Four things that happened in tech worth knowing. Two lines each, link to the source.
Tesla and SpaceX build Terafab, their own chip plant
On August 6, Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, and Intel confirmed the site for Terafab in Texas, near Houston, with an initial investment of $16.8 billion and over 3,000 jobs planned. Musk calls it the largest and most valuable building on Earth: the goal is to make in-house the chips they now buy from others, instead of waiting in line behind global AI compute demand.
ByteDance trains a 10-trillion-parameter model
The Financial Times reports that TikTok's owner is pretraining a model with up to 10 trillion parameters, nearly four times the size of Moonshot AI's Kimi K3. Sources say the goal is to match Anthropic's Mythos, the system Chinese labs have not yet caught up to. Parameter count alone still says nothing about real performance.
Google reshuffles its AI leadership as Hassabis steps back
Demis Hassabis moves from operational CEO of DeepMind to Chairman and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, while Koray Kavukcuoglu takes over Gemini and frontier research, reporting directly to Pichai. The same day, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat left Google after 27 years to launch Discovery Loop, a direct competitor. Alphabet stock dropped about 5%.
A judge orders Meta to pay $567M over kids' mental health
A New Mexico court ordered Meta to pay $567 million for failing to warn the public about the risks its platforms pose to children, bringing its total in the state to $942 million. The judge compared the company to a polluting factory and called it a public nuisance. Four states are now seeking up to $1.4 trillion in a separate trial opening this month in Oakland.
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