Techmeme
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GitHub says its 7+ hour August 17 outage was caused by a capacity failure when peak traffic overwhelmed an infrastructure component in a Central US data center (Vlad Fedorov/The GitHub Blog)
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Sources: Broadcom is in talks with a group of lenders to raise $60B+ in debt for an AI chip financing deal that will benefit Anthropic and other companies (Bloomberg)
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Google rolls out an embeddable "Preferred Sources" button, natural language Discover controls, and custom audio briefings in the Google News app on Android (Matt G. Southern/Search Engine Journal)
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San Mateo-based Twin1 AI, which creates professional digital twins that integrate with tools like Slack, launches from stealth with a $20M seed (Chris Metinko/Axios)
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Sources: Poolside struck a non-exclusive $6B licensing deal with Nvidia, plus a $1B investment at a $12B pre-money valuation; 109 staffers get Nvidia job offers (Newcomer)
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Charter closes its $34.5B Cox acquisition, announced in May 2025, uniting two of the biggest US cable and broadband providers, and completes its Liberty deal (Georg Szalai/The Hollywood Reporter)
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Meta rolls out Pocket, an experimental vibe-coding app that lets users create and share small games, in the US, after launching it in Brazil last month (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
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Sources: Anthropic expects to match or beat the size of SpaceX's record-setting IPO, as it prepares to file publicly for its IPO as soon as the end of August (Bloomberg)
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Source: Anthropic plans a safety system this year that still requires enterprises to retain data for 30 days but lets them do so on their own cloud systems (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg)
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Google DeepMind says its Gemma family of open models has surpassed 1B downloads and developers have published 100K+ Gemma model variants over the past two years (Google)
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Sources: Nvidia plans to begin small-batch shipments of an LPU tailored for Chinese customers by the end of 2026; the chip complies with US export control rules (Qianer Liu/The Information)
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Astromech, which uses genomic data to build predictive AI models of biological change, raised $20M at a $3.8B valuation, bringing its total funding to $60M (Dean Takahashi/GamesBeat)
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Ramp launches Router, an AI model routing service it has been using internally over the past three years, in the US; Router is free to use for the rest of 2026 (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch)
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Two US senators demand answers from TikTok about a "depraved" test that withheld a safety feature from 10% of US users, including a teenager who died by suicide (Olivia Carville/Bloomberg)
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The Chinese city of Hangzhou deploys traffic-control robots that operate autonomously, using cameras and radar to signal traffic and flag violations (Reuters)