The Wire · Funding
Who raised, who bought whom, and at what price — funding rounds, valuations, and deals across the AI stack, tracked as they break.
OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna API prices by 80% to $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output, while Terra fell 20% to $2 and $12. Fast mode gives Sol up to 2.5 times Standard speed at twice the price. OpenAI says Sol-assisted kernel work lowered serving cost by 20% and improved token-generation efficiency by more than 15%, while Luna delivers year-old frontier performance at roughly six cents per task-dollar and nearly nine times the speed. The edition connects cheaper models to Amazon's reported $1.8m, 860%-over-budget coding task, Gemini Robotics 2 whole-body control, Nscale's Anyscale acquisition and Okta's roughly $200m Permiso deal.
UP.Labs, now doing business under the name Vantora, is building startups for industrial corporations.
Read full story →The Federal Communications Commission yesterday approved Paramount Skydance's plan to sell large equity stakes to the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. Under US law , companies with licenses to run broadcast stations need FCC approval to have direct or indirect foreign ownership exceeding 25 percent of the company's stock. Paramount says its indirect foreign ownership will reach 49.5 percent after it receives investments from the sovereign wealth funds and filed a petition asking the FCC to waive the foreign ownership limit. Paramount, the owner of CBS, holds FCC licenses for the 28 local CBS stations that it owns and operates. Paramount is buying Warner Bros. Discovery in a $111 billion deal that is being partially financed with foreign investment but hasn't completed the acquisition because US states filed a lawsuit that aims to block the merger. Trump's Department of Justice approved the merger. Read full article Comments
Read full story →Manus, which earlier this year had to break off a merger with Meta, is in discussions to raise $500M at a $4B valuation.
Read full story →The memory chip that makes a router remember how to be a router is a world away from the sleek GPUs that are attracting eye-popping investments and alarming valuations, as well as sending stock markets shooting upwards. They’re small, historically have been cheap, and are based on technology that has been around for years. But despite being a world away from GPUs, the price of these often overlooked chips is skyrocketing, thanks to the all-encompassing memory price crisis caused by the AI boom. While public and press attention has focused on the expensive chips, there’s an equally large impact beginning to be felt on older, less attractive memory chips. HBM is vital for AI accelerators, while DRAM and high-capacity NAND are being swallowed up by rapidly expanding data centres. A June report from Morgan Stanley reckons memory prices have risen more than sixfold over the last year, breaking with decades in which memory became steadily cheaper as production increased. It’s not just HBM and DRAM that’s being affected. The crunch is also spreading down into much older forms of memory, including NOR flash and single-level cell, or SLC, NAND . Morgan Stanley expects NOR flash to remain undersupplied through 2026, while JPMorgan has warned its forecasts don’t fully capture a potential supply crunch in SLC NAND. The effects are already showing up in prices. TrendForce says contract prices for both NOR flash and SLC NAND rose by more than 100% during the first half of 2026 , while it expects SLC NAND prices to rise another 120% to 170% in the second half of the year compared with the first half . Picking winners An increase in prices will have an impact on the tech we use day in, day out. NOR flash is commonly used to store boot and program code, and is a core part of automotive, industrial, and networking equipment . SLC NAND is deployed across a number of uses because of its reliability and endurance when placed in embedded hardware with long lifespans. Both are vital. And
2019’s Control followed Jesse Faden into the ever-shifting, paranormally corrupted brutalist innards of the Oldest House, the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Control, where she became the new FBC director, fought the invading forces of the Hiss, and sought the truth about the fate of her kidnapped brother Dylan. Control Resonant marks the next chapter in the siblings’ story, as Dylan reawakens to discover that Jesse has gone missing and that the Hiss threat has escaped the Oldest House and corrupted Manhattan. Using his own powers and guided by the mysterious Board, Dylan sets out to find Jesse, combat the Hiss incursion, and uncover the mysteries of a new paranormal entity at work in the twisted Manhattan cityscape. We’ve had access to Control Resonant for the past few days, and we’ve been exploring its performance and image quality across a range of hardware and settings. Control was one of the first games to show off the capabilities of GeForce RTX 20-series graphics cards and their ray-tracing capabilities, and it was also one of the first titles to incorporate DLSS upscaling. It’s only fitting, then, that Resonant is a technical showcase of its own. It features path-traced lighting effects bolstered by Nvidia’s RTX Mega Geometry tech, as well as support for the full suite of DLSS 4.5 features: Super Resolution (aka upscaling), Ray Reconstruction, and Multi Frame Generation. With that extensive spread of cutting-edge rendering tech at its disposal, I expected Resonant to look incredible, as both Control and Alan Wake II did before it. (Image credit: Remedy Entertainment/Future) Even without ray tracing or path tracing and DLSS Ray Reconstruction, Control Resonant already looks good, as we’ve come to expect from Remedy games. If performance is a priority, you certainly won’t make the game bad by leaving RT off. Control Resonant RT off versus RT Ultra Remedy Entertainment/Future Remedy Entertainment/Future But ray tracing or path tracing is certainly worth e
How do you make a really good printer even better? How about a $25 upgrade kit? Recently, Prusa Research rolled out a series of upgrades to the big three : the CORE One, CORE One L, and the XL 3D printers. Since the CORE One L is the newest printer of the batch, it only needed a tweak rather than a full overhaul to earn a “+” designation. No one was surprised by this update, as Josef Prusa has a reputation for upgrading his machines rather than letting them fall by the wayside. In fact, the CORE One L is only the third major variation of Prusa-designed printers since the company was founded in 2012. As we were wrapping up this review, Prusa Research announced the CORE One L+ is now compatible with the Prusa INDX conversion kit , which is $799 for four tools, or $1,079 for eight. We’re currently reviewing the INDX on a standard-size CORE One + (Gen 2), and spoiler alert: it’s running spectacularly. The Prusa CORE One L never left my workshop since its introduction nearly a year ago. In over 1000 hours of hard use, it’s been quietly printing abrasives like carbon and glass fiber, and even a pinch of Prusa Ultra Glow, with no problems. It’s been a real workhorse for practical prints. The “plus” upgrade removes a super annoying flaw that has spoiled an otherwise perfect machine: nozzle wiping failures. Before this upgrade, all Prusa machines would clean the nozzle before bed leveling by tapping the bed, leaving little dots of filament on the plate. When you’re running higher-temp filaments, oozing is a real problem and nozzle wiping fails are more frequent. The error itself isn’t a big deal, and I would often choose to ignore it as I still get excellent prints. The problem is the time I’d lose if I wasn’t watching the printer like a hawk, as the printer would shut down bed heating while it waits for you to come tend to it. We’ve had nozzle wipers on other brands of 3D printers for years now, and it’s a relief that Prusa has finally gotten on board. With a simple additio
The round values the data center giant at $30.9 billion.
Executives working on AI at Microsoft and OpenAI admitted what its critics have been saying all along: Large language models are predatory pieces of technology that have been built on what a Microsoft executive called “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” and the “largest theft of labor in human history.” An internal Microsoft document said generative AI products have created a “doom loop” that is killing “the entire web.” Those statements and a series of other mask-off moments feature heavily in an unredacted court filing that was unsealed Thursday in the behemoth New York Times vs OpenAI copyright lawsuit that has been winding its way through the court system for years. In a filing asking for summary judgment (basically, a filing with the court asking it to rule), lawyers for the New York Times laid out a series of admissions made by Microsoft and OpenAI executives in documents and depositions that until now had remained either sealed or redacted at the request of Microsoft and OpenAI. It’s easy to see why the AI companies wanted to hide this from the public. The statements, taken together, are some of the most damning indictments of the ways LLMs were trained, how they worked, and the immediate threat they pose to human labor. It is a reminder that even as AI becomes more powerful and companies try to shift the narrative to the supposed existential risk of “superintelligent” AI, the tools they have already built were created by stealing from human creativity and labor and are by definition existential threats to the human labor market. “Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” an internal Microsoft document cited in the case read, adding “almost no one intended for content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated for its use.” The filing was written by lawyers for the New York Times but is largely comprised of
At its annual Connect conference, Huawei unveiled a new generation of AI accelerators that promise performance far beyond anything Nvidia can currently sell in the Middle Kingdom. This could be a boon for Chinese developers used to purchasing lesser weapons from everyone's favorite AI arms dealer. If that weren’t enough, the chip, codenamed the Ascend 960DT — the DT here apparently stands for decode/training — is slated to arrive a full three quarters ahead of schedule, launching in the first quarter of 2027. With up to 288 GB of what we assume is Huawei’s custom HiZQ memory tech, a homegrown alternative to the high-bandwidth memory used by the rest of the world, and up to four petaFLOPS of FP4 performance (half that at FP8), the accelerator offers twice the performance and memory capacity of the company’s 950-series parts, launched earlier this year. Compared to American GPUs, the 960DT offers similar memory and bandwidth to Nvidia’s B300 family of chips launched last year, but only about half the FP8 and a third the FP4 compute. While a big step up for the Chinese chip designer, it still has a long way to go to catch up with Nvidia’s Rubin and AMD's recently launched MI455X which promise substantially higher compute and bandwidth. Rubin boasts between 35 and 50 petaFLOPS of FP4 performance, 288 GB of HBM4 memory, and 22 TB/s of bandwidth, putting it in an entirely different league. Having said that, neither of those chips is available for sale in the Middle Kingdom, so it's not like Chinese model devs have better options. The best GPU Nvidia can sell in China offers near-identical dense floating-point performance, twice the memory, double the memory bandwidth, and support for much larger scale-up domains. Scaling up The performance gap may not be nearly as damning as it sounds, either. AI models aren’t trained, and for the most part aren’t run on a single GPU or NPU anymore. The more important factor is often how efficiently the platform scales. Nvidia's and AMD's
The US Department of Energy hopes to spur creation of something no one has yet realized: a fault-tolerant, scientifically relevant quantum computer, and to do it within a couple of years with relatively little federal funding upfront. The DoE announced its Quantum Genesis Q Competition, an initiative that it said in a request for applications on the program’s opportunity site aims to produce a first-generation fault tolerant, scientifically relevant quantum computer (SRQC) by 2028. If that sounds like a lofty goal in and of itself, that goal only becomes loftier when you realize what sort of research grants the DoE intends to award. The department anticipates up to $215 million in funding for the program, subject to congressional appropriations, with the money tied to milestones rather than simply handed out upfront. Up to ten awardees will be selected, with each eligible for up to $1.5 million during the first phase of the competition. All but $250,000 of that will be held back until awardees deliver a validated prototype about a year into the contest, meaning those whose verification and validation plans are approved by DoE will have just $250,000 in milestone funding upfront before delivering the prototype. Those who succeed in delivering a validated prototype will be eligible to move into the next phase, where participants can share a $100 million incentive pool in their bid to build a first-generation SRQC by fall 2028. DoE’s illustrative benchmark for the prototype calls for at least 10 logical qubits (quantum bits) capable of performing 10³ hard operations. For the first-generation SRQC, DoE’s illustrative benchmark rises to at least 100 logical qubits capable of performing 10⁵ hard operations with fault tolerance. Fly me to the quantum moon on a paper-mache rocket The DoE is asking for a lot, and it’s not giving the private entities it’s hoping to entice much to accomplish its requests. For those thinking that quantum systems with bigger raw qubit counts hav
US Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) has proposed a law that would require Internet service providers and other network operators to block foreign piracy websites. Issa's bill would help copyright holders obtain judicial blocking orders to be served to ISPs, domain name resolution services, and virtual private networks. Issa, who is retiring from the House at the end of this year, is the latest in a string of Republican and Democratic lawmakers to propose a site-blocking regime that's been sought by the Motion Picture Association (MPA). He submitted the bill this week, after indicating in a June 30 hearing that he planned to introduce site-blocking legislation. "While millions of listings for copyright-infringing content are removed every day under [the] notice-and-takedown process set forth in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, right-holders have raised concerns with the speed," Issa said at the hearing. Issa asked, "Can we do it at the speed of sound? Can we do it at the speed of light? More importantly, in a 45-minute or sometimes a fraction of that live sports broadcast, can we do it soon enough to make it no longer profitable for those who pop up and sell their clandestine wares?" Read full article Comments
Flock created a fake police department called “Flock City PD” that it used to search a series of live automated license plate readers in several U.S. cities during demonstrations of its surveillance system’s capabilities, public records show. The records show that Flock City PD searched real cameras for people holding signs, “crowds,” people wearing masks, and more, according to audit logs shared with 404 Media. Flock City PD also searched extremely sensitive queries, which Flock told 404 Media were done to prove that the system would not actually perform these searches and that its moderation tools worked. These searches included “coexist bumper sticker,” “vehicle a pretty girl would drive,” “white truck with a trump sticker,” “religious cars,” “Star of David,” and “don’t tread on me flag.” Flock employees accessing live cameras for sales purposes, and showing police specifically how to do dubious searches, have become political flashpoints in the backlash against the company. In April, we reported that Flock employees regularly accessed live cameras in Dunwoody, Georgia, at a children’s gymnastics room, at a playground, in a school, at a pool, and in a Jewish community center in the city while demoing the company’s tech to cops. Audit logs obtained by Jason Hunyar, the Dunwoody resident who originally discovered this access , show that an entity called “Flock City PD” also searched live Dunwoody cameras for all sorts of politically contentious topics during sales demos with police. This included searches for behavior that is expressly protected by the First Amendment. The Flock City PD searches. "Allow" means the search was allowed, "warn" means a popup box appeared, and "block" means the search was blocked Flock accounts called “Flock City PD - Law Enforcement Demo,” “Flock Intelligence,” and “Flock Safety - Commercial Sales Demo” ran searches in Dunwoody and Bryan, Texas, as well as a handful of other unknown jurisdictions, for “coexist bumper sticker,” “Star of
A coalition of advocacy groups is trying to counter the AI industry's influence on US politics by asking congressional candidates and elected officials to reject support from a major pro-AI political group. The Stop Bleeding the Future campaign brings together more than 50 national and grassroots organizations to counter Leading the Future, a super PAC network formed last year to support candidates favoring light-touch AI regulation and oppose those backing tighter rules. The effort is led by QuitGPT, which encourages users to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions and boycott OpenAI over what it describes as the company's support for President Trump. The campaign highlights OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman's $25 million donation to MAGA Inc and the company's $200 million US defense contract. Stop Bleeding the Future says it is concerned about the influence of "Big AI" on US politics and Leading the Future's efforts to defeat common-sense laws intended to protect the American people. The effort comes amid a series of developments that have intensified concerns about AI, including agents breaking out of their sandboxes, the use of AI by miscreants to attack infrastructure, and warnings from AI executives about the dangers posed by their own technology. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that more than half of Americans now view AI negatively, with potential job losses among their concerns. The coalition is asking candidates and elected officials to pledge that they will refuse support from Leading the Future and publicly condemn its efforts to obstruct AI regulation. The campaign says the Leading the Future network has raised more than $140 million for the 2026 election cycle. Its backers include OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, making it one of the largest single-issue political operations in modern US history. The network has also expanded into the fight over the growing datacenter backlash
This is today’s edition of The Download , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Meet a mouse whose brain cortex is made up of human cells Multiple cameras tracked a mouse as it wandered around a small arena. A computer charted its position and speed, leaving Pong-like traces on a monitor. The reason to watch this rodent so carefully? Nearly half its brain volume had been replaced with human cells. A team at Stanford has revealed the effort to mix brain tissues of distant species this week. They previously showed that human brain organoids could survive, and even function, after being injected into the heads of baby rodents. Now, they’ve taken things a step further by genetically modifying mice so their brains don’t fully develop in the first place. The work could help scientists study brain injuries, but it also raises questions about how far these experiments should go. Here’s what the researchers discovered—and where they draw the line . —Antonio Regalado These innovators under 35 are shaping climate tech Each year, the editorial team at MIT Technology Review puts together a list of 35 Innovators Under 35 —a group of researchers, inventors, and other young minds worth following. The final slate includes nine people tackling some of the biggest challenges in climate and energy, from critical materials to cleaner industry. Their innovations include new ways to extract lithium, a furnace built to make steel cleaner and cheaper, and solid refrigerants that could cut energy consumption. There are also efforts to make AI more energy-efficient, track pollution more effectively, and turn invasive weeds and food waste into useful materials. Taken together, they tell us something about where climate tech is at this moment—and where it’s heading. Get to know the innovators and their breakthroughs . —Casey Crownhart This story is from The Spark, our weekly climate tech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox e
The Toronto International Film Festival is a place to go to see the future of film, but this year it also provided a glimpse at what is coming very soon in the realm of streaming. Four different streamers - Peacock, Netflix, Amazon, and AMC - all premiered early looks at upcoming horror-adjacent series that are […]
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