Governors and legislatures in U.S. states that previously welcomed data centers are suddenly moving to rip away sales tax breaks that could raise the price of every gigawatt of AI computing by several billion dollars, potentially adding 7% or more to equipment costs.
In little-noticed moves that sharply accelerated this summer, four states rolled back or paused data center tax incentives, while officials in nine other states are considering repeal measures, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, an advocacy and research association for state lawmakers, and The Information’s analysis.
Brokerage app Robinhood has quickly become a force in prediction markets, challenging the hold of Kalshi and Polymarket on the popular betting market.
Robinhood’s prediction markets revenue surged more than tenfold year over year in the second quarter to $156 million, the company reported last week, as part of its second-quarter earnings update. Prediction markets accounted for 20% of Robinhood’s trading revenue in the quarter, eclipsing both stock and crypto revenue for the first time and becoming its second-largest trading business after options.
Chinese AI developer DeepSeek’s release on Friday of a smaller version of its flagship V4 open-source model is causing a stir.
In early tests, the model, V4-Flash, demonstrated capabilities comparable to much larger open-source and proprietary models, and it’s also less expensive than those ...
Here’s a thought that would’ve seemed startling not long ago: There’s a very good chance that someone secretly recorded you this week with the help of AI. If it didn’t happen this week, it will almost certainly happen sometime in the very near future—then continue to happen with greater and greater frequency.
And if you weren’t the one unknowingly recorded, you might have been the one pushing the record button, and you probably didn’t think twice about it. Because here’s another thought that once would have seemed extraordinary: Despite what would seem like obvious privacy invasion concerns, no one seems all too bothered by the trend—and the AI note-taking apps fueling it.
Of those apps, one of the most popular is Granola, which records a meeting, autogenerates notes from it and suggests follow-up tasks. It can be used for in-person meetings, and it also syncs seamlessly with software like Zoom and Google Meet. And really, I think it’s a pretty clear comment on the app’s caliber that anyone would rather use Granola than rely on the note-taking features Zoom and Google Meet offer. (People like it for a variety of factors, including the fact that it records digital meetings unobtrusively: No one in a Google Meet would know you’re using it—it doesn’t join the meeting as a participant or put up a recording banner.)
Granola is especially well liked especially in Silicon Valley, where the VC crowd has proselytized it. In a testament to Granola’s quality, the company accomplished a real feat a couple of days ago: It released a version of its app for the Apple Watch, and all of a sudden, people were talkingonlineabout the Apple Watch as an honest-to-goodness must-have gadget.
“We’ve had a lot of emails saying, ‘I’m gonna go out and buy a Watch because of this’ or ‘Time to pull my Watch out of the drawer,’” said Granola co-founder Sam Stephenson.
When was the last time Apple managed to release an attention-grabbing AI feature—or make the Apple Watch seem cool? Certainly not anytime in recent memory. So here’s what I think should happen: Apple should buy Granola.
Like the best Apple products, Granola is beloved by its fans—many bands would love to have such dedicated groupies—for its sleek, well-designed simplicity. And the startup has just proven it can breathe new life into an Apple product that has seemed dull for years. Apple needs people who can pull off such a task, having chosen to heavily rely on updates to a few core products in recent years. (Granted, maybe incoming CEO John Ternus will shift that mindset a bit; meanwhile, Apple is reportedly working on smart glasses, as well as a wearable AI pin.)
Perhaps most importantly, Granola can be probably acquired for the type of price Apple likes to pay: The company does not do mega-acquisitions. Granola, founded in 2023, most recently got a $1.5 billion valuation in a March fundraising, which included Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and other investors.
Granola’s attention-catching Apple Watch debut was something of a happy accident, Stephenson said. The app was originally a side project of Tom Humphrey, a Granola software engineer, that gained momentum within the company after he bolstered enthusiasm for it with a surprising revelation: The data Granola accessed about its iOS users showed that 40% of them also owned an Apple Watch.
Among Granola staff, the Apple Watch app has quickly become much more popular than the iPhone one. “You just think to turn it on much more often than you do with the iPhone,” Stephenson said. “The worst thing about the iPhone app is that it’s in your pocket: out of sight, out of mind. You forget to use it.”
Granola has toyed with the thought of making its own hardware but has shied away from doing so. Whatever the startup released would face stiff competition from the growing number of already available devices dedicated to AI note-taking. Plaud, a five-year-old startup, makes one of the most popular ones.
I first wrote about Granola and AI note-taking last year when it seemed like the dawn of a new always-on, always-recording world. It’s now something like sunshiny midmorning: Over the past year, Granola’s user growth has been a “smooth curve: upward and to the right,” said Stephenson. (He declined to give specifics.) Meanwhile, the startup has gone from two floors of a Shoreditch, London, office to occupying the entire building, roughly quintupling its staff to nearly 100.
Given Granola’s rising popularity, I asked Stephenson if he had met any unexpected users. “Well, Gwyneth Paltrow comes to mind,” he said.—Abram Brown (abe@theinformation.com)
The state is now allowing anyone—not just the very sick—to access unapproved, experimental drugs. It’s a boon for biotech startups and an overt embrace of the tech world ethos for cutting back on rules that might limit innovation.
As a genre of fiction, folk horror has given us memorable entertainment such as “Midsommar” and “The Wicker Man.” “Dead Rabbit,” a podcast from BBC Radio 4, is the rare nonfiction version: Hosts Dan Ashby and Lucy Taylor, a husband-and-wife pair of investigative journalists, set off into the countryside to figure out why piles of mangled animals keep getting threateningly piled up around Awbridge, England, a well-heeled, 757-person community. It’s a place full of well-tended flower baskets and a chipper vicar, who tries to turn the first grisly mise-en-scène he encounters on his parish doorstep—a severed deer’s head—into a joke about venison sausages. Not everyone in the clergyman’s flock is as determinedly upbeat, and the carcasses have thoroughly disturbed much of the village, sparking WhatsApp groups replete with theories (devil worship, perhaps?) and recriminations. The series begins as a spotlight on what happens within the unnerved small town and then widens its focus to larger issues of conservation, animal cruelty and liberal-versus-conservative politics. Squished roadkill has never seemed more sinister.—Abram Brown
After three decades and 24 novels, Chris Bohjalian has established himself as an ultrareliable source of highbrow potboilers. More often than not, he likes to get them going with a real bang. Or, as he described it in a 2018 conversation with The New York Times, he likes an opening moment of “cataclysmic disequilibrium.”
Just such a catastrophe unfolds in the first few pages of “The Amateur,” his latest and probably finest novel. On Aug. 3, 1978, Mira Wilston, a privileged teenage golf prodigy from a tony Westchester, N.Y., suburb, sends a well-struck drive straight through a practice net—and it zings right into the head of a nearby caddie: Kenny, a high school classmate. It kills him instantly. So who deserves the blame? Mira, who narrates the tale? The country club? The net’s manufacturer? Had Bohjalian been thinking less ambitiously, he would’ve kept his exploration of culpability and responsibility confined to the immediate damage from Mira’s errant shot (in a tale embellished by nice period-piece details, like the high school’s smoking lounge and the Miami Sound Machine records). But he wasn’t and he didn’t. In the accident’s aftermath, the disequilibrium intensifies—as Kenny’s demise inadvertently leads to the public revelation of a long-running sexual relationship between Mira, 18, and one of the country club dads. Yes, it should sound a little like “Lolita,” and therein lies the greater conceit of “The Amateur,” which appropriates and restyles Vladimir Nabokov’s classic, widening to an examination of power, control and fate. The connection between the two novels is an explicit one: Mira, who recounts all the events with a meta, tragicomic awareness, remarks on it several times.—A.B.
An admission I make with no degree of hyperbole: I watched several parts of “The Drama,” an A24 film starring Robert Pattinson and Zendaya as a pair of engaged lovebirds, with my mouth fully agape. And when the tension between them ratcheted up further, I watched through gaps between my fingers: I’d thrown a hand over my eyes. What can I say? Scenes of matrimonial Armageddon make me squirm, and “The Drama” (newly streaming on HBO Max) goes full-on scorched earth.
To explain the plot in much detail would ruin the film, so to summarize it quickly: Shortly before their big day, a secret-telling drinking game goes horribly awry when Emma (Zendaya) reveals a dark moment from her past that shocks Charlie (Pattinson). I don’t blame him—it shocked me, too, and what’s more surprising is that the film does the reveal quite quickly. (Drew Barrymore survived only marginally longer in “Scream.”) Mostly, “The Drama” devotes itself to chronicling the subsequent fallout—with director Kristoffer Borgli twisting the usual rhythms of a screwball rom-com into devious knots.
As an unmarried 37-year-old who has needed to soldier through more than a dozen friend weddings in the last decade, I also appreciated how “The Drama” very neatly satirizes how millennials have turned the exchanging of vows into an industrial nuptial complex.—A.B.
As Garry Tan, the Y Combinator CEO, has deepened his ambitions to become a political force, the task of turning his agenda into reality has often fallen on the shoulders of one guy: Forrest Liu, his political director. The work keeps Liu, 32, plenty busy—and occasionally requires him to put his body on the line as he drums up money and support for Tan’s platform.
When Liu went to a party in Healdsburg hosted by the CEO of a big fintech company recently, he left with a sprained ankle: It turned out his sandals were the wrong choice for the outing at the sprawling estate. A few weeks later, Liu was at a home near Taos, N.M., to meet with a billionaire, a former California resident who fled there to avoid the Golden State’s proposed wealth tax, which Tan strongly opposes. The estate sat at 7,000 feet—an invitation for altitude sickness for some. Lucky for Liu, the billionaire’s home had a special supply of supplemental oxygen available.
Liu and Tan channel the finances for their efforts through Garry’s List, a dark-money nonprofit that launched in February as well as a related political action committee, so they don’t have to disclose all of the money Liu brings in from his work with the wealthy and powerful. Liu said he is “constantly raising” money. Garry’s List has also hosted events with people like Gov. Gavin Newsom, and this month it plans to do one with the heavy favorite to replace him, Xavier Becerra. In June, the PAC spent $50,000 combating a San Francisco proposal that would have taxed certain highly paid CEOs. The measure failed.
OpenAI is preparing to release a new model family, tentatively using the name “Astra,” with improved abilities to complete long-running tasks, according to three people briefed on the plans.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman demonstrated Astra to policymakers and regulators in Washington, D.C., this week, ...
A new venture capital fund called SemiAnalysis Capital Fund I, managed by Dylan Patel, the founder of chip and infrastructure research firm SemiAnalysis, is targeting raising $400 million, according to a securities filing.
For the last several years, a startup accelerator called Infinita City has devoted its attention to establishing a thriving enclave for biotech companies in Prospera, a charter city on a small Honduran island. Last year, Tim Draper, a billionaire venture capitalist who backed Infinita, hosted a pitch competition on the island that offered a $1 million investment prize. Longevity influencer Bryan Johnson has visited too, and he got dosed with an experimental gene therapy.
While Niklas Anzinger, Infinita’s founder and CEO, said he is proud of the company’s origin story, there hasn’t been enough demand from drug companies to test their medicines on the island. “It will take a very long time before it becomes a credible medical hub,” he said.
Instead, Infinita is turning its attention somewhere new: Montana.
Amazon has completed its $50 billion investment in OpenAI, putting in the remaining $35 billion in two stages in recent months, the commerce-and-cloud firm revealed in a securities filing on Friday.
Amazon agreed in late February to invest $50 billion into the ChatGPT creator, but it only put in ...
Tesla CEO Elon Musk denied a Wall Street Journal report that Tesla was considering selling off its business in China to prepare for a merger with SpaceX. Musk said the report was “fake news” in a post on X Friday morning.
The Journal reported that Tesla executives have been told to prepare ...
Chinese AI firm MiniMax on Friday announced a new open-source video generation model, H3, cranking up competition against AI video rivals like ByteDance and Google.
MiniMax is trying to shake up the market by open-sourcing its flagship video model for the first time. MiniMax said H3, a ...
Elon Musk denied a Wall Street Journal report that Tesla is considering a sale of its China business.
The Journal earlier reported that Tesla executives have been told to prepare for a separation of the China business ahead of the electric car maker’s potential merger with SpaceX. Tesla’s strong ...
CyrusOne, a data center operator owned by private equity giants KKR and BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners, is getting ready to interview and hire investment banks to advise on what could be one of the largest initial public offerings next year, according to people familiar with the discussions.
The IPO preparations indicate that some of the world’s largest asset managers are betting public investors will still want to buy shares of companies tied to the AI boom. CyrusOne could use the IPO to pay down debt borrowed to expand its data centers, while allowing private equity owners to cash out. KKR and Global Infrastructure Partners, which later became a unit of BlackRock, took CyrusOne private in early 2022 for $15 billion.
Anthropic said its AI models hacked into three outside organizations during testing of their cybersecurity capabilities, incidents it discovered during a review prompted by a similar episode at rival OpenAI that has fueled widespread concern about AI safety.
There’s no doubt about it: AI gave the big cloud firms a lift in business in the June quarter. We’ve already heard that from Google and Microsoft, and on Thursday, Amazon, the biggest cloud firm, followed suit by posting 37% growth in its Amazon Web Services cloud unit for the quarter. That’s 9 percentage points faster than it reported for the March quarter, and more than double the growth rate for the same period last year.
Just as strikingly, AWS’ operating profit margin also rose, to 39.4%, the highest since the start of last year. To lift its operating margin while grappling with rising depreciation expenses on new chips and servers is an accomplishment. Amazon stock jumped 9% in response, suggesting investors were more focused on AWS’ accelerating growth than on the huge capital investments it is making to drive future growth. As a reminder of the size of those investments, Amazon burned $7.6 billion in cash in the quarter and raised its 2026 capital expenditures projection by $20 billion to $220 billion.
Nscale, a privately held cloud provider, on Thursday said it agreed to buy Anyscale, a startup that trains, finetunes and runs AI models and applications. Nscale is paying $1.6 billion, The Information earlier reported.
The deal will let Nscale offer more AI services, pairing its data centers ...
Apple expects choppy waters ahead for the quarter that ends in September, the company said on its June quarter earnings call. Apple’s Chief Financial Officer Kevan Parekh warned that supply constraints for advanced chip manufacturing will “increase significantly.”
Coinbase reported second-quarter revenue fell 19% to $1.2 billion from a year ago, the third consecutive quarterly decline. It will renew its revenue-sharing agreement with Circle on the same terms next month, said Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong.
Coinbase is the biggest distributor of Circle’s ...
Amazon stock surged in after hours trading after the ecommerce-and-cloud firm reported that revenue from its cloud division Amazon Web Services soared 37% in the second quarter, nine percentage points faster than the first quarter, bringing the division’s revenue to $42.2 billion. AWS’ operating ...
A jittery stock market isn’t the best environment for new public listings. But one young startup with deep ties to the AI boom is marching ahead with its IPO plans, at least for now.
Nscale, a UK-based AI cloud provider heavily backed by Nvidia, has been meeting with prospective investors recently and scheduled an investor day to pitch analysts and investors next week in New York, according to people familiar with the matter. It’s working with Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan on the IPO, which could happen as soon as this fall, though Nscale could still choose to delay it.
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