Seven items from the past fortnight, all of them assembled from public data. Three of them describe activity that is falling while the pressure behind it rises, which is the harder pattern to write about and the more useful one to track. Taiwan: the sortie count is down because the pressure moved to the water First-half fighter detections around Taiwan came in at 1,334, a … [Read more...] about OSINT Digest: Taiwan Coercion Moves From Air to Water, and NATO Absorbs 144 Incursions Without Article 4
Pixxel Raises $100M Series C as Hyperspectral Imagery Moves Closer to the Collection Stack
Pixxel, the Earth observation company split between Los Angeles and Bengaluru, has closed a $100 million Series C co-led by Temasek and Seraphim Space. New money came from 360 ONE Asset and IMM Investment; existing backers Radical Ventures and growX Ventures came along. Total raised now stands at $195 million, and the company is calling it the largest single round ever taken by … [Read more...] about Pixxel Raises $100M Series C as Hyperspectral Imagery Moves Closer to the Collection Stack
Why European Governments Are Dropping Palantir, and Which Companies Want the Contracts
France's domestic intelligence service told Palantir it was leaving in June. The DGSI had been running Gotham since 2016, adopted in the months after the Bataclan attacks, and had renewed the contract repeatedly, most recently only six months before the announcement. The replacement is ChapsVision, a company almost nobody outside French procurement circles had heard … [Read more...] about Why European Governments Are Dropping Palantir, and Which Companies Want the Contracts
Qatari and Turkish Funding of European Islamist Networks: An Open-Source Assessment of the Protest Link
The assertion that pro-Palestinian street mobilisation in European cities is organised and financed by Qatar and Turkey is usually made without reference to what open sources can and cannot establish. That is a mistake, because the open-source record on this question is unusually strong at one end of the chain and essentially empty at the other, and the shape of that asymmetry … [Read more...] about Qatari and Turkish Funding of European Islamist Networks: An Open-Source Assessment of the Protest Link
RT’s Mirror Domains Outlasted the EU Ban: How OSINT Researchers Map the Network
The European Union restricted RT and Sputnik in March 2022. The restriction was written against outlets and enforced against domains, and those are not the same object. Four years later the outlets are still reachable across most member states, and the gap between the statute and the resolver is now one of the better-documented case studies in open-source infrastructure … [Read more...] about RT’s Mirror Domains Outlasted the EU Ban: How OSINT Researchers Map the Network
Room 3603: British Intelligence Ran Its Largest Wartime Station Out of Rockefeller Center
The tower in the middle of the frame is 30 Rockefeller Plaza. One block east, at 630 Fifth Avenue, the International Building housed a foreign intelligence service that spent five years running influence operations against the population of the country hosting it. The cover was a passport office. The landlord knew, and charged little or nothing for the space. British … [Read more...] about Room 3603: British Intelligence Ran Its Largest Wartime Station Out of Rockefeller Center
Intel’s $20 Billion Upsize and Cloudflare’s Zero-Coupon Converts Say the AI Boom Is Strengthening
One day of wire traffic is a bad sample and a good instrument. It is bad because Businesswire is paid distribution, so the population is self-selecting and the Inc. 5000 items cluster because the list dropped, not because anything changed. It is good because the financing announcements inside it are the only items on the tape that had to clear a real bid before they could be … [Read more...] about Intel’s $20 Billion Upsize and Cloudflare’s Zero-Coupon Converts Say the AI Boom Is Strengthening
CoreWeave’s $2.6B Loan, Point2’s $136M Series B and MaxLinear’s Rack Control Plane: The Capital and the Bottleneck Are in Different Layers
MaxLinear introduced RackCommander, a control-plane portfolio covering connectivity, monitoring, control and power management for AI racks, and then in the same news cycle extended it with intelligent eFuses for rack-scale power protection, telemetry and serviceability. Two releases, hours apart, from a company whose historic identity is broadband connectivity silicon. The … [Read more...] about CoreWeave’s $2.6B Loan, Point2’s $136M Series B and MaxLinear’s Rack Control Plane: The Capital and the Bottleneck Are in Different Layers
The AI Buildout Shifts to Debt and Household Bills
Riot Platforms sold Anthropic 191 megawatts of capacity at its Rockdale, Texas campus for $9.1 billion over twenty years, and the stock added roughly a quarter of its value after hours. The tenor matters more than the headline figure. Twenty years is a utility contract, not a technology contract, and it implies about $2.4 million per megawatt-year. Industrial power in ERCOT … [Read more...] about The AI Buildout Shifts to Debt and Household Bills
The AI trade is entering a new phase
The semiconductor rally led by Intel, AMD and Broadcom is more than another rotation into chip stocks. The market increasingly appears to be looking beyond the GPU itself and toward the entire AI infrastructure stack: compute, networking, storage, memory and cybersecurity. That shift matters. NVIDIA built an extraordinary moat around accelerated computing, but the next stage … [Read more...] about The AI trade is entering a new phase