Yuliya Chernova / Wall Street Journal: Source: Betaworks has a 5.5% stake in Hugging Face, worth ~$650M at its $11.9B acquisition price for stockholders; A.Capital says it could bag $1.5B on the sale — John Borthwick's venture firm wrote the first check Hugging Face ever received, and now owns a stake that could be worth $650 million.
Robbie Whelan / Wall Street Journal: Sources: US negotiators used the promise of access to Nvidia's chips for an Armenian data center to broker a preliminary Armenia-Azerbaijan peace deal last year — Negotiators offered access to advanced AI hardware to help secure a preliminary agreement ending decades of conflict
Amrith Ramkumar / Wall Street Journal: At the G20 summit, Jensen Huang, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk joined Trump officials in lobbying policymakers against heavy AI regulations — Company bosses, officials say advances in technology are already making AI safer than under government regulations
Yuliya Chernova / Wall Street Journal: Wonderful, which helps enterprises deploy AI, raised a $550M Series C led by Insight at a $5B valuation; investors also paid $170M for shares from employees — Founded just last year, the startup already has 650 employees and is expanding its forward-deployed engineering teams around the world
Georgia Wells / Wall Street Journal: OpenAI is facing a new round of lawsuits from witnesses and victims of the February mass shooting in a Canadian town; the suspect spent days talking to ChatGPT — New lawsuits add to list of cases in which the chatbot maker faces questions about the safety of its products
Raffaele Huang / Wall Street Journal: Industry insiders say Chinese robot makers currently rely on Nvidia silicon and software; Nvidia's physical AI business generates ~$10B in annual revenue — Business in ‘physical AI’ is growing, and Chinese companies rely on U.S. chips and software — Nvidia's chips aren't just for training chatbots.
Wall Street Journal: Trade unions threaten to withhold support for politicians opposing data center projects, warning that blocking the projects endangers building-related jobs — Trade unions threaten to withhold support for politicians, joining the building backlash — Much of the public outcry …
Jiyoung Sohn / Wall Street Journal: South Korea unveils a project with KT, SK Telecom, and Kakao to provide premium AI tools to the public for free, a move that treats AI like a public utility — Seoul wants to direct use of homegrown AI chatbots to reduce reliance on U.S. or Chinese options, footing the bill and offering unlimited tokens
Wall Street Journal: Sources: some tech companies are courting Democrats and hiring advisers to prepare for potential investigations if Republicans lose control of the House — Tech firms are courting Democrats and hiring advisers to prepare for potential investigations if Republicans lose control of the House
Dave Michaels / Wall Street Journal: Sources: federal authorities prepare to charge a US serviceman and a KPMG employee with insider trading on prediction markets, as part of a new batch of cases — Charges could come this fall, part of a new batch of insider trading cases — Federal authorities are preparing charges …
Clara Hudson / Wall Street Journal: Kalshi partners with Weather Co. to verify climate and weather prediction market settlements; Kalshi says weather vertical trading volume will hit $1.1B in 2026 — The trading platform is now getting input from experts that operate a leading weather app to verify increasingly popular climate-prediction markets
Meghan Bobrowsky / Wall Street Journal: Meta's AG settlement will be distributed to the 48 signing states and four jurisdictions in annual installments over a 10-year period based on their populations — The deal contains broad new safeguards for underage users but only pays out in full if TikTok and YouTube make similar concessions
Jonathan Weil / Wall Street Journal: Microsoft faces investor criticism over opaque financial reporting across capex, its OpenAI deal, and Azure, which is buried in the Intelligent Cloud segment — From capex to its flagship cloud platform, Microsoft stands out for lack of transparency — Cloud computing, meet cloudy numbers.
Nicole Nguyen / Wall Street Journal: Apple raises Mac mini and Studio prices: the M6 and M5 Pro Mac mini are $899+ and $1,699+, $100 above M4 models, and the M5 Ultra Mac Studio is $5,499+, up $200 — Between the AI agent craze and the global memory-chip shortage, Apple might struggle to keep these refreshed little powerhouse Macs in stock
Wall Street Journal: Sources detail how the Trump admin bypassed the DOJ trial team and pushed to settle the Live Nation case, after CEO Michael Rapino met White House officials — Antitrust case started out aiming to force concert giant to sell Ticketmaster. After two White House meetings, a deal kept the company intact.
Raffaele Huang / Wall Street Journal: The careers of Z.ai's Tang Jie and Moonshot AI's Yang Zhilin, once teacher and pupil at Tsinghua University, show that China's AI leap is no sudden development — University lab nurtured the computer scientists who are using ingenuity and imitation to chase down Anthropic and OpenAI; ‘they know perfectly how to monetize their work’
Robbie Whelan / Wall Street Journal: Sources: Nvidia plans to use its $6B deal with Poolside to build an open-weight AI model to compete with Chinese models like DeepSeek and Kimi — A sweeping agreement with startup Poolside aims to build an open AI ecosystem in the U.S. to compete with Chinese heavyweights and American AI giants
Katherine Bindley / Wall Street Journal: AI agents' growing capabilities are driving productivity FOMO among some startup founders, who feel compelled to work long hours managing and guiding the agents — The growing capabilities of AI give new meaning to working yourself to the bone — Seductive. Intoxicating. All-consuming.
Wall Street Journal: How politicians who once championed data centers, including Greg Abbott and Josh Shapiro, are now slowing their development as the issue becomes a liability — State governors, including Greg Abbott and Josh Shapiro, slowing development of the facilities as anger over AI spreads
Paul Kiernan / Wall Street Journal: PitchBook: California-based startups have raised ~$366B in 2026 so far across 4,000+ companies, more than triple the total of all other 49 states combined — California-based companies have announced a record haul in startup funding, despite billionaire-tax fears
Kate Clark / Wall Street Journal: Stripe's OpenRouter acquisition, its largest yet, is a bet on a future where users turn to a mix of AI models and tokens are the central currency for businesses — The Stripe deal for OpenRouter, founded by an NFT entrepreneur, is a bet on a future where users turn to a mix of AI models
Jennifer Hiller / Wall Street Journal: SMR startup Oklo is currently building its reactor in Idaho, a step towards supplying Meta with power; there are an estimated 22 active US reactor projects — Renewed interest in atomic energy and AI mania are colliding at the Idaho National Lab — BUTTE COUNTY, Idaho …
Wall Street Journal: US tech companies are offering community investments, guaranteed jobs, and hosting open houses to address concerns and win public support for AI data centers — Tech companies are holding listening sessions, offering guaranteed jobs and writing big checks to win public support for the data centers they need.
Connor Hart / Wall Street Journal: Klarna says CFO Niclas Neglén and CMO David Sandström plan to step down in early 2027, and lowers its full-year GMV guidance; KLAR falls 19%+ pre-market — The payments company tempered its outlook for the year, even as it swung to a profit and logged higher revenue in the second quarter
Robbie Whelan / Wall Street Journal: AI inference chip startup Etched raised $700M led by its new server rack customer Jane Street at a $21B valuation, up from $10.3B after raising $300M in July — Etched, founded by Harvard dropouts, has its own in-office data center and has signed quant-trading firm Jane Street as its first customer.
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
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
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
Jason Douglas / Wall Street Journal: A profile of Sony CEO Hiroki Totoki, who aims to transform the company into a business focused on music, movies, video games, and the tech that underpins them — The company built its empire on electronics. CEO Hiroki Totoki says its future is entertainment
Isabelle Bousquette / Wall Street Journal: BCG: enterprise users spent a total of $300M on quantum computing in 2025, outranking the combined spending of research labs and governments for the first time — Many companies are pouring millions into quantum computing programs to gain a competitive edge and prepare for future encryption threats
Wall Street Journal: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says the US is “not in favor” of Apple buying Chinese memory chips, and there have to be “other solutions to the memory issue” — Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urges iPhone maker to find other solutions to AI-driven chip supply crunch
Anissa Gardizy / Wall Street Journal: Sources: Nvidia has reworked a deal to finance an OpenAI Ohio data center campus so that it would initially guarantee only half of its planned $250B backstop — Under new proposed terms, the chip maker would initially backstop only half of the 10-gigawatt project
Katherine Hamilton / Wall Street Journal: Accelerant, which uses data analytics to connect insurance underwriters with risk capital partners, agrees to go private with Thoma Bravo in a $4.4B deal — The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027 — Accelerant agreed to go private in a deal with private-equity firm Thoma Bravo worth more than $4 billion.
Sherry Qin / Wall Street Journal: SMIC reports Q2 revenue up 36% YoY to ~$3B, net profit up 3x+ to ~$479.2M, above ~$283.1M est., and a 25.3% gross margin, driven by strong mature-node orders — The Chinese chip foundry's net profit more than tripled in the second quarter — SMIC, China's biggest chip foundry …
Adam Whittaker / Wall Street Journal: Amsterdam-based Adyen reports H1 2026 net revenue up 19% YoY to €1.3B, processed volumes up 24% YoY to €803.8B, and EBITDA of €641.5M; ADYEN.AS rises 12%+ — Net revenue increased 19% and processed volumes climbed 24% — Shares in Adyen jumped after the Amsterdam-based …
Wall Street Journal: Sources: Demis Hassabis pitched a new independent industry AI safety entity, modeled on the IAEA, to top Trump officials before stepping down as DeepMind's CEO — Demis Hassabis discussed the proposed new entity with heads of other AI labs and Trump administration officials including Scott Bessent
Belle Lin / Wall Street Journal: AT&T says open models currently account for ~25% of its AI usage, and it targets 70% to 80% over time; AT&T uses an average of 45B AI tokens per day — The telecom company is staking its future on open models, both to control token cost and protect its proprietary data
Wall Street Journal: As AI salaries collide with lack of San Francisco housing supply, CoStar says the average asking rent is up 18% in under two years to $3,728/month, passing NYC — Lack of housing supply is colliding with sky-high AI salaries: 'OK, we'll pay $10,000' — SAN FRANCISCO—Flowers and wine for listing agents at open houses.
Ben Cohen / Wall Street Journal: A look back at “Move 37”, a watershed AI moment from AlphaGo's 2016 Go victory, as math witnesses similar breakthroughs where AI makes surprising discoveries — A decade ago, a computer did something that no human would have done. It was considered a breakthrough for AI.
Wall Street Journal: Data Insight: Russia's largest online retailer Wildberries, which owes Russian banks $10B+ in loans, has lost as much as $5B in inventory to Ukrainian attacks — Plans for a megamerger were blessed by Putin, tying company's fortunes to those of the Russian state
Alexander Osipovich / Wall Street Journal: A profile of Russia's A7, a payment network that helps Russia bypass Western sanctions, handling ~20% of payments in Russian foreign trade, or $100B+ annually — A7 says it handles nearly 20% of payments in Russian foreign trade, or more than $100 billion annually
Zusha Elinson / Wall Street Journal: How Amazon and Gilroy, California, quietly negotiated a $2B data center project that AWS applied to build in 2020, without any public meetings or votes — Company and Gilroy, Calif., spent years quietly negotiating $2 billion project that few residents knew about until work began
Wall Street Journal: Sources: Situational Awareness invested $500M, including $400M this week, into Source Foundry, a startup that plans to develop new AI chip manufacturing tools — Investment marks the latest known private-company bet by Situational Awareness after quick sale of its stock portfolio.
Nat Ives / Wall Street Journal: Ad measurement company VideoAmp laid off ~20% of staff this week, citing AI as a “major platform shift”; sources: 50-60 employees were cut, including its CTO — Plus, Claire's redesigns its ear-piercing experience to compete with trendy studios
Yuliya Chernova / Wall Street Journal: Filing: ex-a16z partner Bryan Kim is forming venture firm Mido Capital; sources: he plans to raise ~$100M for a fund backing early-stage AI and other startups — Bryan Kim, who invested in consumer tech and AI startups at Andreessen, is creating his own firm, Mido Capital Bryan Kim …
Anissa Gardizy / Wall Street Journal: Lumilens, which is building data center optical-interconnection tech to replace wires with light, raised $700M at a $5.5B valuation, for $900M in total funding — Lumilens, which makes optical gear to speed up data flowing between AI servers, is valued at $5.5 billion in new funding
Isabelle Bousquette / Wall Street Journal: How Pringles maker Kellanova is using AI and a partnership with Siemens to improve production of the chip in Europe, including making digital twins of its dough — Kellanova, which manufactures Pringles in Europe, says a new AI project could be the key to improving production of the iconic chip
Wall Street Journal: FanDuel parent Flutter says CEO Peter Jackson is stepping down, replaced by President Dan Taylor, and reports a lower profit outlook as its US business falters — The parent company of FanDuel says CEO Peter Jackson is being replaced by Dan Taylor, the company's president
Katherine Hamilton / Wall Street Journal: Visa plans to acquire Israeli company BioCatch, which uses AI to detect fraud and distinguish legitimate users from attackers in real time, for $2.4B in cash — BioCatch uses artificial intelligence to detect fraud and distinguish legitimate users from attackers
Ben Cohen / Wall Street Journal: A profile of Jacob Tsimerman, who won the Fields Medal last week and is taking a leave from the University of Toronto to join OpenAI and work on AI safety — Jacob Tsimerman won the biggest prize in math. Now he's working on the most important problem of his career.