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US imposes 50% tariff on Canadian goods, dozens of wildfires in the PNW pop up in aftermath of lightning strikes, Microsoft to switch to Chinese AI model to lower compute costs, Micron retakes trillion dollar market cap, Intel plans more layoffs.

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Let’s Rip

PNW Market Look

As of market close 7.20.26

Judge orders Paramount to temporarily pause Warner Bros acquisition (Ground)

FIFA emerges as the $9 billion winner as the biggest, brashest World Cup ever draws to a close (CNBC)

Headline Roundup

Paccar's Prospects Are Being Overestimated (SA)
Eastern Oregon healthcare sees federal funding boost amid anxieties about Medicaid cuts (OPB)
Contractor wanted for $19M community library in Washougal (DJC)
Taiwan computer chipmaker TSMC pledges another $100B to expand US chipmaking capacity (DJC)
FAA says Boeing can resume self-certifying its jets as airworthy (KUOW)
Oregon’s Business Ranking Falls Again, Dropping to No. 42 Nationwide (SBJ)
(Boise) City denies $2.6 billion data center, but developer vows to appeal (BD)
Intel plans fresh layoffs, this time in its data center group (ORL)
Trump imposes 50% tariffs on Canadian goods, citing disputes over autos, alcohol and cheese (ST)
Luxury Lake Oswego apartments sell to out-of-state investor for $66M (PBJ)
Missoula County awarded $3 million to replace Glacier Creek bridge (Missoulian)
Nonstop Spokane-Honolulu service begins in December (CDAP)

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Community Highlight

Federal support in question at Great Falls’ popular interpretive center (MTFP)

“The Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center, considered a tourism jewel in central Montana that draws some 50,000 visitors each year, will lose its entire full-time staff of three this year to retirements and a resignation.

Just under 30 years old, the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center has been not only a tourism draw but also a cultural touchstone for the history of those who have lived among the five falls of the Missouri River. Its formidable, cliffside building came into the world with great fanfare amid a decade-long bicentennial celebration of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The center’s grand opening on Independence Day 1998 was attended by more than 1,000 people, including Gov. Marc Racicot, Congressman Rick Hill and U.S. Sen. Conrad Burns

Weber said she had as many as 15 full-time employees during peak summer seasons and more than 100 volunteers. That staff allowed the center to fill the calendar with daily lectures, activities and events for tourists and locals.

The cutbacks took a toll over the years. As staff positions went unfilled, the programming they supported began to suffer as well. The local foundation provided as much support as it could, but it operated on a small budget. Nonprofit filings show that the Lewis and Clark Foundation rarely exceeded $200,000 in revenue through the 2010s.

“I saw the money starting to go down, but I found creative ways through the nonprofit to keep it beefed up,” Weber said. “But when you lose staff, you don’t have people to write grants. You don’t have the people to find and go out and work with you to ask for money.”

The interpretive center will shut down from this October until April 2027, though the closure reflects an investment. A $600,000 allocation from Congress in the 2020 Great Outdoors Act will allow the center to refresh some of its exhibits. That same bill also allocated just over $1 million for building improvements.”

Rip’s Spotlight

Microsoft Looking To Save As Much As $600 Million By Swapping GPT And Claude For China’s Kimi K3 In Copilot, Risking A Rap On The Knuckles From The Trump Administration (WCC)

“Ever since Microsoft transitioned its Copilot Cowork offering to a metered pricing architecture, where you pay for the number of tokens consumed, it has been eyeing open-source models from China with particular interest, especially given the materially lower inference costs that such models entail.

Now, a new report suggests that Microsoft might add Moonshot's Kimi K3 model to Copilot, risking the ire of the Trump administration in the process.

As we explained in a recent post, Moonshot has just unveiled its brand-new, open-source Kimi K3 model, which spans 2.8 trillion parameters, and is designed specifically for frontier-scale intelligence.

Kimi K3 is quite efficient to run on data center-scale hardware, courtesy of its dramatically reduced KV cache and built-in optimizations for per-token memory use - achieved by distributing its 896 experts across a large number of GPUs.

In fact, Microsoft calculates that it could save as much as $600 million in inference costs by moving Copilot away from OpenAI and Anthropic models and towards Moonshot's Kimi K3.”

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