Safaricom housing internet, Databricks $188B, TP-Link GPS leak

Safaricom won the contract to supply pre-connected internet to every unit in the Mukuru Affordable Housing project and additional units across the country, covering around 14,000 homes. The deal ties connectivity directly into the government's flagship housing program, meaning residents move into already-wired homes instead of shopping for an ISP after settlement. For Safaricom, it locks in a captive subscriber base at scale and puts its enterprise connectivity division at the center of public infrastructure delivery. Residents get one less utility to sort out at move-in.

Kenya is moving to fine foreign gambling firms Sh50 million if they do not block Kenyan users from accessing their platforms. The push comes as Kenya Revenue Authority data shows Kenyans wagered a record Sh330.5 billion in the year to June 2026, underlining the scale of the betting market. Off-shore platforms operate outside local regulation, paying no taxes and offering no consumer protections. The fine is designed to force compliance or exclusion. For the state, it is about capturing revenue and asserting regulatory control over a cross-border industry that has grown faster than the law can keep up.

BLUETTI introduced a BNPL model for its Home Star 2, Home Star 3, and GM Home Star 5 energy storage systems in Kenya, letting customers pay over time instead of upfront. The move targets SMEs and households facing rising electricity costs and intermittent supply. Kenyan businesses have increasingly turned to solar to cut operating costs, but the upfront price of storage batteries remains a barrier. BLUETTI says it will also expand distributor networks and offer technical training. For the Kenyan market, it is another sign that off-grid solar is shifting from a niche product to a mainstream financing play.

Databricks announced a Coatue-led funding round at a $188 billion valuation, its second major raise this year as it cements its reinvention from data lakehouse provider into an AI infrastructure company. The company has published research on the cost advantages of open-weight AI models for coding and continues to pull enterprise data teams away from Snowflake. The valuation reflects investor conviction that the real money in AI is not in chatbots but in the data plumbing underneath. Databricks expects the round to close later this summer.

Netflix's AI Platform team published a detailed breakdown of its in-house LLM serving stack: a unified JVM-based system that handles routing, A/B test logic, feature fetching, inference, post-processing, and logging for downstream consumers. Most organizations consume LLMs through hosted APIs, but Netflix chose to own the full stack. The system serves member-scale ML workloads and is designed for the tight latency requirements of production personalization. For engineering teams weighing build versus buy for LLM infrastructure, Netflix just published a credible reference architecture.