Bending Spoons Buys Miro at a 90% Discount
The biggest deal of the day came with a brutal haircut. Bending Spoons agreed to buy Miro for cash at an enterprise value of $1.355…
Morning Tech Digest, September 10, 2026: Chinese AI Chip Prices Up 20% to 50% on HBM Costs, Nasdaq’s $100 Million Kraken Bet
Overnight into Thursday morning. The memory squeeze reached end-customer pricing in China, two card networks sat down with Ant to write rules for agent payments,…
Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4: The Hard Part of Audio Intelligence Is Everyone Not Wearing the Watch
Apple put a microphone on your wrist that listens continuously, holds the last fifteen seconds of whatever was said near you, and can write a…
Apple iPhone 18 Pro: The Base Price Rose $100, the Top Storage Step Rose $600
Apple raised the entry price of the iPhone 18 Pro by $100, to $1,199 for 256GB. Every write-up led with that figure. The number that…
Anthropic Walks Away From $6 Billion Decart Acquisition
Anthropic has reportedly walked away from talks to acquire AI startup Decart for roughly $6 billion after conducting due diligence on the company, according to…
Collapse of Kenya’s academic ghostwriting industry
The New York Times has reported on the collapse of Kenya’s academic ghostwriting industry, which at its height supported more than 40,000 people in Nairobi…
OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki Says No Lab Has Solved Alignment Well Enough to Scale at Full Speed
OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki has said, publicly, that no lab has solved alignment to a degree that would justify scaling at maximum speed, and…
Anthropic Has Contracted at Least 14.8 GW of Compute and May Spend $517B Over the Next Decade
Valida Pau’s analysis in The Information puts numbers on how far Anthropic’s infrastructure commitments have run since October: agreements covering at least 14.8 GW of…
Inspur Is Routing Around US AI Chip Controls Through a Network of New Subsidiaries
The New York Times has laid out how Inspur, the state-owned server maker that has been on the US entity list since 2023, keeps getting…
Retail Investors Are Vibe-Coding Trading Algorithms With Claude and Codex
The Wall Street Journal has a piece by Hannah Erin Lang on ordinary US investors wiring their brokerage accounts to agents built with Claude or…
Tim Cook’s Pay Package Signals He Is Staying, and Phil Schiller Is Leaving Over App Store Profits
Mark Gurman reports for Bloomberg that the structure of Tim Cook’s compensation package points to a CEO who intends to stay closely involved at Apple,…
UBS Now Requires AI Skills From Junior Investment Banking Hires
Simon Foy reports in the Financial Times that UBS has made AI skills a hiring requirement for junior investment bankers, which by the FT’s reckoning…
US to Raise AI-Directed Cyberattacks at September 24 China Talks as Beijing Returns to Export Controls
The September 24 round of US-China technology talks has picked up an agenda item that did not exist in the last cycle. According to Nikkei…
OpenAI Says It Hit Its Automated Research Intern Goal at 3.1 Agent-Workdays Per Human Workday
OpenAI says it has reached the “automated research intern” milestone it set for itself, and it has put two numbers behind the claim. Its researchers…
Trump Officials Say Judeo-Christian Principles Are Shaping US AI Policy
Philip Wegmann reports in the Wall Street Journal that officials in the Trump administration describe Judeo-Christian principles as an input into how they think about…
Travis Kalanick’s Atoms Hires Anthony Levandowski for Robotaxi Push as Uber Invests $100M
Rafe Rosner-Uddin reports in the Financial Times that Atoms, Travis Kalanick’s company, is developing robotaxi technology and has brought in Anthony Levandowski after acquiring his…
OpenAI Quietly Revised Its GPT-6 Astra Evaluation Metrics After Launch
Emily Forlini reports in Fortune that OpenAI has quietly changed how it evaluates GPT-6 Astra, in ways that appear to flatter the model, and that…
IFA 2026 Opens in Berlin: Xiaomi Takes the Floor Samsung Left
Trade visitors were let in at half past nine on Friday morning, and the public had to wait until noon, which gave the halls two…
Why Smart Glasses Beat VR Headsets: Weight, Waveguides and the Shift to Camera-First AI
The thing that beat virtual reality was not better graphics or a cheaper chip. It was a weight budget, and the fact that nobody wants…
Apple Launches Mac Mini With M6, Mac Studio With M5 Ultra, and Its First 2nm Chip
Apple pushed out three press releases on Tuesday with no event, no keynote, and no warning: a new Mac mini, a new Mac Studio, and…
Quintessent’s $40 Million Series A Targets the AI Laser Shortage the OCI Optical Standard Created
Quintessent announced an oversubscribed $40 million Series A on Monday alongside the start of customer sampling for its single-chip quantum dot DWDM comb laser, a…
SanDisk (SNDK) HBF Tapeout: The SLC Requirement Cuts the Capacity Claim and Quadruples NAND Bit Demand
Sandisk taped out its first High Bandwidth Flash memory die and put the picture on a slide at its August 13 investor day, listing first…
30 Rock Was Shaped by How Far Daylight Travels; the Data Center Is Shaped by How Far Heat Does
Every building has one physical quantity that sets its shape. Everything else is negotiable. At 30 Rockefeller Plaza, that quantity was 27 feet, the distance…
Why DRAM and HBM Demand Grows as AI Matures, and Where the Cycle Still Bites
The standard assumption about maturing technology is that hardware demand flattens. Software gets more efficient, silicon gets denser, and the same work needs fewer parts.…