Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Kayak launches a ChatGPT-powered chatbot on its desktop and mobile website that lets users ask travel questions and compare flights, hotels, and car rentals  —  Travel search engine Kayak will now allow users to research trips ahead of booking using AI.  The company this week launched an …

Bloomberg:
Sources: Meta is set to seal an almost $30B financing package for its Louisiana data center; Meta will retain 20% ownership in the Hyperion data center site  —  Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Platforms Inc. is set to seal an almost $30 billion financing package for its data center site in rural Louisiana …

Jennifer Hiller / Wall Street Journal:
AI data centers are building on-site power plants to bypass the overloaded grid and meet soaring electricity demand amid permitting and supply challenges  —  Bypassing the grid, at least temporarily, tech companies are creating an energy Wild West; ‘grab yourself a couple of turbines’

Zeyi Yang / Wired:
A look at ByteDance's Doubao, which became China's most popular AI app in August, with over 157M MAUs, thanks in part to its deep integration with Douyin  —  ByteDance's Doubao app has overtaken DeepSeek, proving that user-friendly design often matters more than having the most advanced AI model.

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week. Around the middle of last year, Pim de Witte started reaching out to a handful of prominent AI labs to see if they'd be interested in using data from […]