inklede.

Meta will build its first Canadian data center, a $9 billion, 1GW facility near Edmonton in Sturgeon County, Alberta. Construction takes two to three years and will support around 3,000 construction jobs and 300 permanent operations jobs once running. Meta is spending CAD $60 million on local roads and water infrastructure and says it will match the facility's electricity use with 100% clean and renewable energy, covering the costs itself. Alberta was chosen for its infrastructure access, robust grid, talent pool, and lenient regulatory environment. Meta is working with local energy providers including Greenlight Limited Partnership, Altalink, and Capital Power. This is Meta's 33rd data center campus globally, part of a buildout the company expects will cost $125-145 billion in 2026 alone.

Microsoft is cutting roughly 3,200 Xbox jobs over the next fiscal year, with about 1,600 eliminated immediately, and is spinning off four studios. Double Fine and Compulsion Games return to independence under founders Tim Schafer and Guillaume Provost, while Ninja Theory and Undead Labs are being sold to new owners with funding secured to finish Senua's next game and State of Decay 3. Arkane Studios, developing the delayed and over-budget Blade, is under review in France. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma's internal memo says the division lost 64 cents for every dollar invested in a typical year and operates at margins 3 to 10 times lower than comparable businesses. Mojang and King will now report directly to Sharma, and management layers will be cut to a maximum of five.

NVIDIA released Nemotron-Labs-3-Puzzle-75B-A9B, a compressed version of its Nemotron-3-Super hybrid Mamba-Transformer MoE model, shrinking it from 120.7B total/12.8B active parameters to 75.3B total/9.3B active while preserving the original's 88-block layout. Using an iterative neural architecture search process called Puzzle, plus knowledge distillation and RL recovery, the compressed model delivers 1.60x to 2.14x higher total throughput on an 8xB200 node depending on workload, and raises concurrency for 1M-token requests on a single H100 from 1 to 8, since its NVFP4 weights occupy about 44.5GB versus 70GB for the original. The tradeoff is accuracy loss concentrated in agentic and instruction-following benchmarks: Arena-Hard-V2 drops 4.2 points and SWE-Bench drops 2.6 points, while long-context benchmarks like RULER barely move. Checkpoints are available on Hugging Face in BF16, FP8, and NVFP4.

Google Research introduced SensorFM, a foundation model for wearable health data pretrained on over one trillion minutes of sensor data from 5 million consented participants across 100-plus countries. The model uses a ViT-1D encoder with a masked-autoencoder objective, ingesting 34 aggregate features from PPG, accelerometer, EDA, skin temperature, and altimeter sensors over 24-hour windows. Four model sizes were tested, with the largest (110.7 million parameters, trained on 5 million subjects) cutting reconstruction loss by 31% versus the smallest and winning 33 of 35 downstream health prediction tasks, covering cardiovascular, metabolic, mental health, sleep, and demographic outcomes.

A novel masking technique called AIM lets the model treat missing sensor data as signal rather than noise, improving imputation accuracy by up to 83.7% over baselines. In blinded physician evaluation across 31 participant profiles, adding SensorFM predictions to AI-generated health summaries improved quality ratings and was statistically indistinguishable from using ground-truth data.

China is considering restrictions on foreign access to its most advanced AI models, according to Reuters sources describing talks last month between the Ministry of Commerce and companies including Alibaba, ByteDance and Z.ai. The proposed rules, still under debate, could classify theft or transfer of protected AI technology under national security law and tighten controls on funding for domestic AI startups. An expert panel in May proposed a tiered system: basic open-source tools would need only registration, advanced technologies would require security review, and the most sensitive frontier models might not be released publicly or would be restricted to domestic use.

The move mirrors US restrictions, including the June decision to bar foreign nationals from Anthropic's Fable and Mythos models. For Europe, which depends on foreign providers for more than 80% of digital products and services per a Draghi report, losing access to cheap Chinese models like Alibaba's Qwen or Z.ai's GLM-5.2 would raise costs. The EU's 200 billion euro InvestAI initiative, including 20 billion euros for AI Gigafactories, is behind schedule, with construction not starting until 2027, against a backdrop of the four largest US tech companies expected to spend roughly $700 billion combined on AI in 2026.

AI and infrastructure dominated the week's largest US venture deals, per Crunchbase News. Keyfactor raised $1 billion in private equity led by Summit Partners for its digital identity and machine identity management software. SambaNova closed a $1 billion Series F at an $11 billion post-money valuation led by General Atlantic, with backers including BlackRock, Intel Capital and T. Rowe Price, for its AI chip and infrastructure business. Quantum startup Oratomic raised a $300 million Series A co-led by Arch Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures and Spark Capital. Other notable rounds: Quaise Energy ($134M, geothermal drilling), Prime Intellect ($130M, distributed AI training), Gauntlet ($125M, DeFi risk software from SBI Group), Norm AI ($120M, AI compliance at a $1.2B valuation), Venus Aerospace ($91M, hypersonic propulsion), EDX Markets ($76M, crypto exchange) and Fore Biotherapeutics ($67.4M, oncology). Non-US highlights included Proxima Fusion's €411M round and Skello's €200M raise.

Kraken Technology Group, a London-based maritime defence company, has raised a €152.9 million ($175 million) Series B round at a valuation of nearly €874.1 million ($1 billion), making it Europe's newest defence unicorn. The round was led by Digital Transformation Capital Partners and backed by the British Business Bank, NATO Innovation Fund, Rheinmetall, Inocea Group, HICO, Thesiger Capital Group, BOKA Capital, Supernova Invest and Hakluyt Capital, with earlier investors NSSIF, SmartCap, Notion Capital and Speedinvest converting to equity.　Founded in 2021 by CEO Mal Crease, Kraken makes uncrewed surface vessels, including the K3 SCOUT, K5 Kraken and K4 MANTA platforms, for maritime awareness, strike and anti-submarine missions. The company has secured contracts with the UK Ministry of Defence, NATO European partners and USSOCOM, and has manufacturing partnerships with Rheinmetall, Anduril Industries and Davie Shipbuilding, with plans to expand into the Middle East and Indo-Pacific.

A federal judge approved a settlement between the SEC and Elon Musk over his 2022 Twitter purchase, despite voicing serious reservations. U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan levied a $1.5 million penalty against Musk, roughly 1% of the $150 million the SEC alleged he saved by failing to disclose his growing stake in Twitter before completing the $44 billion acquisition. The settlement lets Musk deny wrongdoing. The SEC filed the original suit in 2025, shortly before Trump's inauguration, and later filed an amended complaint adding a revocable trust as a co-defendant. Sooknanan wrote she had