# Tech Must Know - September 2, 2026 *Here's what happened in tech over the last 24 hours.* By [Paul Holden](https://paragraph.com/@techmustknow) ยท 2026-09-02 --- Apple hands the keys to John Ternus ----------------------------------- John Ternus is now Apple's CEO. He officially took over on Tuesday, succeeding Tim Cook, who ended a 15-year tenure, and had been serving as senior vice president for hardware engineering since 2021. Cook didn't leave a small company. During his 15-year run, Apple's value skyrocketed to $4.6 trillion, thanks to the iPhone's enormous popularity. Cook now moves to executive chairman, where he'll keep managing Apple's ties with Washington. Ternus inherits one hard problem. Apple got off to a rough start in AI after stumbling in its efforts to deliver new features it promised nearly two years ago. He built the Watch, AirPods, and Vision Pro โ€” but he's never run the software and services fight that will decide Apple's next decade. Watch this week's September 9 iPhone event for his first move as boss. Source: [Al Jazeera](https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/9/1/john-ternus-succeeds-tim-cook-as-apple-ceo-after-15-years) Anthropic locks in $35 billion of Nvidia compute ------------------------------------------------ Anthropic just signed one of the biggest compute deals in AI. The six-year, $35 billion cloud deal is with Nvidia-backed Lambda for a Texas data center expected to provide about 350 MW of capacity powered by Nvidia chips. The structure is what stands out. Nvidia holds three roles in the pact: chip supplier, Lambda equity backer, and lease anchor on the Texas campus. Critics call it circular financing โ€” Nvidia funding demand for its own chips. This isn't Anthropic's only big check. The Lambda deal is the latest in a series of large computing agreements, coming after the company agreed last week to spend $45 billion renting capacity from Nscale's West Virginia campus. That's $80 billion in one week, all to feed Claude and Claude Code ahead of a likely IPO. Source: [Bloomberg](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-31/anthropic-seals-35-billion-cloud-deal-with-nvidia-backed-lambda) An AI reads your ECG and spots hidden heart disease --------------------------------------------------- Doctors at Imperial College London built an AI tool that flags heart disease from a routine test. The "superhuman" tool can spot heart disease in less than two seconds by extracting more information from a routine ECG than the human eye can typically see. The point isn't to replace ultrasound. It's to decide who needs one most urgently and to catch disease on ECGs ordered for completely different reasons like chest pain or pre-operative checks. Patients often wait months for an echocardiogram. This moves the sickest to the front of the line. Source: [The Guardian via Mugglehead](https://mugglehead.com/ai-flags-heart-disease-from-routine-ecg-test-within-seconds/) China's humanoids beat Usain Bolt's 100m record ----------------------------------------------- Robots ran faster than the fastest human alive. At Beijing's second World Humanoid Robot Games on August 22-23, Tiangong Ultra clocked 9.39 seconds and Honor's Lightning recorded around 9.32 seconds, both faster than Bolt's 9.58-second human world record. Records on a track aren't factory work. But the momentum is real. The event underscored China's dominance, with the country making roughly 97% of global H1 2026 humanoid shipments. If you build in robotics or hardware, China's lead in production volume is the story to track. Source: [Humanoid Press](https://www.humanoid.press/) The Pentagon puts ChatGPT and Grok on a military portal ------------------------------------------------------- The US military is going all-in on commercial AI. The Department of War launched Starshield AI's Grok for Government on GenAI.mil, accredited for controlled unclassified information at Impact Level 5, on a platform that has already onboarded 1.7 million of the Department's 3 million-plus personnel. This isn't a pilot. It's deployment at national scale, and it puts private AI labs directly inside defense workflows. Every enterprise buyer watching government adoption just got a signal on where secure AI is headed. Source: [Tech Startups](https://techstartups.com/2026/09/01/top-tech-news-today-september-1-2026-amazon-anthropic-honda-openai-sony-warner-z-ai-more/) SpaceX launches its 100th-plus orbital mission of 2026 ------------------------------------------------------ SpaceX keeps its brutal launch pace. A West Coast Falcon 9 Starlink mission lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, scheduled for 1:18 a.m. PDT. The cadence is the point. SpaceX passed its 100th orbital mission of 2026 on August 21, and has now exceeded 11,000 satellites in low Earth orbit. Every launch lowers the cost of getting to space and widens Starlink's lead. If you run anything that touches connectivity or Earth imaging, this pace reshapes your options. Source: [Spaceflight Now](https://spaceflightnow.com/2026/09/) Watch: Runway renders live websites with no code underneath ----------------------------------------------------------- Runway showed off Solaris, and it's worth seeing. It's an "Interface World Model" that renders websites and apps as live video, with every frame drawn in real time as a user clicks and drags, with no code running underneath. The demos sell it. They include a shirt try-on dragged from a virtual rack onto a photo, a salad built by dropping in ingredients, and an interactive combustion demo. And people liked it. In a Runway study, testers picked Solaris over pages coded by Claude Opus 5 in 71% of matchups judging in-scene behavior and 61% on instruction following. It's early. Text still garbles and long sessions drift. But this is a new way to think about software. [Watch the video](https://www.therundown.ai/articles/runway-solaris-previews-the-no-code-internet) Source: [The Rundown AI](https://www.therundown.ai/articles/runway-solaris-previews-the-no-code-internet) Quick Hits ---------- * **Z.ai** open-sourced GLM-5.3, its most capable coding model, and it posts a 50% gain over GLM-5.2 on Z.ai's Code Bench. Open weights mean you can run and customize it today. * **Perplexity** is rolling out a Hybrid mode on Mac that lets local models handle subtasks while the cloud orchestrates. Gemma 4 works on 16 GB machines, with Qwen3.6 and Perplexity's own model on 32 GB machines. * **Sonos** held an Open House product event today. CEO Thomas Conrad talked up how the company had spent 20 years building an "operating environment for AI in the home." Stat of the Day --------------- > **$80 billion** โ€” Anthropic's total cloud infrastructure spending announced in about one week. The $35 billion Lambda deal follows a separate $45 billion commitment to rent capacity from Nscale's West Virginia campus. Thanks for reading. See you tomorrow. --- *Originally published on [Paul Holden](https://paragraph.com/@techmustknow/tech-must-know-september-2-2026)*