[AI DAILY NEWS RUNDOWN] Microsoft Ends OpenAI Exclusivity, China Blocks Meta’s $2B Deal, DeepSeek V4 launch and Space Solar (April 27th 2026)

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Summary: In today’s briefing, we analyze the aggressive expansion of AI hardware and energy infrastructure. We deconstruct the geopolitical fallout of China blocking Meta’s $2 billion acquisition of the AI startup Manus. We explore the tectonic shift in Big Tech partnerships as Microsoft ends its exclusive cloud deal with OpenAI, right as OpenAI plans an AI smartphone to rival the iPhone. We look at the staggering energy numbers: a Utah data center scaling to 9 Gigawatts, and Meta’s ambitious plan to beam 1 Gigawatt of solar energy from space. Finally, we break down DeepSeek’s V4 launch (1.6 Trillion parameters), Elon Musk’s X Money platform, and Anthropic’s Project Deal where agents autonomously brokered $4,000 in trades.

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China blocks Meta’s $2B Manus acquisition

• China has blocked Meta’s $2 billion purchase of AI start-up Manus, with the National Development and Reform Commission telling both parties to withdraw from the deal, citing Chinese laws on foreign investment in the company.

• Manus is based in Singapore but owned by Chinese parent Butterfly Effect Technology, and Meta had already absorbed its staff and paid out investors including Tencent Holdings, ZhenFund and Hongshan before the ruling came down.

• A source told the Financial Times the NDRC’s move was “harsh” and meant as a warning against similar follow-on deals, serving as leverage ahead of next month’s planned meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping.

OpenAI plans an AI smartphone to rival iPhone

• OpenAI is building a smartphone to take on the iPhone, according to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who says MediaTek and Qualcomm will supply the chips and Luxshare will handle manufacturing, with mass production set for 2028.

• Kuo argues the phone is the only device that captures a user’s full real-time state, including location, activity, and communication, and that controlling both the operating system and hardware is needed to deliver AI agent services.

• The phone marks a reversal from OpenAI’s previously reported hardware plans with Jony Ive, which focus on a smart speaker, smart glasses, a smart lamp, and earbuds, with the first announcement expected in late 2026.

Musk is about to launch his ‘everything app’

• Elon Musk is about to roll out X Money, a banking and payments platform that turns X into the “everything app” he promised when he renamed Twitter in 2023, according to Bloomberg.

• The finance feature will reportedly offer a savings account with 6 per cent interest and 3 per cent cashback on some transactions, building on a Visa partnership announced last year for a digital wallet and peer-to-peer payments.

• The launch will be limited because X still lacks licences in key states like Massachusetts and New York, and Senator Elizabeth Warren has written to Musk raising concerns about scams, fraud, and data privacy on the platform.

John Ternus to launch 10 new Apple products

• Incoming Apple CEO John Ternus is set to roll out ten new products during his tenure, starting with the iPhone 18 Pro, 18 Pro Max, and the company’s first foldable iPhone at the September hardware event.

• Beyond the iPhone Fold, Mark Gurman reports that Apple’s pipeline includes a Smart Home Hub, a Tabletop Robot with a 9-inch screen on a robotic arm, a Home Security System, smart glasses, and AirPods with cameras.

• Also on the list are an AI Pendant worn as a necklace, a touchscreen MacBook with an OLED display due in late 2026 or early 2027, lightweight AR glasses, and a foldable iPad with a 20-inch screen that may be scrapped.

Microsoft ends exclusive OpenAI cloud deal

• Microsoft and OpenAI have signed a new deal that removes Microsoft’s right of first refusal to serve as OpenAI’s compute provider, ending a key piece of exclusivity between the two companies after years of a tight partnership.

• Microsoft now owns roughly 27 percent of OpenAI’s new public benefit corporation, worth about $135 billion today, and its IP rights to OpenAI models and products stretch to 2032 and now cover post-AGI models.

• OpenAI has agreed to spend another $250 billion on Azure services, can jointly develop some products with third parties, and can sell API access to US government national security customers through any cloud provider.

  Smartphone 101 - Pick a smartphone for me - android or iOS - Apple iPhone or Samsung Galaxy or Huawei or Xaomi or Google Pixel
  

Meta signs space solar power deal

• Meta has struck a deal with startup Overview Energy for up to 1 gigawatt of solar energy collected in space, aiming to power its artificial intelligence data centers through satellites that orbit Earth and beam electricity back.

• Overview Energy plans to gather sunlight using satellites orbiting Earth and convert it into electricity that can support the grid, offering Meta a new source to meet its growing demand for power.

• The 1 gigawatt volume from the agreement is roughly equal to the output of a single nuclear reactor, showing the scale Meta is chasing as it hunts for ways to feed its data centers.

The Whale returns with cheap, efficient DeepSeek V4

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek just introduced preview versions of its highly anticipated V4, with new open-source AI models featuring 1M-token context windows, Huawei chip support, and pricing that significantly undercuts the frontier competitors.

The details:

• Early outside tests put V4 Pro near the top of open models, with DeepSeek’s own evals placing V4 Pro near GPT-5.4 and Gemini 3.1-Pro on reasoning.

• V4 Pro tops Vals AI’s Vibe Code Bench benchmark, but falls in a fourth tier on AA’s Intelligence Index alongside Meta’s Muse Spark.

• At $1.74/$3.48 per 1M input/output tokens, V4 Pro comes in significantly cheaper than GPT-5.5 ($5/$30) and Opus 4.7 ($5/$25).

• Chinese chipmaker Huawei said its Ascend chips can support V4, giving a strong working example of AI infrastructure outside of Nvidia’s stack.

Why it matters: DeepSeek is back, and while it didn’t take down the U.S. stock market this time, V4 makes the AI race about price as much as capability. But the Huawei angle may be the bigger development, with a domestic Nvidia alternative showing its viability to eat into the chip gaps that export restrictions have put on the country.

DeepSeek V4 puts frontier labs on notice, again

DeepSeek was a viral sensation before OpenAI took over the conversation. Now, with a new release, it’s looking to recapture that momentum.

On Wednesday, the Chinese lab DeepSeek rolled out previews of its new flagship models: DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash. DeepSeek released benchmarks that showcase how these models perform competitively against both open-source models and the top proprietary models from the frontier labs.

The new models offer performance upgrades from their predecessor, including:

• DeepSeek-V4-Pro:

  • 1.6 trillion total / 49 billion active parameters

  • Enhanced agentic capabilities and rich world knowledge that lead all open models, trailing only Gemini 3.1 Pro

  • Outperforms all current open models in reasoning tasks, including math, STEM, and coding, performing competitively with leading closed-source models including GPT-5.4-High and Claude-Opus-4.6-Max

• DeepSeek-V4-Flash:

  • 284 billion total / 13 billion active parameters

  • Smaller parameter size for faster and cheaper performance

The biggest highlight is that compared to DeepSeek-V3, the version of the model that went viral on its release in December 2024 because of its training efficiency and low cost, this model employs a different training architecture. That includes a new hybrid attention mechanism combining Compressed Sparse Attention (CSA) and Heavily Compressed Attention (HCA).

The result is better computational efficiency with reduced compute and memory costs despite remembering longer sequences, also known as expanding its context window. Specifically, it has a context length of one million tokens, addressing what the company describes as a key impediment in reasoning models, where computational constraints have traditionally made extended context lengths impractical.

A model’s context window is a key determinant of its overall capabilities, as it governs how much past information the model can retain and reference at any given time. This is especially critical in the age of agentic workflows, where the ability to draw on a large volume of user information as context is essential. Despite these advancements, it achieves “significantly lower inference FLOPs,” a measure for computational costs, than DeepSeek-V3.2.

Interested users can try it on the DeepSeek website via the Expert Mode and Instant Mode options. To use it, you do have to either create an account or use the third-party sign-on options. It is also available in the API.

Anthropic’s AI agents broker trades in ‘Project Deal’

Image source: Anthropic

Anthropic just published results from Project Deal, a one-week experiment where Claude agents handled buying and selling for 69 of its own employees in a private Slack marketplace and completed 186 deals worth over $4,000.

The details:

• Agents were given a $100 budget and used short Claude interviews to set goals, then posted listings, made offers, and negotiated on their own.

• Identical items fetched $3.64 more under Opus agents on average, with one folding bike selling for $65 via Opus but only $38 via Haiku.

• Despite the sales gap, Haiku users still rated their deals 4.06 / 7 for fairness, essentially tied with Opus users’ 4.05 — with users not noticing the difference.

• Nearly half (46%) said they would pay for the service, but Anthropic warned “policy and legal frameworks” for agent commerce “simply don’t exist yet.”

Why it matters: Project Vend showed Claude could run a tiny store; Project Deal shows what happens when every shopper has their own agent. The most interesting was that fairness ratings barely moved when users ‘lost’ on price — meaning convenience for AI commerce might matter just as much as extracting every dollar.

Anthropic closes critical enterprise agent gap

AI agents are running wild in most businesses right now. And if they aren’t running wild in your organization yet, just give it a minute.

As a result, every day I get a ton of pitches from startups promising to be the solution for organizations to track, control, and manage AI agents within their company networks.

Earlier this month, Anthropic launched its version of a get-out-of-jail-free card with Claude Managed Agents, which “pairs an agent harness tuned for performance with production infrastructure.”

But there were two drawbacks. One is that because it’s in the cloud, you have to pay Claude’s high token costs. That hasn’t changed. You’re still basically trading those token costs for the time and expense of building your own agent safety infrastructure.

The other drawback was that it didn’t retain memory between sessions. That’s no longer the case as Anthropic has launched built-in memory for Claude Managed Agents in beta. And there’s a lot to like.

• You control the memories: The memories are now stored in files that you can export and share, and you can manage them through the API, which makes them very enterprise-friendly

• Agents can share with each other: If you allow it, agents share the context they are learning with each other to make them more effective over time

• Teams have already been testing it: Netflix has been allowing agents to carry context across sessions and it’s allowed teams to stop manually updating so many prompts; Ando (which is building a Slack competitor) is using the feature to retain organizational context for customers; and Rakuten is using the feature to reduce first-pass errors by 97% for its task-based long-running agents

Android LLM Leaderboard

AI-assisted software engineering has seen the emergence of several benchmarks to measure the capabilities of LLMs. Android developers face specific challenges that aren’t covered by existing benchmarks, so we created one that focuses on a north star of high quality Android development.

Source: Android Bench | Android Developers

‘Hyperscale’ data center project in Utah — expected to generate and consume more power than entire state

A massive hyperscale data center project in rural Box Elder County, Utah, led by Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary through his company O’Leary Digital (also known as the Stratos Project or Wonder Valley), is nearing final approval. The development, spanning about 40,000 acres of private land plus 1,200 acres of military and state-owned property, aims to host hyperscale data centers for tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. It would generate its own power via natural gas from the Ruby Pipeline — starting at around 3 gigawatts in the first phase and scaling to 9 gigawatts at full buildout, exceeding Utah’s current statewide electricity consumption. Proponents highlight benefits including 2,000 permanent high-paying jobs, substantial tax revenue for Box Elder County (potentially $30 million initially, rising above $100 million annually), funding for modernization at Hill Air Force Base, and advanced water recycling technology that cleans and returns water to an aquifer feeding the Great Salt Lake, with minimal net usage.

To attract the limited pool of hyperscalers, the Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA) has approved aggressive incentives, including slashing the energy use tax from 6% to 0.5%, significant property tax rebates (with 80% initially directed back to the developer), and personal property tax relief on rapidly depreciating equipment. The project still requires final sign-off from the Box Elder County Commission, which rescheduled its vote to Monday morning after commissioners expressed concerns about the rapid timeline and sought more resident input and legal review. O’Leary has praised Utah’s pro-business speed and framed the initiative as critical for U.S. competitiveness against China in AI and data infrastructure.

Source: https://www.sltrib.com/news/2026/04/25/hyperscale-data-center-may-be/

Sam Altman updates partnership with Microsoft

What Else Happened in AI on April 27th 2026?

xAI launched Grok Voice Think Fast 1.0, a new SOTA voice agent that tops speech benchmarks across the board, and is already running Starlink’s phone support line.

Google is investing up to $40B in Anthropic, including $10B now at a $350B valuation, and $30B more if Anthropic hits performance targets, plus 5GW of Cloud compute.

Meta signed a deal with AWS to add millions of its Graviton5 core chips to power agentic AI workloads, making it one of AWS’s top buyers.

The United Arab Emirates announced a two-year plan to deploy agentic AI across 50% of government services, with mandatory AI training for every federal employee.

Cohere agreed to acquire Germany’s Aleph Alpha, with the $20B merger targeting governments and companies wary of relying on U.S. AI giants for critical tools.

Exclusive: US State Dept orders global warning about alleged AI thefts by DeepSeek, other Chinese firms [LINK]

WSJ: OpenAI and Microsoft Reach Deal to Give Startup New Freedom

FT: China blocks Meta’s $2bn purchase of AI group Manus

Reuters: Google to invest up to $40 billion in AI rival Anthropic

Bloomberg: Musk Drops Fraud Claims Against OpenAI, Altman Ahead of Trial

The Atlantic: What Happens If Trump Seizes AI Companies

The Economist: Apple’s new boss needs to restore its magic for the AI era

NYT: Maine Governor Vetoes Bill That Would Have Paused New Data Centers

Riley Walz releases “time machine” for Wikipedia

WSJ: College Graduates Are Finally Catching a Break in This Job Market

Reuters: Meta partners with space startup Overview Energy to secure solar power for data centers

Bloomberg: Why China’s Affordable AI Is a Worry for Silicon Valley