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Reading time: 6 minutes
🗞️ In this edition
Amazon Wants The $6B Deal Anthropic Walked Away From
Sponsored: Hubspot
Ukranian Drones Closed Russia's AI Data Centre
Microsoft Says Milk Has More Rules Than AI
🔌 MCP CORNER Three servers worth wiring up this week.
⚡ YOUR MOVE For people building the life they want, now.
In other AI news:
SK Hynix Put A Hundred Tiny Processors In One Drive
The White House Renamed AI, And Big Tech Fell In Line
Amazon And Microsoft Stopped Hiding The Deal
4 must-try AI tools
Anthropic walked away from a startup. Amazon came back with a bigger number. Drones closed a third Russian data centre in a week. Microsoft's president says your washing machine answers to more rules than AI.
Keep reading.
Source: TechFundingNews
WHAT HAPPENED
Amazon is in talks to buy Decart, a startup whose software lets developers move the same work between different makes of AI chip. The reported price is around $7 billion, more than Amazon paid for the film studio it bought four years ago. Anthropic looked at the same company weeks ago and walked away. Amazon's cloud arm had already given Decart early access to its own chips.
WHY IT MATTERS
Every large buyer in AI has spent two years trying to tie customers to one kind of chip. Paying this much for the layer that makes chips interchangeable is a strange thing to do if you want people stuck on yours. It reads like a company deciding the lock is worth less than the traffic.
OUR TAKE
The obvious read is a cloud company picking up useful tooling and a research team to go with it. We think Amazon is buying insurance against its own chips, and the giveaway is who passed. A model lab had little use for a translation layer between hardware. A chip maker trying to win customers away from Nvidia has every use for one.
Watch what happens to the part that works across other people's hardware. If it is still open and still supporting rival chips a year from now, Amazon bought reach and intends to compete on price. If it quietly becomes a feature of Amazon's own silicon, the point was never portability, it was capture.
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Source: Reuters
The third one in a week, and the computers that matter were in the first.
Yandex said on Sunday that operations at its data centre in Vladimir were completely suspended after a drone attack, with several of its services down and the site running in emergency mode. It was the third Ukrainian strike on a Yandex data centre in about a week. An earlier hit took out the hub holding most of the computing power behind the company's own AI model.
If you could only keep one, which would you want?
Source: aol.co.uk
Microsoft's president Brad Smith told the BBC that a washing machine answers to more safety rules than AI does, and asked for binding law instead of another round of voluntary commitments. He wants emergency brakes that can pause a system running away from its owner, required reporting when a model fails, and a legal duty to tell anyone whose systems a rogue agent breaks into. Microsoft's chief executive had written much the same thing the day before.
🔌 MCP CORNER
THREE SERVERS WORTH WIRING UP THIS WEEK.
An MCP server plugs your assistant into another app, so it stops describing the work and starts doing it.
Notion MCP Server: Lets your agent read and write the actual pages and databases, so your notes stop going stale.
Slack MCP Server: Opens the channel history, so your assistant can find the decision nobody ever wrote down properly.
Airtable MCP Server: Hands your agent the base you actually run the business on, records, fields and views included.
⚡️ YOUR MOVE
FOR PEOPLE BUILDING THE LIFE THEY WANT, NOW.
📱 Qualcomm's chief executive says the big AI companies are asking him for phones that run models of at least 100 billion parameters on the handset itself by 2028. His current flagship chip tops out around 30 billion, and 100 billion would want roughly 50GB of memory even after compression, in the middle of a memory shortage. → See what your next phone carries
🧩 The vLLM Semantic Router team put a set of open multimodal decision models on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0, from under a billion parameters up to 26 billion. You hand one an input plus a stack of questions and it returns a probability for each option in a single pass, instead of text you then have to parse. → Pull the weights
🎧 An ambient assistant that listens through your phone, watch and laptop came out of beta with $26 million behind it. You give several agents one standing job, they work from what it has learned about how you operate, and audio storage is off until you switch it on. → Decide if you want this listening
💰 Broadcom's chief executive told a panel in Singapore that the ceiling on AI growth is no longer wafers or memory, both of which he says his company is getting past, but capital. He pointed at Anthropic and OpenAI as proof the revenue is now real. → Follow the money instead
SK Hynix Put A Hundred Tiny Processors In One Drive – The memory maker showed an in-house processor that takes over the repetitive work inside a solid state drive, using about a fortieth of the power of a general purpose core, with more than 100 of them packed into one controller.
The White House Renamed AI, And Big Tech Fell In Line – A federal directive told agencies to write super intelligence instead of artificial intelligence, Salesforce has renamed its agent platform and Elon Musk has pledged to rename his, while OpenAI's chief executive says he has no plans to follow.
Amazon And Microsoft Stopped Hiding The Deal – Both are dropping the non-disclosure agreements that kept sites, terms and even the operator's name secret from the towns hosting them, as New York suspends new large permits for up to a year and San Francisco defers approvals for 45 days.
Three stories about who still gets to say no. Anthropic said no to this company and Amazon is now finding out what that answer cost. Someone with drones said no to Russia's AI capacity, and nobody has worked out what insures against that. And Microsoft's own president said no to the idea that promises are enough, which is a peculiar thing to need saying out loud by the company that writes the most of them.
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