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Apr 17, 2026 |
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TGIF! Chip startup Cerebras is preparing for an IPO and seeking a $35 billion-plus valuation. Elon Musk's xAI will rent computing power to the coding startup Cursor. China's regulator slaps fines on PDD and other e-commerce platforms.
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Chip startup Cerebras is planning to make its IPO paperwork public as soon as Friday, The Information reported Thursday. It aims to raise more than $3 billion and seeks a valuation of at least $35 billion, which represents a 60% premium to its last private valuation of $22 billion in February. Cerebras also struck an unusual arrangement with OpenAI. The AI lab agreed to pay Cerebras more than $20 billion to use servers powered by the firm’s chips over the next three years, double the figure that was previously associated with the deal. As part of the agreement, OpenAI will receive warrants for a minority portion of Cerebras’ shares, and that ownership could increase as it spends more. OpenAI’s spending over the next three years could reach $30 billion, which could give OpenAI warrants for 10% of the firm. OpenAI also agreed to pay Cerebras $1 billion to fund the development of data centers that would run its AI products. |
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SpaceX subsidiary xAI will rent computing power from its data centers to the coding startup Cursor, Business Insider reported. Cursor plans to use tens of thousands of xAI’s chips to train its latest AI coding model, according to the report. The arrangement could help SpaceX, which acquired xAI in February, offset some of the artificial intelligence’s cash burn from building data centers. xAI also hired two senior Cursor staffers in March, as first reported by The Information. SpaceX as a whole lost just under $5 billion in 2025 once its recent merger with xAI is taken into account, The Information has reported. xAI’s capital expenditures were close to $13 billion last year, while revenue from xAI was $3.2 billion. That figure includes revenue from X, formerly known as Twitter, as well as from sales of xAI’s Grok AI models. |
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China’s regulator said Friday that it had imposed fines totaling 3.52 billion yuan ($515 million) on seven e-commerce businesses including those operated by PDD Holdings, Meituan, JD.com, Alibaba Group and ByteDance, citing their lack of oversight of problematic food delivery merchants. The State Administration for Market Regulation said in a statement that the seven platforms failed to fulfill their legal obligations to strictly review the licenses and qualifications of food merchants known as “ghost takeout” shops that operate without dine-in premises. The crackdown comes after a battle among e-commerce platforms offering instant deliveries of food and other items escalated into an unhinged price war. PDD got the biggest fine, amounting to 1.525 billion yuan, followed by Meituan’s 698 million yuan. In December, Bloomberg reported that PDD employees got into fist fights with Chinese regulators who were conducting investigations at the company’s Shanghai headquarters. PDD fired dozens of employees on its government relations team after the incident, according to Bloomberg. The fines for JD.com and Alibaba were 629 million yuan and 614 million yuan, respectively. ByteDance’s fine was much smaller, at 48 million yuan. In addition to the fines, the regulator also confiscated the companies’ illegal gains, worth 101 million yuan in total. Fifteen executives at the seven companies were also slapped fines totalling 19.7 million yuan. In China, ghost takeout merchants with no physical storefronts became problematic on food delivery platforms, as some operated under highly unhygienic conditions and others evaded inspection and other regulations. |
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Netflix reported 16% higher revenue of $12.25 billion in the first quarter, slightly above its projections, and revealed that cofounder and former CEO Reed Hastings would leave the board this spring. Hastings had stepped down as CEO three years ago, becoming executive chairman, although about a year ago he stepped back further to become simply chairman and a non-executive director. On Thursday, Netflix said Hastings would exit the board so he could “focus on his philanthropy and other pursuits.” He is leaving as Netflix enters a more challenging era, as its growth slows. The company is increasingly reliant on advertising and price increases to lift revenue. While first quarter revenue was strong, Netflix has forecast a slightly slower full year growth rate of between 12% and 14%. The company projected second quarter growth of 13.5%. Netflix shares fell 8.7% in after-hours trading. |
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Meta Platforms is raising prices for its virtual reality headsets by $50 to $100 each, citing rising global memory chip costs. The company said Thursday in a blog post that its Meta Quest 3S, first released in 2024, will now cost $349.99 for the 128GB model and $449.99 for the 256GB model—both $50 higher than before—and $599.99 for the Quest 3 512GB model, which is $100 higher than before. Memory chips, a key component of GPUs used in both AI servers and gaming computers, have seen surging demand due to the AI boom as they are required in large quantities to train and run machine-learning models. “We’re making this change because the cost of building high-performance VR hardware has risen significantly,” the company wrote. “The global surge in the price of critical components —specifically memory chips—is impacting almost every category of consumer electronics, including VR.” In December, two Meta vice presidents in its hardware division, Gabriel Aul and Ryan Cairns, told employees in a memo that the company would raise prices for its virtual reality devices and factor in new costs, such as tariffs, to ensure long-term sustainability. |
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Alibaba Group has open sourced a smaller size version of its latest Qwen3.6 large language models. The new release shows how Alibaba is becoming more selective with which models to open source, as it shifts its focus toward proprietary AI models that could generate more revenue. The Chinese tech giant, which became a powerhouse in open-source AI models in the past few years, is now putting more effort into selling powerful closed-source models that come in relatively large sizes to enterprise customers of its Alibaba Cloud business. Over the past several weeks, Alibaba has launched multiple new proprietary models. At the same time, Alibaba continues to open source some of its new models that come in smaller sizes, allowing users to download them for free. Smaller but capable models that are less expensive to run are in strong demand from cost-conscious startups and developers. Alibaba said the newly launched Qwen3.6-35B-A3B open-source model, which has 35 billion parameters, offers AI coding capabilities comparable to other models that are ten times larger. In line with this strategy, Alibaba is also planning to release yet another open-source version of Qwen3.6 later this month that is smaller than the 35B model, according to an employee with knowledge of the plan. |
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