News
What's happening in robotics and AI — curated by the wujec.ai editors.
Alphabet borrows $25bn for AI — and investors offered it $115bn
Alphabet sold $25 billion of investment-grade bonds on 6 August 2026, Bloomberg reported, in one of the largest corporate debt offerings of the year. The order book peaked at roughly $115 billion — more than four times the amount on offer — behind only Oracle's February deal (about $129bn of demand) and Amazon's March sale (about $126bn) among this year's AI-driven issues. Proceeds go to general corporate purposes including AI infrastructure, capital expenditure and refinancing. The interesting part is not the size but the fact that Alphabet is borrowing at all. Companies of this kind have historically paid for their own data centres out of cash flow; the shift to the bond market is what the current build-out looks like from the finance side. By Bloomberg's count, the four large hyperscalers — Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and Oracle — had issued roughly $194 billion of bonds in 2026 through 7 July, up about 79 percent on the roughly $108 billion they raised across the whole comparable period of 2025. For the robots and models catalogued here this is upstream news, but it is the money that decides how many chips get bought, how large the next training runs are and how cheaply inference can be sold. It also means a growing share of the AI build-out now sits on balance sheets as debt with fixed coupons, rather than as spending that can simply be paused.
Hassabis steps back from running Google DeepMind — Kavukcuoglu takes the controls, reporting to Pichai
Sundar Pichai announced on 5 August 2026 that Demis Hassabis is stepping back from day-to-day leadership of Google DeepMind. Hassabis becomes Chair of Google DeepMind and takes a newly created role as Chief Scientist of Alphabet; he remains chief executive of Isomorphic Labs, the drug-discovery spin-off. Operational command passes to Koray Kavukcuoglu, who becomes Senior Vice President of Google DeepMind and reports directly to Pichai. His remit covers Gemini model development, frontier AI research and the Gemini app and developer teams. Kavukcuoglu is not an outside hire: he has been at DeepMind for thirteen years, started its deep learning team and led work behind WaveNet and DQN. The timing matters more than the titles. The reshuffle lands in the same week as the departure of Jeff Dean after 27 years at Google, together with Gemini co-lead Oriol Vinyals — a subject this catalogue covered separately. Within roughly a month Google has also shipped Gemini 3.6 Flash into general availability, put Gemini Omni Flash into public preview as its recommended video model, and released the Gemini Robotics ER 2 endpoints. A laboratory does not usually change its command structure in the middle of a release run unless the change is meant to separate two jobs that had grown too big for one person: setting the research direction, and shipping products on a quarterly clock. Hassabis has led DeepMind since he co-founded it in 2010, through AlphaGo, AlphaFold and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry that followed. Google's announcement gives no effective date for the transition. Reports of the market's reaction to the news come from press coverage rather than from the memo itself.