Anthropic and OpenAI are pursuing agreements for existing, smaller data center facilities with roughly 20-30 MW of capacity in the UK, Nordic countries and the US, according to a CNBC report citing sources familiar with the talks. This comes even as both companies have already committed tens of billions of dollars toward massive gigawatt-scale AI infrastructure projects, including Anthropic's $45 billion Nscale deal and OpenAI's expanding Stargate commitments.
A letter in Nature responds to a feature on AI-enabled biological threats by arguing that biosecurity thinking is too narrowly focused on mortality. The author points to severe ME/CFS and post-COVID disability as evidence that a biological event can devastate a population's functional capacity without killing large numbers of people.
Weather modification startup Rainmaker has secured $100 million in Series B funding from investors including NOA VC, Upfront Ventures, DCVC, Lowercarbon Capital, and Dream Ventures. The company, led by founder Augustus Doricko, uses drones for cloud seeding to generate rain and snow, and plans to expand operations to new locations following successful test flights in Alaska.
Testing by Bilibili channel Homolab found that the 1TB iPhone 18 Pro Max, which uses QLC NAND, suffers major performance drops compared to the 512GB TLC-based iPhone 18 Pro. Once its SLC and secondary TLC caches are exhausted, sustained writes fall to about 79.4 MB/s and can dip as low as 25.6 MB/s, worsening to just 1.1 MB/s once the drive is 60% full.
CyberPowerPC's SLC8500WST prebuilt pairs AMD's Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor with Nvidia's RTX 5080 Founders Edition graphics card, 32GB of DDR5-6000 memory, and a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD, all for $2,299 at Walmart. The CPU and GPU alone typically cost over $2,000 when bought separately, making the bundled memory and storage essentially free by comparison.
Google confirmed that its Gemini models breached three actual companies while participating in a cybersecurity test run by Irregular, after a misconfiguration let the AI access the live internet instead of a closed simulation. Gemini cracked one company's login by guessing passwords and found exposed credentials for the other two in public code repositories, but stopped once it realized the targets were real. Irregular didn't report the incident to Google until July, months after it occurred.
Data Center Watch reports that local resistance blocked or delayed $68 billion worth of data center construction between April and June 2026, driven by concerns over water use, electricity demand, land, and noise. Despite this pushback, hyperscalers have poured over $1 trillion into data infrastructure since 2023, with $745 billion more expected this year alone, and total data center investment is still projected to reach $32 trillion by 2050.
AMD's stock surged roughly 9% on Monday morning, pushing its market capitalization above $1 trillion for the first time. The rally capped a month-long climb of about 29% in AMD shares, with most of that gain coming in the past week alone. The milestone puts AMD ahead of rival Intel, whose market cap sits near $648 billion.
AMD has crossed a $1 trillion market valuation, becoming the fourth US chipmaker to hit that milestone after Nvidia, Broadcom and Micron. Its stock has nearly tripled in 2026, rising from around $223 in January to over $607 currently, fueled by strong AI-driven demand. Intel, despite a 208% year-to-date share gain, remains far behind with a market cap of about $643.5 billion.
Advanced Micro Devices stock hit a record intraday high of $613.92 on Monday, pushing the company's market valuation above $1 trillion for the first time. The gain extends a five-day rally in which AMD shares climbed roughly 24%, and the stock is now up more than 180% for the year.
Benchmark's entire current partnership—Jack Altman, Peter Fenton, Chetan Puttagunta, Everett Randle and Eric Vishria—will join a single main-stage panel at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco, marking the first time the full team has appeared together on the Disrupt Stage. The session, titled 'What We Believe Now,' will focus on where future startups may emerge and which founder assumptions deserve rethinking. The panel follows Benchmark's recent expansion, having raised roughly $2 billion this year across a new flagship fund and its first growth fund.
Corridor, a startup co-founded by former Scale AI product lead Jackson Wagner along with Eric Qian, Nikhil Aggarwal, and Jason Dong, has raised a $25 million seed round led by Bain Capital Ventures. The company pairs human advisors with AI agents to serve small businesses seeking health benefits, an area it says larger brokerages neglect due to low commissions relative to the administrative workload involved. Corridor's AI handles tasks such as verifying network coverage, scheduling appointments, and relaying updated insurance details to providers.
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