Google

Google and Alphabet — Gemini, Search, antitrust, and AI products — balanced across the spectrum.

250 articlesLast updated 2026-09-07 06:31 UTC
au tech 6 3h ago 3 min read

AirTrunk's Australian Data Centers Top 1.2 Gigawatts as Microsoft, Google and Amazon Sign On

AirTrunk, valued at roughly A$24 billion after a 2024 Blackstone-led buyout, is pouring billions into new Australian data center campuses to feed Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple and Oracle's AI demand. Australia's cheap solar and wind power and its distance from Chinese-controlled infrastructure make it attractive, but the country's own permitting bureaucracy is reportedly running two years behind Asian rivals, a self-inflicted wound in a race Australia otherwise looks built to win.

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us tech 6 18h ago 3 min read

Massachusetts AI Safety Bill Splits Anthropic From OpenAI and Google as Legislature Heads to Conference

Massachusetts senators passed an AI safety bill in late July 2026 that would force the biggest AI labs to submit to catastrophic-risk reviews roughly every four months. Anthropic is cheering it on while OpenAI and Google are fighting it, and the fate of the country's toughest state AI law now sits in closed-door House-Senate talks.

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us tech 6 2d ago 4 min read

Google DeepMind's WeatherNext 3 Cuts Forecast Lag From 7 Hours to 4, Company Says

Google DeepMind rolled out WeatherNext 3 on Thursday, September 3, an AI weather model that updates every hour using live satellite data instead of waiting on government supercomputer cycles. It's already live in Search, Maps, and Gemini, and Google says it beats the U.S. National Weather Service and Europe's ECMWF on an independent leaderboard, though that leaderboard is currently the only outside check on the claim.

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us finance 6 3d ago 4 min read

Prediction Markets' Insider Trading Crackdown Spreads Past George Santos to a Google Engineer and a Former White House Aide

Since Kalshi banned George Santos for life on August 28, the insider-trading dragnet around prediction markets has widened to a Google engineer accused of front-running Polymarket contracts and a former White House teleprompter operator ordered to pay $172,000. The cases expose a real tension: these platforms sell themselves as forecasting tools, not casinos, but forecasting accuracy and insider-trading enforcement pull in opposite directions.

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us tech 5 3d ago 3 min read

Microsoft Slashes AI Transcription Price to 10 Cents an Hour, Targeting OpenAI, Google and ElevenLabs

Microsoft AI launched MAI-Transcribe-2 on Thursday at 10 cents per hour of audio, a 72% cut from the $0.36 rate it charged five months ago. The move is the clearest sign yet that Microsoft is building its own AI stack to compete with OpenAI, the same company it has poured $13 billion into.

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us energy 6 4d ago 4 min read

Google Signs 396 MW Deal With Fervo Energy for Geothermal Power to Fuel Utah Data Center

Google committed Tuesday, September 1, to buy 396 megawatts of geothermal power from Fervo Energy's Cape Station project in Utah, the largest enhanced-geothermal purchase agreement on record, with an option for another 600 MW by June 2030. It's a bet that Fervo can deliver reliable power where gas turbines and grid interconnection queues can't, but Fervo's own stock has been sliding since its May IPO and Wall Street analysts say the technology remains unproven at this scale.

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us tech 6 4d ago 4 min read

Google Launches Gemini 3.8 Flash at a Fraction of Claude Opus 5's Price, Benchmarks Split Down the Middle

Google DeepMind shipped Gemini 3.8 Flash on September 2, pricing it at roughly one-seventh what Anthropic charges for Claude Opus 5 while beating it on several benchmarks. Opus 5 still wins on the benchmarks that measure sustained autonomous work, so this isn't a clean knockout, it's a price war with a mixed scorecard.

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us tech 8 4d ago 4 min read

Judge Rules Google Illegally Monopolized Ad Tech, Then Refuses to Force a Breakup

U.S. Judge Leonie Brinkema found Google broke antitrust law by tying its ad server to its AdX exchange, but she rejected the Justice Department's demand to force a sale of AdX. It's the third straight loss for federal trust-busters trying to break up a Big Tech company, after similar defeats against Meta and in Google's own search case.

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us tech 6 5d ago 3 min read

Google and Technion Study Finds AI Models Often Have the Right Answer, Just Can't Find It

A new Google Research and Technion study analyzed over 4 million responses across 13 large language models and found frontier AI systems like GPT-5 and Gemini-3-Pro already store 95 to 98% of tested facts. The problem is retrieval, not knowledge: models fail to directly recall 26 to 34% of what they've already encoded. That's a real finding worth taking seriously, but it doesn't mean AI hallucinations are solved.

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us finance 5 6d ago 4 min read

Arbitrator Clears Gemini in Earn Lending Collapse, Interest Claims Still Unresolved

An arbitrator ruled Aug. 12 that Gemini did not mislead customers or botch its due diligence when its Earn lending program collapsed in 2022, pinning the blame instead on fraud at partner Genesis Global Capital. The ruling settles one customer's claim, not the dozen-plus still pending, and does nothing to resolve the separate fight over interest Earn users were promised but never got.

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us finance 7 Aug 31 4 min read

Alphabet, Amazon and Nvidia Booked $160 Billion in AI Paper Gains Last Quarter. None of It Was Cash

SEC filings show Big Tech's blowout Q2 2026 profits were juiced by more than $160 billion in unrealized markups on private AI stakes, led by SpaceX's June IPO and Anthropic's rising valuation. Chipmakers, meanwhile, are the ones actually posting real stock gains this year while Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft shares lag behind.

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us tech 6 Aug 30 4 min read

Marvell Gives Google a Warrant Worth Up to $12.2 Billion in Expanded Custom Chip Deal

Marvell Technology disclosed on August 19 that it handed Google a stock warrant worth up to $12.18 billion, tied to Google actually buying $120 billion in custom chips through fiscal 2033. Analysts are mostly bullish and Marvell now serves all three major U.S. cloud giants, but the stock has since fallen after a beat-and-raise earnings report, and the warrant only pays off if Google's orders show up.

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us tech 7 Aug 29 4 min read

OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and 100+ Firms Warn AI Cyberattacks Are Months Away, But Pledge No Money or Deadlines

More than 100 tech, banking, and infrastructure companies published a letter Thursday, August 27, warning that AI-driven hacking could overwhelm hospitals, water systems, and banks within months. CrowdStrike data shows AI-enabled attacks jumped 89% in 2025, and OpenAI's own AI agents autonomously breached Hugging Face last month, but the letter itself contains no funding pledges, deadlines, or binding commitments from its signatories, according to Axios.

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us finance 6 Aug 29 4 min read

Lawyers Get $147 Million in Google Privacy Case, Each of 98 Million Users Gets Under $5

A federal judge awarded Boies Schiller, Susman Godfrey, and Morgan & Morgan roughly $147 million in fees after a jury found Google kept tracking app activity on users who opted out. The 98 million class members split what's left of the $440 million fund, meaning most get less than five bucks. This is what class actions look like when they work exactly as designed, and it's still worth asking who the system actually serves.

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us tech 7 Aug 28 4 min read

Google Moves Gemini's Bioweapon-Risk Safety Team Under Its Lobbying Chief, Denies Transfer Requests

Google is folding its 90-person AI responsibility unit, the team that screens Gemini for bioweapon and chemical risks, into the office of Kent Walker, its head of global lobbying, starting September 1. Staffers who asked to transfer into research roles instead were denied, according to the Wall Street Journal. Separately, a former Twitter trademark lawyer launched Twitter.now, a paid rival betting users, not a central algorithm, should decide what reaches their feed.

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us finance 5 Aug 28 4 min read

Google Engineer Says Polymarket Bets Were Gambling, Not Insider Trading, in Motion to Dismiss

Michele Spagnuolo, arrested in May for allegedly using Google's internal data to win over $1.2 million on Polymarket, now argues in a new court filing that his bets were plain gambling, not regulated financial swaps. His lawyers are making almost the same jurisdictional argument state regulators use against prediction markets, just aimed at getting him off the hook instead.

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cn tech 7 Aug 26 4 min read

Chinese AI Firm Moonshot Wants 30% Cut From Microsoft, Amazon and Google to Host Kimi K3

Moonshot AI, the Beijing-based startup Washington already wants blacklisted, is negotiating with Microsoft, Amazon and Google to host its Kimi K3 model on their clouds, according to Reuters. Moonshot wants up to 30% of the revenue. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has floated sanctioning the company over accusations it stole from Anthropic and bought Nvidia chips illegally, so any deal will need Washington's blessing, not just a handshake.

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us tech 6 Aug 25 4 min read

Google's AI Chip Bet: Analysts See TPU Shipments Nearly Tripling by 2027, Debt Piles Up to Pay for It

Wall Street thinks Alphabet's custom AI chips are about to go from niche to massive. Multiple bank forecasts have TPU shipments jumping from roughly 2.8 million units in 2025 to somewhere between 8.8 and nearly 10 million by 2027. Alphabet is borrowing tens of billions to build it out, and free cash flow already turned negative. That's the trade: a real shot at cutting NVIDIA out of a chunk of the AI chip market, financed by debt investors will be watching closely.

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us finance 7 Aug 25 4 min read

Berkshire Hathaway Nearly Doubled Its Alphabet Stake Last Quarter, Buying $10 Billion Straight From the Company

Berkshire's second-quarter 13F shows Alphabet is now its third-largest holding at roughly $38 billion, after Greg Abel's team bought $10 billion of stock directly in a private placement and scooped up more on the open market. Warren Buffett says he initiated the position himself, and it's the clearest sign yet that Berkshire under Abel is willing to do things Buffett historically avoided.

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us tech 6 Aug 25 4 min read

Google Cloud Rolls Out AI Products Built Specifically for Lawyers and Bankers

Google Cloud launched Gemini Enterprise for Legal and Gemini Enterprise for Financial Services on August 25, 2026, pitching AI agents that handle contract review, credit analysis, and regulatory research inside the platforms professionals already use. Moody's, CME Group, Deutsche Bank and several elite law firms signed on as launch partners, meaning this isn't a pilot anymore, it's a live product with paying customers.

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ru tech 7 Aug 23 4 min read

Study Finds Nine Employee Monitoring Apps Sent Worker Data to Facebook, Google and Russia's Yandex

Researchers from Vanderbilt, Northeastern and UC Berkeley posed as employers, deployed nine popular workplace monitoring apps, and caught every single one shipping worker data to outside companies without clear disclosure. Names, emails, IP addresses, and browsing data landed at Facebook, Google, Microsoft, AppLovin, and Yandex. This is what happens when nobody in Washington bothers to write basic data-privacy rules.

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us finance 6 Aug 22 4 min read

Berkshire's Bigger Alphabet Bet Comes With $700 Million in SpaceX Exposure, By Accident

Berkshire Hathaway boosted its Alphabet stake 83% last quarter to nearly 106 million shares worth $38 billion, making Google's parent its third-largest holding. Because Alphabet owns roughly 4% of SpaceX, Berkshire now has an indirect $700 million interest in Elon Musk's rocket company, without buying a single SpaceX share.

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in tech 6 Aug 22 4 min read

India Orders Google to Kill Hundreds of Firebase Accounts Used in Bank Scam Network

India's cybercrime agency identified a pattern of criminals hosting fake bank apps and phishing pages on Google's Firebase platform, ordering at least 57 sites and databases removed in August alone. Google isn't accused of wrongdoing, but the case shows how free cloud tools built for legitimate developers become a scammer's best friend when nobody's watching the front door.

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us tech 6 Aug 21 4 min read

Walmart Ends Decade-Long Refusal to Accept Apple Pay and Google Pay

Starting Monday, August 24, Walmart will accept Apple Pay and Google Pay at select stores, ending 12 years of stubbornly pushing its own QR-code system on customers who wanted to just tap their phone. Full rollout hits all U.S. stores by the end of 2026, gas stations by mid-2027. This is a company finally admitting the market won.

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us tech 5 Aug 21 4 min read

Google DeepMind Takes Minority Stake in EVE Online Studio to Train AI on 20 Years of Player Data

DeepMind bought a minority stake in Fenris Creations, the newly independent studio behind EVE Online, as part of the studio's $120 million management buyout from Pearl Abyss. The deal hands DeepMind access to two decades of player behavior across 7,000 star systems to test AI on long-term planning and memory. No product is shipping. This is research, and DeepMind says so directly.

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us tech 6 Aug 20 4 min read

Broadcom Stock Drops 4.6% as Marvell Lands Google Chip Deal and BofA Flags $370 Billion Financing Exposure

Broadcom shares fell 4.6% Wednesday after Marvell disclosed an expanded custom-chip deal with Google, threatening Broadcom's grip on its biggest AI customer. Layer in a Bank of America note modeling Broadcom's AI financing platform at up to $370 billion by 2029, and you get a stock that's up just 10% this year while Marvell, Nvidia and AMD have run circles around it.

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us tech 6 Aug 20 4 min read

Jeff Dean Speaks at Stanford: Google's Ex-Chief Scientist Explains Why He Ditched 27 Years for a 4-Person Startup

Since Jeff Dean's August 5 departure from Google after 27 years, he's given his first public accounting of the move, choking up during an August 7 Stanford talk about Alphabet's Gemini plans. Dean says small teams with rented cloud compute now beat big-company bureaucracy, a pitch that landed him founding-investor backing from his own former employer.

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us tech 6 Aug 20 4 min read

Google Pays $10 Million for Bankrupt Spirit Airlines' Data. Flight Attendants Union Objects in Bankruptcy Court

Google won a bankruptcy auction to buy roughly 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, and 176,000 employee records from defunct Spirit Airlines for $10 million to train AI. The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA is fighting the sale, arguing Google's privacy promises protect passengers but leave workers' disciplinary files, medical records, and payroll data exposed. A bankruptcy judge pushed the approval hearing to September 9.

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us sports 4 Aug 20 3 min read

Michigan Stadium Sells Its First Ads Ever: Coca-Cola, Meijer and Google Gemini Move Into the Big House

The Big House turns 99 this season and, for the first time in its history, will carry advertising inside the stadium bowl. Coca-Cola, Meijer and Google Gemini are the first three sponsors, part of a program Michigan says is designed to fund player pay without wrecking the venue's identity.

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us tech 7 Aug 20 4 min read

Google Used AI to Find 1,072 Chrome Bugs. One Bug Hid in the Code for 13 Years.

Chrome 149 and 150 fixed 1,072 security bugs combined, more than the prior 23 updates put together, after Google turned Gemini-powered AI agents loose on the Chromium codebase in early 2026. Chrome 151 patched another 370 flaws this week, including two critical buffer overflows, and Google is now moving toward shipping security fixes twice a week.

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gb energy 6 Aug 20 4 min read

UK Pays Google $6.76 Million to Test Whether Rerouting Planes Around Contrails Actually Cools the Planet

The British government launched a 30-month trial Tuesday, nudging hundreds of transatlantic flights up to 2,000 feet off course to dodge contrail-forming air, using Google's AI forecasts. It's a real experiment with a real open question: does dodging contrails burn enough extra fuel to cancel out the benefit.

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us tech 6 Aug 19 3 min read

Google Gets Warrant for 58.97 Million Marvell Shares at $206.58 in Expanded AI Chip Deal

Marvell Technology filed an 8-K on August 19, 2026 confirming it issued Google a warrant for nearly 59 million shares, exercisable at $206.58 through 2033, tied to a custom chip partnership covering TPU infrastructure. The warrant mostly vests as Google's purchases from Marvell hit $500 million revenue milestones, meaning Google only cashes in big if the chips actually sell.

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us politics 7 Aug 18 4 min read

Maryland Tax Court Kills Digital Ad Tax, Orders State to Refund $535.5 Million to Apple, Google and Peacock

The Maryland Tax Court ruled on August 14 that the state's first-in-the-nation digital advertising tax violates federal law and the U.S. Constitution, ordering refunds with interest to Apple, Google and Peacock TV. Comptroller Brooke Lierman is signaling an appeal, but the ruling is already spooking lawmakers in Illinois and Pennsylvania who copied Maryland's playbook. Government tried to tax Big Tech's ad revenue and got smacked down by its own tax court. Taxpayers win, for now.

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us tech 5 Aug 18 4 min read

Google Set Gemini to Read All Your Workspace Files by Default. Turning It Off Takes an Admin.

Google Workspace automatically lets Gemini pull from your company's Gmail, Docs, Drive, Calendar, Chat, and Meet data to answer prompts, and most users never opted into that. It's not a privacy nightmare on its own, but it is a decision Google made for you that only an admin can undo. Meanwhile, Google just paid $10 million for Spirit Airlines' internal data, a reminder that anything you write at work can outlive your job and your employer.

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cn tech 6 Aug 18 4 min read

Google Tells Suppliers It Will Pull All Pixel Production Out of China by 2027

Nikkei Asia reports Google has told suppliers it plans to build every Pixel phone, watch and earbud outside China starting in 2027, shifting the work to Vietnam and India. Unlike Apple, Google doesn't sell Pixel in China, so it has little to lose and a lot of geopolitical risk to shed.

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au finance 7 Aug 17 4 min read

Alphabet Hires Banks to Sell Its First Australian Dollar Bonds, Debt Total Tops $30 Billion in 2026

Alphabet has mandated ANZ, Deutsche Bank, RBC and TD Securities to arrange its first-ever Australian dollar bond, adding a seventh currency to a borrowing binge that's already raised $25 billion in dollar debt and nearly $85 billion in equity this year. The company posted its first-ever negative free cash flow last quarter. Google's parent is betting big on AI, and it's financing that bet with other people's money at scale nobody's seen before.

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us economy 8 Aug 16 4 min read

Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft Plan Nearly $600 Billion in 2026 Capex as Wall Street Splits on Whether It Pays Off

Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft are on track to spend close to $600 billion combined on AI infrastructure this year, and Taiwan Semiconductor looks like the clearest beneficiary of that spending. But free cash flow is shrinking, credit default swaps are widening, and the same tech giants already shed a combined $1.35 trillion in market value during a rough stretch this summer.

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us tech 5 Aug 16 4 min read

Google Ships Gemini 3.7 Flash Three Weeks After 3.6 Flash Couldn't Build a Working File

Google released Gemini 3.7 Flash on August 13, a budget AI model that can now generate a playable game from a single text prompt, three weeks after its predecessor couldn't produce a working file at all. Coding benchmarks jumped roughly 27% and prices got cut in half, but Google admits this is a speed-and-cost tool, not a reasoning model, and independent testers say a free 27-billion parameter model still writes better prose.

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us tech 7 Aug 15 3 min read

Google Research Shrinks Quantum Threat Timeline to Bitcoin's Encryption, Industry Scrambles to Respond

A Google Quantum AI paper released in March 2026 cut the estimated quantum computing power needed to break Bitcoin's encryption by 20-fold, reviving warnings that over $2 trillion in crypto assets could eventually be exposed. The computers capable of the attack don't exist yet, but the math keeps getting easier and nobody's forcing the industry to upgrade.

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us tech 6 Aug 15 3 min read

Study: ChatGPT and Google AI Got Election Facts Right But Still Failed Voters

A States United Democracy Center study released August 4, 2026, found ChatGPT and Google AI hit a 0% factual error rate on voter questions in their second testing round, up from error rates of 6.9% and 8.2% earlier. But accurate isn't the same as complete: both platforms were inconsistent about pointing voters to their state's official election website, the actual authoritative source.

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us finance 6 Aug 15 4 min read

Berkshire Hathaway's 13F Shows Abel Doubled Down on Alphabet, Delta and Homebuilders

Berkshire Hathaway's second-quarter 13F filing, released Friday, August 14, shows Greg Abel put $19.8 billion net into stocks, ending a 14-quarter selling streak. Alphabet is now Berkshire's third-biggest holding at $37.9 billion, and Abel added to Delta, Lennar and D.R. Horton while trimming Bank of America and exiting Constellation Brands entirely.

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us tech 7 Aug 14 3 min read

Judge Gives Google One Week to Stop Sabotaging Rival App Store Installs

A federal judge caught Google burying rival Android app stores behind confusing menus, fake search results, and an extra View button most users would never click through. Judge James Donato called it exactly what it looks like: deliberate friction to protect a monopoly the company already lost in court. Google gets seven days to fix it.

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us tech 6 Aug 14 4 min read

Google Cloud Sets 2027-2029 Deadlines to Quantum-Proof Its Encryption

Google Cloud published a phased roadmap on August 11, 2026, to replace the encryption protecting cloud data before quantum computers can break it, with full readiness targeted for 2029. Two days later, Quanta Computer and Quantinuum announced a separate deal to industrialize quantum hardware manufacturing, showing both sides of the race, defense and offense, moving in parallel.

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us tech 6 Aug 14 4 min read

OpenAI and Google Both Roll Out Ultrafast AI Models the Same Day, as OpenAI's Revenue Run Rate Hits $40 Billion

OpenAI launched a preview mode called Ultrafast that runs GPT-5.6 Sol at 14x normal speed using Cerebras chips, the same day Google shipped Gemini 3.7 Flash to general availability. The timing lands right as Bloomberg reports OpenAI's annualized revenue run rate has doubled to $40 billion ahead of a planned IPO. Speed is now a selling point on par with raw capability, and both companies are racing to prove it before Wall Street starts asking hard questions about the cash burn behind it.

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us tech 7 Aug 13 4 min read

Google Shakes Up DeepMind While Meta and Rivals Spend $2 Trillion Chasing AI Dominance

Since Google's DeepMind reorganization was announced last week, Jeff Dean has departed to start his own Google Cloud-based lab and Demis Hassabis has stepped back to chair-level research, prompting industry-wide questions about whether Google is losing the AI race despite its resources. Meanwhile Meta keeps rolling out open-weight models and hyperscaler AI spending commitments have hit nearly $2 trillion, with Alphabet alone jumping from roughly $150 billion to $811 billion in purchase commitments in under a year.

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us finance 6 Aug 13 4 min read

JPMorgan Bundles Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle Debt Into New Credit Default Swap Basket

JPMorgan launched a synthetic credit default swap basket in February 2026 letting Wall Street bet on or hedge against the debt of five AI hyperscalers at once. Trading volume in this space jumped roughly sixfold in a year, and Oracle's credit spread hit a record. Translation: the smart money is starting to price in real default risk on companies that just months ago were treated as bulletproof.

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au tech 7 Aug 12 4 min read

Australia to Raise Tech Levy to 2.5%, Force Google, Meta and LinkedIn to Cut More News Deals

Australia's government will introduce legislation later this month raising the charge on Big Tech's local ad revenue to 2.5% and requiring platforms to strike news deals with at least eight media outlets, up from six. It's a bigger, broader version of the 2021 bargaining code Meta already walked away from once, and there's no guarantee this version fares any better.

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us tech 5 Aug 12 4 min read

Google Launches Pixel 11 Lineup, Pixel Watch 5, and Pixel Tag: Prices Start at $899

Google unveiled the Pixel 11 phone family, Pixel Watch 5, and its first Bluetooth tracker at Made by Google on Wednesday, August 12, 2026, with preorders open now and shipping starting August 20. Prices climb across the board and the base phone loses its 128GB option, but a new breathing-emergency detection feature on the watch remains blocked from US release pending FDA clearance.

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us tech 3 Aug 12 4 min read

Google Drive Desktop Stops Backing Up Photos to Google Photos as of August 10, 2026

Google killed the auto-bridge that sent Drive desktop folders to Google Photos, effective August 10, 2026. Nothing already backed up gets deleted, but the convenient set-it-and-forget-it sync is gone unless you manually run a browser tab or a web app. Typical Google move: fine print, minimal warning, and users left to rebuild a workflow they didn't ask to change.

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us finance 5 Aug 12 3 min read

NYC Council Launches Probe Into Prediction Market Ad Tactics at Polymarket, Kalshi, Coinbase, Gemini

City Council Speaker Julie Menin sent letters to four prediction market platforms demanding answers on marketing practices, citing a Wall Street Journal report that Polymarket made paid influencers look like winning bettors when they weren't using their own money. The probe skips the gambling-legality fight entirely and goes straight at whether these companies lied to get people to bet.

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us tech 6 Aug 12 4 min read

Google Talks $1.5 Billion Deal for AI Training Startup as Meta Tracks Employee Keystrokes

Google is negotiating a deal worth more than $1.5 billion for Mechanize, a startup that builds simulated workplaces to train AI agents, according to Business Insider. Separately, Meta has been collecting employee keystrokes and mouse movements to teach AI how people use software. Both moves signal the AI industry is pivoting from chatbot text training to teaching machines to do actual jobs.

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us tech 7 Aug 12 4 min read

Google Shakes Up AI Leadership as Hassabis Steps Back and Jeff Dean Departs After 27 Years

Alphabet handed day-to-day control of Google DeepMind to Koray Kavukcuoglu on Wednesday, moving founder Demis Hassabis into a chairman and chief-scientist role. Jeff Dean and three other senior engineers are leaving to launch a new AI startup, and Alphabet shares fell roughly 4 to 5% on the news. The shake-up comes as Google's Gemini models have lost ground to OpenAI and Anthropic.

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us tech 6 Aug 12 4 min read

Google Commits to Three New Undersea Cables Making the Dominican Republic a Data Hub

Google announced three new subsea cable systems, Alisios, Canoa and OlaLuz, plus a new branch of its Firmina cable, all converging on the Dominican Republic. It's a straightforward infrastructure bet on AI and cloud demand, not a revenue event, and it puts Google in more direct competition with Chinese state-linked cable builders in Latin America.

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us tech 6 Aug 11 4 min read

Gemini Hits 1 Billion Monthly Users, Google Says, Following ChatGPT's Milestone by About Two Months

Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced Tuesday that the Gemini app has surpassed 1 billion monthly active users, calling it Google's fastest-growing product ever. That's real scale, but the number is company-reported with no independent audit, and it says nothing about how many of those users actually pay for anything.

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us tech 8 Aug 11 4 min read

Appeals Court Clears Way for 3,000+ Youth Addiction Lawsuits Against Meta, Google, TikTok, Snap to Proceed

The 9th Circuit ruled Monday that Meta and TikTok jumped the gun trying to use Section 230 to kill thousands of lawsuits over addictive app design, since Section 230 only blocks liability, not the lawsuit itself. Meta also lost its bid to delay a 29-state trial starting Wednesday, adding to a string of courtroom losses that already includes $942 million in New Mexico judgments this year.

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us tech 6 Aug 10 4 min read

Klaviyo Leaked Customer Passwords to Google, Meta and X for Nearly Two Years, Researchers Find

A misconfigured signup form on Klaviyo's website funneled new customers' passwords and contact details to Facebook, Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, HubSpot and X for at least 21 months, according to security researcher Sam Jadali. Klaviyo says it fixed the bug and only 200 people were affected, but it won't say how long its logs go back or release the notice it sent affected customers.

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us tech 7 Aug 10 4 min read

Google Play Store Lists a Rival App Store for the First Time in the US, After Losing to Epic in Court

Aptoide Games, a mobile game storefront, is now downloadable directly through Google's Play Store in the US, the first third-party app store to appear there since Google opened the door on July 22. It's a direct result of Google losing its years-long legal fight with Epic Games over Play Store control, and it's very likely just the first of several rivals to show up.

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us tech 4 Aug 9 4 min read

Google's Pixel 11 Launch Set for Wednesday: Prices Jumping $100, RAM Getting Cut on Pro Models

Google will unveil the Pixel 11 lineup Wednesday, August 12, at a Made by Google event in New York. Leaked pricing points to a $100 hike across the board and a reported RAM downgrade on Pro models, all while Google axes the base 128GB storage tier. If the leaks hold up, you're paying more for less memory and calling it progress.

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us tech 5 Aug 8 3 min read

Google Overhauls Its Hacker-Naming System: 5,000 Groups, One New Code

Google's Threat Intelligence Group scrapped the old Mandiant APT-number naming scheme last month for a two-word system that flags a hacking group's likely home country. The company says it now tracks more than 5,000 distinct hacking clusters worldwide, an admission of just how crowded and chaotic state-sponsored cyber warfare has become.

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us tech 5 Aug 7 3 min read

Google Loses Jeff Dean and Other Top AI Names in a Week of Departures

Several senior Google AI figures, including longtime engineer Jeff Dean, took new roles this week, some leaving the company entirely. The shake-up lands while Google's models trail recent releases from Anthropic and OpenAI, raising the obvious question: is this a talent bleed or just Silicon Valley musical chairs.

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