Industry

AI News Brief: Crypto infrastructure companies are doubling down on Texas land acquisitions, driven by growing AI and HPC power demand. Galaxy Digital announced on Tuesday the purchase of a 500-acre site in McGregor, Texas, where it will build its second AI and HPC data center campus in the state, with initial planned power capacity of 74 MW to be expanded in phases. On the same day, Bitcoin miner MARA Holdings announced an acquisition agreement for a 1,200-acre site in Matagorda County with existing power access, supporting up to 2 GW of capacity, with plans to develop it for AI and HPC workloads while also using it as a Bitcoin mining base.

AI News Brief: Visa outlined its stablecoin strategy during the Q3 earnings call, emphasizing that it is investing across every layer of the stablecoin ecosystem. The company posted Q3 revenue of $11.6 billion, up 14% year-over-year, driven by double-digit growth in payments volume, cross-border volume, and processed transactions. Visa said it has invested across blockchain, issuance, wallets, infrastructure and orchestration, and applications, with progress this quarter in both the issuance and application layers. The company has joined the OpenStandard consortium, which plans to issue the OpenUSD stablecoin for global money movement. Visa’s stablecoin platform is designed to let partners settle with Visa in stablecoins, offering on-chain wallet-as-a-service infrastructure as well as the ability to move funds between fiat and stablecoins (starting with OpenUSD). The platform will also integrate with Pismo to support tokenized deposits for financial institutions, with plans to onboard third-party tokenized deposit infrastructure providers in the future. Visa also pointed to AI as another long-term growth area, viewing stablecoins and AI as complementary technologies: if stablecoins are reshaping the back end of commerce, AI is reshaping the front end, and agentic commerce will expand Visa’s addressable market and drive future growth. Cross-border volume grew 13% YoY (12% excluding intra-Europe), while processed transactions grew 10%.

AI News Brief: Bitcoin mining stocks surged Monday on two major AI infrastructure deals. Hut 8 announced a 15-year, $9.8 billion AI data center campus lease; IREN revealed a $2.8 billion cloud services contract with an AI developer. IREN, Cipher Digital, CleanSpark, Hut 8, and MARA Holdings all rose at least 11% in early trading, and IREN expects its AI cloud business to generate over $4 billion ARR by end of 2026.

AI news brief: A joint report by Visa and blockchain data platform Artemis points to concrete signals of machine-to-machine (machine-native) micropayment adoption, with Coinbase’s x402 payment protocol as the leading example. Since launching in May 2025, x402 has processed approximately $15 million in adjusted transaction volume with over 109 million adjusted transactions…

AI News Brief: Coinbase now has over 95% of its code written with AI assistance, more than doubling the 40% figure announced back in February this year — a clear sign that its AI adoption pace is rapidly accelerating. This was disclosed by Coinbase platform lead Rob Witoff to Cointelegraph, coming shortly after the company laid off 700 employees (14% of its workforce) earlier this year. CEO Brian Arms…

AI News Brief: CleanSpark shares surged as much as 22% on Tuesday after the Bitcoin miner announced a 20-year triple-net lease agreement with an unnamed investment-grade global tech company to build a 175MW data center at its Sandersville, Georgia campus. CleanSpark estimates the deal will generate approximately $6.6 billion in contracted revenue over the initial lease term, potentially increasing to $11.6 billion if the tenant exercises two five-year extension options…

AI news brief: In H1 2026, crypto hack losses dropped 46.8% YoY to $1.32B, but blockchain security firm CertiK told Cointelegraph the decline mainly reflects the inflated 2025 baseline caused by Bybit’s record $1.4B hack — not genuine defensive improvements across Web3.

AI News Brief: Australian cryptocurrency exchange Swyftx noted in its Q2 industry report that the global gig and freelancer payment market is projected to reach $2.1 trillion by 2033, with AI-native workers’ payment needs estimated at $775 billion. If stablecoins achieve approximately 33% adoption in this group, it could drive up to $262 billion in stablecoin transaction volume. Swy…

AI News Flash: Robinhood has announced it will soon allow eligible US users to connect third-party AI agents to crypto accounts, letting agents execute trades autonomously. Users can collaborate with AI in advance to set strategies with specific guardrails, no need for continuous account monitoring. Since the stock and options agent beta launched at the end of May, over 70,000 agent accounts are already live on the platform, showing significant early adoption. Currently supported third-party…

AI News Brief: Fintech company Revolut announced a major upgrade to its crypto exchange Revolut X last Friday, allowing users to connect AI assistants directly to the platform. Currently supported AI tools include Claude, Gemini, Cursor, and OpenClaw. Users can operate these AI assistants through natural language commands to complete three core functions: market analysis, trading strategy backtesting, and actual order execution.