Source: Meta is spending hundreds of millions per year on Azure to consume trillions of AI tokens weekly, becoming one of Microsoft's largest AI customers (Brody Ford/Bloomberg)
Tech Blog
Published on 2026-08-20
Sources: Trump officials expect Elon Musk to spend $100M to $200M in the November midterm elections, with a focus on voter turnout in key races, including Texas (Hugo Lowell/Wired)
Australia passes the News Bargaining Incentive, which will tax tech giants 2.5% on their Australian ad revenue unless they strike deals with local news media (Christine Chen/Reuters)
PitchBook: California-based startups have raised ~$366B in 2026 so far across 4,000+ companies, more than triple the total of all other 49 states combined (Paul Kiernan/Wall Street Journal)
Muon Space, which is building a spacecraft platform for orbital data centers and AI computing, raised a $250M Series C, with participation from Google (Yash Roy/Bloomberg)
Stripe's OpenRouter deal, its largest-ever acquisition, is a bet on a future where users turn to a mix of AI models and gives it a foothold in the token market (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal)
Alibaba reports Q1 revenue up 9% YoY to ~$40B, meeting est., and net income down 75% to ~$1.6B due to heavy AI spending and weak domestic retail consumption (Luz Ding/Bloomberg)
Binance launches Agent OS, a platform that lets AI agents analyze markets and execute trades on users' behalf; users set limits on AI agents' access and trades (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
South Korea media: SK Hynix and its union reach a tentative deal on a 6.3% wage hike and paying out 60% of profit-sharing bonuses in shares and 40% in cash (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)
Uber, Verne, and Pony.ai launch autonomous rides in Zagreb, making the Croatian capital the first European city where users can book such rides via Uber's app (Anzar Mehraj/Reuters)
