Nearly 400 local newspapers sue OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright
Nearly 400 local newspapers sue OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright

A coalition that owns nearly 400 local US newspapers has sued OpenAI and Microsoft. The publishers call AI training on their reporting a death knell for local journalism. It is the largest copyright case the local press has brought yet. Local newspaper…

California will tax downloaded software for the first time as part of a $351.7 billion budget deal
California will tax downloaded software for the first time as part of a $351.7 billion budget deal

California Governor Gavin Newsom and top Democratic legislators agreed on a $351.7 billion state budget that will extend sales tax to prewritten software downloaded from the web. The tax is expected to raise $900 million for the state and another $1.1 …

onsemi to buy Synaptics in $7bn bet on ‘physical AI’
onsemi to buy Synaptics in $7bn bet on ‘physical AI’

onsemi is buying Synaptics in an all-stock deal worth about $7bn. The onsemi Synaptics deal bets that AI’s next wave lives not in the cloud, but in cars, factories and robots. The chip industry has spent three years building for AI that runs in giant d…

The hidden cost of complacency and Jay Roland’s mission against corporate America’s technical debt crisis
The hidden cost of complacency and Jay Roland’s mission against corporate America’s technical debt crisis

Corporate America is hemorrhaging money through inefficient IT business processes, and Jay Roland, founder of Varex Solutions, believes that the industry is complacent about it. Technical debt, which is the accumulated cost of deferred IT fixes, miscon…

A Michigan township killed a $2.4 billion Chinese battery plant, and now the company might bankrupt it
A Michigan township killed a $2.4 billion Chinese battery plant, and now the company might bankrupt it

Less than three years ago, residents of Green Charter Township, a rural community of roughly 3,000 people in central Michigan, packed a hall to celebrate what they saw as a victory for local democracy. They had recalled every member of their town board…

A Princeton grad’s $30M AI detector is selling to Superhuman
A Princeton grad’s $30M AI detector is selling to Superhuman

Superhuman, the company that used to be Grammarly, just bought GPTZero, the startup that catches AI writing. The contradiction is the point. As the internet fills with machine-made text, proving something is human is becoming a product. There is a neat…

Hadrian’s reported $7.5bn round and the physical-AI rush
Hadrian’s reported $7.5bn round and the physical-AI rush

Bloomberg says defense-factory startup Hadrian is in talks to raise as much as $1bn at a $7.5bn valuation. Hadrian calls that “inaccurate”. Either way, the rumour shows how hot physical AI and US reindustrialisation have become. Here is a number, and a…

SpaceX lands $6.3bn compute deal with Reflection AI
SpaceX lands $6.3bn compute deal with Reflection AI

Reflection AI will pay SpaceX $150mn a month for Nvidia chips at Colossus 2, a deal worth roughly $6.3bn by 2029. The SpaceX Reflection AI deal puts Nvidia on both sides of the trade. SpaceX has signed another giant compute tenant. This time it is Refl…

Groq’s $650M raise: rebuilding after the Nvidia deal
Groq’s $650M raise: rebuilding after the Nvidia deal

Groq has confirmed a $650mn raise to rebuild itself as an AI inference cloud, six months after Nvidia paid out its investors and hired away its founder. The Groq $650M round is a bet that purpose-built chips still beat GPUs. Groq spent years as one of …

Qualcomm nears $4bn Modular deal to rival Nvidia
Qualcomm nears $4bn Modular deal to rival Nvidia

Qualcomm is closing in on a deal to buy AI-software startup Modular for about $4bn. The Qualcomm Modular deal would hand the chipmaker fresh ammunition in its fight to rival Nvidia. Qualcomm has entered advanced talks to acquire Modular, according to B…