Daily Tech & GNSS News Digest - July 2, 2026

Thursday’s tech news turned on a single question everyone in AI keeps circling: who actually owns the upside? OpenAI floated giving Washington a 5% stake in itself and every other major US AI lab, Kuaishou’s Kling AI unit raised $2 billion by selling a slice of its video-generation business, and the FBI moved against a company accused of quietly renting out access to two million people’s home internet connections without asking. Meanwhile the market delivered its own verdict on AI’s near-term economics, with chip stocks sliding for a second straight day even as a soft jobs report pushed the Dow to a record close. On the positioning side, the day’s news was about who controls the supply chain underneath GNSS—a European chip sovereignty milestone and a plainer story about steering tractors.

Tech News

OpenAI Proposes Giving the US Government a 5% Stake in the Company

OpenAI has proposed handing the US government a 5% stake in the company—worth roughly $42.6 billion at its recent $852 billion valuation—as it looks to defuse mounting political pressure in Washington, according to the Financial Times via Bloomberg and CNBC. CEO Sam Altman reportedly argued the move was the best way to share AI’s upside with the public, and floated the idea as part of a broader arrangement in which the government would hold a 5% stake in each of the leading US AI developers—including Anthropic, Google, and Meta—through a sovereign-wealth-style vehicle.

Altman’s model is explicitly the Alaska Permanent Fund, which pays residents annual dividends from the state’s oil wealth. The pitch follows more than a year of informal talks between Altman and the Trump administration dating back to early 2025, and comes just days after Washington reportedly delayed the rollout of GPT-5.6. It’s not yet clear whether any of the other AI labs would agree to cede equity on the same terms.

Kuaishou’s Kling AI Raises $2 Billion, Seeks $20 Billion Valuation in Spinoff

Kling AI, the AI-video unit that Chinese short-video giant Kuaishou is spinning off, has raised an initial $2 billion in venture funding, with the round potentially growing to $3 billion and diluting Kuaishou’s stake to about 68%, per Bloomberg and multiple reports citing General Atlantic in a lead role. The deal values the unit—previously pegged at $15 billion—as high as $20 billion.

Kling generates video and short films from text prompts, competing directly with ByteDance’s Seedance and stepping into the gap left by OpenAI shuttering Sora. The unit’s annualized recurring revenue grew from roughly $300 million in January to about $500 million in March, driven by the launch of Kling 3.0, with first-quarter revenue up more than 300% year-over-year to over 650 million yuan (about $96 million)—one of the clearest signs yet that Chinese AI-video services are pulling in serious global revenue, not just domestic buzz.

FBI Seizes Domains Tied to Alarum’s NetNut Proxy Network Over Botnet Links

The FBI seized hundreds of domains associated with NetNut, a residential proxy service run by Israel-based Alarum Technologies, as part of a more than year-long investigation into whether the service was built in part on devices compromised without their owners’ consent, per Bloomberg and KrebsOnSecurity. The probe centers on potential links between NetNut and Popa, malicious software allegedly used to quietly route traffic through at least 2 million co-opted home internet devices—roughly two weeks after security researchers first published findings connecting NetNut to the Popa botnet.

Residential proxy networks let businesses and consumers route web traffic so it appears to originate from a different location—a legitimate tool for regional website testing or streaming access that can also be abused to mask malicious traffic or disguise botnet activity as ordinary residential browsing. Alarum’s legal counsel, Omer Weiss, said the company is cooperating with investigators and takes the matter seriously; Alarum’s stock fell sharply on the news.

Additional Headlines:

Chip stocks slide for a second day even as the Dow hits a record: The Dow closed at a record 52,900.07 after a weak June jobs report (just 57,000 jobs added, about half of expectations) pushed back Fed hike odds, but the Nasdaq 100 fell 0.8% as Micron (-7%), Applied Materials (-7.4%), AMD (-4.3%), SanDisk (-14%), and Marvell (-9.8%) all dropped on renewed doubts about AI-driven chip valuations, per CNBC.
China’s AI-powered quant funds draw a wave of investor money: China’s private fund industry hit a record 23.5 trillion yuan (~~$3.5 trillion) by the end of April, with AI-driven quant managers like Ubiquant—which raised 2.6 billion yuan (~~$384 million) in under two hours in May—increasingly dominating the category as over 60% of Chinese quant funds now use AI or machine learning, per Bloomberg.
Bloom Energy and Brookfield quintuple their AI power partnership to $25 billion: The companies expanded their AI infrastructure financing framework from $5 billion to $25 billion to fund Bloom’s fuel-cell deployments at data centers, underscoring how much new capital is flowing specifically into power for AI compute.
Together AI raises $800 million at an $8.3 billion valuation: Aramco Ventures led the Series C for Together AI, which builds infrastructure for running open-source AI models, as Gulf sovereign capital continues moving deeper into US AI infrastructure.

GNSS News

GlobalFoundries and Qualinx Complete First Fully European GNSS Chip Manufacturing Flow

GlobalFoundries and Dutch chipmaker Qualinx have demonstrated the first fully European, end-to-end semiconductor manufacturing flow for a GNSS system-on-chip, designing, taping out, and manufacturing the chip entirely at GF’s Dresden fab without any design data or physical materials leaving the EU, per Inside GNSS and GlobalFoundries. The chip in question, Qualinx’s QLX3xx, is a reconfigurable GNSS SoC and analog front end built for secure positioning, navigation, and timing—including resilient timing and synchronization networks and ultra-low-power GNSS receivers for connected-edge deployments.

The project is co-funded by the European Chips Act and framed explicitly around supply-chain sovereignty for PNT-dependent aerospace, defense, and critical-infrastructure customers who don’t want security-critical chip production touching non-EU soil at any stage. GF says it’s targeting a fully automated trusted European flow by the end of 2026, with regular foundry engagements opening to aerospace and defense customers in 2027—a concrete milestone in Europe’s broader push to control its own chip supply chain for the systems its militaries and infrastructure depend on.

Tersus GNSS Launches Modular Autosteer Kit With Built-In Satellite Correction Fallback

Tersus GNSS launched the AG993, a modular autosteer retrofit kit for agricultural vehicles that pairs high-precision GNSS positioning with the company’s proprietary TAP (Tersus Advanced Positioning) satellite correction service alongside conventional RTK support, per Inside GNSS. The system targets better-than-2.5 cm accuracy across a 0.2–30 km/h working speed range, with support down to 0.1 km/h and standard automatic headland U-turns.

The core differentiator is TAP itself: it delivers correction via an L-band satellite signal rather than requiring a local base station or cellular connection, so the kit keeps working in fields where cell coverage is spotty or a base station isn’t practical to set up. It’s a smaller, more incremental story than a chip-sovereignty milestone or a satellite constellation, but it’s exactly the kind of retrofit hardware that determines how fast precision-ag accuracy actually reaches working farms rather than staying confined to new equipment.

Key Takeaways

AI’s biggest players are negotiating who owns the upside: OpenAI’s proposed 5% government stake and Kuaishou’s $2 billion Kling AI raise are both, in different ways, about converting AI value into equity—one toward the public sector, one toward private investors racing to back Chinese AI video.
The market is pricing in doubt even as headline indices hit records: A weak June jobs report pushed the Dow to a record close, but chip stocks fell for a second straight day, with Micron, SanDisk, and Marvell all down sharply on questions about whether AI-driven semiconductor valuations have run ahead of reality.
GNSS supply chains are quietly becoming a sovereignty issue on both continents: GlobalFoundries and Qualinx’s all-European GNSS chip manufacturing flow is a defense-grade milestone, while Tersus’s autosteer kit is a reminder that the same positioning technology ultimately has to work in a tractor cab with patchy cell service.