital bank removed TS Anil as chief last year before reinstating him to board after investor rebellion| 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, Neowin, The Stack, and Notebookcheck
X: @biilmann, @piq9117, @threepointone, @imlunahey, @doodlestein, @jdxcode, @uwukko, @_dylanga, @teknium, @amritwt, @charliermarsh, @darrenjr, @tekbog, @samlambert, and @__tinygrad__
Bluesky: @penbird42, @xor.blue, @drsmith, and @caseynewton
Forums: r/QuebecTI, r/webdev, and r/technology
| 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.Sponsor Posts
Subquadratic:
SubQ Snap 1.1: the first long-context decision model for real enterprise work — Tied for #1 on the AA Decision Index, Snap is a multimodal model with a 384k-token context window for fast reasoning and agentic decisions.
SubQ Snap 1.1: the first long-context decision model for real enterprise work — Tied for #1 on the AA Decision Index, Snap is a multimodal model with a 384k-token context window for fast reasoning and agentic decisions.
Zoho:
Introducing Zoho TouchPoint: Every handshake deserves a next step — Here's a scene you've probably experienced. You spend a day at an event, talk to dozens of people, and come home with a stack of business cards.
Introducing Zoho TouchPoint: Every handshake deserves a next step — Here's a scene you've probably experienced. You spend a day at an event, talk to dozens of people, and come home with a stack of business cards.
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data — Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data — Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.
WebBrain:
WebBrain: an open-source AI agent for your browser — Read pages, fill forms and automate tasks in Chrome or Firefox. Use local models or your preferred AI provider. Get started free.
WebBrain: an open-source AI agent for your browser — Read pages, fill forms and automate tasks in Chrome or Firefox. Use local models or your preferred AI provider. Get started free.Featured Podcasts
Lenny's Podcast:
Meta's Muse: How we launched the most successful consumer product this year | Mona Sarantakos
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
Big Technology Podcast:
Special Report: The Fall Of Jensen Huang & What Comes Next
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Machine Gods:
The 10 Biggest Losers from Jensen Huang's Fall + The METR Report That Scared Us
The official podcast of the singularity, from Casey Newton and Kevin Roose. Twice-weekly news, analysis, and interviews with the people who are building the future.
Subscribe to Machine Gods.
The Upstarts Podcast:
The $1.4B Startup Deciding What You See When You Shop Online | Sequen's Zoë Weil
Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.
Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.
Great Chat:
Too soon to call it a vibe shift?
A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.
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Channels with Peter Kafka:
Encore: Chuck Klosterman on Why Football Owns TV (and Why It Won't Forever)
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
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