THE RUNDOWN

SpaceX's AI revenue tripled year-over-year to $2.6 billion, driven largely by deals to provide compute to other AI companies — including a headline-grabbing arrangement with Anthropic and Google. Overall revenue doubled compared to last year, with Starlink continuing to pull serious weight. The first earnings call had its own entertainment value too: Musk kept inflating the already-ambitious numbers his CFO and Gwynne Shotwell were presenting, one-upping his own team live on the call.

Electronic Arts has officially completed its $55 billion takeover, led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. The deal closes a chapter on EA as a publicly traded company, but it's not exactly a clean slate — the company is carrying $20 billion in new debt going into this next phase. How EA's new owners handle that while trying to compete in an increasingly expensive games market is the real story to watch.

AMD posted data center revenue of $6.7 billion in its latest quarter — more than double what it recorded the same period last year. AI chip demand is doing the heavy lifting here, while AMD's gaming division has gone quiet by comparison. The numbers reinforce just how completely enterprise AI has reshuffled the semiconductor industry's priorities over the past two years.

Anthropic has been signing cloud partnerships at a dizzying pace, and its latest is a reported $10 billion agreement with AI cloud startup Volta. It's a massive bet on compute infrastructure at a time when the AI arms race is essentially a race to secure processing power. If you're following the AI industry, Anthropic's partnership strategy is one of the more interesting competitive moves happening right now.

Texas built its identity as America's AI data center capital — and then realised it had quietly approved connections totalling over 400 gigawatts of power demand across more than 500 facilities. The governor has now ordered an audit and paused new data center grid connections. It's a sharp turnaround from the state that was marketing itself as the 'epicenter' of AI infrastructure just months ago, and it raises real questions about how seriously governments are thinking through the energy consequences of the AI buildout.

A new report from SaferAI found that Z.ai's open-weight GLM-5.2 model is approaching the capabilities of frontier AI systems — but without the safety mitigations that labs like Anthropic and OpenAI have built in. Open-weight models are getting better fast, which is great for accessibility, but the safety gap is widening just as quickly. It's a tension the AI research community hasn't resolved yet.

Signal rolled out a long-requested feature: you can now link multiple phones — Android or iPhone — to a single account, not just tablets and desktops. It's a practical upgrade for people who carry more than one device, and it keeps Signal competitive as encrypted messaging becomes more mainstream. For privacy-conscious users across Africa who rely on Signal, this is a genuinely useful quality-of-life change.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has flagged a nasty problem: some third-party code that Android developers drop into their apps is quietly collecting and sharing users' location data with advertisers — often without the developers even realising it. It's a security and privacy issue that hits users who have no idea it's happening, and it puts the responsibility on developers to audit the SDKs they're using.

Pavel Durov claims that child sexual abuse material was deliberately planted in a public Telegram chat by an extortionist trying to get the app pulled from Apple's App Store — and it worked, at least temporarily. Durov is framing it as a 'systemic risk' for any platform that hosts user-generated content. Whether you take his word for it or not, it highlights how platforms can be weaponised against themselves through their own content moderation systems.

Perplexity has overturned the injunction Amazon filed against its AI shopping assistant back in November 2025. The AI search company's bot, which helps users find and compare products, had been blocked from operating in ways Amazon objected to. The legal win keeps Perplexity in the game as it tries to carve out territory in e-commerce search — one of the most commercially valuable corners of the internet.

It's a day where the money flows make the story: rockets funded by AI compute deals, gaming giants absorbed by sovereign wealth funds, and an entire US state scrambling to manage the power consequences of bets it made a few years ago. The infrastructure reality of the AI era is catching up with the hype — and not always gracefully.