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Companies, products, and big moves

**Anthropic commits $45B to rent 460MW of Nscale AI compute**

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**Anthropic commits $45B to rent 460MW of Nscale AI compute**

Anthropic commits $45B to rent 460MW of Nscale AI compute Anthropic has reportedly agreed to pay Nscale $45 billion over six years to rent about 460 megawatts of AI computing power at a data center in West Virginia built around Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips. The deal, first reported by Bloomberg on Wednesday and separately confirmed by Reuters and CNBC, is among the largest compute-procurement agreements in AI to date — a clear sign of how the compute arms race has moved from renting GPU hours to l

OpenAI's reboot: Altman says AGI lands by end of 2026

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OpenAI's reboot: Altman says AGI lands by end of 2026

A rare look inside a company trying to reverse-engineer its own identity — OpenAI admits it lost the lead to Anthropic, has spent the summer cleaning up the worst safety crisis in its history, and still insists the thing it was founded to build is months away. Sam Altman now says OpenAI will have a system he'd call AGI by the end of 2026 — the most concrete timeline yet from the company that started the boom. The claim sits inside a sweeping TIME cover story, "Inside OpenAI's Reboot," built fro

The Take — Unitree's rout isn't a bubble. It's the brain lagging the body

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The Take — Unitree's rout isn't a bubble. It's the brain lagging the body

Unitree did not lose half its value because investors suddenly hated robots. They stopped paying for a general-purpose humanoid whose intelligence, by the builders' own admission, is still stuck in its "GPT-2 era." The rout is the market finally pricing the one thing the last funding cycle chose to ignore: the gap between a robot body that can walk and a robot brain that can work. I think we should stop calling this a bubble popping and call it what it is — a repricing from promise to proof. An

SenseTime posts first-ever profit as generative AI hits 80% of revenue

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SenseTime posts first-ever profit as generative AI hits 80% of revenue

The day's clearest signal that China's AI companies can actually turn a profit lands from Hong Kong, where long-unprofitable SenseTime just posted its first-ever half-year profit — and it's not a cost story, it's a generative-AI revenue one. SenseTime posted its first profit since its 2021 IPO, reporting ¥620 million in net income for the first half of 2026 under IFRS. Revenue climbed 23.4% year over year to ¥2.91 billion, gross profit hit ¥1.21 billion at a 41.4% margin, and the company disclo

Unitree loses half its value as robot hype meets its GPT-2-era reality

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Unitree loses half its value as robot hype meets its GPT-2-era reality

A reality check rippled through the hottest corner of AI investing this week, and it came from the public markets rather than a lab. China's flagship robot maker saw its valuation roughly halve days after a euphoric listing — at the same moment the builders of robot "brains" were privately admitting their field is still stuck in a pre-ChatGPT phase. Unitree lost roughly half its market value in a week, the sharpest signal yet that investors are starting to ask what all those humanoid robots can

Meta weighed cutting teams 60% to go 'AI native' — then pulled back

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Meta weighed cutting teams 60% to go 'AI native' — then pulled back

Two views of the same bet landed today: an internal plan to hand Meta's workforce over to AI agents, and a fresh round of vendor promises that enterprise agents finally pencil out. Only one of them survived contact with reality. Meta explored slashing many teams by as much as 60 percent in two waves to become an "AI native" company — then backed off after staff revolted and its own data showed the agents weren't delivering. That is the core of a Reuters investigation published Wednesday, built

Moonshot wants a cut when US clouds sell its Kimi K3 model

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Moonshot wants a cut when US clouds sell its Kimi K3 model

Moonshot AI is in early talks with Microsoft, Amazon and Google over revenue-sharing deals that would put its flagship Kimi K3 on Azure, AWS and Google Cloud — and the Chinese lab is asking for up to 30% of the revenue those clouds generate from K3 services, according to Reuters. The talks are early and unresolved: the sticking points include how revenue would be split and whether Moonshot gets data access to audit token usage on its model. Nothing is signed. The significance runs deeper than o

Deep Dive — DeepSeek's leaked P&L shows frontier AI can run on a shoestring

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Deep Dive — DeepSeek's leaked P&L shows frontier AI can run on a shoestring

A lab that spent the year as everyone's favorite underdog just handed the industry its first real balance sheet, and it reads like an argument about what AI should cost. DeepSeek generated roughly $70.7 million in revenue over the first seven months of 2026 while losing $106 million, according to figures The Information reported this week, citing sources. The company has not confirmed the numbers, and no filing backs them yet — treat them as sourced, not filed. But if they are even roughly righ

Ex-Pangu chief's TokenRhythm raises again as model routing turns into a land grab

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Ex-Pangu chief's TokenRhythm raises again as model routing turns into a land grab

The money is chasing the layer between models and agents. And in robotics, two new papers argue the same lesson from the other direction: stop waiting for one model to rule them all. TokenRhythm, the AI infrastructure startup founded by former Huawei Noah's Ark lab director Wang Yunhe, has closed another funding round, bringing its total raise into the tens of millions of dollars, according to an exclusive from Leiphone. Hongzhou Fund led the new round, with Juhe Capital and Shangshi Capital pa

DeepSeek's books leak: $70.7 million revenue, $106 million loss

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DeepSeek's books leak: $70.7 million revenue, $106 million loss

The most-watched lab in open weights just got something none of its Western rivals have volunteered: a public look at the P&L. DeepSeek generated roughly $70.7 million in revenue during the first seven months of 2026 while posting a $106 million net loss, according to figures reported by The Information, citing sources. That top line is about ten times what the Hangzhou lab earned in all of 2025 — around $7 million of revenue against a $139 million annual loss. The company has not confirmed the

Tencent's AI chief tells staff outlasting rivals beats moving first

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Tencent's AI chief tells staff outlasting rivals beats moving first

Two stories today about playing the long game: Tencent's cloud boss has written an unusually candid internal essay conceding his firm looks slow on AI — while in India, a voice-AI startup just convinced Peak XV that a phone call is only where the work begins. Dowson Tong, who runs Tencent's Cloud and Smart Industries Group, has published an internal essay confronting the charge that Tencent is falling behind in AI — and arguing the race is a marathon, not a sprint. The piece appeared Tuesday ev

ByteDance ships Doubao Work, an AI agent wired into Feishu

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ByteDance ships Doubao Work, an AI agent wired into Feishu

A busy Tuesday across Chinese tech: ByteDance gave its chatbot a real job title, Alibaba's founder put his own money behind the AI pivot he's asking investors to fund, and Tesla quietly scrubbed China from its self-driving map. ByteDance has launched Doubao Work, a standalone AI agent product built to carry entire workloads rather than answer questions. The company positions it as a new product and brand aimed squarely at productivity: given a goal, it decomposes the task, calls tools on its ow

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