A 23-year-old’s AI startup wants a $20bn valuation, months after a breach cost it Meta

A three-year-old startup run by a 23-year-old is in talks to double its worth to $20bn. The numbers are dazzling. Read the footnotes. Mercor, the AI training marketplace, has told investors it can rai [...]

China wants its green power wired straight into the data centre

In the desert outside Zhongwei, in the northwestern region of Ningxia, four dedicated power lines now run from a field of solar panels to a cluster of computers. They do not pass through the public gr [...]

Prosper AI raises $30M from a16z to automate the patient journey

Most of what makes American healthcare expensive happens before a doctor is ever in the room, and after. Someone schedules the appointment, confirms the insurance, works out what the patient owes, and [...]

SoftBank’s debt-fuelled AI bet faces its reckoning at earnings

SoftBank’s AI bet meets its accountants this week. When the Japanese group reports earnings, the headline profit will look healthy, but the real story is the mountain of funding commitments Masayosh [...]

Ford pivots its Kentucky battery plant from EVs to AI data centre storage in a $2 billion bet

Ford has launched Ford Energy, a wholly owned subsidiary that will manufacture large-scale battery energy storage systems for utilities, data centres, and industrial customers. The company has committ [...]

Micron breaks ground on $9bn Hiroshima expansion to chase AI memory demand

Micron Technology broke ground on Saturday on a ¥1.5 trillion, roughly $9.3bn, expansion of its factory in Hiroshima, western Japan, the company’s latest bet on the AI memory boom that has already [...]

OpenAI’s new GPT-Live lets ChatGPT listen and speak at the same time

OpenAI wants you to talk to ChatGPT, not type at it. On 8 July it launched GPT-Live, a new generation of voice models. The company says they make talking to AI feel much closer to a real conversation. [...]

Brain-computer interfaces could create a new digital divide, and this time it may be biological

As BCIs move from laboratories towards commercial use, Neurochip.com founder Herbert Sim warns that unequal access could separate people not only by income or connectivity, but by physical and cogniti [...]

US holds off blacklisting DeepSeek and 100-plus Chinese firms

The decision had, in effect, already been made. According to people familiar with the matter, reports Reuters, a US interagency committee approved adding the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, the memory-ch [...]