Google is giving college students a free year of AI Pro, and a raft of study tools
Google is giving college students a free year of AI Pro, and a raft of study tools

Google is rolling out a wave of study tools across Search and Gemini for the new school year. It is also giving eligible college students a free year of its paid AI plan. The company set out the changes in a back-to-school post on Wednesday. The headli…

A British AI-chip startup is raising at $6.5bn after an Anthropic deal
A British AI-chip startup is raising at $6.5bn after an Anthropic deal

Fractile, a British startup building chips for artificial intelligence, is in advanced talks to raise money at a valuation more than six times what it fetched three months ago, Bloomberg reported. The jump follows a deal to supply chips to Anthropic. T…

Meta launched a Mac app to put its AI to work for businesses
Meta launched a Mac app to put its AI to work for businesses

Meta has released a dedicated Mac app for Meta AI, its chatbot. The company is pushing to turn the assistant into a tool for businesses and creators. The app can watch a window on your screen and answer questions about what it sees, Meta said on Wednes…

Samsung hiked foundry prices up to 15%, with China paying the steepest
Samsung hiked foundry prices up to 15%, with China paying the steepest

Samsung has raised prices for some of its advanced contract chipmaking by as much as 15 percent for new orders, according to a Reuters report. Two people familiar with the matter said the increases follow a surge in demand for AI chips. That demand is …

Stripe seals its OpenRouter deal for a reported $7.5bn or more
Stripe seals its OpenRouter deal for a reported $7.5bn or more

Stripe has agreed to buy OpenRouter, the startup whose software helps companies route their spending across hundreds of AI models. The payments firm confirmed the deal on Wednesday, making official an acquisition the press first reported earlier this m…

Marvell hands Google a $12.2bn share option in a custom-chip deal
Marvell hands Google a $12.2bn share option in a custom-chip deal

Marvell Technology has agreed to give Google the right to buy up to $12.2 billion of its shares. In return, Google will buy its custom chips. The chipmaker set out the deal in a regulatory filing on Wednesday. Its stock jumped as much as 14 percent on …

Flock built an AI tool that lets police search for people by how they drive
Flock built an AI tool that lets police search for people by how they drive

The surveillance firm Flock Safety has told the public for years that its cameras “cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals.” It has now built a tool that does both, according to a new investigation. The artificial-intelligence system lets poli…

OpenAI puts a 20% compute cost on its new AI safety monitoring
OpenAI puts a 20% compute cost on its new AI safety monitoring

OpenAI has put figures and detail on the slowdown it signalled this week. It paused some frontier training for two weeks, it said. It is also running a new monitoring system for the riskiest work. That system adds about 20 percent to the compute cost o…

Nebius is raising $4.5bn in convertible bonds to build AI data centres
Nebius is raising $4.5bn in convertible bonds to build AI data centres

Nebius Group said on Wednesday that it plans to raise $4.5 billion by selling convertible bonds. It will use the money to build data centres for artificial intelligence. The Amsterdam-based company set out the plan in a statement. The offering comes in…

Temporal is in talks to raise $500mn at a $12bn valuation, double February
Temporal is in talks to raise $500mn at a $12bn valuation, double February

Temporal Technologies is in talks to raise around $500 million, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. The round would value the software startup at $12 billion or more before the new money, the news agency said. It cited people familiar with the talks. The ro…