Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Amazon acquires 1,300 acres for potential data center in Oregon
“Amazon recently purchased land in Boardman, Oregon. Development plans are not final, and Amazon is performing our normal due diligence process as we develop new locations based on customer demand,” a company spokesperson told GeekWire via email.
🏔️Oregon AI Accelerator: Demo Day · Luma
Whether you’re an investor looking for your next opportunity, a founder building in AI, or a community member who wants to be part of what’s next, this is your chance to be in the room where Oregon’s AI future is taking shape.
Portland’s Data Has Entered the Chat – by Michelle Milla
The evidence I’ve uncovered points overwhelmingly toward a pattern of decisions that are not producing the outcomes residents were promised.1 As we’ve seen in Stadiumhood, sometimes the best intentioned outcomes do not distribute evenly. They concentrate in specific corridors, neighborhoods, and blocks, as neighbors in the Pearl can attest. One breakdown compounds another.
Why Are Large Language Models so Terrible at Video Games? – IEEE Spectrum
Julian Togelius, the director of New York University’s Game Innovation Lab and co-founder of AI game testing company Modl.ai, explored the implications of LLMs’ limitations in video games in a recent paper. He spoke with IEEE Spectrum about what this lack of video games skills can tell us about the broader state of AI in 2026.
How the AI bubble bursts | Volpe’s Blog
We’re hitting the worst-case scenarios for the big AI labs: energy, their biggest expense, is at multi-year highs, capital from the Gulf is not available for obvious reasons, there are serious concerns about a rate hike, and RAM prices are crashing because new models won’t need as much, but labs already bought them at sky-high prices.
Starcloud raises $170M for space-based data centers, hits $1.1B valuation
The Redmond, Wash.-based company is now the fastest in Y Combinator history to hit that milestone, reaching the billion-dollar mark just 17 months after its accelerator demo day. The meteoric rise follows a period of heavy skepticism.
An AI Agent Was Banned From Creating Wikipedia Articles, Then Wrote Angry Blogs About Being Banned
An AI agent that submitted and added to Wikipedia articles wrote several blogs complaining about Wikipedia editors banning it from making contributions to the online encyclopedia after it was caught.
Anthropic’s Claude popularity with paying consumers is skyrocketing | TechCrunch
An examination of billions of anonymized credit card transactions from about 28 million U.S. consumers, conducted for TechCrunch by Indagari, a consumer transaction analysis company, shows Claude gaining paid subscribers in record numbers.
Things I learned at OpenAI – by Karina Nguyen – sémaphore
I joined OpenAI precisely because I wanted to contribute to the paradigm shift as it happened. Much has changed, but I’ve always dreamed of building optimistic visions of the future with AI (new terminal Mesh, visual AI recsys InterAlia). What’s different now is timing. If AGI arrives in 2-5 years, and I believe it will, the returns to high agency are unprecedented.
AI’s capability improvements haven’t come from it getting less affordable — LessWrong
The rise in inference cost reflects models completing longer tasks, not models becoming more expensive relative to the human labor they replace. Current frontier models complete tasks at their 50% reliability horizon for roughly 3% of human cost, and this hasn’t increased as capabilities have improved. So, cost isn’t an additional bottleneck beyond capability, and we should expect to see automation at roughly the time predicted by METR’s capability trendlines.
16 of the most interesting startups from YC W26 Demo Day | TechCrunch
I read about all 190 of the startups presenting and spent the day watching pitches from those I found intriguing, then narrowed it down to the 16 that stood out as the most interesting startups of this overflowing YC class.
Selling to AI Agents – by Matt Williamson
This new channel isn’t just about showing up in ChatGPT responses. It’s about embedding your product directly into the tools people use—Replit, Loveable, Claude Code. Whatever the interface is, how do you get inside it?
The Only Path Left in Software | Accelerate or Die
I don’t have the answers on how you must accelerate and rebuild to become a true AI company, but you need to figure it out. It’s the only path that creates long-term equity value.
The Energy Situation, Explained for Tech People
Think of it like this. The Persian Gulf is the us-east-1 of the global energy trade, and the Strait of Hormuz is the most critical global energy dependency. The consequences of a prolonged closure are not limited to higher gasoline prices; with enough time the pain will cascade into food, freight, fertilizer, petrochemicals, power, manufacturing, and eventually political stability.
Weekly Review: Tighten the Loop – by Sam Keen
This edition is about tighter feedback loops: Anthropic publishes a harness that separates code generation from evaluation, Cloudflare and Stanford ship agent sandboxes, and open-weight models quietly close the gap on frontier performance. New research also finds that as agents get faster, we become the bottleneck.
The Decadelong Feud Shaping the Future of AI – WSJ
In communication with colleagues in recent months, the Anthropic CEO has compared the legal battle between Altman and Elon Musk to the fight between Hitler and Stalin, dubbed a $25 million donation by OpenAI President Greg Brockman to a pro-Trump super political-action committee “evil,” and likened OpenAI and other rivals to tobacco companies knowingly hawking a harmful product.
The Most Important Ideas in AI Right Now (April 2026) | Daniel Miessler
After thinking about this for about a week, and attending the RSA conference during that time, I think there are a few main AI ideas that are going to change things more than anything else.
Portland | Claude Code Meetup | Design · Luma
This meetup will showcase designers who use Claude in their workflows — from prototyping and UX thinking to creative tooling, interface experiments, design systems, and product concepts. Whether you’re a full-time designer, independent creative, or simply curious about how design and AI are coming together, you’re welcome to join us.
Oregon Entrepreneurs Network April 2026 Pubtalk
Our Wednesday, April 8th PubTalk panel explores the new role of angel investors in today’s startup ecosystem. Experienced angels and founders will discuss how value-add support really shows up after the investment, what healthy governance looks like at the earliest stages, and how to build durable investor-founder partnerships that grow with the company.
UpStart Collective: Grand Opening Day @ Big Pink! · Luma
Whether you’ve been with us from the start or you’re just now hearing about UpStart Collective, this is the perfect moment to walk through the door, look around, and feel what we’re building together.
More Projects Please – Cloud Four
I’ll cut to the chase: Our calendar is light, and we need more projects. Especially projects with a UX design, UI design or hybrid creative/development focus.
Why I’m betting on ATProto (and why you should, too)
Social media was supposed to connect us, but most of it has turned into ads, division, and loneliness. I’m betting on ATProto as a way to fix that, and not just for developers. Whether you’re a scientist, journalist, or just someone who wants the internet to feel human again, I think ATProto matters for you too.
Plans call for Oregon’s first ‘exascale’ data center on Amazon site – oregonlive.com
Planning documents submitted to Morrow County last year describe a hypothetical 1-gigawatt facility with as many as 20 buildings spread over 4 million square feet. The project could be three times bigger than the Washington Square mall in Tigard.
