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…

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…

Rivian spinout Also raises $150m, and the e-bike is just the wedge
Rivian spinout Also raises $150m, and the e-bike is just the wedge

Also, the micromobility startup that spun out of Rivian last year, has raised $150 million in a Series D round. The round values it above $1 billion. The company told Fortune the money will go towards its real ambition, which is not e-bikes but small a…

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…

Tesla asked Las Vegas for 5,000 robotaxis and Nevada granted 10
Tesla asked Las Vegas for 5,000 robotaxis and Nevada granted 10

Tesla asked Nevada regulators for permission to run up to 5,000 robotaxis across Las Vegas. It was granted 10. The Nevada Transportation Authority set out the limit in an interim order dated 27 July. The cap sits far below what the company requested. T…

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…

China lands a rocket booster on the ground for the first time
China lands a rocket booster on the ground for the first time

The Chinese startup LandSpace recovered the first stage of its Zhuque-3 rocket on Wednesday. It is one of only a handful of private companies to land an orbital-class booster. Reuters reported that the feat places LandSpace alongside SpaceX and Blue Or…