Business — page 31
Google Cloud clears $20B in Q1 but says it can't keep up with demand
Revenue rose 63% year-over-year and the backlog doubled to $462B, but Sundar Pichai told analysts the business is compute-constrained.
Microsoft says Copilot has crossed 20M paid seats with engagement matching Outlook
Satya Nadella told investors Copilot queries per user rose nearly 20% quarter over quarter, and Accenture just signed for 740,000 seats.
Nadella says Microsoft will 'exploit' royalty-free OpenAI access through 2032
Microsoft's AI run rate hit $37B, up 123% year-over-year, as the CEO shrugs off concerns about OpenAI's new Amazon deal.
Meta loses another $4B on Reality Labs as AI capex balloons past $125B
Reality Labs has now bled $83.5B since 2021, even as Meta projects up to $145B in 2026 infrastructure spending.
Google adds 25M paid subscriptions in Q1, hits 350M total
YouTube Premium and Google One drive subscription growth as YouTube ad revenue misses Wall Street's $9.99B target by $110M.
Parallel Web Systems hits $2B valuation five months after Series A
Parag Agrawal's agent-tooling startup raised a $100M Series B led by Sequoia, nearly tripling its valuation since November.
Runway CEO says world models are the next act after AI video
The New York startup has raised close to $860M at a $5.3B valuation and is now chasing gaming, robotics, and real-time generation.
Pure DC pauses Middle East data center buildout after Iranian drone strike
Iranian missile and drone attacks have damaged AWS, Oracle, and Pure DC sites, freezing a trillion-dollar Gulf AI data center plan.
Shapes raises $8M to put AI characters inside human group chats
The Lightspeed-led seed funds an app with 400,000 monthly users where AI 'Shapes' chat alongside friends instead of one-on-one.
Firestorm Labs raises $82M to print drones inside shipping containers
The San Diego startup's xCell unit prints drone systems in under 24 hours and is already deployed with the Air Force in New York and Florida.
Scout AI raises $100M to train a vision-language-action model for the battlefield
Coby Adcock and Collin Otis's defense lab is building an AI called Fury to drive ATVs and command drones, with $11M in DoD contracts already booked.
Eka's robots screw in light bulbs and sort chicken nuggets, claiming a path to superhuman dexterity
MIT's Pulkit Agrawal and ex-DeepMind researcher Tuomas Haarnoja say simulation, not human demos, will crack the dexterity problem.
Big Tech's $700B AI Capex Faces ROI Reckoning as Earnings Land
Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon report this week with Wall Street demanding revenue proof for record AI infrastructure spending.
OpenAI CFO Clashes With Altman Over $660B Compute Bill and 2026 IPO Push
Sarah Fryer opposes a Q4 2026 listing as OpenAI faces $660 billion in compute commitments and missed Q1 revenue targets.
OpenAI CFO Breaks With Altman Over $660B Compute Bill and 2026 IPO Push
Sarah Fryer no longer reports directly to Sam Altman and has told colleagues OpenAI is not ready to go public next year.
Rural America turns on the AI data center boom as 67% of new builds head for farm country
Pew finds 67% of planned data centers are now in rural areas, flipping a decade of urban concentration and igniting fights from Illinois to West Virginia.
GitHub Copilot moves to usage-based billing as inference costs double
Starting June 1, Copilot subscribers get AI Credits matching their monthly fee — overages billed by the token at API rates up to $30 per million.
Neurable opens its non-invasive BCI tech to wearable makers after $35M Series A
The Boston-area startup wants OEMs to embed its EEG-plus-AI brain sensing into headphones, hats, and glasses without surgery.
Anthropic opens Sydney office, hires Snowflake's Theo Hourmouzis to run Australia and New Zealand
Hourmouzis brings 20+ years across Asia Pacific to lead Anthropic's ANZ business as the company expands beyond Tokyo, Bengaluru, and Seoul.
OpenAI and Microsoft drop exclusivity, clearing path to Amazon Bedrock
Microsoft keeps a 20% revenue share through 2030 and IP license through 2032, but its Azure exclusivity is gone.
Skye raises $3.58M pre-seed to build an AI home screen for the iPhone
Signull Labs closed the round at a $19.5M post-money valuation in September 2025, with a16z and True Ventures backing the unlaunched app.
David Silver's Ineffable Intelligence raises $1.1B at $5.1B to ditch human data
The AlphaZero co-creator left DeepMind to build a reinforcement-learning superlearner; Sequoia and Lightspeed led the round.
OpenAI plans an AI-agent smartphone with MediaTek, Qualcomm, and Luxshare
Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says OpenAI is targeting 2028 mass production for a phone that replaces apps with agents.
China blocks Meta's $2B Manus acquisition, orders parties to unwind deal
The NDRC's veto leaves roughly 100 Manus staff already inside Meta's Singapore offices and founders reportedly under exit bans in mainland China.
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