Welcome to the latest edition of the World of DaaS Roundup.
Less than 14 days to the Summit, and this week reminded us exactly why this community exists.
Amazon is destroying rare books to train its AI. Apple is proposing to pay publishers per query. Anthropic hit $65B in annualized revenue. And Databricks raised $5B at $190B after investors offered $15B and it turned most of it down. Don't skip this week's Unexpected Read. It will change how you look at the internet.
This week's edition is brought to you by the World of DaaS community. If you're not already a member, join us here.
🌐 WORLD OF DAAS SUMMIT 2026
The White House and The Watergate Hotel, Washington, D.C. | September 2 & 3, 2026
⏳ Less than 14 Days to Go.
In less than two weeks, 150+ of the sharpest minds in the data economy will gather at The White House and the Watergate Hotel in Washington D.C. — September 2 & 3 — for closed-door conversations, curated roundtables, and the kind of networking that doesn't happen at any other event.
We are almost sold out. Due to high demand, ticket prices are $3,200.
FOR SUMMIT GOERS - A QUICK REMINDER
🗺️ Plan Your D.C. Experience.
As we get closer to September, Yan is your go-to for anything Summit-related: agenda, tickets, logistics, or any question you don't know who to ask.
🎟️ Haven't registered yet? Reach him directly at [email protected] we'll make it happen.
⭐️ The partners behind the Summit.
The World of DaaS Summit 2026 is made possible by companies helping shape what comes next for data. Their support goes beyond the Summit, it reflects a commitment to the ideas, conversations, and community driving the data economy forward.
We’re proud to have them alongside us in Washington, D.C.
📰 News & Reads
Amazon which started as an online bookseller, is now buying and destroying rare books to extract their data for AI training.
A 404 Media investigation tracked a rare book shipment via AirTag to Amazon's VGT3 facility in Las Vegas, where workers cut off spines and scan pages to feed its Nova AI models. Printed books published before 2022 are especially valuable — they contain zero AI-generated text.
Hollywood and ByteDance just signed a deal to put guardrails on how AI models use copyrighted data.
Months after Disney, Paramount and the MPA sent cease-and-desist letters over Seedance and Seedream generating copyrighted characters without permission, ByteDance agreed to a framework of IP protections. The message: AI companies can no longer treat creative data as free input.
Apple is proposing to pay publishers every time Siri uses their content, a pay-per-query model that would rewrite how data gets priced in AI.
Instead of fixed licensing fees, Apple would pay publishers each time their content answers a Siri query. With a nine-figure budget on the table, this marks a fundamental shift in how content data is valued, from flat access to transactional use.
Anthropic annualized revenue just hit $65B, a sevenfold increase in a year, driven entirely by enterprise data and AI workflows.
The company added $18B in annualized revenue in just two months. At rival OpenAI, the run rate recently hit $40B. The message from both numbers: the companies that control how enterprises access and deploy data through AI are generating returns no one predicted two years ago.
🎙️ DaaS Podcast Spotlight
NYT CEO Meredith Kopit Levien on how to run a media business when AI companies want your data for free — and why that's not going to happen. Odd Lots — Bloomberg, August 10, 2026.
→ The New York Times spent close to $2 billion last year producing half a million pieces of journalism. Meredith Kopit Levien sat down with Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway to explain what that cost base means for any AI company that wants to license that data and why the NYT has already sued three of them. This episode lands the same week Apple proposed paying publishers per-query for Siri, and ByteDance settled with Hollywood over AI-generated content. The price of content data is no longer a conversation. It's a negotiation.
In this episode, they discuss:
Why the NYT treats its journalism as a proprietary data asset — not a loss leader.
The three conditions any AI company must meet before the NYT will license its content data.
Why the NYT has sued OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity — and what that means for the broader data licensing market.
How the NYT's bundle strategy is turning subscriptions into a data flywheel for future AI deals.
What the ideal framework for AI companies and media properties to coexist on data actually looks like.
An Unexpected Data Read For Today.
The fiber optic cables carrying this newsletter to your inbox are also detecting earthquakes in real time.
Scientists at the USGS just found that existing internet cables can determine an earthquake's magnitude within the first four seconds of a seismic wave, twice as accurately as the government's current warning system.
Nobody designed the global internet infrastructure to be a seismic sensor network. It just is.
Where Data Meets Art
At the Boston Museum of Science, MIT City Science built something deceptively simple: a colorful gas bubble on a screen that shrinks or expands depending on the choices a city makes.
The installation, Community Carbon Impact, uses real urban data from Kendall Square in Cambridge to simulate how collective decisions walkability, density, energy use, change carbon emissions for every person in a neighborhood. Visitors control the model by interacting with the visualization directly.
The data is real. The choices are real. The bubble responds in real time.
When data stops being a number on a report and starts being something you can physically move, people make different decisions.
🔥 In Case You Missed It…
M&A Funding Roundup
Equality Asset Management acquired OptionMetrics to scale its options and equity-linked data analytics platform.
Nasdaq acquired LeveL Markets to build always-on equity data and liquidity infrastructure.
FirstParty acquired Gulp Data to connect data valuation with commercialization.
Databricks raised $5B at a $190B valuation to scale its enterprise data intelligence platform.
💼 World Of DaaS Job Board
The World of DaaS job board highlights opportunities from members across our community
Head of Data, Private Investor, YipitData
Data Strategist, Point 72
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📍 See you in September
Less than 14 days. The room is almost full, and we mean it.
On September 2 & 3, The White House and The Watergate Hotel in Washington D.C. become the gathering point for the leaders actually building, investing in, and shaping the global data economy. 150+ decision-makers. Zero vendor pitches. The kind of high-signal access that doesn't happen at scale.
If you've been following this newsletter, you already know why the data industry matters right now. This is where that conversation happens in person.
Tickets are $3,200. Spots are almost gone.
