Intel's second-quarter 2026 revenue exceeded $16 billion, marking a 25% increase from the previous year and its fastest growth pace since late 2011. The company's adjusted earnings per share reached 42 cents, doubling Wall Street's estimate of 21 cents. While shares initially rose on the strong performance, they later declined during extended trading sessions. The surge was largely driven by a 59% increase in AI data center revenue.
For the first time in internet history, automated bots have overtaken humans in web traffic. Security firm Cloudflare reports that bot-driven requests surpassed 50% in June, now comprising close to 58% of all webpage visits. Another study by cybersecurity company HUMAN supports these findings, signaling a significant shift in the nature of web interactions.
Federal prosecutors arrested two Volkswagen engineers in San Jose, California, charging them with insider trading. Michael Stamp and Marcus Plank, who work at VW’s US operations, allegedly purchased Rivian stock before the company publicly announced its multibillion-dollar joint venture with the electric vehicle manufacturer. Each faces one count of federal securities fraud.
A UK employment tribunal has decided that requiring a remote worker with anxiety, ADHD, and autism to keep her camera on during a video training session was discriminatory. Laura Tait, a home-based travel consultant for Holiday Extras, received compensation after the Croydon tribunal ruled the employer failed to provide reasonable adjustments for her conditions.
Etched offers a focused alternative to Nvidia's all-encompassing chip approach by specializing exclusively in inference chips, claiming superior performance in that niche. The startup's targeted strategy has attracted substantial investor confidence, culminating in a $300 million Series C funding round led by Sequoia, boosting its valuation to $10.3 billion in just seven months.
For the past two decades, Google and publishers maintained a straightforward arrangement: publishers allowed Google to crawl their pages, and in return, Google directed traffic back to them. This mutually beneficial relationship is now under strain. Reddit has emerged as one of the latest and most prominent platforms to consider limiting Google's access to its content. Following reports from the Wall Street Journal, Reddit's shares dropped by about 9% on Wednesday, highlighting the growing tensions around content sharing between publishers and search engines.
Cathedral, a covert military cybersecurity venture established by four ex-Department of Government Efficiency employees, has secured $160 million in funding, reaching a $1.4 billion valuation. Leading venture firms Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital participated in the funding round and took seats on the company's board. The startup aims to develop AI-powered offensive and defensive cyber capabilities to protect US government interests from various threats.
AMD introduced a new range of data center products at its Advancing AI event in San Francisco, asserting their superior performance over Nvidia’s AI training and inference hardware. The product lineup features the MI455X AI accelerator and the Helios server rack, which integrates 72 MI455X chips into a single system, along with the Venice platform. These innovations mark AMD's effort to close the competitive gap with Nvidia in AI technology.
During Tesla’s Q2 earnings call, Elon Musk cautioned investors that scaling production of the Optimus humanoid robot will be the most difficult manufacturing challenge Tesla has faced. He highlighted that Optimus lacks an existing supply chain and involves entirely new components. Musk emphasized the importance of setting realistic expectations for this ambitious project, acknowledging that the initial phases will be complex and demanding.
Cisco has introduced its Antares AI models, which are compact enough to operate on personal devices. These models reportedly surpass the performance of Google's Gemini and comparable GPT systems in identifying software bugs. Cisco is releasing these models as open-weight, but access will be selectively granted after a review process. This move signals Cisco's subtle challenge to the prevailing trend of developing ever-larger AI models, emphasizing efficiency and accessibility instead.
