BP, Walmart and 7-Eleven sued over AI-set petrol prices in California
BP, Walmart and 7-Eleven sued over AI-set petrol prices in California

A group of California drivers has sued six of the country’s biggest fuel retailers, accusing them of using an artificial-intelligence pricing tool to coordinate the cost of petrol and keep it artificially high. The complaint, filed on 22 June 2026 in f…

OpenAI’s suspiciously clean balance sheet is about to get a hard look
OpenAI’s suspiciously clean balance sheet is about to get a hard look

OpenAI’s books show zero debt and just $46mn of quarterly capital spending. The catch, reported by The Information: around $665bn of commitments sitting just off the balance sheet, now heading for regulators’ desks. On paper, OpenAI looks like a lean s…

SpaceX taps the bond market for the first time to fund AI
SpaceX taps the bond market for the first time to fund AI

Fresh from a record IPO that helped make Elon Musk a trillionaire, SpaceX is raising at least $20bn in its debut bond sale to bankroll a vast AI build-out. SpaceX is about to do something none of Elon Musk’s companies has done before. It is borrowing m…

Uber anchors Lime’s IPO as the scooter firm goes public
Uber anchors Lime’s IPO as the scooter firm goes public

The Lime IPO has a price and an anchor investor: Uber, the ride-hailing giant that already owns a chunk of the scooter firm and is now backing its market debut. Lime is going public, and an old backer is helping carry it across the line: Uber. The scoo…

China hits back at the Pentagon with curbs on 56 US firms
China hits back at the Pentagon with curbs on 56 US firms

China’s new trade curbs target 56 US companies, from rare-earth miners to drone makers. It is direct retaliation for Washington adding Chinese firms to its military blacklist. China has answered the Pentagon’s blacklist with one of its own. On Monday, …

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-…