Business — page 19
Google's electricity use jumped 37% in 2025 as AI buildout accelerates
Data centers consumed 42 million MWh, more than New Zealand or Denmark; operational emissions still fell 2%.
Meta puts smart glasses features behind a Meta One Premium subscription
Conversation Focus is capped at 3 hours a month without a plan, 15 hours with one — a template for how AI hardware gets monetized next.
Bhavin Turakhia stakes $30M of his own money on Neo, an AI-native Office rival
The Directi and Zeta founder is bootstrapping a work platform he says can't be built by retrofitting chatbots onto pre-AI software.
OpenAI proposes 5% US government stake worth $42.6B
Altman pitched the Trump administration on a sovereign holding as OpenAI seeks to defuse Washington pressure at an $852B valuation.
Nvidia opens AI-factory model with Sharon AI and Firmus taking 210,000 GPUs
Nvidia is fronting infrastructure to AI clouds in exchange for revenue sharing, with Sharon AI booking 40,000 GB300s and Firmus scaling to 360 MW.
Cloudflare will block mixed-use AI crawlers by default from September 2026
New defaults force AI companies to separate search bots from training and agent crawlers, or lose access to ad-supported pages.
Venice AI raises $65M at $1B valuation on privacy-first AI platform
The uncensored AI service hit $70M in run-rate revenue with 3M users before taking its first outside check, led by Dragonfly.
Meta plans cloud business to resell AI compute, following SpaceX playbook
Meta Compute would sell raw capacity and hosted models, targeting AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure after $182.9B in infrastructure commitments.
Wayve runs $85M employee tender at $8.5B valuation
The UK self-driving startup's second liquidity event lets staff cash out at the Series D price set in February.
EquiLibre, built by DeepMind's poker AI trio, hits $500M valuation
The Prague lab's reinforcement learning agents trade billions daily across the S&P 500 and Nasdaq with zero losing months since inception.
AWS commits $1B to forward-deployed engineer org as OpenAI and Anthropic scale theirs
Amazon's new FDE team will embed engineers inside customers to build agentic systems, matching a model already valued at $4B at OpenAI.
Etched hits $5B valuation with $1B booked for its AI inference chip
The Harvard-dropout founders raised $500M in December and have TSMC-manufactured silicon in customer hands.
NVIDIA wires BioNeMo into Anthropic's Claude Science workbench
The BioNeMo Agent Toolkit lets Claude agents call accelerated drug-discovery workflows directly, with one preprocessing step dropping from 52 minutes to 25 seconds.
OKX opens marketplace where AI agents hire and pay each other
The crypto exchange's 150-million-user platform now lets autonomous agents discover services, settle in stablecoins, and resolve disputes on-chain.
Base44 launches its own AI model to defend $100M ARR vibe-coding business
The Wix-owned platform is rolling out Base1, trained on tens of millions of user interactions, to cut reliance on frontier models like Opus.
Waymo and Uber end Phoenix robotaxi pilot after three years
The first market for the partnership shuts down with just over a dozen vehicles, while Austin and Atlanta scale to hundreds.
South Korea commits $1T to memory chips, AI data centers, and humanoid robots
Samsung, SK Hynix, and Hyundai anchor a national plan to double DRAM output and ship 30,000 Atlas robots a year by 2028.
Tidal stops paying royalties on AI-generated music, stops short of a ban
Fully AI-generated tracks lose royalties starting today and get a label on July 15th, but they stay on the platform.
TIDAL will demonetize fully AI-generated music starting July 15
The streaming service will tag 100% AI tracks, block royalties, and bar direct-to-fan sales — a sharper line than Spotify or Apple Music.
Samsung and SK Hynix anchor $900B South Korean AI and memory push
Seoul unveils a national plan: $518B for four new memory fabs, $52B for HBM packaging, and $356B for AI data centers through 2035.
Anthropic cuts California government a 50% discount on Claude
Governor Gavin Newsom struck a statewide deal with Anthropic as the federal government continues to freeze the company out.
Arena hits $100M run-rate eight months after launching paid evaluations
The UC Berkeley-born AI leaderboard tripled revenue from $30M in January, competing for post-training dollars against Scale AI, Mercor, and Surge.
Anthropic's Claude goes live on NVIDIA GB300 Blackwell Ultra in Azure
Claude in Microsoft Foundry now runs on GB300 NVL72 systems with Quantum-X800 InfiniBand, opening Azure-native enterprises to agentic deployments.
Omen AI raises $31M to monitor data center coolant in real time
The startup's spectrometer spots bacterial growth in liquid-cooled GPU racks before it triggers five-to-six-hour shutdowns.
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