📰On The Record – 21st July 2026

Meta walked into a Tennessee courtroom yesterday to defend Instagram against claims it was built to hook teenagers and hide the damage. The state alleges the company knew its algorithms, autoplay and notifications kept kids scrolling long past the point of good sense, and buried the research proving it. Meta says it's added safety tools and that the law shields it from content liability. This one matters because it's not really about one app anymore — it's about whether "engagement" as a business model can survive sustained legal scrutiny, and that question is coming for every platform built the same way.

A federal judge slammed the brakes on Paramount Skydance's $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery yesterday, granting a 14-day restraining order after twelve states sued to stop it. Their argument: fewer studios means higher prices and worse content for everyone downstream. Paramount says it needs the scale to compete with streaming and tech giants, and a hearing on 3 August will decide what happens next. Whatever the outcome, it's a reminder that "too big to compete" has become as politically potent an argument as "too big to fail" once was.

BlackRock is fronting more than $12 billion to build a new AI data centre with Meta in El Paso, taking an 80% stake while Meta runs the site and keeps 20%. The facility will deliver around a gigawatt of computing power once live. It's a sign that Wall Street's biggest money managers now see AI infrastructure as a safer long-term bet than the companies actually building the models on top of it.

Hut 8, once purely a cryptocurrency miner, signed a second AI data centre lease worth $9.8 billion, fully commercialising its Texas campus. The deal could eventually be worth more than $50 billion with renewals. It's one of the clearest examples yet of a company reinventing itself entirely around the AI gold rush, and a preview of how many crypto-era firms may survive: by becoming landlords to the machines instead.

Google is reportedly developing a new AI chip, codenamed "Frozen v2," that embeds parts of its Gemini models directly into the hardware to run them faster and cheaper. The goal is simple: stop depending so heavily on other people's chips while computing capacity stays scarce. If it works, it hands Google a cost advantage that rivals leasing capacity from third parties simply can't match.

The EU hit AliExpress with its biggest Digital Services Act penalty yet, €550 million, for failing to keep counterfeit and unsafe goods off its marketplace. Regulators pointed to fake clothing, unsafe toys and hazardous cosmetics slipping through. AliExpress called the fine disproportionate but must submit a fix-it plan by October. It's a costly reminder that "the algorithm let it through" stopped being an acceptable excuse the moment Brussels started actually enforcing its own rulebook.

A daily score of business conditions (scored out of 100), with a breakdown of what’s driving it.

Global business conditions edged up today, with the Daily Business Index ticking to 51.0. Chip stocks staged a comeback after last week's bruising sell-off, Hong Kong and Shanghai markets rebounded, and oil prices backed off a weekend spike triggered by fresh US-Iran clashes. American consumers are also feeling noticeably more confident, helped by cheaper petrol. Japan's markets stayed closed for a holiday, though, meaning Friday's sharp correction there is still the freshest word out of Tokyo — a reminder that today's recovery is real, but not yet universal.

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Hut 8 spent years mining bitcoin in an industry famous for boom-and-bust whiplash. Yesterday's $9.8 billion lease, on top of an earlier deal, shows just how completely it's rebuilt itself as an AI infrastructure landlord instead, effectively renting out gigawatts to whoever needs them most. It's a playbook worth watching: plenty of smaller, capital-heavy companies with spare power capacity are eyeing the same pivot, and the ones who move first are locking in customers for over a decade.

Somewhere along the way, looking exhausted became a stand-in for looking successful, and it's quietly wrecking how companies actually perform. Plenty of teams still reward whoever answers Slack at 11pm over whoever ships the best work by 3pm, mistaking visible effort for real output. The smartest organisations are figuring out that presence isn't productivity, and that burnout doesn't scale, it just breaks people slightly later than you'd expect. The businesses that quietly decouple busyness from value are going to out-hire, out-retain and out-execute the ones still handing out gold stars for exhaustion. Hustle theatre was never a strategy, it was just a very convincing costume.

A year ago this week, the US and Japan announced a trade agreement that cut a threatened 25% tariff down to a flat 15%, in exchange for Japan committing $550 billion to US investment projects. Car makers cheered, the Nikkei jumped, and it briefly became the template every other country wanted a copy of. A year on, tariffs are still reshaping supply chains and pricing decisions everywhere, and this deal was the moment "just negotiate a lower number" became the default playbook. Funny how a single percentage point still ripples through boardrooms twelve months later.

What it means: Inference is the moment an AI model actually gives you an answer, as opposed to "training," which is the long, expensive process of teaching it in the first place. Think of training as years of medical school, and inference as the doctor seeing you in clinic. Google's new chip in today's must-reads is built specifically to make that clinic visit faster and cheaper to run.