Business — page 16
OpenAI ships $230 Codex Micro keyboard as Apple trade-secret suit looms
The Work Louder collaboration is a limited run, but it lands the same week Apple sued OpenAI over alleged hardware IP theft.
Whatnot acquires Shaped to sharpen live-shopping recommendations
The $11B livestream marketplace absorbs Shaped's real-time ML stack and a dozen engineers to shrink recommendation latency toward zero.
OpenAI ships its first hardware — a $230 Codex control pad with Work Louder
The limited-run Codex Micro is a 13-switch keypad for monitoring coding agents, not the Jony Ive smart speaker still in development.
Apple Intelligence cleared for China launch with Alibaba's Qwen
The Cyberspace Administration of China signed off on Apple's AI stack after a deal to route Chinese requests through Alibaba's Qwen model.
Rime raises $24M Series A to handle enterprise customer calls
The voice AI startup says it is already processing more than 100 million calls a month for enterprise clients.
Anthropic and Blackstone launch Ode, a $1.5B AI implementation firm
The joint venture absorbs Fractional AI to sell enterprise deployment services, mirroring OpenAI's Deployment Company play.
Apple FaceID co-inventor raises $52M for brain-diagnostic AI startup Hemispheric
Gidi Littwin's Hemispheric trained a frontier model on 250,000 hours of brain data from 100,000 people to diagnose PTSD, depression, and Parkinson's.
Emergent hits $1.5B valuation with $130M Series C led by Creaegis
The Indian AI coding startup's valuation jumped five-fold in six months as run-rate revenue climbed to $120M.
Nvidia and SEGA mark 30 years with Virtua Fighter Crossroads on RTX Spark
The partnership that began with the NV1 chip powering the first PC Virtua Fighter now stretches into a new class of AI-capable Windows machines.
OpenAI researcher Miles Wang in talks to raise $200M for drug discovery startup at $2B valuation
Lightspeed is in discussions to lead the round as Wang and other OpenAI researchers leave to build AI models for drug repurposing.
OpenAI's first hardware is a screenless smart speaker that moves, per Bloomberg
The mobile AI companion, built with ex-Apple engineers, is pitched as a physical manifestation of ChatGPT for the home.
OpenAI plans a ChatGPT smart speaker for 2027, its first major device
The screenless, camera-equipped speaker joins roughly five hardware products OpenAI is building with Jony Ive after its $6.5B acquisition of io Products.
Hinge founder Justin McLeod raises $18M for AI dating service Overtone
Match Group is backing its former Hinge CEO's new voice-forward matchmaking startup, which promises curated intros over swiping.
Meta's Mosseri says AI token budgets may soon be capped per engineer
Instagram head says a strong engineer's AI burn rate could match their salary within one to two years, forcing per-head caps.
US official says 'very few' Nvidia H200 chips have shipped to China
Commerce's Jeffery Kessler confirms H200 licenses are being issued, but volumes to China and Hong Kong remain tiny under a 25% revenue cut to Washington.
Reflection signs $1B compute deal with Nebius for Nvidia chips
The open-weight model startup, valued at $8B, adds Nebius capacity weeks after locking in SpaceX compute access.
SoftBank's Masayoshi Son says AI will need $5 trillion a year by 2040
The SoftBank founder dismissed bubble talk, arguing annual AI capital requirements will scale into the trillions within 15 years.
South Korea forecasts 2026 growth at 5-year high on AI chip demand
Seoul projects 2.6% GDP growth in 2026, up from 2.2% in 2025, as memory-chip orders from AI data-center buildouts drive exports.
PixVerse raises $439M at $2B valuation, betting video generation is a two-horse race
The Singapore startup pulled Alibaba into its Series C extension and now claims 150 million registered users on its consumer app.
Uber pushes into hotels and AV data, tells partners it won't chase L4 autonomy
Chief product officer Sachin Kansal says Uber One hit 51M members and AV Labs will gather millions of miles of driving data for partners.
Nadella warns AI buyers 'pay twice' — with cash and proprietary data
Microsoft's CEO says enterprises are teaching OpenAI and Anthropic their trade secrets, and pitches open source and cloud-hosted models as the fix.
Anthropic localizes Claude pricing in India, its second-largest market
Rupee pricing lands in India, which drives 5.8% of global Claude usage — but UPI payments still aren't supported.
Meta doubles Hyperion data center to 5GW, pushing spend past $50B
Louisiana's 20-year sales tax exemption helped land the buildout, now nearly double the $27B figure Meta cited in October.
Helsing raises $1.8B at $18B valuation, cementing European defense-AI lead
The Munich drone and autonomy startup, already supplying HX-2 drones to Ukraine, secured backing from JPMorgan, Lightspeed and Iconiq.
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