Companies, products, and big moves
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Two stories today show where the AI money is actually landing — on the balance sheets of the memory and hardware makers feeding the build-out — plus a bionic hand that pushes robot dexterity another notch. Samsung plans to return up to $80 billion to shareholders in 2026. The company said
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Waymo has reportedly designed its own automotive AI chip, a purpose-built piece of silicon that pushes past 1,000 trillion operations per second (TOPS) and is built on TSMC's 5-nanometer process. The headline detail: Google's Gemini large model is deeply integrated into it, and
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The pendulum in the OpenAI–Anthropic revenue race just swung back. Three weeks after Anthropic briefly passed OpenAI on quarterly revenue for the first time, OpenAI says GPT-5.6 Sol has it growing again — and the spending data behind the scenes backs that up. OpenAI says GPT-5.6
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Two moves today show where the AI race is being won — in the memory fabs and the image APIs. Micron is betting a decade of research dollars on keeping the physical substrate of AI on U.S. soil, while OpenAI quietly closes one of the last annoying gaps in generative
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Two stories show how the AI build-out is playing out — one sovereign, one on your AWS bill. Brazil is putting 2.3 billion reais (about $444 million) into its AI ecosystem, and it is deliberately splitting the work between American and Chinese technology. The larger slice — 1.3 billion
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A startup betting that biology can be forecast like the weather just pulled in a $20 million vote of confidence — and a valuation that says investors think the model might actually work. Astromech, the AI-bio company co-founded by entrepreneur Ben Lamm and geneticist George Church, has raised $20
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Two signals this morning point at the same pressure point in the AI economy: the scramble for training data has become a billion-dollar business of its own. Micro1, a four-year-old AI training-data startup, grew its gross annual run rate from $100 million to $500 million in
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Two enterprise moves today show where the money is flowing in AI: security vendors are betting that defending against AI-made threats means selling AI-made defense, and the autonomous-driving race is increasingly a silicon race. Palo Alto Networks and NTT DATA signed a multiyear global alliance that targets
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OpenAI just wired ChatGPT into Apple Messages, and the move says as much about where assistants are heading as it does about iMessage. OpenAI launched a ChatGPT plugin that can read, draft, and send your Apple Messages. The new integration connects a user's Messages inbox to the chatbot,
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Two quiet-but-significant product moves today show the AI business is as much about distribution and defaults as it is about raw model power. Nvidia is building a China-specific AI chip it plans to start shipping before the end of the year. According to The Information, the part
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The money pouring into AI is increasingly spent after the model is trained — on the steady, unglamorous work of running inference at scale. A new funding round today shows where a slice of that budget is heading. Callosum Ltd. has raised $100 million to build software that makes AI applications
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Two big-money moves in AI's industrial layer bookend the hour: a coding-startup megadeal that wires Nvidia deeper into the software stack, and an unusually candid governance essay from OpenAI itself. Poolside has struck a non-exclusive $6 billion licensing deal with Nvidia, alongside a $1 billion