Databricks hits $188 billion; San Francisco targets nudify apps

Databricks is raising about $3 billion in a round led by Coatue that values the data-and-AI company at $188 billion, up from $134 billion in February and $100 billion last September. The deal extends one of the fastest valuation climbs in enterprise software and reflects investor conviction that Databricks has finished its pivot from big-data analytics into a full AI platform — pushing products like its Lakebase agent database and championing cheaper open-weight models for enterprise cost control. The financing is expected to close later this summer.

San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu sent cease-and-desist letters ordering Apple and Google to stop distributing and profiting from 13 AI 'nudify' apps — marketed as face-swap tools but used to generate nonconsensual nude deepfakes of women and girls. Chiu argues the companies are 'aiding and abetting' the spread of the images and have likely made millions from in-app purchases tied to them. Google said it has already removed hundreds of such apps and takes swift action against violations; Apple did not comment before publication.

Surging AI data-center demand for memory is squeezing consumer electronics, as chip makers steer supply toward far more profitable AI servers. Counterpoint Research says mobile memory prices in the second quarter ran nearly double their late-2025 levels, helping drag global smartphone shipments down about 3 percent to their weakest second quarter in 13 years and ending nine straight quarters of growth. Budget phones are hit hardest — models priced under 150 dollars face what analysts call a near-permanent squeeze out of the market — with price-sensitive markets like India seeing the sharpest declines.

Agility Robotics opened a 60,000-square-foot center in Fremont, California — minutes from Tesla's factory, where Optimus production is expected — to train its Digit humanoid for real-world work. The company says it now holds about 300 million dollars in contract orders, with Digits having moved more than 100,000 totes at a GXO warehouse and customers including Amazon and Toyota. Agility is also pursuing a reverse merger to become the first pure-play humanoid-robot company on public markets, with a more capable fifth-generation Digit due this fall.

In this week's Stratechery, Ben Thompson argues that IBM's steep stock decline is not just corporate budgets shifting toward AI, but something more permanent: AI can now port the essential back-end programs that still run on decades-old mainframes onto modern systems. If that holds, the lock-in that made the mainframe IBM's most defensible business for over a century erodes, and those lost sales never come back. It is an early, concrete example of AI dissolving a competitive moat that looked untouchable.

Three FireSat satellites — built by Muon Space for the nonprofit Earth Fire Alliance, with over 15 million dollars from Google.org and AI models from Google Research — launched on July 7th and are entering service just as thick wildfire smoke blankets the United States and Canada. Using multispectral imaging that can see through smoke, the constellation is designed to detect fires as small as five by five meters and flag them to agencies before they spread — early enough to matter, unlike most satellites that only see large, established blazes. The pilot has already spotted small fires other systems missed.