The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Meta acquires a startup Assured Robot Intelligence to bolster its robotics team, which is working on humanoid hardware and the underlying AI that powers it (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg) [23m]
A bug in popular cPanel, WHM, and WP Squared software has reportedly been exploited since Feb.; CISA it gives a 9.8 CVSS score, tells agencies to patch by May 3 (Jonathan Greig/The Record) [29m]
Experts say supply chain attacks compromised SAP and Intercom npm packages, plus the PyPI package Lightning, in a campaign that calls itself Mini Shai-Hulud (Jessica Lyons/The Register) [1h]
Fun, which builds fiat and crypto payment rails for platforms like Polymarket and Aave, raised a $72M Series A in January, co-led by Multicoin and SignalFire (Ben Weiss/Fortune) [1h]
Sources: Coatue formed Next Frontier in 2025 to buy land for data centers; Next Frontier has a JV with neocloud Fluidstack that's raised $5.7B via junk bonds (Wall Street Journal) [3h]
The US Navy awards Domino Data Lab a contract worth up to $100M for AI software that teaches underwater drones to identify new mines in the Strait of Hormuz (Mike Stone/Reuters) [4h]
Sources: Peter Thiel's Founders Fund raised $6B for a fund to invest in later-stage companies, marking its largest haul ever; $4.5B comes from limited partners (Natasha Mascarenhas/Bloomberg) [4h]
Tim Cook says that the Mac Studio and the Mac mini, used for AI and agentic tools, "may take several months to reach supply demand balance" (Juli Clover/MacRumors) [5h]
Amazon launches "Join the chat", an AI-powered feature that allows users to ask questions about products and receive conversational audio responses in real time (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch) [5h]
Sources: the US DOD strikes agreements with Nvidia, Microsoft, Reflection AI, and AWS to use their AI tools on classified military networks for "lawful" use (Katrina Manson/Bloomberg) [6h]
Cloud computing provider Nebius agrees to buy Eigen AI, which optimizes the performance of chips running AI inference tasks, for $615M in stock and cash (Dina Bass/Bloomberg) [7h]
Apple CFO Kevan Parekh says "the iPhone 17 family is now the most popular lineup in our history" and "we believe we gained market share during the quarter" (Michael Acton/Financial Times) [7h]
China's EV makers are competing on in-car AI features; ByteDance says its Doubao AI is used in 7M+ cars across 145 models, including from Mercedes, Audi, and VW (Evelyn Cheng/CNBC) [9h]