Personal Tech — Friday, September 18, 2026

Crusoe raises $3.9B Series F at $30.9B valuation (TechCrunch, Sept 17)

• data center developer co-led by Atreides, Mubadala, Valor
• Nvidia/Founders Fund/QIA participated
• modular truck-transportable "Spark" AI factories built in own facilities
• Abilene TX site used by OpenAI
• ex-crypto-miner pivot
• customers Meta/Microsoft/Oracle
• $13B 5-year Jane Street cloud contract
• IPO talks with Goldman/Morgan Stanley per Axios
• CEO Chase Lochmiller "electrons to tokens"

NYT v OpenAI/Microsoft unsealed filings (Sept 17)

• Microsoft director of applied science Brent Hecht Jan 2023 memo called scraping "largest theft of labor in human history" / "astonishing theft"
• "doom loop" memo (Copilot answer engine cut news click-throughs ~93%)
• OpenAI head of ChatGPT Nick Turley called chatbots "largely substitutive" / "existential threat" to publishers
• Nadella testified chatbots "substituted" journalism
• 91,692+ copies of Times/NY Daily News/CIR articles in training data, 2M+ nytimes.com docs from Common Crawl
• paywalls bypassed, copyright notices stripped
• Trump admin filed brief defending OpenAI fair use this month
• suit filed Dec 2023, core case cleared April 2025

DeepMind Institute launches (Sept 17)

• Google DeepMind essay platform on AGI
• directors Shane Legg (managing editor), Demis Hassabis, James Manyika
• four launch essays incl. reasoning transparency (Rohin Shah/Anca Dragan, limiting "opaque serial depth") and Hassabis's US-led frontier AI standards body with voluntary 30-day pre-release review, potentially mandatory
• Legg: capabilities must not outrun safety, 50% chance of "minimal" AGI by 2028, Amodei slowdown call "interesting directionally"
• views not Google's official position

FAA SMART program

• $875M over 12 years (WSJ, Sept 17): Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes, and Trajectories, built by Air Space Intelligence
• AI assesses schedules/weather/capacity to predict traffic flows and conflicts
• DC metro first
• amid air-traffic-controller shortage
• broader modernization push

Mantic $25M seed (Reuters, Sept 18)

• London startup beat every human in Metaculus Cup summer 2026 forecasting tournament
• Radical Ventures led, M12, Thinking Machines Lab, Balderton
• CEO Toby Shevlane (ex-Google DeepMind)
• specializes frontier models for forecasting, grades on historical data
• avoided herd mentality (Shakira "Dai Dai" Billboard bet
• gave Abelardo De La Espriella ~40% chance of Colombia win vs ~30% consensus, won)

Rapid-fire

• Google/Nvidia/Anthropic back Emerald AI for grid space for data centers
• Meta's AI and rival Instinct add phone-call ability
• Anthropic merges Claude chat + Cowork
• SK Hynix reportedly in talks with Intel to build memory chips in US
• Pinterest teases "Restyle" AI room redesign
• Gemini closing in on another billion-user product
• Impulse Space $308M Series D extension -> $808M total at $5.6B (Reuters Sept 16), Tom Mueller founded, rideshares sold out through 2028

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