Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

Ripple applies for a US national banking license, which would place Ripple's dollar-backed stablecoin, RLUSD, under the US OCC's regulatory remit (Vicky Ge Huang/Wall Street Journal)

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Microsoft cuts hundreds of Xbox jobs across studios, sources say including Halo Studios and King, and cancels games like Perfect Dark and Everwild (Eddie Makuch/GameSpot)

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Sources: Netflix has held talks with Spotify about partnering on projects such as a music awards show, as it adds content that was core to the cable bundle (Jessica Toonkel/Wall Street Journal)

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Sources: OpenAI will rent additional computing power from Oracle, totaling about 4.5 gigawatts of US data center power, as part of its Stargate initiative (Bloomberg)

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Analysis: crypto ventures have added at least $620M to President Trump's fortune in months, overshadowing traditional real estate licensing deals (Bloomberg)

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Perplexity launches a $200/month Max plan with unlimited Labs access, early access to features like Comet browser, and priority use of models like o3-pro (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)

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TikTok lays off workers from the US division of TikTok Shop, the third round of layoffs for the team since April, after a year of missing internal sales targets (Bloomberg)

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TikTok users are posting AI-generated videos, seemingly made with Google's Veo 3, depicting racist and antisemitic tropes that have garnered millions of views (Abbie Richards/Media Matters for America)

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ICEBlock, an app for reporting sightings of ICE officials, was the top free app in the US App Store on Tuesday; the app claims to collect no personal data (Emma Roth/The Verge)

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A French court finds three ex-Ubisoft executives, including the chief creative officer, guilty of enabling a culture of sexual and psychological harassment (Angelique Chrisafis/The Guardian)

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Berlin-based Talon.One, which provides software for brands to run personalized promotions and loyalty schemes, raised $135M (Freya Pratty/Sifted)

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Tax credits for Intel, TSMC, and other chip companies under the Big Beautiful Bill would rise from 25% to 35% if they expand their US manufacturing before 2026 (Dylan Butts/CNBC)

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Source: Microsoft plans to lay off ~9,000 employees, or less than 4% of its workforce, across teams and role types, after cutting ~6,000 in May and 300+ in June (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

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Amsterdam-based Dexter Energy, which offers AI-based forecasting and trading products for renewable energy and batteries, raised a €23M Series C led by Alantra (Sudip Kar-Gupta/Reuters)

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A report finds Google undercounted its carbon emissions, which rose 65% from 2019 to 2024, not 51% as claimed; the largest YoY jump was 26%, from 2023 to 2024 (Johana Bhuiyan/The Guardian)

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Sources: Apple supplier Luxshare is working with China International, Citic, and Goldman Sachs on its Hong Kong IPO for as soon as 2025, aiming to raise $1B+ (Bloomberg)

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Sources: Foxconn recalled 300+ Chinese engineers from its Indian iPhone factories over the past two months, a blow for Apple as it ramps up iPhone 17 production (Bloomberg)

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A US judge rules that Huawei must face criminal charges in an indictment alleging racketeering, stealing trade secrets, and bank fraud tied to Iran sanctions (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)

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Alibaba plans $7B in delivery and shopping subsidies over the next year, opens a Singapore AI hub, and is opening data centers in Malaysia and the Philippines (Tracy Qu/Wall Street Journal)

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A deep dive into Oracle's data center strategy and the company's emergence as an AI computing powerhouse, amid questions about its GPU business' sustainability (Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros/SemiAnalysis)

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