Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Your August dispatch from the Office of Small Business
The Office of Small Business would like to invite you to attend the rescheduled Show Up for Small Business event, which will take place on Thursday, August 13 at 5:00pm at the ModHaus food cart pod (3829 SE Division St, Portland, OR 97202).
(2008) Shizzow knows Portland, Oregon. Now get to know Shizzow.
Sharing information about your current location with people you trust has always held this glimmer of potential. The glimmer of actually finding the time to meet face-to-face during our ever increasingly busy schedules. The glimmer of that impromptu meetup with people whom you would like to get to know better.
AI & Robotics Field Trip · Luma
Climb aboard the AI Portland school bus! We’re heading down to Oregon State for a day inside their AI and robotics labs. Yes, an actual yellow school bus… lean into it, it’s part of the fun!
NVIDIA Partners With Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to Establish AI Compute Infrastructure Financing Platforms to Mobilize Over $500 Billion of Third-Party Capital | NVIDIA Newsroom
“NVIDIA has reached an important milestone. We began by building chips; today, we are helping create a new class of productive, investable infrastructure: AI factories,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “In AI, compute is revenue. NVIDIA compute is uniquely suited for this role. It is broadly adopted, flexible across models and workloads, fungible and transferable across customers and operators, and continuously improved through CUDA software — extending its useful life and improving its economics over time. It is supported by a deep global ecosystem of developers, customers and offtakers. That is why we are bringing the world’s leading long-term capital providers together to independently underwrite AI infrastructure. These financing platforms will help customers access scarce compute at scale and build the DSX AI factories that will power every industry and country in the age o
Intel raises $19.7 billion to help fund future projects as 14A production looms — share sale attracted $100 billion in demand, report claims | Tom’s Hardware
Intel will sell 210,526,315 shares for $95 apiece through an underwritten public offering. In addition, participating banks have 30 days to acquire as many as 31,578,947 more shares at the same $95 price, minus applicable underwriting discounts. Should they exercise all their options, Intel could sell approximately 242.1 million shares altogether and increase the proceeds to roughly $23 billion. Without the additional shares, Intel expects net proceeds of approximately $19.7 billion after underwriting discounts, commissions, and estimated expenses. The transaction is scheduled to close on August 12, 2026.
Meta’s Open Weight Whiplash
A lot has changed since the last time Meta released an open weight model – namely, seemingly the entire team building models for Meta. Famously, “Llama” was put out to pasture as Alexandr Wang and his Scale team was brought in to fix what ailed those previous models. That included not only spending billions on fresh AI talent and data centers, but also setting aside that notion of “open” in favor of a closed approach to AI development. Why? Because it sure seemed like that model – and those models – had won the day just over a year ago.
OpenAI’s Only Dedicated Ethicist Has Left With No Replacement: FT – Decrypt
Chloé Bakalar joined from Meta last August and departed in July without any announcement, one of several safety exits in recent weeks.
OpConnect expands in Portland with new HQ, production facility – Portland Business Journal
OpConnect, which makes EV charging stations that are aimed at fleet and multifamily customers, is moving from its 10,000-square-foot Southeast Portland headquarters to a new 30,000-square-foot facility in the Central Eastside Industrial District.
September Entrepreneur Mixer: Tillamook
Enjoy a morning just for entrepreneurs and founders at the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network (OEN) September Entrepreneur Mixer from 8:30 – 10:00 am on Wednesday, September 2nd in partnership with NW Innovation Hub hosted at Tillamook Creamery Red Barn in Tillamook.
To All the Folks Who Are About to Be Rich | by Julie Zhuo | Jun, 2026 | Medium
I was in your shoes once, pre-IPO at the hot company of my generation. We had a hackathon the night before we rang the bell. Some of us felt like life was about to change. Others of us felt it was just another ordinary day — a nice milestone, sure, but with so many already crossed on the path to hypergrowth, what’s yet another?
How to make people care about your startup
It’s never been easier to start a company. It’s also never been harder to get someone to care that you did. Anyone can now go from idea to business in less time than it takes to hire a single engineer. But the same tools that make building simple make standing out a challenge.
Portland Festival of Cinema, Animation & Technology
OMSI is the place to be for the Portland Festival of Cinema, Animation & Technology! Enjoy a six-day celebration of independent film and animation featuring exclusive screenings, filmmaker Q&As, an interactive expo, and visionary experiences that explore the future of storytelling through immersive VR, dome screenings in the Kendall Planetarium, and emerging technologies.
The Future is for Everyone
The defining questions of our age are who will have access to superintelligence and what will we direct it towards. Will it be centralized and restricted to a few institutions, or will it be a tool that empowers everyone?
Power 2026 by Neel Somani – Electricity Pricing in the Age of AI
Before we dive into power, you have to understand where it sits in the broader context. There are three major commodity categories: energy (e.g. power, crude oil, natural gas), agriculture, and metals. All commodities have some basic properties in common that set them apart from other asset classes.
Weekly Review: Everything Around the Model – by Sam Keen
Welcome back to Altered Craft’s weekly AI review for developers, and thank you for starting another week here. This edition keeps landing on the same quiet truth: the model is the part you can’t change, and everything around it is where the leverage lives. Context compilers, persistent memory, unified harnesses, loop verifiers, evals as files, code graphs, guardrails. Even the editorials agree, with a four-tool agent beating heavyweight rivals and domain expertise still steering the whole thing.
NuScale Power builds $1.9B capital cushion in nuclear race – Portland Business Journal
The Corvallis company reported negligible sales and rising expenses in the second quarter but grew its liquidity by around $900 million.
