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August 17, 2026, 6:35 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  —  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 …
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
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 …
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 …
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.
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.
Stacy Cowley / New York Times:
BNPL lenders like Flex, Zip, and Affirm are now pitching loans for basic household needs; Americans spent $160B through pay-later loans in 2025, up 2x from 2023  —  The rapid growth of pay-later loans raises questions about whether their popularity is driven by consumer preference or desperation.
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.
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
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” …
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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About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 6:35 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

Lillian Rizzo / CNBC:
Filing: Paramount seeks a $1.88B bond from state AGs, based on its calculation of ticking fees and other costs it will have to pay due to the WBD deal delay

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

Michael Calderone / New York Magazine:
Q&A with WHCA president Jacqui Heinrich about her role, Trump plane swap in Turkey, why the annual dinner is important, Karoline Leavitt stepping down, and more

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
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