The Rundown: Daily AI & Compute
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OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna prices by 80% after its own model reduced serving cost by 20%, making cheap autonomy easier to start and harder to budget
July 30, 2026 · 2 minOpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna API prices by 80% to $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output, while Terra fell 20% to $2 and $12. Fast mode gives Sol up to 2.5 times Standard speed at twice the price. OpenAI says Sol-assisted…
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Microsoft spent $41bn in a quarter and Azure grew 43%, while Copilot passed 30m paid seats, showing the infrastructure is monetizing faster than the assistant
July 30, 2026 · 2 minMicrosoft reported $90bn of quarterly revenue as Azure grew 43% and Microsoft Cloud reached $59.3bn. The company spent $41bn on capital equipment, about two thirds on short-lived CPUs and GPUs, while generating $55.4bn in operating cash…
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MCP removed its handshake and session state after reaching nearly half a billion monthly SDK downloads, turning agent tools into ordinary routable web infrastructure
July 30, 2026 · 2 minMCP's 2026-07-28 specification removes the required handshake and protocol session, its largest operational change since remote transport launched. Every request becomes self-describing and can land behind a plain load balancer, while…
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Kimi K3 puts 2.8 trillion parameters and a million-token window into open weights, but activates only 104bn at a time, making the frontier portable before it is cheap
July 30, 2026 · 2 minMoonshot AI released Kimi K3 as an open-weight 2.8tn-parameter model with 104bn parameters active per token. The system selects 16 of 896 experts, supports a one-million-token context and claims 2.5 times K2's scaling efficiency. Its…
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Alphabet's $900m SpaceX cheque became a $94.1bn stake, turning a decade-old strategic investment into a balance-sheet business large enough to move the quarter
July 30, 2026 · 2 minAlphabet's original $900m SpaceX investment is now worth $94.1bn, turning a strategic supplier stake into a material business. The roughly 6% holding is more than 100 times larger, with about $80bn under short-term restrictions and another…
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Nvidia and SK Group put a $500bn umbrella over chips, memory and a 2GW AI campus, but the first useful number is still missing: how much capacity is actually under contract
July 30, 2026 · 2 minNvidia and SK Group announced a $500bn AI partnership covering memory, systems and a Korean AI campus. The disclosed plan includes long-term HBM4 supply and a 2GW South Korean datacentre built around Vera Rubin, with initial service…
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Anthropic replaced its flagship model today and did not change the price, while Stripe moved to buy the switch that chooses between models for close to $10bn, the engine tier keeps improving at a flat number and the routing layer just repriced roughly e
July 24, 2026 · 5 minAnthropic released Claude Opus 5, replacing Opus 4.8 at the top of its lineup with stronger agentic judgement, more efficient tool calling and 84% on the Online-Mind2Web computer-use benchmark, at identical pricing of $5 per million input…
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Google is going to rent: after a record $44.9bn quarter of capital spending pushed free cash flow negative, Alphabet says it will lease third-party datacentre capacity as a bridge, the most vertically integrated compute company on earth becoming a tenan
July 24, 2026 · 5 minAlphabet's Q2 2026 contained a bigger signal than its capital spending: CFO Anat Ashkenazi said the company will use third-party datacenter capacity as a bridge in Q3 because it remains supply-constrained. The most vertically integrated…