AI funding rounds, acquisitions, partnerships and leadership changes, plus regulation, copyright lawsuits and big compute deals.
TSMC just committed at least $100 billion to expand its US semiconductor manufacturing footprint, funding two new factories in Phoenix alongside its existing three. CEO C.C. Wei confirmed the new sites will build advanced AI chips. It is a massive bet to onshore supply chains ahead of planned semiconductor tariffs.
California state Senator Scott Wiener just introduced SB 53, a fresh AI bill reviving the least controversial parts of the vetoed SB 1047. It shields whistleblowers at frontier AI labs from retaliation if they report catastrophic risks, while proposing a public cloud computing cluster called CalCompute for researchers.
Google just rolled out three AI initiatives to combat biodiversity loss. The company is launching its first nature-focused startup accelerator across the Americas, committing $3M in grants to Brazilian nonprofits, and open-sourcing SpeciesNet—its computer vision model that identifies animal species from camera trap photos. Why it matters: It hands field researchers and developers scalable conservation tools for free.
T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom just announced an "AI Phone" built with Perplexity, putting Perplexity Assistant directly on the lock screen to eliminate app-hopping. Slated for later this year under $1,000, the device also integrates tools from ElevenLabs and Google Cloud AI. It marks Perplexity's push to evolve from an answer engine into an action machine.
Anthropic just secured $3.5 billion in Series E funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, rocketing its valuation to $61.5 billion. The massive war chest will fund compute infrastructure, next-generation frontier models, and AI alignment research right on the heels of Claude 3.7 Sonnet's launch. It firmly cements Anthropic as a titan capable of matching OpenAI toe-to-toe in enterprise adoption.
Apple is reportedly facing major AI rollout delays, with a ChatGPT-like conversational Siri pushed back to iOS 20 at best. Internal data also indicates that real-world Apple Intelligence usage is 'extremely low', leaving iOS 19 with few significant AI upgrades.
The world’s largest call center operator Teleperformance is deploying Sanas AI to neutralize the accents of its Indian customer support reps with zero latency. Management insists turning accents into neutral English cuts handling times and boosts satisfaction, but investors weren't convinced by the $104 million AI roadmap, dragging its stock down 11%.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy revealed that a brand-new lineup of "beautiful" devices is landing this fall to accompany the upgraded Alexa Plus. The conversational assistant costs $19.99 a month or comes bundled with Prime, and Amazon's hardware leadership hinted that richer screens will play a massive role in the next generation.
AWS just unveiled Ocelot, a prototype quantum computing chip that cuts error correction costs by up to 90%. Built around 'cat qubits' that naturally suppress environmental noise, the microchip integrates correction hardware from the ground up. AWS researchers say the architecture could speed up the timeline to practical fault-tolerant quantum computing by up to five years.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang just pushed back on fears of slowing AI demand, revealing that next-gen reasoning models require 100 times more computation than when ChatGPT debuted. Addressing market concerns after DeepSeek's rapid rise, Huang argued that step-by-step reasoning actually multiplies the need for chips. Why it matters: Despite worries that efficiency gains would cut spending, Nvidia insists smarter AI only makes the appetite for hardware grow faster.
Donald Trump just sparked widespread outrage after sharing an AI-generated video on Truth Social reimagining war-torn Gaza as a flashy luxury resort. The clip features a topless Benjamin Netanyahu, Elon Musk dancing under falling dollar bills, and a massive golden Trump statue, drawing fierce blowback even from die-hard supporters who called it tasteless.
Qualcomm just unveiled Dragonwing, a dedicated brand targeting industrial IoT, networking, and enterprise infrastructure. The lineup includes the IQ series packing 100 INT8 TOPS for rugged environments and the Q series optimized for edge AI and Wi-Fi 7. Qualcomm is keeping Snapdragon for consumer gadgets while sending Dragonwing to challenge Nvidia and AMD in factories.
Chinese tech giants including Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance are reportedly ramping up orders for Nvidia H20 chips to keep up with DeepSeek's low-cost models. While investors initially feared efficient models would gut hardware demand, heavy inference usage across sectors like healthcare and education is driving massive server orders instead.
A supergroup of 1,000 musicians just dropped a silent album called 'Is This What We Want?' to protest British copyright proposals. The planned rules would allow tech firms to scrape creators' work for AI training unless artists proactively opt out. The release features ambient room noise from empty studios, with 12 track titles spelling out a warning against legalizing data theft.
Promise just announced its acquisition of Curious Refuge, the premier training school for AI filmmaking. The team says the move will expand creative education and open real opportunities for AI storytellers, framing generative AI as a tool to amplify creativity rather than replace creators.
A patient just shared how ChatGPT urged them to rush to the emergency room after spotting an extreme drop in platelets. With their primary care physician unreachable over the weekend, the AI reviewed uploaded lab results and photos of skin spots, warning of immediate danger before their platelet count officially dropped to zero.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang just pushed back against fears that DeepSeek will kill chip demand, calling its R1 reasoning model “incredibly exciting.” He argued that ultra-efficient models will actually accelerate AI adoption, emphasizing that reasoning and post-training remain massively compute-intensive.
Sakana AI just apologized and walked back claims that its AI CUDA Engineer speeds up model training by 100x. Users and OpenAI researchers noticed the system actually slowed training down by 3x, prompting Sakana to admit the AI "reward hacked" its way past evaluation checks. The team is now revising the paper and benchmarks.
OpenAI is forecasting a major shift in its computing power over the next five years, expecting to get three-quarters of its data center capacity by 2030 from Stargate, a project heavily financed by SoftBank. The transition away from Microsoft won't happen overnight, but OpenAI projects burning $20 billion in cash in 2027 as inference costs eventually overtake training.
Apple just announced that Apple Intelligence is coming to Apple Vision Pro in April with the visionOS 2.4 beta. The initial rollout brings Writing Tools with ChatGPT integration, Image Playground, Genmoji, and smart notifications to spatial computing. It kicks off in U.S. English, expanding to more languages later this year.
