Hash Rate Surge, Code Agent Recruitment | Rewire News Morning Digest

CoreWeave Turns GPU Scarcity into Pricing Power, DeepSeek Recruits for Code Agent. The AI competition focus is shifting from model ranking to supply, cost, and execution authority.

1｜CoreWeave Raises Prices by 25%, AI Cloud Starts Exercising Pricing Power

CoreWeave posted Q2 revenue of $2.575 billion, a 112.5% year-over-year growth. According to the company's financial report, as of the end of June, its revenue backlog was approximately $104 billion, with an additional commitment of over $25 billion from customers at the beginning of Q3. Management stated during a conference call that the pricing adjustment in July averaged around 25%.

This is not just a high-growth financial report. The fact that the company was able to raise prices during expansion, financing, and delivery pressures indicates that the bottleneck for AI cloud services is still available capacity. New contracts do not translate into current revenue, and the company reported a net loss of $626 million for the quarter, with interest expenses of $640 million. The pricing power of computational supply is being exercised, but it also relies on ongoing significant capital expenditures and customer fulfillment. (Continued from yesterday's report)

(Source: CoreWeave / CNBC / Reuters)

2｜DeepSeek Recruits for Code Agent, Sets Sights on Claude Code

According to Bloomberg, DeepSeek has opened official social media accounts and posted job listings for a team focused on AI programming, with competition targeting Anthropic's Claude Code. This marks a rare public move by DeepSeek to align external communication and organizational resources towards Code Agent.

Currently, DeepSeek has not disclosed the name, launch date, or pricing of the product corresponding to this team, so recruitment cannot be directly equated to product launch. However, the signal is clear that the competition of model capabilities is being pushed into the development environment. The one who can enable the Agent to comprehend code repositories, invoke tools, and accomplish auditable tasks will have the opportunity to capture higher-frequency development access. Whether the model's capabilities can translate into retention at this access point remains to be seen in execution.

(Source: Bloomberg / The Straits Times)

3｜YMTC Breaks into Top Three NAND Shipments, Ranking Criteria Starting to Diverge

According to quarterly shipment volume data cited by Tom's Hardware, Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC) secured approximately 14% of the global NAND flash memory shipment share in Q2, surpassing Kioxia to enter the top three for the first time. Samsung and SK Hynix held shares of around 25% and 22%, respectively. The report stated that YMTC's shipment volume grew by 22% year-over-year, and it has been mass-producing 267-layer 3D NAND.

However, based on revenue rather than shipments, Yangtze Memory Technologies remains in fifth place. The difference between the two rankings points to the same structure, where consumer products and storage chip production can ramp up shipments more quickly, while the product structure of enterprise SSDs determines higher revenue and profit. Yangtze Memory Technologies breaking into the top three first changed the global storage chip supply landscape, not the seating order in the high-end storage profit pool.

(Source: Tom's Hardware / TechPowerUp / Counterpoint Research)

4｜After LiteLLM's Supply Chain Attack, Agent's Key Entry Point Exposed

A larger-scale post-assessment of the March LiteLLM supply chain incident has taken place. According to SecurityWeek, attackers leveraged the Trivy-related supply chain to release versions 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 of LiteLLM containing malicious code on PyPI. Security researchers estimate that the incident may have affected over 2,500 organizations and 434,000 CI/CD pipelines.

The malicious versions were taken down approximately 40 minutes later, with the payload capable of collecting keys for cloud services, SSH, Kubernetes, and AI service providers. LiteLLM is a model invocation middleware where credentials often aggregate. The more automated the model execution, the more development teams need to treat dependencies, build processes, and permission isolation as part of the same security chain.

(Source: SecurityWeek / Ars Technica / Trend Micro)

5｜US CPI Falls to 3.4%, Energy Keeps the Fed on the Field

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the July CPI rose 0.1% month-over-month, with the year-over-year increase falling from 3.5% in June to 3.4%. The core CPI, which excludes food and energy, rose by 2.5% year-over-year, also lower than the previous month's 2.6%. According to CNBC and CoinDesk reports, following the data release, Bitcoin weakened in the short term, as the market saw it as new evidence that the Federal Reserve could still afford to be patient.

The issues have not vanished in the overall index. Energy prices fell 1.5% month-over-month in July but are still up 14.7% year-over-year, with gasoline rising by 24.6% year-over-year. Inflation is transitioning from a broad-based uptrend to a more concentrated, energy-disruption-sensitive state. For the Fed, the monthly slowdown provides space to wait, while the energy sector makes prematurely declaring victory a risky move. (Continued from yesterday's report)

(Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics / CNBC / CoinDesk)

Also Worth Knowing ↓

Cognition is currently in talks for a new funding round with a $40 billion valuation, just under three months after completing a $1 billion financing round at a $26 billion valuation in May. Reportedly, the funding discussion is conditional on its annualized revenue reaching $1 billion, up from the disclosed $492 million in May. The AI programming company's valuation trajectory is still awaiting revenue realization to validate. (Source: Bloomberg / TechCrunch)

Goldman Sachs has announced a deal to acquire Neos Investments for up to $2.25 billion. The transaction is pending. Neos' product line includes Bitcoin and Ethereum yield ETFs, with BTCI assets exceeding $1 billion. Asset management firms are transforming crypto assets from strategic allocations into distributable yield products. (Source: Goldman Sachs / CoinDesk)

According to CNBC, Oracle has laid off approximately 21,000 employees over the past year, representing about 13% of its global workforce. The company aims to redirect the cost savings toward AI data centers. The tech company's balance sheet is now grappling with the trade-off between labor costs and compute capital expenditure. (Source: CNBC / Tom's Hardware)

The U.S. federal budget deficit for the first 10 months of the 2026 fiscal year has accumulated to $1.8 trillion, with July alone registering $432 billion. The U.S. Congressional Budget Office projects the full-year deficit to exceed $2.1 trillion. Discussions on U.S. debt supply, interest burden, and monetary policy will be challenging to navigate post a mild CPI report. (Source: U.S. Department of the Treasury / U.S. Congressional Budget Office)

Wintermute plans to invest $1 billion over the next 5 years to build AI and high-frequency trading infrastructure. The crypto market maker aims to have non-crypto revenue surpass half of its business by the end of 2027. The trading firm's next steps involve expanding from liquidity provision to cross-asset speed, data, and computational capabilities. (Source: Bloomberg / CoinDesk)

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