Reading List

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

PayPal expands access to its PYUSD stablecoin from the US and the UK to 70 countries in total, including Colombia, Panama, Peru, Singapore, Uganda, and Malawi (Ben Weiss/Fortune)

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Mastercard agrees to acquire London-based stablecoin payments infra startup BVNK for up to $1.8B, including $300M in contingent payments, set to close in 2026 (Reuters)

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Enterprise AI automation startup Standard Template Labs raised a $49M seed co-led by Iconiq and CRV, a source says at a $300M post-money valuation (Natasha Mascarenhas/Bloomberg)

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Darton Commodities: the global cobalt shortage is set to persist through 2030, after Congo limited exports in 2025; the DRC accounts for 70%+ of global supply (Annie Lee/Bloomberg)

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Agentic cybersecurity startup Surf AI, which helps teams read signals from identity, cloud, and other tools, emerges from stealth with $57M in seed and Series A (Chris Metinko/Axios)

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Amsterdam-based Nebius plans to raise ~$3.75B in convertible debt to fund its data center expansion and to purchase customized AI chips, after its Meta deal (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg)

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Q&A with Jensen Huang on Nvidia's CUDA core, reasoning and coding, CPUs' role in accelerated computing, Groq, China and the doomers, Nvidia's nature, and more (Ben Thompson/Stratechery)

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Amazon begins three-hour deliveries in ~2K US cities and towns and one-hour deliveries in hundreds of those areas, after 2025 pilots; 90K+ products are eligible (Annie Palmer/CNBC)

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Sources: Google is in talks with Envicool and other Chinese companies about buying liquid cooling equipment for data centers, amid a tight supply of such parts (Reuters)

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Gecko Robotics secures a $71M US Navy contract to use robots to slash repair time for dated ships, as the US races to reindustrialize its aging defense systems (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

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Sources: KKR, Blackstone, and other investors have turned down some data center debt because of insufficient insurance against risks like natural disasters (Financial Times)

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SK Group Chair Chey Tae-won says memory chip makers are expanding capacity but are unlikely to match demand until around 2030; basic wafer supply lags by 20%+ (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

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Q&A with Ted Sarandos on his visit to Brussels, Netflix's European investments, EU regulation, YouTube, TikTok, WBD, Trump's Susan Rice criticism, AI, and more (Carrie Budoff Brown/Politico)

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The UK plans to spend £1B+ on quantum computing research over four years, including funding companies in pharmaceuticals, financial services, and energy (Mia Dawkins/Bloomberg)

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EU countries introduce sanctions on hacking groups, including Iran's Emennet Pasargad, which hacked magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2023, and two Chinese companies (Sam Clark/Politico)

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Berlin-based Upvest, which builds trading APIs for neobanks and retail lenders, raised $90M in equity, sources say at a $735M valuation, up from ~$413M in 2024 (Arno Schütze/Bloomberg)

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Samsung says it is winding down sales of its $2,899 Galaxy Z TriFold in South Korea and the US once it clears inventory, after just three months on the market (Bloomberg)

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Q&A with CEO Jim Lanzone on Yahoo being "very profitable", its new AI search engine, focusing on sports content, including original video and podcasts, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge)

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Open models will largely lose if they keep chasing closed frontier AI models; instead, open models should serve as complementary tools to closed agents (Nathan Lambert/Interconnects AI)

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Nvidia says game developers have full "artistic control over DLSS 5's effects", following backlash alleging that the AI rendering tech altered source material (Tyler Wilde/PC Gamer)

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