Intel reports Q2 revenue up 25% YoY to $16.1B, vs. $14.42B est., its fastest sales growth in ~15 years on "unprecedented" demand; INTC jumps 10%+ after hours (Kif Leswing/CNBC)

The Pentagon signs an up-to-10-year contract with Oracle worth up to $7B to consolidate department's on-premises software licenses into a single contract (Mike Stone/Reuters)

Tesla stock closed down 14.52% and Alphabet closed down 6.89% after they signaled increased AI spending, amid worries about the mounting costs of the AI boom (Arjun Kharpal/CNBC)

Germany's Black Forest Labs launches Flux 3 and Flux-mimic, its first models for robotics, as it expands from generative AI into physical AI (Yazhou Sun/Bloomberg)

AI inference chip startup Etched raised a $300M Series C led by Sequoia, with a16z, SK Hynix, others participating, at a $10.3B valuation, up from $5B in Dec. (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)

The Little Tech Association, a new group of ~200 companies across the startup community, including Y Combinator, urges Trump not to ban Chinese open-weight AI (Sophia Cai/Politico)

Sources: OpenAI staff were "freaked out" when GPT-Sol 5.6 breached Hugging Face, as OpenAI used more aggressive training methods to compete with Anthropic (Financial Times)