Open Links In New Tab
Mobile Archives Advertise Site News Contact Editors
Techmeme
August 17, 2026, 7:35 PM
Mediagazer memeorandum WeSmirch
Home River Leaderboards About Events Newsletter

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
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 …

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.
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.
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.
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.
Sponsor Techmeme

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.
Subscribe to Great Chat.
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.
Add your podcast here
 

About This Page

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

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

From Mediagazer

Angela Fu / Poynter:
A look at what a Democratic-controlled Congress could focus on to protect press freedom, including investigating the FCC and reforming transparency laws

Linda Hourani / The Kyiv Independent:
Russia is bringing young foreign influencers to occupied Ukraine, encouraging them to share their highly curated experiences, to legitimize its occupation

Jesse McKinley / New York Times:
After the midterms, Joe Rogan says Trump's policies lost “most of the country”, not just the “podcast bros”, as manosphere influencers shift away from politics

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
Mediagazer memeorandum WeSmirch
Home River Leaderboards About Events Newsletter