The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Source: Elastic has agreed to acquire the AI site reliability engineering startup Deductive AI for up to $85M; CRV led Deductive AI's $7.5M seed round in 2025 (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch) [26m]
Appfigures: daily downloads of major VPN apps in India rose 49% on June 16 after India announced its Telegram ban; Proton and Turbo recorded largest increases (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch) [51m]
Sources: SpaceX plans to raise $20B in a bond sale as soon as next week; the funds would be used to pay back a $20B bridge loan taken out after the xAI merger (Financial Times) [1h]
Doc: SpaceX says the EU's plan to reserve satellite spectrum for European operators risks disrupting connectivity, including for emergency services in Ukraine (Financial Times) [2h]
A US circuit court overturned an injunction against Ohio, allowing the state to implement a law forcing platforms to seek parental consent if a user is under-16 (Nate Raymond/Reuters) [2h]
A profile of Meta President Dina Powell McCormick, who has become one of Silicon Valley's top power brokers as she helps oversee Meta's AI infrastructure push (Financial Times) [3h]
Intel names former SK Hynix CEO Seok-Hee Lee as EVP of Intel Foundry; Naga Chandrasekaran will lead front-end technology development and front-end manufacturing (Juby Babu/Reuters) [5h]
Sources: Kalshi is generating $2B+ in annualized revenue, up about three times from November, and has held informal talks with banks about an eventual IPO (Yueqi Yang/The Information) [5h]
Snap plans to spin off an internal generative AI video team into Dotmo, a new company focused on AI models for interactive gaming experiences, citing high costs (Lucas Ropek/TechCrunch) [6h]
Sources: Meta is under contract to buy roughly 1.6 GW of computing capacity from Crusoe across two data centers in Texas and Missouri (Bloomberg) [6h]
Unsealed docs: Google lost a court fight against a 2023 US warrant in a Jan. 6 pipe bomb probe seeking info of 300+ users who searched for the RNC and DNC HQs (Zoe Tillman/Bloomberg) [7h]
Sources: the White House and Anthropic are working on a framework that would assess the severity of AI security flaws, a sign that negotiations are progressing (Politico) [7h]
Sources: APEC, a derivatives exchange founded by the 22-year-old son of pro-crypto Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, raised $30M led by Lux at a $300M valuation (Ben Weiss/Fortune) [8h]
GLM-5.2 is the leading open weights model on Artificial Analysis' Intelligence Index, scoring 51, only behind Fable 5's 60, Opus 4.8's 56, and GPT-5.5's 55 (Artificial Analysis) [8h]
New book: Trump mocked Zuckerberg and Bezos by showing associates their fawning texts, saying they were "kissing my ass"; Musk called it "First-class groveling" (Hugo Lowell/Wired) [9h]
Rockstar Games announces that pre-orders for Grand Theft Auto VI will go live on June 25; TTWO jumps 5%+ (Zack Zwiezen/Kotaku) [9h]
Apple opens iOS to alternative app marketplaces in Brazil and changes App Store commission structure following a settlement with competition watchdog CADE (Marcus Mendes/9to5Mac) [10h]
Former Trump AI adviser Dean Ball is joining OpenAI to lead a new team called Strategic Futures, focused on frontier AI policy and internal governance (Ashley Gold/Axios) [11h]
Sources: General Intuition, which trains AI agents in spatial reasoning, is in talks to raise $300M from Jeff Bezos and others at a $2B+ valuation (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch) [11h]
Amazon's AI chief Peter DeSantis says the company is in talks to sell its custom Trainium AI chips for use in third-party data centers (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg) [12h]
Filings: Waymo pulls its ~4K robotaxis from highways after finding 13+ instances of the cars driving into highway sections under construction (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch) [12h]
Seattle-based Gradial, which makes AI agents that automate enterprise marketing workflows, raised a $65M Series C led by Insight Partners at a $675M valuation (Kerry Flynn/Axios) [13h]
Sources: the early Chinese backers of Manus, including HSG and Tencent, plan to buy the AI startup back from Meta at the $2B price Meta paid (The Information) [14h]
Architect Labs, which aims to use AI to cheapen and speed up the process of designing custom chips, raised a $24M seed led by Kindred Ventures (Max A. Cherney/Reuters) [14h]
Sources: the EU is set to unveil its preliminary findings that AWS and Azure likely meet the criteria for regulation under the DMA as early as next week (Bloomberg) [14h]
As David Sacks steps back and Sriram Krishnan prepares to leave, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and others are leading AI policy in the Trump administration (Maria Curi/Axios) [14h]
Hive stock jumps 10% in premarket trading after announcing a $220M, three-year GPU cloud contract with Bell Canada and Cohere, as it pivots from bitcoin mining (James Van Straten/CoinDesk) [15h]
Former Gojek CEO and Indonesian education minister Nadiem Makarim is charged with taking ~$46M in rewards tied to a Chromebook procurement contract for schools (Bloomberg) [15h]
An in-depth look at Meta's AI-fueled rampage through its engineering organization, reassignments of engineers on core teams to data labeling, and more (Gergely Orosz/The Pragmatic Engineer) [16h]
Prem AI, a Swiss startup that lets hedge funds and law firms run AI models on their own infrastructure, is raising a $100M Series A, targeting a $500M valuation (Natalia Kniazhevich/Bloomberg) [16h]
Accenture says it will buy a majority stake in Dragos and fully acquire runZero and NetRise in a combined deal for the cybersecurity startups valued at $4.18B (Anhata Rooprai/Reuters) [16h]
Verse Enterprises, which wants to provide energy-management software for 100 data centers by 2027, raised a $54M Series B from Nvidia and others (Summer Maxwell/Bloomberg) [16h]
Trump, who entered office opposing AI regulation, is shaping the industry through case-by-case interventions without clear rules, creating major uncertainty (Axios) [16h]
AI inference startup Baseten is raising $1.5B in a dual-tiered deal, with some investors putting in money at an $11B valuation and others at a $13B valuation (Angel Au-Yeung/Wall Street Journal) [16h]
Report: DeepSeek's first external funding round has a non-negotiable term that investors should not poach its staff or encourage them to start own companies (CNBC) [16h]
Guardrails Alliance, a super PAC that raised $5M, launches to advocate for AI safety legislation and counter pro-industry lobbying, running ads for Alex Bores (New York Times) [17h]
Dream, co-founded by ex-NSO Group CEO Shalev Hulio with a focus on protecting critical infrastructure, raised $260M at a $3B valuation, up from $1B in 2025 (Galit Altstein/Bloomberg) [17h]
Intel stock jumps around 9% in premarket trading, after Trump said "Apple has agreed to work with Intel to design and build its Chips in America" (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC) [18h]
A look at 764, an online group the FBI declared domestic terrorists due to members manipulating teen girls into sharing sexual pictures and cutting themselves (Margi Murphy/Bloomberg) [20h]
As tech giants rush to build AI infrastructure, some residents living near data centers say a constant infrasonic vibration is ruining their health and homes (Adeel Hassan/New York Times) [21h]
A PwC study suggests that AI is rewarding companies that use it to enhance human skills, while leaving further behind those that use it merely to cut costs (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg) [21h]
Businesses have started using Kalshi to hedge business risks; Kalshi says institutional trading volume on its platform has grown 800% since November 2025 (Michael J. de la Merced/New York Times) [21h]
The Bank of Korea warns rising bonuses at some South Korean chipmakers could fuel broader wage growth and consumer spending, complicating the inflation outlook (Heesu Lee/Bloomberg) [21h]
SpaceX's all-stock Cursor deal illustrates the power of public markets, which could help SpaceX narrow the gap with Anthropic and OpenAI through acquisitions (New York Times) [21h]
Nation-state hackers are increasingly using preinstalled software on low-cost home devices to create residential proxy networks and mask cyberattack traffic (Robert McMillan/Wall Street Journal) [21h]
South Korean and Taiwanese tech companies that helped build China's hardware sector during the smartphone boom now reap the AI boom as US curbs sideline China (New York Times) [21h]
A Blackstone-led consortium agrees to take control of software company Medallia from Thoma Bravo, which will lose the entire $5B it invested in Medallia (Financial Times) [22h]
NeuralTrust, which offers tech that lets enterprises discover, monitor, govern, and secure AI agents, raised a $20M seed led by Alstin Capital (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu) [22h]
Sources: JPMorgan Chase has stopped its staff in Hong Kong from accessing Anthropic's AI models, following a similar move by rival Goldman Sachs (Financial Times) [22h]
Sources: ByteDance has been Microsoft's biggest AI customer in recent years, largely using OpenAI models, and is on track to spend $1B+ a year on Azure services (Bloomberg) [22h]
Midjourney unveils its first hardware product, the Midjourney Scanner, an ultrasound-based full-body scanner; it is unclear how AI fits into the medical effort (Richard Lawler/The Verge) [23h]