Walter Schulze

Walter Schulze · Jul 21, 2026 · 2:43 PM

Trump's Top AI Safety Official Resigns as the AI Czar Post Sits Empty

CAISI director Chris Fall resigned after just three months, the second AI safety leadership departure in a row, while the actual White House AI czar post has sat vacant since March. The churn comes as Washington debates restricting China's Kimi K3 open weight model.

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Walter Schulze · Jul 21, 2026 · 9:56 AM

China Weighs Locking Down Qwen and Doubao Just as the World Adopted Them

China Weighs Locking Down Qwen and Doubao Just as the World Adopted Them

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Walter Schulze · Jul 21, 2026 · 6:13 AM

Oracle Sues Wisconsin Over A $7 Billion Data Center Collateral Bill

Oracle sued Wisconsin's Public Service Commission over a rule that could force it to post more than $7 billion in collateral for its Port Washington data center campus. The fight helped push S&P to cut Oracle's credit rating to BBB-, one notch above junk, as the company's AI spending outpaces its cash flow.

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Walter Schulze · Jul 21, 2026 · 2:21 AM

Chris Fall Resigns as Head of the US AI Safety Agency CAISI

Chris Fall resigned as director of the Commerce Department's Center for AI Standards and Innovation on Monday, just three months into the job, with no reason given. NIST Director Dr. Arvind Raman steps in as acting director while the White House weighs whether to ban the Chinese open-weight models CAISI was built to evaluate.

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Walter Schulze · Jul 20, 2026 · 8:52 PM

Jeff Bezos and the UK Government Just Bet $450 Million on CuspAI

CuspAI, a Cambridge AI-for-materials-discovery startup, raised a $450 million Series B at a $2.6 billion valuation, with Jeff Bezos's family office and the UK's Sovereign AI Fund investing side by side. The round arrived alongside the launch of an AI Materials Foundry coalition with Nvidia and Meta.

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Walter Schulze · Jul 20, 2026 · 3:49 PM

Blackstone Bets $676 Million on Futronic, the Robot Actuator Maker From Korea

Blackstone has agreed to acquire a majority stake in Futronic, a South Korean actuator maker, valuing the company at roughly $676 million. The deal, first reported by Bloomberg, bets on the unglamorous parts suppliers behind humanoid robots rather than the robot brands themselves.

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Walter Schulze · Jul 20, 2026 · 10:48 AM

Zhongji Innolight Raises Hong Kong IPO Target to $7 Billion

Zhongji Innolight, the world's top optical transceiver maker and a key Nvidia supplier, won Hong Kong Stock Exchange approval and raised its IPO target from $5 billion to $7 billion after strong roadshow demand. The deal is set to become Hong Kong's largest listing of 2026, even as the company sits on the Pentagon's list of Chinese military-linked firms.

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Walter Schulze · Jul 20, 2026 · 9:30 AM

How Much Runway Do You Need Before Raising, and How to Model It

How much runway do I need before raising is the wrong question on its own. What actually decides whether investors fund you is your burn multiple, the ratio of cash burned to net new ARR added, and this guide shows how to build a month-by-month model that tracks it before your raise even starts.

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Walter Schulze · Jul 20, 2026 · 7:32 AM

TSMC Doubles Down on Arizona as It Sees Years of AI Chip Demand Ahead

TSMC posted a record quarter and told investors it expects strong, multi-year AI chip demand, pushing its US investment to $265 billion just days after a $3.3 trillion semiconductor selloff. Micron's own blowout earnings and new take-or-pay customer contracts back up the same read: the AI infrastructure buildout isn't slowing, whatever chip stocks are pricing in.

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Walter Schulze · Jul 20, 2026 · 1:52 AM

Indian AI startup Emergent hits $1.5 billion valuation a year after launching

Emergent, a Bengaluru based AI coding startup, raised a $130 million Series C led by Creaegis at a $1.5 billion valuation, a five fold jump in four months. The platform lets non-technical entrepreneurs build software by prompt, and now counts 200,000 paying customers and $120 million in annual run rate revenue.

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Walter Schulze · Jul 19, 2026 · 3:25 PM

AMD Acquires FastFlowLM Team to Speed Up AI on Ryzen Chips

AMD absorbed the small open-source team behind FastFlowLM, the software that makes its Ryzen AI NPUs actually fast at running large language models. The stock dropped the same day, but that had more to do with a sector-wide selloff triggered by TSMC's capex guidance than the deal itself.

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Walter Schulze · Jul 19, 2026 · 9:48 AM

Netflix Confirms It Paid $587 Million in Cash for Ben Affleck's AI Startup

Netflix's July 2026 Form 10-Q filing revealed it paid $587 million in cash for InterPositive, the AI post-production startup Ben Affleck founded in 2022. The tools have already been used across roughly 300 Netflix titles, mostly for VFX and crowd-scene work.

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Walter Schulze · Jul 19, 2026 · 5:28 AM

XRP Withdrawals From Binance Hit Their Highest Level Since 2024

Binance's share of XRP withdrawal transactions hit 54.5% on July 17, the highest since July 2024, mirroring the setup that preceded XRP's 66% rally last summer. Analyst Amr Taha cautions the metric tracks transaction share, not volume, so it's not a guaranteed repeat.

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Walter Schulze · Jul 18, 2026 · 9:58 PM

Kazakhstan Exempts Crypto Gains From Tax and Legalizes Flared Gas for Bitcoin Mining

President Tokayev signed a decree on July 7 exempting individual crypto trading income from tax on regulated Kazakh platforms and legalizing the use of flared natural gas to power Bitcoin mining. Kazakhstan already holds about 13% of global hashrate, third behind the US and China.

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Walter Schulze · Jul 18, 2026 · 9:00 AM

Databricks Hits $188 Billion Valuation With New $3 Billion Coatue Round

Coatue Management is leading a $3 billion investment in Databricks at a $188 billion valuation, a 40% jump from its February raise. The deal reflects a broader shift of investor money toward AI infrastructure plays like SambaNova and Fireworks AI rather than frontier model labs.

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Walter Schulze · Jul 18, 2026 · 5:14 AM

AWS billing dashboard told a customer who spent 19 cents that they owed 2.5 billion dollars

AWS's billing console spent Thursday night into Friday showing customers wildly inflated cost estimates, including one user whose 19 cent monthly bill was projected at nearly 2.5 billion dollars. Amazon traced the bug to a unit-pricing error in its estimated billing subsystem and says real charges were never affected, with a fix expected by Saturday, July 18.

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