Volkswagen can build a $17,175 car. Just not in Europe
Volkswagen can build a $17,175 car. Just not in Europe

Start with the Volkswagen, because it is the one that should give Europe pause. SAIC Volkswagen, the joint venture with China’s state-owned SAIC Motor, opened preorders for the ID. Era 5S saloon this week. The introductory price is 115,900 yuan, which …

An AI-written article needs no label. Your proofread email gets one
An AI-written article needs no label. Your proofread email gets one

Start with what the mark actually is, because it is not a stamp on the page. When a model writes, it picks each word from a set of reasonable options. A watermark quietly splits those options into two groups using a secret key, then nudges the model to…

CodeRabbit raised $143m to read the code AI wrote
CodeRabbit raised $143m to read the code AI wrote

Code review is the step where somebody reads a change before it ships. A developer proposes an edit, opens what the trade calls a pull request, and a colleague checks it for bugs and security holes. It is slow and unglamorous work. Until recently it wa…

Europe’s drought is shutting down nuclear reactors
Europe’s drought is shutting down nuclear reactors

Nuclear reactors need water. They sit beside rivers and coastlines for a reason. The water carries heat away from the core. When it runs low or runs warm, the reactor has to power down. That is happening across Europe right now. On Thursday, Romania’s …

Accel raised $3.5bn. Europe now gets the same fund as the US
Accel raised $3.5bn. Europe now gets the same fund as the US

Accel is a venture capital firm. It gives money to startups early, usually before anyone else has, and takes a stake in return. It has done this since 1983, and it wrote the first institutional cheque into Atlassian, CrowdStrike, Flipkart and Slack. On…

Nebius revenue grew 454%. Most of the cash came from customers paying in advance
Nebius revenue grew 454%. Most of the cash came from customers paying in advance

Nebius rents out computing power. It buys Nvidia chips, puts them in data centres, and charges companies to train and run AI models on them. The trade calls this a neocloud. It is based in Amsterdam, listed on Nasdaq, and was spun out of the Russian in…

A Pentagon memo tells staff to spend $244m with Palantir. Its subject line is ‘Funding Palantir’
A Pentagon memo tells staff to spend $244m with Palantir. Its subject line is ‘Funding Palantir’

Government software is usually bought by asking several companies to bid. A department writes down what it needs, suppliers compete, and the file records why the winner won. A memo drafted inside the US Defense Department on 4 August did something diff…

AI compute becomes a tradable commodity on 5 October. The price goes public
AI compute becomes a tradable commodity on 5 October. The price goes public

Renting an Nvidia H100 for an hour costs whatever your supplier says it costs. There is no published price. Two companies buying identical capacity can pay very different rates, and neither of them will know. That changes on 5 October. CME Group, the e…

Megadeals took 87.5% of US venture dollars, and the rest of the market is priced by vintage
Megadeals took 87.5% of US venture dollars, and the rest of the market is priced by vintage

PitchBook published its Q2 US VC Valuations report on 10 August. Megadeals took 87.5% of the dollars deployed in the first half of 2026. PitchBook defines those as rounds of $100m or more. AI is the primary driver of that concentration, though the figu…

Tencent’s AI compute bill outgrew its cash flow, and the fallback plan is becoming a landlord
Tencent’s AI compute bill outgrew its cash flow, and the fallback plan is becoming a landlord

Tencent reported second-quarter revenue of 204.8bn yuan ($30.4bn) on Wednesday, up 11% and ahead of forecasts. Net profit came in at 56bn yuan against the 61.8bn analysts expected, CNBC reports. Capital expenditure rose 176% on the year to 52.8bn yuan,…