The Information AM

Save 25% on an annual subscription to read the most important news about technology and business first. For even more, Save $250 on The Information Pro for unlimited access to our proprietary org charts, databases and surveys.

1.	TSMC Plans Another $100 Billion U.S. Investment as AI Demand Surges By Qianer Liu Source: The Information

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company said on Thursday it will invest an additional $100 billion in the U.S., deepening its pledge to manufacture the world’s most advanced chips in Arizona as demand for AI infrastructure surges.

The expansion will add at least four chip plants and advanced-packaging facilities, bringing TSMC’s announced U.S. investment to $265 billion. The new factories will use 2-nanometer or more advanced technology, CEO C.C. Wei said, without giving a timeline for the construction, which he said will depend on market demand.

The U.S. expansion is part of TSMC’s broader increase in spending to meet demand from customers including Nvidia and Apple. TSMC raised its 2026 capital expenditure forecast to $60 billion to $64 billion from $52 billion to $56 billion, while lifting its projected revenue growth in U.S. dollar terms to slightly above 40% from more than 30%. The company reported revenue in the second quarter rose 33.7% to $40.2 billion from a year ago, while net income jumped 77.4% to about $22 billion.

Wei said customers were pressing TSMC to expand capacity, while inflation had increased the cost of chipmaking equipment. TSMC is pushing back against proposed price increases from ASML, its main supplier of the lithography machines used to make advanced chips, The Information reported

2.	Stripe, Advent Made Joint Offer to Buy PayPal By Yueqi Yang Source: Reuters

Stripe and private equity firm Advent International made an unsolicited joint offer to buy PayPal at $60.50 per share, valuing the company at more than $53 billion, Reuters reported late Tuesday. Stripe and Advent haven’t received a response from PayPal, and there’s no certainty the offer will result in a transaction, Reuters said. The offer price represents a premium of 28% to PayPal’s closing price on Tuesday. PayPal shares jumped 16% to $54.98 per share as of Monday midday.

PayPal shares have fallen 80% in the past five years from its pandemic-era e-commerce high, due to competition and slowing growth. In March, it appointed a new CEO, Enrique Lores, a board member of PayPal and former HP CEO, replacing Alex Chriss. In April, it reorganized its business into three units, covering checkout, consumer financial services Venmo, and payments and crypto.  Stripe-PayPal deal, if completed, could create the world’s largest merchant acquirer and give Stripe more direct consumer relationships.

3.	Senior AWS Exec Dave Brown Departs By Kevin McLaughlin and Catherine Perloff Source: The Information

Longtime Amazon Web Services executive Dave Brown is leaving the cloud provider, AWS chief Matt Garman told staff Wednesday. Brown is going to a “new role outside the company,” Garman said.

Brown had been running AWS’ compute and machine learning services, and he also ran the company’s Trainium AI chip business that has become increasingly important. Dave Treadwell, a current senior executive at Amazon’s commerce group, is taking Brown’s place, Garman said.

The move comes as AWS has recently accelerated revenue, as have its main AI rivals, in part by providing servers to large AI customers such as Anthropic and OpenAI.

4.	Thinking Machines Lab’s First Model Gives Nod to Chinese Open Source AI By Juro Osawa Source: The Information

Thinking Machines Lab, co-founded last year by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, announced its first AI model called Inkling, while giving a nod to Chinese open-source models.

Thinking Machines said in a blog post that Inkling’s architecture design “largely follows” DeepSeek’s V3 model, which was released in late 2024. For a part of Inkling’s post-training process, the U.S. firm also used data generated by open-source models including Chinese startup Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2.5.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic have repeatedly accused Chinese model developers including DeepSeek of distilling their models, saying the practice violated their usage policy.

For Thinking Machines, Inkling is a modest first step. “Inkling is not the strongest overall model available today, open or closed,” the firm said. “We trained it to be a broad, balanced foundation model: strong across many domains, flexible enough to adapt.”

5.	Nvidia Releases New Robotics AI Model By Phoebe Liu Source: The Information

Nvidia on Wednesday released a new small, open-source model for “physical” AI that operates in the real world, including for robots.

The model, Cosmos 3 Edge, is just 4 billion parameters and can run on a customer’s own computer rather than in a data center. It can act as both a so-called vision language model or a world model, both of which help robots navigate or understand their surroundings. (There’s heated debate in robotics over which type of model is best.)

Nvidia also released new versions of its Jetson computer for powering robotics applications, though they are less powerful and have less memory than the prior version.

Deepu Talla, Nvidia’s vice president of robotics and edge AI, said that, collectively, 2.5 million developers and 10,000 companies have used Nvidia’s Jetson hardware and Cosmos models. Nvidia’s non-data center revenue streams, which include hardware sales from Jetson, Nvidia’s new PC and gaming card sales made up 8% of its revenue last quarter.

6.	SpaceX Shares Drop Below IPO Price By Grace Kay Source: The Information

Shares of SpaceX fell below their June initial public offering price of $135 on Wednesday, and are now trading around 40% below their peak hit last m