Contemplations News
This is the latest addition to our website, and its purpose is to help you stay in touch with current news posts. Click on any post to read the full text.
- Turkish state media reports that Faruk Fatih Ozer, the former CEO of failed crypto exchange Thodex, has been found dead in his prison cell (Baris Balci/Bloomberg)
- Anduril conducts the first flight of its jet-powered unmanned drone, flying it "semi-autonomously", as the US Air Force plans swarms of unmanned jet drones (David Jeans/Reuters)
- ESPN plans to make its College Gameday telecast available on host Pat McAfee's X account, as Disney and YouTube TV continue to spar over a new carriage deal (Brian Steinberg/Variety)
- A profile of AI contractor marketplace Mercor, which is valued at $10B and whose three 22-year-old founders are Thiel Fellows, each holding a roughly 22% stake (Richard Nieva/Forbes)
- MediaTek says it is on track to generate $1B in revenue from its data center AI accelerator ASIC chips in 2026, after reporting Q3 revenue up 7.8% YoY to $4.64B (Reuters)
- Singapore seizes more than $115M in assets linked to Cambodia's Prince Group, which the US and UK accuse of stealing billions of dollars via online scam centers (Bloomberg)
- China says it will allow some Nexperia semiconductor chip exports to resume to ease critical supply shortages impacting global auto production (Financial Times)
- Nvidia says it will supply 260K+ of its most advanced AI chips to the South Korean government and major companies, including Samsung, Naver, and SK Group (Reuters)
- Despite the hype around large AI models, many companies like Meta are using small models for routine tasks, finding them more practical and cost-effective (Christopher Mims/Wall Street Journal)
- Shares of Seagate and Western Digital have sharply outperformed the broader market in 2025, surging ~200% on AI-related infrastructure demand for hard drives (Shashwat Chauhan/Reuters)
- Vista Equity Partners buys a majority stake in Nexthink, which uses AI to let businesses track employees' device and app performance, valuing Nexthink at $3B (Paula Doenecke/Bloomberg)
- Vodafone agrees to acquire Skaylink, a German company specializing in managing cloud deployments on Microsoft Azure and AWS, for €175M from PE firm Waterland (Yamini Kalia/Reuters)
- NEC to buy US-listed CSG, a SaaS provider of customer care and billing services for telcos and other companies, for ~$2.9B in a deal expected to close in 2026 (Mayumi Negishi/Bloomberg)
- Mumbai-based Snapmint, a BNPL partner to brands that lets consumers pay in monthly instalments via India's UPI, raised a $125M Series B led by General Atlantic (Shashank Pathak/Entrackr)
- Tech companies, including Meta and xAI, are using SPVs to raise tens of billions for AI data centers, letting them keep the debt off their balance sheets (Carmen Arroyo/Bloomberg)
- New York-based Kaizen, which provides a commerce platform for government agencies to offer services like utility billing, raised a $21M Series A led by NEA (Chris Metinko/Axios)
- Sources: Coinbase is in late stage talks to buy stablecoin infra startup BVNK in a ~$2B deal; Coinbase expects to close the deal later this year or early 2026 (Bloomberg)
- In its Q3 earnings, Alphabet said the profit included "net gains on equity securities of $10.7B," in part from a private company, which sources say is Anthropic (Bloomberg)
- Bluesky says it has hit 40M users and plans to launch "dislikes" in beta to tailor content rankings and reply rankings (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
- Brian Armstrong ended Coinbase's Q3 earnings call by saying certain words that Kalshi and Polymarket users had wagered would be mentioned during the call (Bloomberg)