Techmeme

Geraldine McKelvie / The Guardian : UK's incoming PM Andy Burnham is expected to scrap Keir Starmer's plans for digital ID cards; last year a petition opposing the cards attracted ~3M signatures —  Incoming PM will reallocate unspecified resources from unpopular plan to helping with cost of living

Ann Davis Vaughan / The Information : Permit hurdles push up costs for AI data centers; Oracle pivoted from gas turbines to costlier fuel cells for its Project Jupiter in NM, costing billions more —  Building an AI supercampus increasingly means paying more than you bargained for.  Oracle's attempt to salvage a proposed $165 billion project …

Wall Street Journal : Prediction market political betting on insider info spreads in DC; sources: WH lawyers raised alarms over anonymous Polymarket bets on the Iran ceasefire timing —  White House officials are grappling with how deeply political betting has worked itself into fabric of government

Leo Schwartz / The Information : How the Trump administration shifted from a “light-touch” approach to AI policy to an interventionist stance that led to restrictions on top AI models in the US —  In January 2025, just three days after entering office for his second term, President Donald Trump signed …

Reuters : The grassroots group HumansFirst is organizing protests against the “unaccountable” buildout of data centers across 125 US locations on July 18 —  Opponents of the rapid buildout of data centers plan to hold protests on Saturday in at least 125 locations across the United States …

Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge : A review of Microsoft's 13-inch Surface Laptop shows 8GB of RAM is not enough for a good Windows 11 experience; PC makers have unveiled upcoming 8GB laptops —  Last year, Microsoft's 13-inch Surface Laptop quickly became one of my favorite thin-and-light Windows notebooks.

AI Security Institute : Analysis: recent open weight models lag frontier closed models' cyber capabilities by 4 to 7 months, a narrower gap than the 6 to 10 months through most of 2025 —  AISI has tracked the cyber capabilities of frontier AI models since 2023.  On our evaluations, the most capable models …

Reuters : SEC filing: GameStop says it owns 9.8% of eBay, signaling its intent to press ahead with a bid for the company after its unsolicited $56B offer was rejected —  Videogame retailer GameStop (GME.N) owns nearly 10% of e-commerce company eBay, the company said in a regulatory filing late on Friday …

FinTech Global : Feathery, which develops an AI operating and decisioning system for financial services, raised $30M in total funding, including a recently completed Series A —  Feathery, an AI operating and decisioning platform for financial services firms, has secured $30m in funding as it expands …

Minxiao Chang / South China Morning Post : China's National Data Administration says the country's daily AI token consumption hit 140T in March 2026, up from 100T in December 2025 and 100B in early 2024 —  Every month, a Beijing-based ByteDance employee says he burns through close to a billion units of a new corporate currency - one that cannot buy a coffee or pay rent.

Reuters : The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index sank ~10% for the week, its largest weekly fall in over a year, and is now down ~20% from its late-June all-time high —  A brutal week for chip stocks — the same names that fueled this year's blistering market rally — has left investors from Seoul …

The Information : Sources: Valar Atomics, which makes small nuclear reactors intended to power data centers, is in talks to raise $1B at a ~$5B pre-money valuation —  Valar Atomics, a three-year-old startup that makes small nuclear reactors intended to power data centers and other industrial facilities …

Joe Rossignol / MacRumors : Apple raises iPhone prices in Japan by up to 11%, likely due to the Japanese yen's depreciation against the US dollar over the past year —  After raising prices on all Macs and iPads worldwide last month, Apple has now increased the price of iPhone models in Japan.

Robert Booth / The Guardian : Amazon apologizes after some AWS users received bills as high as $1.5T due to “an issue with unit pricing within the estimated billing computation subsystem” —  One UK man whose bill is usually less than £1 says he ‘almost had a heart attack’ when he saw £5.8bn invoice

The Information : Sources: OpenRouter has discussed a potential sale to a bigger tech company that could value it at billions of dollars, a premium to its $1.3B valuation in May —  OpenRouter, which helps app developers access hundreds of AI models, has discussed a potential sale to a bigger tech company …

Wall Street Journal : Sources: SpaceX is in talks with the DOD about providing the agency with access to data-center capacity worth billions of dollars for running AI models —  Elon Musk's company would sell military billions of dollars' worth of data-center capacity for running AI models

Chance Miller / 9to5Mac : Apple raises the price of Apple Music, with the individual plan up by $1 to $11.99, and some Apple One bundles, citing rising licensing costs —  Apple has raised the price of Apple Music today in the United States and other countries.  Starting today, Apple Music's Individual plan now costs $11.99 per month, up from $10.99.

Bloomberg : Sources: Apple and the DOJ are in early discussions about settling a 2024 antitrust lawsuit alleging that Apple violated antitrust laws —  Apple Inc. and the US Justice Department are in early discussions about settling a 2024 lawsuit that alleges the iPhone maker violated antitrust laws.

New York Times : Sources: Meta is in talks to rent computing power from its data centers to Anthropic in a deal that could be worth ~$10B over two years —  A deal would underline how scarce computing power is for artificial intelligence development, and could create a new business for Meta.

Gavin Baker / @gavinsbaker : Models like Kimi K3, Grok 4.5, and Muse 1.1 may prevent the dominance of 2-3 frontier labs with 90% inference margins from hurting other AI ecosystem layers —  Kimi K3 may be an important inflection point for AI. Potentially negative for Anthropic and OpenAI while being net positive for essentially every other company in the world. I mean that very literally. Although the real “Sputnik moment” would be an open-source frontier model that [image]