Welcome back to your daily memorandum talking tech, business, AI, markets, and more. 🗞️

In today’s edition, we are tackling the following:

🧊 Tech companies eye Argentina's Patagonia for mega data centers.
📱 Huawei's $3k tri-fold Mate XT 2 is China's answer to the iPhone.
💰 Samsung leads Mistral's $3.5B raise, lifting the French AI startup to $24B.
🪙 Copper hits a second straight record on tight supply & tariff fears.
🧍 U.N. rights chief Volker Turk warns AI could threaten humanity's existence.

TECHNOLOGY

• Tech companies eye Argentina's Patagonia for mega data centers (Reuters)
  ^{_{More: Firstpost, TNW, Japan Times}}

  • Cool temperatures, renewable energy, shale gas, and empty land make the region attractive to hyperscalers.

  • Pampa Energia is courting investors for a Patagonia project targeting up to 500 megawatts.

  • Weak connectivity and electrical infrastructure remain the main obstacles, though Argentina lacks the U.S. backlash.

• Huawei's $3k trifold Mate XT 2 is China's answer to foldable rivals (Bloomberg)
  ^{_{More: Business Standard, Business Times}}

  • The device unfolds into a 10.2-inch tablet using two hinges and costs roughly 10% more than its predecessor.

  • Richard Yu blamed rising memory procurement costs; the base model ships with just 16GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage.

  • Its Kirin 9050 Pro debuts Huawei's LogicFolding design, built to work around U.S. lithography restrictions.

• Opendoor’s Eric Wu returns with NavigateAI, targeting construction's deepening labor shortage (TechCrunch)
  ^{_{More: Tech Buzz}}

  • Eric Wu left Opendoor in 2022, then returned to building because AI felt too big to skip.

  • NavigateAI makes hands-free AI copilots that coach construction crews and other field laborers on the job.

  • U.S. construction needs 349k more workers this year, while data center megaprojects each demand thousands more.

BUSINESS

• Samsung leads Mistral's $3.5B raise, lifting the French AI startup to $24B (CNBC)
  ^{_{More: Bloomberg, Reuters, Business Times}}

  • Mistral raised €3B ($3.5B) led by Samsung, joined by the EU-backed Scaleup Europe Fund and PSG Equity.

  • Its post-money valuation now tops €21B, nearly double the €11.7B it commanded a year ago.

  • Mistral is betting on open-weight models and self-built data centers to challenge OpenAI and Anthropic.

• Copper hits a second straight record on tight supply & tariff fears (Bloomberg)
  ^{_{More: WSJ, Yahoo!}}

  • The metal touched an all-time peak of $14,617 a ton on the London Metal Exchange.

  • Refined copper flowing toward the U.S. ahead of tariffs has drained LME warehouse stockpiles.

  • Shanghai inventories sit at 2024 lows, with Chinese demand expected to rise in the peak manufacturing season.

• NVIDIA-backed Firmus lands OpenAI deal for Malaysian data center capacity (Reuters)
  ^{_{More: Economic Times, Business Times}}

  • The agreement increases Firmus' contracted capacity across customers to more than 900 megawatts, extending its Asia-Pacific footprint.

  • Firmus was valued at over $10.5B in its last raise and is rumored to IPO this year.

  • Malaysia is Southeast Asia's fastest-growing data center market, though its buildout draws scrutiny over electricity and water use.

MARKETS

WORLD

• U.N. rights chief Volker Turk warns AI could threaten humanity's existence (SCMP)
  ^{_{More: ABC, Reuters, Euronews}}

  • Turk demanded "cast-iron guarantees" on AI safety and security before it is too late.

  • His office cited July's Hugging Face incident, where a swarm of OpenAI agents hacked an open-source platform.

  • Speaking in Geneva, he also condemned Russia's reported autonomous drones and deaths in U.S. immigration custody.

• Four EU telecom giants weigh joint bid for satellite-to-mobile spectrum (Bloomberg)
  ^{_{More: Reuters, CNA, TNW}}

  • Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Vodafone, and Telefonica are in early talks to form a bidding consortium, Bloomberg reported.

  • They would target 2 gigahertz of airwaves that the EU wants reserved for a local operator.

  • The plan follows Brussels' May push to limit U.S. access to IRIS² satellite spectrum.

• Australia would let social media users switch off algorithmic feeds (Reuters)
  ^{_{More: Al Jazeera, Straits Times, Yahoo!}}

  • Draft laws require platforms to notify users and offer a choice over their default feed.

  • Opting out means seeing posts only from friends and creators a user actively follows.

  • Albanese called the reform pragmatic and said it holds big tech responsible for any inaction.

FUTURISM

• China's PLA looks to turn showcase humanoid robots into future combatants (Reuters)
  ^{_{More: Japan Times}}

  • The PLA Daily urged researchers to move cutting-edge robotics from laboratories to military training grounds.

  • Military scenarios model humanoids joining urban assault forces and infiltrating enemy lines during operations.

  • Procurement records point to the defense establishment's growing appetite for humanoid systems.

• Shoved humanoid robot answers with kicks in viral Russian store footage (Futurism)
  ^{_{More: Tom's Guide, Yahoo!}}

  • CCTV shows a man lightly pushing what appears to be a Chinese Unitree G1 humanoid.

  • The robot recoils, plays fighting music, and drops into a wide-legged stance before throwing high kicks.

  • Two store clerks step in to restrain it, showing how far combat-style robot programming has come.

• Arm's new AI-native GPU could reshape mobile gaming on premium Android phones (The Verge)
  ^{_{More: CNET, Digital Trends}}

  • CSS for Mobile 2 gives chipmakers a redesigned GPU that upscales graphics and lifts frame rates.

  • The Mali G2-Ultra NX applies AI inside the graphics pipeline, cutting latency and improving power efficiency.

  • Arm also strengthened its CPU clusters to handle AI agent processing on next year's flagship silicon.

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CONTENT

• Danny Yeung's advice before you launch an ecommerce brand in 2026 (My First Million)

  • Shaan Puri interviews Danny Yeung about scaling a $200M supplement business in only 18 months.

  • Yeung explains how he hit $100M in 11 months with IM8, the brand he built alongside David Beckham.

  • He traces the playbook to telemarketing skills, 200 offline events, and pandemic-era COVID testing wins.

• Town CEO JD Grèze argues the AI assistant market isn't a bubble (20VC)

  • Grèze co-founded Town, an AI work assistant reportedly raising funding at a $1B valuation.

  • He previously spent seven years as CTO of Plaid and led engineering at Dropbox.

  • The conversation covers surviving Google and OpenAI, agent trust, and whether SaaS-level margins are reachable.

• Fei-Fei Li explains why spatial intelligence is World Labs' central bet (a16z)

  • She and co-founders Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall discuss Atlas, their latest world model, with a16z.

  • Atlas centers on 'new view prediction,' merging generation and 3D reconstruction into a single model.

  • Li argues that access to real-world training data is now the biggest constraint on robotics applications.

EXTRAS

• Amazon cargo jet hit two vehicles, stopping 1.3k feet past the runway (CNBC)
  ^{_{More: Washington Post, NY Times}}

  • The crash occurred Sunday at Miami International Airport and is now under federal safety investigation.

  • At least five people died, and five more were injured, all riding in the struck vehicles.

  • NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy confirmed the overrun distance but provided no details on its cause.

• Longsys shares stall on Hong Kong debut after $903M listing (CNA)
  ^{_{More: Reuters}}

  • The Shenzhen data storage maker raised HK$7.08B, selling 29.99M shares after exercising an upsizing option.

  • Stock traded at HK$235.8, just below its HK$236 offer price, as broader Hong Kong indexes slipped.

  • Transsion and Lenovo came in as cornerstone investors, adding to Hong Kong's run of AI-linked listings.

• An Elizabeth Holmes documentary from Nathan Fielder stunned Telluride on Sunday (NY Times)
  ^{_{More: LA Times, TechCrunch, Washington Post}}

  • Phones were locked away as 650 festivalgoers entered a screening with no title or synopsis.

  • 'You Can See Everything' follows Holmes and her husband, Billy Evans, during her final 34 days before prison.

  • Holmes is serving an 11-year fraud sentence; appeals failed, and her clemency petition to Trump remains pending.

AND MORE

• Audi's new A2 E-tron is its cheapest & most efficient EV yet.

• Authors resist publishers & agents staking claims on the Anthropic settlement.

• Explore all the tools and more here to outperform the competition.*

• What we expect from the upcoming Apple launch.

• Soaring RAM costs explain why your next phone will cost more.

• Trump claims hundreds of billions in U.S. stock gains amid AI posts.

• OpenAI's top scientist urges extreme caution over the pace of AI.

• The Matrix 5 sits in limbo as director Drew Goddard awaits a green light.

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