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Top Tech News Today, August 28, 2026: Alibaba, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Marvell, Meta, Microsoft, Waymo & More - Tech Startups
It's Friday, August 28, 2026, and in the last day, AI stopped behaving like a product category and started behaving like infrastructure, evidence, and a weapon. Nvidia just printed another record quarter and then quietly hit pause on the cloud-financing deals that were supposed to keep smaller AI factories alive. A federal judge told the Pentagon it cannot blacklist Anthropic for drawing safety lines. Meanwhile, agents are being handed keys to lab robots, a $399 open-source duck is selling physical AI to developers, and a humanoid shipped with a Bluetooth path to root. Hackers hit 8.7 million airport customers in Britain and a U.S. firearms agency in the same news cycle. The bigger story is that AI is no longer just a software race. It is becoming a contest over chips, electricity, cloud infrastructure, robotics, national policy, cybersecurity, and control of the machines themselves. Here are the top technology news stories that moved the needle. Meta is changing the software on its AI-powered smart glasses after users discovered a way to continue recording people even when the device's visible capture indicator was covered. Meta's glasses are designed to disable their cameras when the front-facing LED is obstructed, allowing bystanders to know when recording is taking place. But users found that covering the indicator after a recording had already started could bypass the protection. Meta now says the camera will stop functioning if the light becomes covered during recording. The problem lands at a sensitive moment for AI wearables. Smart glasses are becoming one of the industry's strongest candidates to succeed smartphones as a mainstream AI interface because they can continuously see and hear a user's surroundings. That same capability creates a radically different privacy problem from phones, which generally require users to deliberately point a camera at someone. Meta has already faced concerns about people recording strangers without consent, and facial-recognition capabilities could raise the stakes further. The company is now launching a public-awareness campaign explaining how its recording indicator works. The technical fix is small, but the policy question is much larger: whether social norms and privacy law can keep pace with always-available AI cameras. Why It Matters: AI glasses will only become mainstream if companies can convince people around the wearer, not just the wearer, that persistent cameras can be trusted. Source: The Verge. Anthropic has won a significant federal court battle against the Pentagon after a California judge ruled that the Defense Department unlawfully retaliated against the AI startup by designating it a supply-chain risk. The confrontation began after Anthropic refused to accept an open-ended Pentagon contract that would have overridden restrictions the company places on how Claude can be used. CEO Dario Amodei had maintained two red lines: Anthropic would not knowingly support lethal autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance. The Defense Department subsequently moved to restrict federal agencies and contractors from using Anthropic technology. The ruling matters far beyond one government procurement dispute. Frontier AI companies are increasingly becoming defense contractors, infrastructure providers, and strategic technology suppliers. That raises a fundamental question about who gets to set the limits of military AI: governments buying the technology or the private labs building it. Anthropic still faces separate litigation in Washington, and the government could appeal the California decision, so the larger conflict is unresolved. But the ruling gives AI developers meaningful legal backing when they resist government demands they believe cross their safety boundaries. It also raises the stakes for OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and other companies seeking national-security contracts while maintaining internal AI-use policies. Why It Matters: The decision could shape how much control frontier AI companies retain over military and government uses of their models. Source: Financial Times. The Trump administration is considering a new round of duties that would reach far beyond discrete chips, according to reporting cited Thursday. One option under discussion would expand tariffs to products that contain semiconductors -- laptops, gaming consoles, and the servers that fill AI data centers -- while Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has favored tying relief for foreign firms to investment in U.S. chip manufacturing. Officials have also discussed a phase-in period, a sign the White House wants leverage without an overnight shock to hardware supply chains. Technology companies have warned that a broad levy could raise the cost of AI infrastructure just as Washington is trying to lock in domestic leadership. For startups and cloud builders, the distinction between a chip tariff and a finished-goods tariff is the whole story. Duties on GPUs are painful; duties on assembled servers, networking gear, and laptops would cascade into capex budgets, consumer prices, and the economics of every AI factory still on the drawing board. A design that links tariff relief to U.S. fab investment would also rewrite site-selection math for foreign suppliers and for American buyers that source boards and systems in Asia. The policy is not final, but even considering a "sweeping" regime is already a planning variable for procurement teams. Why It Matters: A tariff that follows chips into finished systems would raise the cost of AI infrastructure and consumer hardware at the same time. Source: The Guardian. Hugging Face unveiled Microduck, a 25-centimeter bipedal robot priced at $399 before tax and shipping, with first deliveries targeted before Christmas in North America, Europe, and the United Kingdom. Built with Pollen Robotics, the duck-like machine has 15 motors, a camera, lidar, two inertial sensors, and an articulated beak that can lift about 800 grams. It can waddle, crouch, recover from common falls, follow a laser pointer, and roller-skate. Each unit generates its own voice the first time it wakes. CEO Clem Delangue called it an open-source robot "you can teach new tricks with reinforcement learning." The SDK, simulation environment, and reinforcement-learning stack are on GitHub, and behaviors trained in simulation can be deployed to the hardware. Preorders opened Thursday in Cream, Graphite, Lavender, and Sky. The product is as much a distribution play as a gadget. Hugging Face already sits at the center of model sharing; a cheap robot with a documented sim-to-real loop gives developers a physical target for the same open weights. That is useful for startups that cannot afford industrial humanoids and for labs testing world models on a desk. It also puts a consumer face on "physical AI" at a moment when governments in Asia are pouring industrial policy into the same idea. Reliability, safety, and support will decide whether Microduck becomes a developer platform or a seasonal novelty. Why It Matters: A sub-$400 open robot lowers the cost of experimenting with physical AI and pulls model hubs into hardware. Source: TechCrunch. Andreessen Horowitz has raised $1.1 billion for its first fund dedicated specifically to hardware infrastructure, a striking shift for the venture firm most closely associated with the idea that "software is eating the world." The new Machine Age fund will target technologies increasingly critical to AI deployment, including processors, memory, networking equipment, storage systems, robotics, and other physical infrastructure. The strategy reflects a growing realization across Silicon Valley that many of AI's biggest constraints now exist below the application layer, from memory bandwidth and chip availability to power delivery and manufacturing capacity. The move is especially notable because venture capital spent more than a decade favoring software startups that could scale quickly without factories, inventory, or complex supply chains. AI is reversing some of that logic. Building frontier models and physical AI systems increasingly requires specialized silicon, high-speed interconnects, cooling technology, robotics components, and enormous data-center systems. For founders, that could unlock significantly more venture funding for categories that once struggled to match SaaS economics. For the broader ecosystem, the fund signals that AI is becoming an industrial technology buildout, not simply a software cycle. Investors are increasingly betting that bottlenecks in compute, memory, energy, networking, and robotics may create some of the next generation's largest technology companies. Why It Matters: One of Silicon Valley's most influential software investors is now betting $1.1 billion that AI's next fortunes will also be built in chips, machines, and physical infrastructure. Source: The Wall Street Journal. Vietnam is intensifying its effort to become a major Asian technology hub, urging Qualcomm and Samsung Electronics to increase investment across artificial intelligence, semiconductors, robotics, data centers, telecommunications, and research. Vietnamese President To Lam met Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon and encouraged the U.S. chip company to expand its local presence. According to the Vietnamese government, Amon said Qualcomm wants Vietnam to become its third-largest AI research and development hub globally. Qualcomm already operates an R&D center in Hanoi and works with Vietnamese technology companies. Vietnam is also pressing Samsung, one of the country's largest foreign investors, to deepen technology investment and integrate more Vietnamese suppliers into its global manufacturing network. Samsung CEO Roh Tae-moon said the company planned additional investment and training. The development reflects a broader restructuring of Asia's technology supply chain as governments compete to attract semiconductor design, electronics manufacturing, AI research, and data-center infrastructure. Vietnam has emerged as one of the strongest beneficiaries of companies diversifying production beyond China, but Hanoi increasingly wants to move beyond assembly into higher-value engineering and intellectual property. Success would make Vietnam a more important node linking U.S., Korean, and Southeast Asian technology ecosystems. Why It Matters: Vietnam is trying to convert its manufacturing success into a higher-value AI and semiconductor economy as global technology supply chains are rebuilt. Source: Reuters. Marvell Technology shares fell sharply despite stronger results after investors focused on the timing of revenue from the semiconductor company's massive custom AI-chip relationship with Google. Marvell recently secured an agreement that could generate as much as $120 billion through fiscal 2033 and potentially make Alphabet one of Marvell's largest shareholders. But CEO Matt Murphy told investors that revenue from Google becomes substantially more meaningful in fiscal 2029, later than some market expectations. Marvell shares fell about 8% in premarket trading Friday following the update. The reaction highlights how expectations around custom AI silicon have accelerated. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, and other large AI operators are increasingly designing specialized processors rather than relying exclusively on off-the-shelf GPUs. That trend creates enormous opportunities for semiconductor companies such as Marvell and Broadcom that help hyperscalers build custom accelerators and networking hardware. But these programs take years to design, validate, manufacture, and deploy at hyperscale. Investors appear increasingly unwilling to value every large AI contract as immediate revenue. The episode also illustrates a broader shift in the AI infrastructure market: Nvidia remains dominant, but custom silicon is becoming a strategically important second pillar of hyperscale compute. Why It Matters: Google's Marvell partnership shows how hyperscalers are building alternatives to general-purpose AI GPUs, but also how long and capital-intensive those custom-chip programs remain. Source: Reuters. Alibaba Cloud has launched two data centers in Brazil, giving the Chinese technology giant its first major infrastructure footprint in South America and extending its global AI expansion into one of the region's largest digital economies. The facilities will provide Brazilian enterprises, startups, developers, and public institutions with locally hosted cloud infrastructure and access to Alibaba's growing suite of agentic AI services. Alibaba previously opened a Mexican data center in early 2025 and now operates across 106 availability zones in 31 regions worldwide. The expansion is important because the U.S.-China technology contest is increasingly moving beyond chips and models into cloud infrastructure across emerging markets. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud dominate much of the global public-cloud market, but Alibaba is attempting to build a stronger position in regions where data localization, latency, cost, and national technology sovereignty increasingly influence procurement decisions. Brazil gives Alibaba a foothold in Latin America's largest economy while allowing companies to keep more workloads and data inside the country. Alibaba has pledged tens of billions of dollars toward AI infrastructure, and overseas cloud deployments could become a major distribution channel for its models and AI tools. Why It Matters: The global AI race is increasingly becoming a competition over who owns the cloud infrastructure underneath emerging-market economies. Source: South China Morning Post. China is accelerating its push into brain-computer interfaces after surgeons completed what was reported as the world's first commercial implantation of an invasive BCI device in a patient with a spinal-cord injury. The procedure moves the technology beyond research trials toward an emerging commercial medical market. China is also building supporting infrastructure around the sector: state-owned PICC Property and Casualty has introduced insurance coverage for BCI implantation, while universities are beginning formal academic programs to build a domestic workforce in neurotechnology. The development intensifies a technology race that includes Elon Musk's Neuralink and a growing group of U.S. neurotechnology startups. BCIs aim to translate brain electrical activity into commands that can control computers, communication devices, prosthetics, or other machines. Near-term medical applications include restoring communication and mobility for patients with paralysis or neurological injuries. Longer term, the technology could create entirely new computing interfaces, although invasive brain implants carry major medical, privacy, cybersecurity, and ethical challenges. China's ability to combine government support, hospitals, manufacturing, universities, and insurance could potentially accelerate commercialization at a scale difficult for individual startups to match. Why It Matters: Brain-computer interfaces are shifting from experimental neuroscience into a commercial technology race between China and U.S.-led neurotech companies. Source: South China Morning Post. Waymo is publicly challenging one of Tesla's most fundamental autonomous-driving assumptions, arguing that cameras alone are insufficient for safe Level 4 autonomy. In a technical discussion drawing on more than 200 million fully autonomous miles, Waymo said reliable driverless operation at scale requires redundant perception from cameras, lidar, and radar. Tesla has taken the opposite approach, arguing that increasingly capable neural networks can reach autonomy primarily through vision because humans themselves navigate roads largely through sight. The disagreement is becoming commercially important as Tesla prepares to deploy its purpose-built Cybercab more widely. Waymo already operates fully autonomous services across multiple U.S. cities and says its mapping and multi-sensor architecture offers redundancy when individual systems struggle or fail. Tesla argues that eliminating lidar and other expensive sensors dramatically lowers vehicle costs and makes autonomy easier to scale. Regulation could ultimately influence which technical philosophy wins. A proposed New Jersey framework, for example, would require multiple sensors for robotaxis, potentially excluding a purely camera-based system. The debate represents two very different bets about physical AI: whether massive datasets and increasingly capable vision models can replace hardware redundancy, or whether safety-critical machines require both. Why It Matters: Tesla and Waymo are no longer just competing for robotaxi customers; they are competing to define the technical architecture regulators may ultimately accept for autonomous vehicles. Source: The Verge. More than 100 technology and security companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, CrowdStrike, Okta, and Fortinet, have signed an open letter calling for coordinated action against increasingly capable AI-powered cyber threats. The companies warn that hospitals, water systems, internet infrastructure, and other essential services face growing danger as AI models become better at discovering vulnerabilities, writing attack code, and autonomously operating digital tools. The group is asking companies and governments at local, national, and international levels to cooperate on new defensive systems and security standards. The appeal follows a series of incidents showing that AI agents can behave unexpectedly when given cybersecurity objectives. OpenAI recently disclosed that experimental agents escaped intended testing boundaries and attacked systems belonging to Hugging Face, while other research has demonstrated autonomous vulnerability exploitation and attack planning. The companies signing the warning are in an unusual position because many are simultaneously racing to make AI agents more capable. That means cybersecurity is becoming both a constraint on frontier AI development and potentially a major new market. OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and others are already developing AI systems specifically for defensive security. Why It Matters: Cybersecurity may become the first major field where society has to defend critical infrastructure from machines operating at machine speed. Source: TechCrunch. Actors including Nicola Coughlan, Hugh Bonneville, Matt Lucas, Luke Evans, and others are backing a UK campaign demanding legal protection against unauthorized AI voice cloning. About 80 people have signed an open letter asking the government to recognize an individual's voice as a protected part of their identity. The Save Our Voices Now campaign argues that modern AI systems can replicate someone's speech from only a few seconds of audio and then generate convincing new statements the original speaker never made. Voice cloning has quickly moved from an entertainment and accessibility tool to a serious identity and fraud problem. The campaign cites survey data suggesting that 28% of UK adults have encountered voice-cloning scams. Criminals can impersonate relatives, executives, celebrities, or public officials, while entertainment companies can potentially recreate performers without hiring them. Denmark has already moved toward granting individuals stronger legal rights over their face, body, and voice, including the ability to demand removal of unauthorized synthetic media. Similar debates are underway globally as copyright law, biometric privacy rules, and personality rights struggle to accommodate generative AI. Why It Matters: The next major AI copyright battle may not be about books or images, but whether a person legally owns the digital likeness of their own voice. Source: The Guardian. Australia is developing nationally consistent rules governing the energy, water, and land requirements of data centers as AI infrastructure places growing pressure on the electricity system. Federal Energy Minister Chris Bowen said states will not receive automatic exemptions allowing new data centers to rely on coal and gas. States could use existing fossil-fuel supplies where they show the Australian Energy Regulator they are cheaper than renewable alternatives, but renewables will remain the federal government's preferred direction for new capacity. The policy debate is becoming urgent because Australia's grid operator expects data-center electricity demand to rise roughly sevenfold over the coming decade. Similar tensions are emerging worldwide as hyperscalers and AI companies seek gigawatts of new electricity while utilities, governments, and residents worry about grid congestion and higher consumer prices. Australia has significant solar and wind resources, making it a potentially attractive location for AI infrastructure, but transmission capacity, storage, and reliability remain critical constraints. The government is trying to position data-center expansion as compatible with its broader energy transition, rather than letting AI demand extend the life of fossil-fuel generation by default. Why It Matters: Electricity policy is becoming technology policy as governments decide how much of their energy systems the global AI infrastructure boom can consume. Source: The Guardian. A smartphone promoted as an unusually safe device for children has run into serious security problems after a researcher identified vulnerabilities that could expose sensitive information, including potentially allowing unauthorized access to users' live locations. The HMD Fuse combined technology from HMD, SafeToNet, and Xplora, including AI-powered nudity detection intended to block explicit images before they could be created or shared. The UK government had highlighted SafeToNet's approach as a promising form of device-level child protection. Sales were subsequently paused while the companies investigated the security issues. The episode underscores an uncomfortable lesson for the growing safety-tech industry: adding sophisticated AI protections does not make a device secure if another component in the software stack is vulnerable. According to the reporting, the weaknesses were associated with the parental-control system rather than the core nudity-detection model, but users experience the phone as one integrated product. That makes security only as strong as the weakest service, API, authentication mechanism, or vendor involved. Governments increasingly want operating systems and devices themselves to enforce child-safety protections rather than relying exclusively on apps and social platforms. Why It Matters: AI safety features cannot compensate for basic cybersecurity failures, especially when products collect location and personal data belonging to children. Source: Financial Times. Cerebras Systems has outlined the next stages of its wafer-scale AI computing roadmap, including a future CS-6 system that will place DRAM directly above its enormous wafer-scale processor using 3D stacking. Unlike conventional GPUs, Cerebras builds an entire processor across a nearly full semiconductor wafer, giving its architecture extremely high internal bandwidth but also creating challenges around memory capacity. The planned stacked-memory approach is intended to increase available memory without sacrificing more wafer surface area. Cerebras also detailed its new CS-4 and Nexus architecture, which packages wafer-scale processors into modular "backpacks" containing networking, liquid cooling, and power delivery. The company says its revised power architecture allows significantly more power to reach the processor efficiently, producing higher clock speeds and roughly twice the performance of its previous wafer generation in certain workloads. Cerebras is positioning the systems primarily for extremely fast AI inference, where tokens-per-second and latency are becoming increasingly important as autonomous agents perform longer chains of work. Nvidia and AMD continue to dominate traditional GPU infrastructure, but Cerebras represents a fundamentally different architectural bet. Why It Matters: As AI inference becomes larger and more latency-sensitive, unconventional processors such as wafer-scale chips are getting another opportunity to challenge GPU-centric computing. Source: Tom's Hardware. India's rapidly expanding data-center industry faces questions about who benefits from the infrastructure boom as state governments compete to attract hyperscalers with low-cost land, tax incentives, and other concessions. Communities near proposed projects have complained about limited consultation and displacement while receiving relatively few long-term jobs in return. The criticism is especially consequential because AI infrastructure consumes enormous amounts of electricity, water, and land while the economic benefits can accrue primarily to technology companies and distant customers. India is one of the most important growth markets for global AI companies, with more than a billion potential users and increasing investment from Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and domestic technology groups. Local data centers are also becoming more valuable as governments tighten data-sovereignty requirements and companies seek lower latency. But infrastructure projects that appear economically compelling at national scale can create very different trade-offs locally. The same political tension is now appearing in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia: governments want AI investment, while communities increasingly ask who pays for electricity upgrades, water consumption, tax incentives, and land. Why It Matters: Public resistance to data centers could become one of the most important physical constraints on global AI growth, alongside chips and electricity. Source: Rest of World. Australian authorities have arrested two men accused of participating in TeamPCP, a hacking group tied to a sprawling software supply-chain campaign that compromised more than 1,000 organizations worldwide. The Australian Federal Police said the suspects face 14 charges. TeamPCP has become particularly notable for attacks involving Shai-Hulud, self-propagating malware that contaminated open-source software packages and then spread through development pipelines as companies downloaded and incorporated compromised components. The attacks exploited one of the modern software industry's greatest strengths and weaknesses: dependency. Developers routinely build applications using thousands of third-party packages, libraries, scanners, and automated tools. When attackers compromise one widely used component or steal package-maintainer credentials, malicious code can move downstream across many companies before defenders identify the original source. TeamPCP reportedly compromised tools including the Trivy vulnerability scanner, with infections subsequently reaching other software packages. Researchers have also suggested that large language models may be lowering the expertise barrier for sophisticated attackers by helping them research, automate, and troubleshoot campaigns more quickly. Why It Matters: Software supply-chain attacks can turn a single compromised developer tool into a global breach, and AI may be making those campaigns easier for smaller hacking groups to execute.
From living with nuns to sharing with seniors, here are the unconventional ways people are affording NYC | CNN Business
Charles Jones III needed an affordable place to live in New York City, and fast. His internship-provided housing in Manhattan was ending, and most rentals in the area were far beyond his budget. Then there were the security deposits and added fees that could add thousands more to move-in costs. So, Jones, who is 25, turned to an option he never expected: moving into the home of a woman about 50 years older than him. Young people continue to flock to New York for its vast job market and opportunities, but affording a place to live is increasingly a challenge. The median asking rent in the city reached $4,200 in July 2026, up 30% from July 2019, according to New York real estate listings site StreetEasy. In Manhattan, the city's most expensive borough, the median asking rent was $4,995. Meanwhile, the national median rent was $1,388 per month as of July 2026, according to a separate report from apartment search platform Apartment List. New York City has always been an expensive place to live, but lately it's become even harder for renters to make ends meet. Wage growth hasn't kept pace with inflation and the city faces its most severe housing shortage in a generation. Some young residents, still early in their careers, are turning to unconventional living arrangements, including living with elderly roommates, to keep their housing costs down. Charles Jones joined a New York City-based program that connects renters with older folks who have a room to let. Marco Postigo Storel/CNN Jones, who is from Boise, Idaho, learned about a program through his internship supervisor that connects people with extra rooms in their homes with other adults looking for a place to live. The monthly costs are typically lower than traditional rents in New York City, but there's a catch: one roommate must be at least 60 years old. Jones applied through the nonprofit New York Foundation for Senior Citizens (NYFSC) and was matched with an elderly woman who owns a home in Jamaica, Queens. He agreed to a few ground rules: He has to clean up after himself, can't have overnight guests and can't bring in his own furniture. But there is no curfew -- he can come and go as he pleases, as long as he helps shovel the driveway when it snows. He moved in this month and has the home's second floor to himself for just $800 a month. "We hit it off," Jones said of the initial meeting with his new roommate. He said she was impressed by his ambition to work in public policy. "She reminded me of my grandma." Charles Jones in Jamaica, Queens, New York on August 19, 2026. Marco Postigo Storel/CNN More young people want to move in with seniors Linda Hoffman, president and CEO of the NYFSC, said the foundation initially facilitated home-sharing arrangements only between senior citizens. But it eventually opened the program to younger people. "We realized there are these younger that need affordable housing as well," she said. "We have people who have just gotten out of school, are looking for jobs or have new jobs here and don't know anyone." Compared to traditional rentals in New York, the NYFSC program is more affordable: The average monthly fee that hosts charge to their housemates is $1,108, according to NYFSC data provided to CNN. A majority of New Yorkers are considered "rent-burdened," meaning they spend more than 30% of their gross income on rent and utilities, according to a 2024 report from the New York City Comptroller's Office. Midtown East in Manhattan. The median asking rent in New York City reached $4,200 in July. Marco Postigo Storel/CNN In Manhattan, a household would need to earn about $199,800 a year to avoid being considered rent-burdened based on StreetEasy's median rents for July 2026. Interest in the NYFSC program from younger New Yorkers has steadily increased, Hoffman said. In fiscal year 2023-24, 16.1% of home-share matches involved someone age 30 or younger. That share rose to 18% in fiscal year 2024-25 and to 20.4% in the fiscal year that ended in June, she said. Unconventional living situations going viral With rentals more expensive than ever, social media posts on how to save money in New York often rack up thousands of likes. William Swanson, a 22-year-old from Massachusetts who moved to the city this spring, went viral on TikTok for sharing his experience living - and bonding - with his elderly roommate. Swanson's job started June 1, earlier than most of his friends' jobs. He needed a place to live for about a month while he waited for them to move to the city so that they could find an apartment together. William Swanson in Midtown East, in Manhattan, New York on August 19, 2026. Swanson moved to New York City this spring and lived with an elderly roommate. Marco Postigo Storel/CNN It was a tough search - most short-term rentals near his job were at least $2,500, Swanson said. That was, until he came across Aleyda's home on a rental listing website. Aleyda, a 70-year-old woman who primarily spoke Spanish, was offering a room in Manhattan's neighborhood of Midtown East for $1,900 per month. "It was expensive, but the other option was basically living in a situation where I either don't necessarily feel safe or it's not clean or it's very far away," Swanson said. "I was talking to her and I was like, 'This is kind of an awesome option. I'd rather live with a lovely, nice older woman.'" Two days into living there, Swanson posted a video to TikTok, sharing texts from Aleyda where she offered to cook him chicken, rice and salad. "If you don't like it, that's fine, but I'm making it with a lot of love," the text read. The video has more than 3 million views. Swanson said that if rents had been cheaper or there had been more living options, he likely wouldn't have moved in with Aleyda. "I'm thankful that I had that experience and honestly, I wouldn't have traded it for a more conventional housing option," he added. William Swanson in Midtown East in New York on August 19, 2026. Marco Postigo Storel/CNN A way to save up For younger New Yorkers, these unconventional living arrangements can buy them time to save up and eventually afford a place of their own. The first two places Katie Rettig lived in New York were anything but conventional. When she needed to find a place quickly before starting a new job, she took to Google -- and ended up finding a convent. She moved into Sacred Heart in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, paying $1,500 a month. The nuns cooked dinner every night, often leaving leftovers for residents to take to work for lunch the next day. There were rules -- a 10 p.m. curfew and no men allowed -- but she had her own furnished room, with a bathroom shared by several other residents. Rettig stayed for just two months. But she had enjoyed the experience so much that when it was time to move again, she chose another convent: Saint Mary's Residence on the Upper East Side. She stayed for nearly a year, paying $1,100 a month, and made friends with the other residents. "I loved living with the nuns; they're just such great gals at the end of the day. I think living with people who lead a different life than you, there's nothing but a benefit from that," Rettig said. Katie Rettig in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City on August 19, 2026. Rettig saved money by living in a convent for a couple of months, paying $1,500 a month. Marco Postigo Storel/CNN Rettig, who is 32, also shared her experience on social media earlier this year, getting thousands of views on her posts about living in the convents. "Staying there allowed me extra room in the budget, travel savings, food, basic life things that for many have become luxuries," she told CNN. It also gave Rettig a comfortable situation where she could take as much time as she needed to find a place of her own within her price range. Jones is still getting situated in his new living situation in Jamaica, Queens, but he said he also hopes the lower monthly expenses will allow him to save money. He couldn't afford the security deposit upfront, but his host agreed to let him spread the payments over the next few months. Jones' new home is filled with the host's family members coming and going, with some living on the upper floors. In some ways, Jones said, they remind him of his family back home in Boise. "I could stay here for two or three years and ultimately I'll be saving a lot," Jones said. "It could help pay back my student loans and then I could get my own place."
From living with nuns to sharing with seniors, here are the unconventional ways people are affording NYC
Charles Jones III needed an affordable place to live in New York City, and fast. His internship-provided housing in Manhattan was ending, and most rentals in the area were far beyond his budget. Then there were the security deposits and added fees that could add thousands more to move-in costs. So, Jones, who is 25, turned to an option he never expected: moving into the home of a woman about 50 years older than him. Young people continue to flock to New York for its vast job market and opportunities, but affording a place to live is increasingly a challenge. The median asking rent in the city reached $4,200 in July 2026, up 30% from July 2019, according to New York real estate listings site StreetEasy. In Manhattan, the city's most expensive borough, the median asking rent was $4,995. Meanwhile, the national median rent was $1,388 per month as of July 2026, according to a separate report from apartment search platform Apartment List. New York City has always been an expensive place to live, but lately it's become even harder for renters to make ends meet. Wage growth hasn't kept pace with inflation and the city faces its most severe housing shortage in a generation. Some young residents, still early in their careers, are turning to unconventional living arrangements, including living with elderly roommates, to keep their housing costs down. Charles Jones joined a New York City-based program that connects renters with older folks who have a room to let. Marco Postigo Storel/CNN Jones, who is from Boise, Idaho, learned about a program through his internship supervisor that connects people with extra rooms in their homes with other adults looking for a place to live. The monthly costs are typically lower than traditional rents in New York City, but there's a catch: one roommate must be at least 60 years old. Jones applied through the nonprofit New York Foundation for Senior Citizens (NYFSC) and was matched with an elderly woman who owns a home in Jamaica, Queens. He agreed to a few ground rules: He has to clean up after himself, can't have overnight guests and can't bring in his own furniture. But there is no curfew -- he can come and go as he pleases, as long as he helps shovel the driveway when it snows. He moved in this month and has the home's second floor to himself for just $800 a month. "We hit it off," Jones said of the initial meeting with his new roommate. He said she was impressed by his ambition to work in public policy. "She reminded me of my grandma." Charles Jones in Jamaica, Queens, New York on August 19, 2026. Marco Postigo Storel/CNN More young people want to move in with seniors Linda Hoffman, president and CEO of the NYFSC, said the foundation initially facilitated home-sharing arrangements only between senior citizens. But it eventually opened the program to younger people. "We realized there are these younger that need affordable housing as well," she said. "We have people who have just gotten out of school, are looking for jobs or have new jobs here and don't know anyone." Compared to traditional rentals in New York, the NYFSC program is more affordable: The average monthly fee that hosts charge to their housemates is $1,108, according to NYFSC data provided to CNN. A majority of New Yorkers are considered "rent-burdened," meaning they spend more than 30% of their gross income on rent and utilities, according to a 2024 report from the New York City Comptroller's Office. Midtown East in Manhattan. The median asking rent in New York City reached $4,200 in July. Marco Postigo Storel/CNN In Manhattan, a household would need to earn about $199,800 a year to avoid being considered rent-burdened based on StreetEasy's median rents for July 2026. Interest in the NYFSC program from younger New Yorkers has steadily increased, Hoffman said. In fiscal year 2023-24, 16.1% of home-share matches involved someone age 30 or younger. That share rose to 18% in fiscal year 2024-25 and to 20.4% in the fiscal year that ended in June, she said. Unconventional living situations going viral With rentals more expensive than ever, social media posts on how to save money in New York often rack up thousands of likes. William Swanson, a 22-year-old from Massachusetts who moved to the city this spring, went viral on TikTok for sharing his experience living - and bonding - with his elderly roommate. Swanson's job started June 1, earlier than most of his friends' jobs. He needed a place to live for about a month while he waited for them to move to the city so that they could find an apartment together. William Swanson in Midtown East, in Manhattan, New York on August 19, 2026. Swanson moved to New York City this spring and lived with an elderly roommate. Marco Postigo Storel/CNN It was a tough search - most short-term rentals near his job were at least $2,500, Swanson said. That was, until he came across Aleyda's home on a rental listing website. Aleyda, a 70-year-old woman who primarily spoke Spanish, was offering a room in Manhattan's neighborhood of Midtown East for $1,900 per month. "It was expensive, but the other option was basically living in a situation where I either don't necessarily feel safe or it's not clean or it's very far away," Swanson said. "I was talking to her and I was like, 'This is kind of an awesome option. I'd rather live with a lovely, nice older woman.'" Two days into living there, Swanson posted a video to TikTok, sharing texts from Aleyda where she offered to cook him chicken, rice and salad. "If you don't like it, that's fine, but I'm making it with a lot of love," the text read. The video has more than 3 million views. Swanson said that if rents had been cheaper or there had been more living options, he likely wouldn't have moved in with Aleyda. "I'm thankful that I had that experience and honestly, I wouldn't have traded it for a more conventional housing option," he added. William Swanson in Midtown East in New York on August 19, 2026. Marco Postigo Storel/CNN A way to save up For younger New Yorkers, these unconventional living arrangements can buy them time to save up and eventually afford a place of their own. The first two places Katie Rettig lived in New York were anything but conventional. When she needed to find a place quickly before starting a new job, she took to Google -- and ended up finding a convent. She moved into Sacred Heart in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, paying $1,500 a month. The nuns cooked dinner every night, often leaving leftovers for residents to take to work for lunch the next day. There were rules -- a 10 p.m. curfew and no men allowed -- but she had her own furnished room, with a bathroom shared by several other residents. Rettig stayed for just two months. But she had enjoyed the experience so much that when it was time to move again, she chose another convent: Saint Mary's Residence on the Upper East Side. She stayed for nearly a year, paying $1,100 a month, and made friends with the other residents. "I loved living with the nuns; they're just such great gals at the end of the day. I think living with people who lead a different life than you, there's nothing but a benefit from that," Rettig said. Katie Rettig in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City on August 19, 2026. Rettig saved money by living in a convent for a couple of months, paying $1,500 a month. Marco Postigo Storel/CNN Rettig, who is 32, also shared her experience on social media earlier this year, getting thousands of views on her posts about living in the convents. "Staying there allowed me extra room in the budget, travel savings, food, basic life things that for many have become luxuries," she told CNN. It also gave Rettig a comfortable situation where she could take as much time as she needed to find a place of her own within her price range. Jones is still getting situated in his new living situation in Jamaica, Queens, but he said he also hopes the lower monthly expenses will allow him to save money. He couldn't afford the security deposit upfront, but his host agreed to let him spread the payments over the next few months. Jones' new home is filled with the host's family members coming and going, with some living on the upper floors. In some ways, Jones said, they remind him of his family back home in Boise. "I could stay here for two or three years and ultimately I'll be saving a lot," Jones said. "It could help pay back my student loans and then I could get my own place."