NVIDIA didn’t invest in Xanadu, but it made its CEO a billionaire anyway

Christian Weedbrook, the founder and CEO of Toronto-based Xanadu Quantum Technologies, became a billionaire this week without NVIDIA investing a single dollar in his company. His 46.4 million multiple [...]

Europe is pouring tens of billions of public money into VC. The hard part is making it work

The European Investment Fund is raising a €15 billion fund of funds called ETCI 2 that aims to unlock up to €80 billion in scaleup funding across Europe. Germany’s WIN initiative is targeting � [...]

Nvidia’s Huang warns DeepSeek running on Huawei chips would be ‘horrible’ for the US

In short: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang warned on the Dwarkesh Podcast that DeepSeek optimising its AI models for Huawei’s Ascend chips instead of American hardware would be “a horrible outcome” for t [...]

Anthropic’s Amodei meets Wiles and Bessent at the White House in first step toward resolving Mythos standoff

In short: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei met White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Friday in what the White House called “productive and constructive” talks ov [...]

Threads is redesigning its website and finally adding direct messages to the desktop

Summary: Threads head Connor Hayes previewed a redesigned web interface that adds direct messages, a navigation sidebar with shortcuts to saved posts and insights, and a cleaner single-feed layout rep [...]

Meta targets 20 May for 8,000 layoffs as it redirects billions toward AI infrastructure

In short: Meta will begin companywide layoffs on 20 May, cutting approximately 8,000 employees (10% of its 78,865-person workforce), with additional cuts planned for the second half of 2026. The restr [...]

Trump wants to stop states from regulating AI. States and Congress keep saying no.

In short: The Trump administration is waging a multi-front campaign to prevent states from regulating AI, using a DOJ litigation task force, Commerce Department evaluations of “burdensome” state l [...]

Google is in talks with Marvell to build custom AI inference chips as it diversifies beyond Broadcom

Summary: Google is in talks with Marvell Technology to develop two new AI chips – a memory processing unit and an inference-optimised TPU – adding a third design partner alongside Broadcom and Med [...]

Stanford’s AI Index finds China has nearly closed the performance gap with the US despite spending 23 times less

In short: Stanford’s 2026 AI Index Report finds the performance gap between the best American and Chinese AI models has collapsed to 2.7%, down from 17.5-31.6 percentage points in May 2023, despite [...]