Microsoft turns to Chevron’s gas to power a Texas data centre
Microsoft turns to Chevron’s gas to power a Texas data centre

The Chevron Microsoft gas deal hands the oil major a 20-year contract to power a giant West Texas data centre. For a company that built its AI plans on renewables and nuclear, that is a sharp turn. Chevron will power one of the largest data centres in …

The bet against bigger models: Aether AI lands $20mn for causal AI
The bet against bigger models: Aether AI lands $20mn for causal AI

Most of the AI industry is betting that bigger models mean smarter machines. A new startup is betting the opposite. Aether AI, based in San Diego, has raised a $20mn seed round to chase a different idea entirely. Its founder thinks the next leap will n…

A startup betting on a different material for AI’s optics problem just raised $80mn from the people who build the hardware
A startup betting on a different material for AI’s optics problem just raised $80mn from the people who build the hardware

AI’s next bottleneck is not the chips. It is the wiring between them. As clusters grow to hundreds of thousands of GPUs, the copper links that shuttle data between them are running out of road. So the industry is racing to move that traffic onto light …

Trump mocked Zuckerberg and Bezos for ‘first-class groveling’, new book claims
Trump mocked Zuckerberg and Bezos for ‘first-class groveling’, new book claims

A new book paints an unflattering picture of how Silicon Valley’s most powerful men handled Donald Trump’s return to power. According to its authors, they grovelled. And Trump, they write, mocked them for it behind their backs. The book is “Regime Chan…

Bernie Sanders’ AI bill would hand the public half of OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI
Bernie Sanders’ AI bill would hand the public half of OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI

Bernie Sanders has turned a talking point into a bill, and it goes further than anything Silicon Valley or the White House has put on the table. On Thursday, the Vermont senator introduced legislation that would hit the largest AI companies with a one-…

A city hit pause on AI data centres. Amazon responded by investigating its own engineers.
A city hit pause on AI data centres. Amazon responded by investigating its own engineers.

The backlash against AI data centres used to be a local zoning story. This week, it became a fight inside Amazon. Three Amazon engineers, Patrick Schloesser, Darius Irani and Liesl Wigand, say the company placed them under investigation after they test…

A $5M tech-worker PAC is taking on Big Tech’s $100M war chest over AI rules
A $5M tech-worker PAC is taking on Big Tech’s $100M war chest over AI rules

Silicon Valley is spending more than $100mn to elect politicians who will leave AI alone. A new group of tech workers wants to fight back with a fraction of that. The Guardrails Alliance, a super PAC that supports AI regulation, launched on Thursday wi…

Disney is joining the AI-ad arms race, just as audiences turn on ‘slop’
Disney is joining the AI-ad arms race, just as audiences turn on ‘slop’

Disney is about to start making your ads with AI. The company is preparing to launch a beta version of a tool that generates television ads using AI, a Disney executive told staff at an internal meeting, according to a recording obtained by Business In…

GitHub for the factory floor: Copia raises $26M to protect the code that runs industry
GitHub for the factory floor: Copia raises $26M to protect the code that runs industry

Ask an industrial engineer how their plant would recover if a controller’s code got corrupted or encrypted, and the honest answer is often grim: a backup on someone’s laptop, in a folder named “final_backup_2”. Copia Automation wants to replace that wi…

‘Fight fire with fire’: Databricks is buying Panther Labs to challenge Splunk and CrowdStrike with AI
‘Fight fire with fire’: Databricks is buying Panther Labs to challenge Splunk and CrowdStrike with AI

Databricks has a new pitch for the AI age of cyberattacks: fight fire with fire. The $134bn data-and-AI company said it will buy Panther Labs, a cybersecurity startup, as it pushes deeper into a market dominated by Splunk and CrowdStrike. It is Databri…