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1.	Apple to Raise Prices with Memory, Storage Shortages By Aaron Tilley Source: The Wall Street Journal

Apple plans to raise prices on its devices to counteract soaring component costs for memory and storage chips, Chief Executive Tim Cook told The Wall Street Journal. Cook didn’t elaborate in the interview about timing or exact price increases. Apple is expected to hold its annual hardware event in September, where it will unveil new iPhones, including a foldable model.

Cook also said in the interview that Apple is ready to use its massive cash reserves to help boost supply of memory chips. Although he declined to say more, he clarified that the company wouldn’t go as far as building its own component factories.

The artificial intelligence boom is responsible for the massive supply constraints hitting the tech industry. Large AI players are spending hundreds of billions of dollars annually building out data centers packed full of memory-hungry servers. During Apple’s most recent earnings, the company said that limited chip supply was hindering growth for its iPhones and Macs.

For years, Apple held sway over much of the electronics supply chain as the scale of its iPhone business ate up huge portions of the industry. But the rise of AI has diminished the company’s influence. Nvidia, for example, this year overtook Apple as the biggest customer of advanced chip manufacturer Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Apple has been struggling in this new environment.

2.	SpaceX Names Roelof Botha to Board By Theo Wayt Source: The Information

SpaceX added Roelof Botha to its board of directors, the company said in a securities filing on Wednesday. Botha was a longtime leader at Sequoia Capital, a major SpaceX investor, and currently represents Sequoia on some boards. He is joining the board in a personal capacity.

Botha joins SpaceX’s other board members Ira Ehrenpreis, Randy Glein, Antonio Gracias, Donald Harrison, Steve Jurvetson and Luke Nosek. The appointment comes less than a week after SpaceX raised $85.7 billion in the biggest IPO in history. Sequoia first invested in SpaceX in 2020 in a deal led by partner Shaun Maguire.

Botha previously worked with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk at PayPal, where Botha was chief financial officer from 2000 to 2003. After PayPal, Botha joined Sequoia, where he rose through the ranks to become a managing partner in 2022. Last year, Botha stepped down from the position, though he remained with the firm. Botha currently still describes himself as a partner at Sequoia on his social media profiles and is listed on Sequoia’s website. SpaceX’s securities filing says Botha “has been with” Sequoia since 2003, but does not list his job title.

(This story has been updated to clarify Botha’s position on the board.)

3.	AWS Introduces New Cybersecurity, Coding Tools at NY Summit By Catherine Perloff Source: The Information

Amazon Web Services unveiled several new AI products at its annual New York Summit, some of which are designed to solve novel problems created by the new era of AI-driven software engineering. These include AWS Continuum, which helps identify code vulnerabilities to prevent companies from cybersecurity threats. In announcing the product, AWS specifically called out new threats from AI models like Mythos.

AWS is also building new tools to adapt to the challenges of AI coding. AWS released its Dev Ops agent last year, and is now introducing new release management capabilities, which uses AI to help test code before it is released wider. In an interview, senior principal engineer for Agentic AI at AWS David Yanacek explained how new AI coding tools inspired the feature, because they lead to new bottlenecks in the software development process.

“Coding agents are getting a ton done in parallel,” Yanacek said. “The more that you’re doing in parallel, the higher the probability that the resulting train will not be able to leave the station because one of these things has a bug in it.” Yanacek said improvements to the DevOps agent have turned an eight-minute task in January into a three-minute task in May.

4.	Midjourney Announces Full-Body Scanner, Plans to Launch Spa By Jemima McEvoy Source: The Information

AI image generation company Midjourney on Wednesday launched the first of its long-awaited hardware projects: a full-body scanner for detecting diseases and other health issues. The company’s founder and CEO David Holz claimed the machine is more detailed than an MRI.

Midjourney has spent years developing the scanners, he said during a launch event at Vita Brevis, a member’s only club in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood. He said the scanner relies on sound waves and water. A demonstration video showed a woman descending slowly into a circular tank of water.

To commercialize its scanners, Midjourney plans to open a spa in 2027. The company has rented a 24,000 square foot, four-floor space near San Francisco’s Union Square, Holz said at the event. The spa will have nine or 10 of the scanners, along with hot tubs, cold plunges and other amenities. Eventually, he added, the company plans to have thousands of these spas across the country.

Holz described the scanner as the first of four hardware products the company plans to launch, two of which people will be able to “hold” and purchase themselves. (The body scanners are not in that category.)

The body scanners do not seem to link directly to the AI image generation product that Midjourney is known for. The 37-year-old Holz founded Midjourney in 2022. The company quickly developed a large following for its image generator, which was seen as more artful than those from larger AI labs like OpenAI and Google.

However, Holz has long teased a futuristic hardware effort, apparently inspired by his previous startup, Leap Motion, which sold a device for controlling computers with hand gestures. This move into hardware also coincides with growing competition in the AI image generation space, which is now crowded with competitors like Google, Runway and Black Forest Labs.

Holz owns 100% of Midjourney but told The Information in March that he’d consider taking outside capital for the first time to fund the company’s hardware efforts. “We have never raised and don’t need any money for the business right now,” he said. “But we have projects that may benefit from external financing over the years.”

5.	Video App Rumble Buys GPU Provider Northern Data By Phoebe Liu Source: The Information

Rumble, which started in 2013 as a YouTube alternative and hosts conservative content, completed a stock-for-stock transaction Wednesday to acquire data center company Northern Data, becoming the latest company to join the mad dash to rent out Nvidia graphics processing units to AI developers.

Rumble and Northern Data, also known as a neocloud, earlier Wednesday had market capitalizations of $2.5 billion and $500 million, respectively, and crypto stablecoin provider Tether is a major shareholder in both companies.

“It was always part of our plan to have infrastructure as a service,” Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski said. “It’s something I thought would take us to profitability, and we needed to focus on that.” (In the last year, the company generated just over $100 million in revenue, primarily from selling ads, but lost about the same amount.)

Pavlovski compared the deal to a much smaller version of the merger between Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, and Musk’s AI firm xAI. (SpaceX later acquired the combined entity ahead of its IPO.)

Rumble’s video platform will continue as-is, and it will rebrand its cloud business, including Northern Data, as Quake AI, he said. Rumble was already in the traditional cloud computing business, providing servers to other firms including Truth Social.

The acquisition will give Rumble 22,000 Hopper-generation Nvidia GPUs, most of which are being rented out to customers in Europe and the U.S., and access to a planned data center site in Georgia. Rumble is also looking to buy $270 million worth of Nvidia’s Blackwell 300 chips—the most advanced chips available in large quantities—for Together AI, he said.