Mark Zuckerberg just bought a cozy abode close to Meta’s international headquarters in Ireland. By cozy abode, we mean a castle. Zuck bought the 19th-century Strancally Castle and its 440-acre grounds, an estate estimated to have cost him anywhere from $23 million to $35 million.

“Mark and his family are excited to continue caring for this historic home and look forward to spending time in Ireland, where Meta maintains its international headquarters,” a spokesperson told the press about the purchase.

We’ve reached out to Meta for further comment.  

The home is stunning: it sits on a river, surrounded by greenery, and the Irish Times reported in 2001 that it has at least 11 bedrooms, four tower suites, a library, a dining room, and a drawing room. Zuck bought the castle from a financier who’d lived there with his family for 25 years. 

Meta’s international headquarters is in Dublin, where the company opened a 31,000-square-foot data center in 2017, 20 minutes from the city. Waterford, where Zuck’s new castle is, is about a two-hour drive from Dublin.

This isn’t Zuck’s first big real estate purchase this year. He and his wife also reportedly splashed out $170 million for a home in the same exclusive Miami neighborhood as Jeff Bezos, joining a slew of tech billionaires leaving California as the state seeks to implement a form of wealth tax. 

As AI continues to kill traffic to websites, Google on Thursday threw a bone to those publishers negatively impacted by the change. It’s now allowing readers to push a button on a publisher’s website to indicate it’s a “favorite source” they’d like to see highlighted more often across Google Search, Discover, and Google News.

The tech giant said it’s making this new, interactive “Preferred Sources” button available to online publishers to embed on their own websites.

The launch follows Google’s rollout of Preferred Sources in May to Google’s AI experiences, including AI Mode and AI Overviews. The option was previously available in Top Stories.

The idea is to make it easier for readers to find links from the sites they know and trust when they’re searching for content or interacting with Google’s AI to learn about a topic or read the latest news. As of May’s launch, the company said that people across the web had already selected over 345,000 unique sources through this method.

To add a site as a favorite publisher, you can visit Google’s source preferences page, then search for a publisher by name or website.

Becoming a preferred source can drive more traffic to publishers’ websites, Google said. In earlier studies, it found that people are twice as likely to click through to a preferred source when available. By offering publishers these additional tools, Google is trying to assuage the damage that the rapid growth of AI-powered search features has had on traffic-dependent businesses.

Alongside the new button, Google said that readers will soon be able to customize their Discover feed in Google’s app in their own words. To use this feature, readers will tap any three-dot menu in the feed and then tell Google what topics they’d like to see more or less of, using natural language commands. This helps Google refine the feed in real-time.

The search giant is not the only company turning to AI to offer feed-tuning tools powered by AI. In recent months, a number of top social media apps have launched user-controlled algorithms that allow people to fine-tune the content that is recommended to them.

In addition to personalizing the Discover feed, Google says Android users will be able to customize their audio daily briefings in the Google News app, as well.

Castelion, a missile startup founded by former SpaceX executives, has raised a $1 billion Series C at a $13 billion valuation. The round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, Carlyle, and JP Morgan Chase.

Founded in 2022, Castelion set out to manufacture hypersonic weapon systems at a lower cost and at faster speeds than traditional defense primes. Since then, the startup has secured more than $500 million in U.S. military contracts.

The funding for the startup is timely. The Pentagon has been looking to procure more of these weapons, since the U.S.’s stockpile of hypersonic missiles capable of travelling at speeds above Mach 5 hasn’t kept pace with China’s. Castelion is betting it can help close the gap with its faster manufacturing process.

The Torrance, Calif.-based startup will use the fresh capital to produce its Blackbeard missiles, named after a fierce English pirate, and other hypersonic weapons in its New Mexico production facility.

The funding round, which included participation from existing backers including Lightspeed, General Catalyst, and Altimeter, comprised $800 million in equity and a $250 million revolving credit facility.