- Sony unveils a cheaper, Japan-only PlayStation 5 Digital Edition for ~$350, a ~25% discount, following a similar move by Nintendo with the Switch 2 (Financial Times)
- Google unveils new features for Pixel phones, including AI-powered notification summaries, notification prioritization, and AI photo edits in Messages (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
- SoFi launches SoFi Crypto, saying it's the first nationally chartered bank in the US to offer crypto trading to consumers (James Hunt/The Block)
- China says the December 2020 theft of 127,272 BTC, now worth ~$13B, from Chinese mining pool LuBian is likely a "state-level hacker operation" led by the US (Bloomberg)
- CoreWeave closed down 16% after its CEO admitted delays at a data center developer that Jim Cramer implied may be Core Scientific; CORZ closed down 10% (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)
- Threads adds new features for podcasters, as it tries to become the de facto place for people to talk about shows and engage with creators (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
- Coinbase confirms that it has called off acquisition talks with stablecoin infra startup BVNK; reports previously put the acquisition price around $2B (Ben Weiss/Fortune)
- Google unveils Private AI Compute, a cloud platform providing a "secure, fortified space" to run AI tools on devices, similar to Apple's Private Cloud Compute (Robert Hart/The Verge)
- AMD CEO Lisa Su says AMD's annual revenue growth will average 35%+ a year over the next three to five years and the total AI chip market will reach $1T by 2030 (Ian King/Bloomberg)
- Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine partner with ElevenLabs to create AI versions of their voices for its Iconic Voice Marketplace; McConaughey also invests (Todd Spangler/Variety)
- Sony says PlayStation 5 has sold a total of 84.2M units since launch, including 3.9M units sold in Q2, up from 3.8M a year ago (Steve Dent/Engadget)
- Google rolls out Nano Banana image editing upgrades in Photos, including a "help me edit" feature that lets users make edits using text or voice prompts (Elyse Betters Picaro/ZDNET)
- Amazon says ads on Prime Video reach 315M viewers across its series and films, live sports and events, and free, ad-supported live channels (Dade Hayes/Deadline)
- A UK judge jails a Chinese woman to 11 years and 8 months in prison for laundering bitcoin linked to a £5B investment scheme in which UK seized 61K bitcoin (Upmanyu Trivedi/Bloomberg)
- Lighter, which operates an Ethereum Layer 2 network and a decentralized exchange to support perpetual futures contracts, raised $68M at a ~$1.5B valuation (Ben Weiss/Fortune)