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Park officials have repeatedly warned that bison are responsible for more injuries to visitors than any other wild animal in Yellowstone.

De Puy also told Page Six how he felt about not joining the game as an "icon" despite his "RuPaul's Drag Race" background.

De Puy also told Page Six how he felt about not joining the game as an "icon" despite his "RuPaul's Drag Race" background.

The ho-down showdown between K. Michelle and Drew Sidora ended with Drew on the floor of the Puddin Saloon. Our “Virtual Reali-Tea” co-hosts, Danny Murphy and Evan Real, are recapping season 17, episode 17 of the “Real Housewives of Atlanta” and the explosive reunion trailer that followed. In this episode, Drew reveals text messages between...

The ho-down showdown between K. Michelle and Drew Sidora ended with Drew on the floor of the Puddin Saloon. Our “Virtual Reali-Tea” co-hosts, Danny Murphy and Evan Real, are recapping season 17, episode 17 of the “Real Housewives of Atlanta” and the explosive reunion trailer that followed. In this episode, Drew reveals text messages between...

VC Money Floods Into US Nuclear Startups As AI Power Demand Explodes

Authored by Haley Zaremba via OilPrice.com,

• Global VC funding for nuclear fission and fusion startups has already topped $4.5 billion across 81 companies in 2026, on pace to beat 2025's $6.2 billion record.

• Big Tech figures including Sam Altman and Bill Gates are pouring money into fusion to keep up with AI's ballooning electricity demand.

• Critics warn the startup boom is skipping voluntary safety guardrails and pulling attention from proven large-scale reactor technology.

Venture capitalists are taking a major interest in nuclear energy start ups. Funding is surging for both nuclear fusion and fission firms as the technology becomes an increasingly essential part of a feasible pathway toward sustainable energy security in the face of the artificial intelligence boom.

According to reporting by Axios, global investment in both fission and fusion has topped USD $4.5 billion across 81 companies in 2026 so far. At this pace, by year’s end, this year will shatter 2025’s previous record of $6.2 billion for 93 companies.

Data center hyperscalers are driving up energy demand projections to previously unthinkable levels that will require an all-of-the-above approach to energy development that is likely to prominently feature nuclear energy as a round-the-clock source of zero-emissions electricity. In the United States, the public and private sectors alike are extremely bullish on the technology and clearly eager to usher in a new nuclear era. As a result, the majority of this year’s funding surge is going to U.S. companies.

Big Tech has taken a particular interest in expanding nuclear energy deployment and technological advancement to feed its own ballooning energy needs.

Some of the tech sector’s biggest names, including Bill Gates and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, are major investors in and advocates of nuclear fusion as an answer to AI’s ballooning energy problem.

"There's no way to get there without a breakthrough," he said at the 2024 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "It motivates us to go invest more in fusion."

The Trump administration, too, is a major proponent of nuclear energy expansion, with a particular focus on next-gen nuclear technologies as part of a broader push to "reestablish the United States as the global leader in nuclear energy” and “produce lasting American dominance in the global nuclear energy market.” To this end, Executive Order 14301, signed by Trump in May 2025, mobilizes significant resources from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program to fast-track the testing and commercialization of advanced nuclear technologies in order to bring them to scale.

These advanced technologies include nuclear fusion as well as small modular reactors (SMRs) which hold major promise for overcoming some of the hurdles that have been causing nuclear energy to fall out of fashion in the United States. Traditional nuclear power plants are enormously costly and face long timelines and miles of red tape to come online. The country’s most recent traditional nuclear power plant, Georgia’s Plant Vogtle, finally came online years late and billions over budget. The hope is that modular and alternative technologies won’t face the same issues, as they can be built offsite relatively cheaply.

SMRs are still an emerging technology. While one SMR design has been officially approved for development in the United States, and many more firms are seeking approval for their plans, zero SMRs have yet come online in the country.

“The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission took about six years to approve the first advanced small reactor design, from fission developer NuScale,” Axios reports.

“President Trump has sought to accelerate the process, aiming for 18 months. But that still could give first movers a major advantage in locking down contracts with data centers and electric utilities.”

With the backing of both the federal government and Silicon Valley, it’s no surprise that nuclear startups are going gangbusters. But while the increasing fragmentation and privatization of the nuclear energy sector could be great for innovation and expansion of the technology, it also poses some key drawbacks. For one thing, nuclear startups have so far shown a concerning disregard for voluntary safety guidelines that were tacitly accepted in the nuclear sector until now.

In addition to safety concerns, some critics have argued that a focus on cutting-edge nuclear energy technologies and startups may be diverting energy and funding from proven technologies that would better serve nuclear power capacity addition goals. A recent op-ed for the Wall Street Journal argued that “The administration is chasing unproven technology when it could encourage Wall Street investment in large-scale reactors,” and, as a result, Trump’s nuclear renaissance is stalling.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/03/2026 - 14:40

A 23-year-old California woman has been identified as one of those killed when a gunman opened fire at an Idaho In-N-Out this weekend.

Quiet luxury doesn't have to be a big investment.

Brie Bella said she finished a six-woman tag-team match with a broken scapula during WWE's 2026 SummerSlam Night 1 on Saturday.

The Suffolk County Department of Health announced three potential cases of an illness known as "rabbit fever," a high infectious disease.

A new rival to Wall Street officially debuted on Friday as the Texas Stock Exchange went fully live for the first time with trading available for all of its listed tickers. The Texas Stock Exchange, which is based in Dallas, is the first new major stock exchange to launch in the US in decades. The TXSE, called...

The hotel also condemned the wave of criticism directed at the staff member involved.

Tiffany Olin has left the Fresno station for KVVU-TV, the Fox affiliate in Las Vegas, where she will serve as the weekday weather anchor.

The San Francisco 49ers entered training camp worried about finding enough practice time for all their receivers. That problem appears to have solved itself. Wide receiver Mike Evans missed Monday’s training camp practice because of a quad strain, according to ESPN’s Adam Schefter, adding another significant concern to a receiving corps that was considered San...

"There is currently no estimated reopening date," the City of Malibu said.

Sarwa Ama Aldoori, 71, was found dead in a swimming pool behind an upscale Bakersfield home on June 30, according to the Bakersfield Police Department.

The most expensive place to rent a home isn’t New York, Miami or even San Francisco — it’s a sleepy California beach enclave better known for tasty waves than glamour, according to a new report. Santa Cruz, the seaside community roughly 90 minutes south of San Francisco, has been crowned the most expensive place to...

America’s homeowners associations are running out of money — and patience.

After Blockbuster IPO, China's Memory Giant CXMT Plans Second Chip Plant In Beijing

CXMT, China's largest chipmaker by output and certainly by market value thanks to its blowout IPO pricing one week ago, which saw its stock surge more than 7x from its offering price of 8.66 yuan per share, is considering building a second memory-chip plant in Beijing ​and is in financing talks with a tech manufacturing hub backed by the local government, Reuters reported citing source familiar.

The move ‌comes as CXMT, which is currently the world's 4th largest maker of DRAM memory but has ambitions to become the world's largest, seeks to boost production amid a global chip shortage driven by debf-funded AI infrastructure spending. It highlights intensifying competition among Chinese local governments to attract CXMT, as the memory chipmaker pursues a major expansion following its $8.6 billion IPO last month, the largest mainland Chinese semiconductor listing on record.

Reuters previously reported that CXMT was building new plants in Shanghai and Hefei and was in ​discussions with authorities elsewhere about another facility.

Those projects, when fully operational, could double its capacity to more than 600,000 wafers per month. The new Beijing ​12-inch plant would be built in Yizhuang, about 20 km (12 miles) southeast of central Beijing, where CXMT already operates a ⁠fab producing dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips. CXMT currently operates two 12-inch DRAM ​fabs in Hefei and one in Beijing, each with capacity of about 100,000 wafers per month, the Reuters sources said.

CXMT is seeking at least 60 million yuan ($8.9 ​million) in support from the development zone's governing body, also known as the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area, and other state-owned tech companies have also expressed interest in participating ​in the financing, they said.

The talks are at an early stage and the size and structure of any funding package could change, the sources said. It was not immediately clear whether the funding would come directly from the development zone's administrative authority or through its investment vehicles.

Reuters adds that the planned capacity and total ​investment for the proposed fab were not immediately known. Building a fab that can produce leading-edge DRAM chips usually costs more than $10 billion. 

The discussions began before CXMT's stock market debut last week, which provided ‌the company ⁠with fresh capital for an expansion drive during a memory-chip upcycle fueled by demand from AI infrastructure, data centres and consumer electronics. 

The company has become a key pillar of Beijing’s drive to build a self-sufficient chip industry and narrow the gap with the U.S. in strategic technologies such as AI amid a fierce tech rivalry between the two superpowers.

Although CXMT is the world's fourth-largest DRAM producer, it remains far smaller than Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron whose combined global ​market share approached 90% in the ​first quarter, according to data from ⁠Counterpoint Research.

Within China, however, CXMT's growing dominance has enabled it to raise prices for customers such as Huawei, Reuters reported last month. 

CXMT has been in the news over the past couple of months due to reports that have suggested that Apple is interested in buying the firm's memory chips. The global memory shortage has affected the Cupertino, California-based consumer electronics giant's supply chain as it has been unable to secure supplies without having to face price hikes.

Yet, as wccftech reports, others have suggested that CXMT's ability to target the global memory market is limited, as the firm has to primarily meet the needs of China's domestic memory market. US sanctions on China, which limit its ability to procure high-end chips and manufacturing equipment, have come at a time when Beijing is aiming towards semiconductor self-sufficiency despite the capital and knowledge-intensive nature of the industry. 

Today's report follows one that surfaced last week and claimed that CXMT was making progress with its LPDDR6 memory chips. These are among the latest in the world, and the sources suggested that the Chinese firm was eager to target the gap left by Samsung and Micron. The two are focused on making high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, and CXMT hopes to utilize the gap they've left to establish itself as a player in the global memory market. The sector is currently dominated by the two firms plus Korea's SK hynix, which control the vast majority of the market share.

The company's rise has been closely linked to the "Hefei model," under which the capital of Anhui province has used state funding to ​nurture strategic technology companies... because as we said a year ago, it is only a matter of time before the AI arms race is directly funded by the governments of China and the US directly. 

Beijing and Shanghai have also provided CXMT with funding and other support, as the cities seek a larger share of the economic and strategic benefits generated by the company's growth. 

CXMT's Beijing-based fab, operated by Changxin Jidian, was founded in 2020 and received funding from E-Town Capital, a state-backed investment arm of the Yizhuang development zone, and its ⁠affiliate Beijing ​E-Town Technology, according to corporate records.

The Beijing development area is a manufacturing base for technology and ​chip companies, including contract chipmaker SMIC, chip equipment maker Naura Technology and smartphone and electric-vehicle maker Xiaomi. 

The area is also positioning itself as a hub for robotics and AI. Last year, it hosted what organisers ​described as the world's first humanoid robot half-marathon, part of an effort to promote and test embodied-AI technologies.

News of China's aggressive push to boost memory output is one of the reasons for the weakness in memory and chip stocks in early trading, and also slammed Korea's Kospi which slumped 5% with Samsung / Hynix both tumbling -9%. 

Additionally, the market is again focused on Chinese open-source model releases, with BABA +4% on new Qwen model this weekend as well as DeepSeek V4 Flash model launched Friday. 

As reported earlier, BABA’s latest Qwen 3.8 Max Model was released overnight (stock closed +7% in HK) - a 2.4t parameter model (smaller than Kimi K3 @ 2.8t ) but looks relatively comparable on benchmarks (I.e. broadly Opus + level) and will go open-weight release next week.

The model is also far cheaper: API tokens are priced at $2/m input & $6/m output (cheaper than Kimi K3 @ $3/M input & $15/M ⁠output)...  & 80% cheaper than current GPT flagship 5.6 Sol's output tokens.

Qwen3.8-Max by @Alibaba_Qwen has reshaped the cost-performance Pareto frontier in Frontend Code Arena, with pricing of $2 per input MToken and $6 per output MToken.

Top models on the Pareto frontier:
- Claude-Opus-5
- Kimi-K3
- Qwen3.8-Max
- GLM-5.2
- DeepSeek-V4-Flash

Congrats… https://t.co/3S4tW1KmlI pic.twitter.com/CiWU7Hh4BD

— Arena.ai (@arena) August 3, 2026

The marketing campaign has been well received showing Qwen as an “always on workmate” that completes tasks while people go to the beach, fish & play tennis. 

Over the weekend, Goldman revised up its aggregate China model ARR estimates, now forecasting to reach US$13bn by year-end 2026 (prior: US$10bn) on higher demand /faster ramp.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/03/2026 - 14:00

Forget how this story will end — when will House of the Dragon end?