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…

The Big Four bill by the hour. Andera just raised $37M to let AI do the audit.
The Big Four bill by the hour. Andera just raised $37M to let AI do the audit.

Audit is the part of corporate life almost no one thinks about, and almost everyone pays for. Public companies spend thousands of hours a year collecting evidence, testing controls and writing it all up. Most of it is done by hand, in Excel, much the w…

Rejected by 180 investors, Bland just raised $50M to prove voice AI is the future
Rejected by 180 investors, Bland just raised $50M to prove voice AI is the future

Isaiah Granet spent three weeks at Y Combinator getting turned down by 180 investors. Their reason was always the same: phone calls would not exist in a year. He has now raised more than $100mn to prove them wrong. His startup, Bland, has closed a $50m…

US court rules Ohio can restrict children’s use of social media
US court rules Ohio can restrict children’s use of social media

Ohio can require social media companies to get a parent’s permission before letting children under 16 onto their platforms, a US appeals court ruled on Thursday, reviving a law the tech industry had managed to freeze. The decision from the Cincinnati-b…

FERC orders a fast lane for data centre grid connections, but the electricity to fill them is another matter
FERC orders a fast lane for data centre grid connections, but the electricity to fill them is another matter

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Thursday ordered six major grid operators to fast-track interconnection requests from data centres and other large electricity users. Under the directive, approved unanimously, grid operators must demonstrate…

Nvidia-backed Verse raises $54M to help AI data centres skip the power queue
Nvidia-backed Verse raises $54M to help AI data centres skip the power queue

For years, the scarce resource in AI was chips. Now it is power. Verse Enterprises wants to unblock that bottleneck. The San Francisco startup has raised an oversubscribed $54mn Series B. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round. GV, Nvidia and Norrsken…