Tech News — Week of 2026-05-16 to 2026-05-22#
Story of the Week#
SpaceX’s highly anticipated IPO filings peeled back the curtain on Elon Musk’s labyrinthine empire, revealing the aerospace firm is actually a massive artificial intelligence powerhouse in disguise. The S-1 exposed a staggering $45 billion compute deal with Anthropic and highlighted $20.7 billion in capital expenditures to fuel Musk’s data-centers-in-space ambitions. By pitching investors on a $26.5 trillion total addressable market, Musk is effectively betting SpaceX’s future—and its record-shattering $2 trillion valuation—on dominating the AI hardware and software landscape.
Top Stories#
Data Center Demands Drive Megamerger and Strain Power Grids · Bloomberg The voracious energy appetite of AI data centers is forcing radical, immediate shifts in physical infrastructure. NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy agreed to a historic $67 billion megamerger specifically tailored to feed the power demands of Northern Virginia’s massive data center hubs. Meanwhile, the physical grid is already buckling, with NV Energy reportedly diverting 75% of the electricity supply for 49,000 Lake Tahoe residents to power nearby data centers for tech giants.
Meta Axes 8,000 Jobs to Fund Its AI Obsession · The Verge Meta is ruthlessly cutting 10% of its workforce—roughly 8,000 jobs—while reassigning 7,000 surviving employees to newly formed AI divisions. The sweeping layoffs are a drastic bid to enforce a flatter corporate hierarchy and offset the massive capital requirements of the company’s AI infrastructure. In the background, Meta conveniently settled a bellwether lawsuit with a Kentucky school district over youth social media addiction, averting a highly publicized federal trial on the societal costs of its platforms.
Trump Halts AI Oversight Order After Billionaire Pressure · Slashdot President Trump abruptly canceled a planned executive order that would have mandated government security testing for frontier AI models prior to their public release. The 11th-hour reversal followed intense lobbying from tech leaders like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and David Sacks, who argued the red tape would erode the US innovation lead over China. The administration is now pivoting to a much narrower cybersecurity directive.
Elon Musk Loses Landmark Lawsuit Against OpenAI · TechCrunch A federal jury handed OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman a massive procedural victory, ruling unanimously that Elon Musk waited too long to sue over the company’s shift from a nonprofit to a for-profit entity. The verdict clears a major legal cloud for OpenAI, which is now moving full speed ahead toward a highly anticipated initial public offering targeted for as soon as September. Musk, meanwhile, has already promised to appeal the decision.
Hackers Breach Thousands of GitHub Repositories · Ars Technica A cybercriminal group dubbed TeamPCP successfully executed a massive supply chain attack on GitHub using a poisoned VS Code extension. The attackers breached the platform and stole data from roughly 3,800 internal repositories, which they are now attempting to sell on cybercrime forums. While GitHub confirmed the breach, the Microsoft-owned platform claims the exposed data consists of internal code rather than customer files.
Also Worth Knowing#
- Anthropic Nears $900B Valuation: Anthropic is reportedly closing a massive $30 billion funding round that would push its valuation past $900 billion, catapulting it ahead of OpenAI to become the world’s most valuable AI startup.
- Google’s Search Overhaul: Google introduced a massive search overhaul powered by Gemini 3.5 Flash, shifting away from traditional links toward an “agentic,” conversational interface that threatens to devastate web traffic for digital publishers.
- Nvidia’s $58.3B Profit: Nvidia reported a staggering $58.3 billion quarterly profit, yet Wall Street investors reacted with a shrug due to mounting fears over chip competition and the sustainability of the AI hardware rally.
- Waymo Pauses Operations: Waymo was forced to suspend its robotaxi services in Atlanta and San Antonio after its autonomous vehicles repeatedly drove into flooded intersections and got stuck, while also halting freeway driving across all US markets.
- Fisker Owners Hack Their Cars: Following Fisker’s bankruptcy, a community of stranded Ocean SUV owners successfully reverse-engineered proprietary code to keep their rapidly deprecating software-defined vehicles running, essentially building a volunteer-run car company.