Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

Sources: OpenAI signed a deal with AWS to sell its AI services to US government agencies for both classified and unclassified work, amid the Anthropic-DOD spat (The Information)

Techmeme

Baidu is integrating OpenClaw with its Xiaodu devices to work as voice-controlled remotes, joining Tencent and Alibaba in racing to capitalize on agentic AI (Bloomberg)

Techmeme

IBM closes its $11B deal for data streaming company Confluent; IBM CEO Arvind Krishna says he expects IBM will maintain or grow its head count over five years (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal)

Techmeme

Qualcomm says it plans to buy back another $20B worth of shares and is raising its quarterly cash dividend, after unveiling a $15B buyback in November 2024 (Lynn Doan/Bloomberg)

Techmeme

Q&A with Kalshi co-founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara on suing the US government, solving market making, agentic and insider trading, ethics, and more (John Collison/Cheeky Pint)

Techmeme

PayPal expands access to its PYUSD stablecoin from the US and the UK to 70 countries in total, including Colombia, Panama, Peru, Singapore, Uganda, and Malawi (Ben Weiss/Fortune)

Techmeme

Mastercard agrees to acquire London-based stablecoin payments infra startup BVNK for up to $1.8B, including $300M in contingent payments, set to close in 2026 (Reuters)

Techmeme

Enterprise AI automation startup Standard Template Labs raised a $49M seed co-led by Iconiq and CRV, a source says at a $300M post-money valuation (Natasha Mascarenhas/Bloomberg)

Techmeme

Darton Commodities: the global cobalt shortage is set to persist through 2030, after Congo limited exports in 2025; the DRC accounts for 70%+ of global supply (Annie Lee/Bloomberg)

Techmeme

Agentic cybersecurity startup Surf AI, which helps teams read signals from identity, cloud, and other tools, emerges from stealth with $57M in seed and Series A (Chris Metinko/Axios)

Techmeme

Amsterdam-based Nebius plans to raise ~$3.75B in convertible debt to fund its data center expansion and to purchase customized AI chips, after its Meta deal (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg)

Techmeme

Q&A with Jensen Huang on Nvidia's CUDA core, reasoning and coding, CPUs' role in accelerated computing, Groq, China and the doomers, Nvidia's nature, and more (Ben Thompson/Stratechery)

Techmeme

Amazon begins three-hour deliveries in ~2K US cities and towns and one-hour deliveries in hundreds of those areas, after 2025 pilots; 90K+ products are eligible (Annie Palmer/CNBC)

Techmeme

Sources: Google is in talks with Envicool and other Chinese companies about buying liquid cooling equipment for data centers, amid a tight supply of such parts (Reuters)

Techmeme

Gecko Robotics secures a $71M US Navy contract to use robots to slash repair time for dated ships, as the US races to reindustrialize its aging defense systems (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

Techmeme

Sources: KKR, Blackstone, and other investors have turned down some data center debt because of insufficient insurance against risks like natural disasters (Financial Times)

Techmeme

SK Group Chair Chey Tae-won says memory chip makers are expanding capacity but are unlikely to match demand until around 2030; basic wafer supply lags by 20%+ (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

Techmeme

Q&A with Ted Sarandos on his visit to Brussels, Netflix's European investments, EU regulation, YouTube, TikTok, WBD, Trump's Susan Rice criticism, AI, and more (Carrie Budoff Brown/Politico)

Techmeme

The UK plans to spend £1B+ on quantum computing research over four years, including funding companies in pharmaceuticals, financial services, and energy (Mia Dawkins/Bloomberg)

Techmeme

EU countries introduce sanctions on hacking groups, including Iran's Emennet Pasargad, which hacked magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2023, and two Chinese companies (Sam Clark/Politico)

Techmeme