The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Data center shares fall as investors expect slower AI buildout after Democrats win Congress; Hut 8 drops 23%, IREN 11%, Core Scientific 10%, Applied Digital 7% (Reuters) [2d]
Figma reports Q3 revenue up 43% YoY to $391.4M, above est., gross margin of 80%, below 81% est., and lifts its 2026 revenue outlook; FIG drops 6%+ after hours (Deborah Mary Sophia/Reuters) [2d]
Snap reports Q3 revenue up 14% YoY to $1.72B, in line with est., and DAUs up 4% to 495M, vs. 499M est.; SNAP drops 9%+ after hours (Spencer Soper/Bloomberg) [2d]
Qualcomm reports Q4 revenue down 8% YoY to $10.3B, vs. $10.1B est., and handsets revenue down 26% to $5.14B, vs. $5.25B est.; QCOM drops 5%+ after hours (Ian King/Bloomberg) [2d]
Arm reports Q2 revenue up 27% YoY to $1.44B, vs. $1.38B est., royalty revenue up 8% to $670M, vs. $720.8M est., and licensing revenue up 50% to $773M (Reuters) [2d]
Meta raised €9B from its debut euro bond sale that drew a record €53B of orders, paying ~1.4x the risk premium Alphabet offered for similar bonds this week (Bloomberg) [2d]
Sources: Apple cut some engineers' daily AI spending cap to $200 from $300 and plans cuts to as little as $100, as cost cutting stokes staff fears of layoffs (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [2d]
Filing: AMD will pay ~$2.9B in cash and stock for AI chip startup Taalas, with $1.4B dependent on unspecified conditions; the deal was announced in August (Murad Hemmadi/Globe and Mail) [2d]
Apple says it will check iCloud items shared to "Anyone with the link" for "harmful content" in 27.3 OS versions, and may delete the content or disable accounts (Ryan Christoffel/9to5Mac) [2d]
Meta acquires Conductor, which lets developers run multiple AI coding agents in parallel; CEO Charlie Holtz says the team will join Meta Superintelligence Labs (Madison Mills/Axios) [2d]
Shares of US tech giants jump after Democrats' midterm sweep as investors bet that a Democrat-controlled Congress will slow AI capex that's draining cash flow (Bloomberg) [2d]
Sequoia raised ~$10B in new funds, and announces it is shutting down its Arc accelerator and Scouts program, merging its early-stage and growth teams, and more (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch) [2d]
Pangram releases Pangram Image 1.0, which it says is state-of-the-art in AI image detection, and Image Flash 1.0, which powers its AI video detection (Isaac Kasahara/Pangram) [2d]
Titan OS, which monetizes smart TVs via ads and FAST deals, raised $46M in equity and debt, for a total funding of $110M, says it has 30M users, up from 18M YoY (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [2d]
EloElo Group, the company behind Indian microdrama app Story TV, raised an $80M Series C co-led by NBCUniversal and Hornbill, bringing its total raised to $130M (Naman Ramachandran/Variety) [2d]
Democrats' sweep of Congress raises the likelihood of strong frontier AI legislation passing in early 2027, including mandatory testing and developer liability (Shakeel Hashim/Transformer) [2d]
CoreWeave's stock and unsecured bonds fall after sweeping Democratic midterm victories, as Texas Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa calls for a data center moratorium (Katherine Schwartz/Bloomberg) [2d]
Sources: Tron, Tether, Binance, and TRM Labs' T3 Financial Crime Unit quietly dissolved in August due to slow response times, after freezing $250M in assets (Ryan Weeks/Bloomberg) [2d]
Circle reports Q3 revenue up 17% YoY to $875M, driven in part by ARC token sales, net income up 5% YoY to $226M, and says it is cutting 5% of its staff (Yueqi Yang/The Information) [2d]
TeraWulf secures a credit backstop agreement with Google to support financing for its data center project with Anthropic in Kentucky, set to come online H2 2027 (Deborah Sophia/Reuters) [2d]
Crypto and AI super PACs spent $250M in 2026 midterms, but lost 9/12 competitive races called so far, spending $74.7M on losing candidates and $28.3M on winners (Molly White/Citation Needed) [2d]
Sources: Singapore-based, Nigeria-focused payments company OPay halts its $300M US IPO hours after pricing it due to 11th-hour inquiries from Chinese regulators (Bloomberg) [2d]
Revolut hits a $115B valuation, up from $75B in November 2025, after a secondary share sale led by Glade Brook, Coatue, and others, as it plans a US launch (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) [2d]
UK AI Minister Kanishka Narayan says AI is set to add £55B to £140B to the economy by 2030, below a £400B estimate from a Google-led report touted by officials (Ben Gartside/Wired) [2d]
The French Blood Establishment says external providers' blood cold storage units were hacked to raise temperatures, in a wave of refrigeration cyberattacks (Sawdah Bhaimiya/CNBC) [2d]
Sequoia says it is closing its London office after six years and consolidating operations back to the Bay Area, citing a lack of need for a local presence (Mike Butcher/Pathfounders) [2d]
Qualcomm signs a multiyear SpaceX deal to supply Dragonwing hardware and network software for "tens of thousands of cell sites" for a US-wide network in 2027 (Bloomberg) [2d]
Waymo plans to end its exclusive robotaxi partnership with Uber in Austin and Atlanta in January 2028 and switch to its own app to improve consistency for users (Bloomberg) [2d]
Sentra, which helps restrict and monitor data access for AI agents, raised a $150M Series C led by Capital One Ventures, taking its total funding to $250M+ (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE) [2d]
AI sales automation startup Nooks secures a $500M commitment from General Catalyst's CVF, which will take a share of the returns generated by the capital (Reuters) [2d]
Uber reports Q3 revenue up 10% YoY to $14.8B, Gross Bookings up 20% to $59.8B, trips up 16% to 4B, and plans to scale its autonomous fleet to 2,000+ in 2027 (Rafe Rosner-Uddin/Financial Times) [2d]
US voters in 29+ jurisdictions overwhelmingly pass data center bans or restrictions; S&P says 145+ US projects were delayed or canceled through early August (Washington Post) [2d]
HP names former GSK CEO Emma Walmsley as its new CEO, effective January 4, permanently filling the role after HP's Enrique Lores departed in February 2026 (Bloomberg) [2d]
Democrats running on AI regulation and anti-data center platforms won key races, including Sherrod Brown in Ohio, as leadership signals aggressive AI oversight (Politico) [2d]
OpenAI acquires developer tools startup Pierre Computer for an undisclosed amount and plans to integrate Pierre's Code Storage feature directly into Codex (Madison Mills/Axios) [2d]
Democrats' US midterms victory is a win for hyperscalers and AI labs, a mixed bag for Nvidia, an advantage to China, and may make space data centers attractive (Ben Thompson/Stratechery) [2d]
Elon Musk's preferred US midterm candidates, including Ken Paxton and Vivek Ramaswamy, lost almost everywhere; Musk spent $446M, a record for a non-candidate (Calder Mchugh/Politico) [2d]
Analysis: SpaceX revises its 2027 data center capacity target up to a record ~13GW, roughly equivalent to all of Google's capacity from 1999-2026 in 1.5 years (SemiAnalysis) [2d]
Google plans to spend $15B across 2027 and 2028 to expand its data center and cloud infrastructure in Malaysia, including building new computing hubs (Danial Azhar/Bloomberg) [2d]
Google says it expanded voluntary exit buyouts in June to employees across Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and Switzerland to manage costs amid huge AI spending (Reuters) [2d]
Texas elects Democrats for governor and the US Senate for the first time in decades, creating uncertainty for its booming AI data center sector and Elon Musk (Nick Wingfield/The Information) [2d]
Tencent releases its Hy4 open-weight foundation model, which it says joins the top tier of Chinese open-weight AI for the first time, and plans a Flash version (Bloomberg) [2d]
NBC exit poll: 56% said AI and data centers had been a "crucial or a major factor" in casting their votes for Congress, as candidates pledge to halt development (Financial Times) [2d]
Legal shifts in Texas and Delaware leave Elon Musk's SpaceX-Tesla merger and Meta's new non-voting share plan better prepared to fend off shareholder lawsuits (Financial Times) [2d]
A software engineer details how he went from merging eight to 20 pull requests per month to 200+ after joining AI-native creator startup Tano eight months ago (Neil Kakkar/The Pragmatic Engineer) [2d]
Democrat James Talarico defeats Ken Paxton to win Texas's first Democratic Senate seat in 30+ years; Elon Musk spent $47M backing Paxton and attacked Talarico (Stephanie Findlay/Financial Times) [2d]
Ohio voters approved data center bans or restrictions in at least 14 municipalities across 21 ballot measures, adding to 125 local moratoriums in the state (Sasha Rogelberg/Fortune) [2d]
Industry experts warn that slow US power grid expansion could stifle its AI boom and give China an edge, as China builds power infrastructure faster (Martha Muir/Financial Times) [2d]
ITjuzi: Chinese embodied AI companies raised ~$13B across 322 deals in H1 2026, up 5x YoY, as robot makers shift focus from hardware to AI (Reuters) [2d]
Democratic gubernatorial wins in Texas, Georgia, Ohio and Pennsylvania could expose 50% of proposed US AI data center additions to greater scrutiny and pushback (Bloomberg) [2d]
AMD projects ~$17B in Q4 2026 revenue, compared to Intel's $15B to $16B, potentially overtaking Intel as the largest x86 processor vendor for the first time (Simon Sharwood/The Register) [2d]
India-based EloElo, whose Story TV microdrama app has 33M+ estimated active users, raised an $80M Series C from Hornbill Capital and NBCU at a $500M valuation (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) [2d]
A Democratic sweep of US Congress pulls down Asian tech stocks, as investors rethink trades built around Trump's policy agenda for AI infrastructure and crypto (Bloomberg) [2d]
Sources: Oracle has scrapped a ~$7B, five-year deal to lease ~100K advanced AI chips to Tencent after yielding to pressure from the Trump administration (Financial Times) [2d]
Sources: Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, and other Chinese AI companies ordered 6M Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 chips worth $70B, but expect only ~1% within four months (Bloomberg) [2d]
Q&A with Simile CEO Joon Sung Park on claims that its digital twins predict human behavior with 85%+ accuracy, its goal of simulating all 8B people, and more (Mario Gabriele/The Generalist) [2d]
Pharmaceutical leaders are skeptical of claims that AI could cure most diseases within a decade; the US FDA has yet to clear any AI-designed biotech drugs (Xavier Martinez/Wall Street Journal) [2d]
Meta raised $15B in a US dollar bond sale; sources: the offering drew as much as $58B in orders and is the biggest portion of a $20B+ cross-border bond offering (Bloomberg) [2d]
California accepts $1.42B in federal broadband funding, but challenges the Trump administration's demand that it stop enforcing state net neutrality rules (Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica) [2d]
Q&A with NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani on new municipal AI policy measures, like an AI ban for some students, support for a one-year data center pause, and more (Katie Drummond/Wired) [2d]
Following backlash against its education updates, Google says schools can choose to enable Gemini, Gemini Notebook, and Search individually (Isabel O'Brien/CNBC) [2d]
Cat Wu, product lead for Claude Code and Cowork, has left Anthropic; Thariq Shihipar, who worked on Claude Code, announced his departure last month (Stephen Council/Business Insider) [2d]
How Nvidia uses soft power to influence customers and shape US chip policy; sources: OpenAI took no public stance on China chip exports to avoid angering Nvidia (The Information) [3d]
Google says its education updates give schools "more choice, not less"; Gemini, Gemini Notebook, and Search are off by default and can be enabled individually (@newsfromgoogle) [3d]