Tech News · The field notes
Personal Tech — Saturday, September 19, 2026
Anthropic partners with Accenture on a two billion dollar model evaluation pact and pushes back on the DOJ's Google remedy; CoreWeave seeks three billion more; Mazama Energy raises one hundred thirty-five million for geothermal; chip stocks rebound.
Anthropic-Accenture $2B partnership (Sept 18)
- each commits ≥$1B over five years for independent evaluation of Anthropic frontier models
- Accenture's Faculty leads, evaluate/red-team/alignment assessments
- "embedded evaluation" with employee-level access
- verify safety commitments, report incidents publicly
Anthropic asks federal court to nix DOJ Google search remedy (Sept 18)
- proposal would block Google from investing in AI startups
- Google invested ~$3B in Anthropic, Amazon also a backer
- "would harm both Anthropic and competition more generally"
CoreWeave raises again (Sept 17)
- $3B convertible bond offering (due 2033) + 35M-share ATM program
- up to ~$3.5B total to fund AI data-center buildout, push toward investment-grade credit
Mazama Energy $135M Series B (Sept 17, Khosla-backed)
- superheated-rock geothermal, drills ~3 miles down
- led by Centaurus Capital and Doerr Capital
- ConocoPhillips, Shell Ventures participated
- oversubscribed
- round-the-clock baseload for data centers
Chip stocks rebound (Sept 17/18)
- Intel +7.7%, AMD +6.4% to $545.09, Micron +5.5%, Nvidia +2.5%
- SOX up 3.1% third straight session
- "spending is not slowing" sentiment
- Intel reportedly in talks with SK Hynix on planned Ohio factory
AMD 6th Gen EPYC Venice benchmarks (new AMD blog/whitepaper)
- Zen 6, agentic AI workloads
- 20% per-core uplift vs Nvidia 88-core Vera in SPECrate 2026 Integer
- 2.24x platform-level
- 2.4-3.7x in enterprise/cloud-native tests
- AMD's own numbers
M&A roundup
- Infillion acquiring Foursquare (Sept 18
- 100M+ POIs, 16B check-ins
- +20-25% revenue/headcount, ~150 employees join 650)
- Taboola offer to acquire Dianomi (Sept 18, UK takeover, 600+ advertisers, closes before year-end, runs via Realize)
- Lovable agrees to acquire Sutro (Sept 18, UK, undisclosed)
- Copart $10.50/share tender offer for ACV Auctions (merger agreement Sept 10, expires Sept 30, board recommends)
Launches
- Fingerprint Bot Directory (Sept 18
- public searchable repository of AI tools/bots/crawlers by identity/provider/purpose
- Web Bot Auth compliance testing)
- iPhone 18 on sale in US today (Evercore PT raised to $380)