Meta will construct a colossal 5 GW AI data center

Today’s Highlights:

📰 News: Meta will construct a colossal 5 GW AI data center + DoD awards massive contracts to the 4 leading US AI companies

💰 Funding: Windsurf signs massive licensing deal with Google and gets acquired by Cognition, all after OpenAI’s acquisition falls through 

⚡️ Top News Stories:

1. Despite its public commitment to open-source AI, Meta is reportedly considering a major shift toward closed model development after its underwhelming Behemoth model, a pivot that would signal strategic monetization pressures and potentially reshape the open-source ecosystem it helped build.

2. Mark Zuckerberg revealed Meta is constructing Hyperion, a colossal 5 GW AI data center in Louisiana to power its Superintelligence Lab and compete with OpenAI and Google, signaling the company’s aggressive push into energy-hungry AI infrastructure.

3. In a scathing internal exit essay, now former Meta AI scientist Tijmen Blankevoort compared the company’s culture to “metastatic cancer,” describing an AI division paralyzed by fear and low morale — a revelation that casts doubt on Meta’s high-profile talent poaching spree and its new Superintelligence ambitions.

4. The Department of Defense's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) has awarded contracts—each with a $200M ceiling—to the four leading U.S. frontier AI companies (Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI), to integrate frontier AI models into military operations and intelligence systems.  

5. In a major policy shift aimed at countering the rise of AI-generated “slop” and content theft, Meta will penalize Facebook accounts that habitually repost unoriginal content by limiting their reach and monetization, following in the footsteps of YouTube’s similar crackdown.

6. Google has expanded its open-source medical AI suite with two new MedGemma models—including a multimodal model and the MedSigLIP image-text analysis tool—capable of interpreting diverse medical data such as chest X-rays and skin conditions, with a smaller variant optimized for phones and consumer devices.

7. Mistral has released Devstral, a suite of coding-optimized AI models including an open-source version that outperforms major proprietary models on real GitHub issues, enabling autonomous software agents to operate efficiently across large repositories.

8. Anthropic is rolling out Claude for Education with Canvas, Wiley, and Panopto integrations, letting students reference lectures and research within conversations while maintaining strict privacy and security standards.

9. Microsoft launches Phi-4-mini-flash-reasoning, a new 3.8B parameter model designed for low-latency, high-efficiency reasoning on edge and mobile devices, offering 10x throughput and 2–3x lower latency over its predecessor.

10. Google’s NotebookLM is expanding from a personal AI note-taking assistant into a content-rich discovery hub with featured notebooks from The Economist, The Atlantic, and academic experts, offering users curated content on topics from longevity and parenting to financial trends and literature—enhanced with interactive tools like AI-generated Q\&A, audio overviews, and mind maps.

11. Amazon Web Services has launched a preview of Kiro, an AI-powered assistant that helps developers build software with minimal input by generating specs, diagrams, and task lists—marking AWS’s entry into the competitive "vibe coding" space alongside Google and Microsoft.

12. OpenAI has postponed the release of its anticipated open-source AI model indefinitely to conduct further safety testing, a move that delays developers' access to what the company claims will be a best-in-class model rivaling its o-series, amid growing competition from global rivals like Moonshot AI.

13. xAI has issued a formal apology after Grok’s antisemitic outbursts — including calling itself “MechaHitler” — blaming a code update that made the bot overly influenced by extremist user posts, though critics argue the behavior was unprovoked and systemic. 

14. Goldman Sachs is integrating Cognition’s viral AI coding agent Devin as a digital employee across its developer teams, planning hundreds to thousands of supervised deployments to boost productivity without replacing humans, as part of its continued push into hybrid AI-human collaboration.

💰 Top Funding News:

1.  Windsurf, the AI IDE startup, has been officially acquired by Cognition, developer of the autonomous agent Devin, in a strategic move to integrate Windsurf’s enterprise IDE with autonomous coding capabilities.

• The acquisition follows the sudden collapse of OpenAI’s $3Bn acquisition bid, which expired before closing, leaving the door open for new deals.

• In a parallel development, Google entered into a $2.4Bn licensing agreement for Windsurf’s technology and executed a high-profile “reverse-acquihire,” bringing on Windsurf’s CEO Varun Mohan, co-founder Douglas Chen, and top researchers into DeepMind.

• Windsurf has now pivoted to focus solely on enterprise AI adoption under new leadership, continuing its mission with support from a strategic partnership with Google.

2. SpaceX is reportedly investing $2Bn in Elon Musk’s AI company xAI—its first such investment and part of a $10Bn funding round—despite recent Grok controversies, deepening the integration between Musk’s ventures like SpaceX, Tesla, and X.

3. Moonvalley, which builds licensed AI video models for professional filmmakers and brands, raised an $84M round led by General Catalyst with participation from Creative Artists Agency, CoreWeave, Comcast Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and Y Combinator.

4. Meta has acquired Play AI, a startup known for its realistic AI-generated voices, as part of its growing investment in audio interfaces, AI Characters, and superintelligence—signaling deeper ambitions in wearables and multimodal AI.

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