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August 17, 2026, 12:05 PM
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Top 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
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  —  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” …
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.
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
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.
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 …
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 …
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
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 …

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This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 12:05 PM ET, August 17, 2026.

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From Mediagazer

Bloomberg:
A profile of Studio Ghibli, which released its last film over two years ago, as its creative succession remains unresolved; the studio says it is AI agnostic

Max Tani / Semafor:
The Daily Mail hires Mike Rothman, most recently president of The Dispatch, as general manager to oversee its North American business and video expansion

Sharon Udasin / The Times of Israel:
Alyssa Katz, who became EIC of Jewish newspaper The Forward in January, has left; she previously worked in editorial positions for The City and NY Daily News

More News

Mike Wheatley / SiliconANGLE:
ETH Zurich spinout Gravis Robotics raised a $200M Series A from SoftBank to scale Gravis Rack, a retrofit autonomous control appliance that mounts on excavators
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

Earlier Picks

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
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