Companies, products, and big moves
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The AI buildout's bill just got a lot bigger — and most of it was never on the books. A Wall Street Journal analysis of nine top tech companies found roughly $3 trillion in AI-related off-balance-sheet commitments, far exceeding the roughly $600 billion those same companies
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The AI video boom is going physical: startups that used to make clips on demand are now planting flags in Hollywood itself. Meanwhile, a Peking University research push is quietly attacking the one bottleneck that makes chatty models feel sluggish — the wait for the first word. AI film startups are
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Stripe has finalized a deal to buy OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, vaulting a small router startup into the center of the AI stack and turning a two-year-old experiment in "just call any model" into the most revealing acquisition of the cycle. It is worth
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The AI buildout's quiet winners aren't chipmakers — they're the industrial manufacturers retooling factories to feed data-center demand for power equipment. A Wall Street Journal report out this week shows the money is already landing in orders and backlogs, not just strategy decks. Caterpillar,
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State capital is quietly moving into the data layer beneath China's robot boom — this time through a six-month-old startup that sells the raw material physical AI runs on. Mifeng (Maniformer), a Shanghai startup building one-stop data infrastructure for physical AI, has closed a new round
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Money is moving into the AI application layer this morning: the video-generation startup most brands don't talk about just got a lot more expensive, and China's biggest AI image platform is lining up a Hong Kong debut. AI video startup Higgsfield has raised $400 million
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Payments giant Stripe has finalized a deal to buy OpenRouter, the startup that lets developers route queries across hundreds of AI models instead of locking into one provider. It is the clearest sign yet that the plumbing layer between developers and models has become a prize worth billions. Stripe has
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The company that processes a big share of the internet's payments just bought the gateway developers use to pay for AI models. Stripe now owns the toll booth of the AI economy — pending the usual confirmations. Stripe has finalized a deal to acquire OpenRouter for more than $7
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Two stories out of the labs' pre-IPO week: Anthropic's CEO staked public trust on a medical moonshot, and OpenAI kept losing the engineers who built it. Dario Amodei published his most personal case for Anthropic yet — and set a deadline: AI will cure most human diseases
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The open-weight center of gravity has a new address: Alibaba's Qwen crossed 3 billion downloads in six months, and Hugging Face's summer ecosystem report crowns it the largest foundation in open AI. Alibaba's Qwen family has become the most-downloaded open model line
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The gray market for AI tokens has grown from scattered forum posts into storefronts, Telegram channels, and brokers offering $100,000 a day of API spend. A new investigation maps that economy end to end — and the discounts it documents are real enough to check yourself. The brokers came to
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Secondhand bookshops across the UK and Ireland say mystery buyers are clearing their shelves with erratic, theme-free bulk orders — and the trade increasingly suspects the books are being scanned and pulped to feed AI training pipelines. Booksellers in the UK and Ireland are reporting a wave of "strange&