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 id [...]

China’s car market is heading for its worst year since 2021. Sales fell 20% in the first half.

China’s passenger car sales fell 20.2% in the first half of 2026 to 8.7 million units, and the China Passenger Car Association has lowered its full-year forecast to a 14% decline, projecting 20.4 mi [...]

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 Ven [...]

Architect Labs raises $24M to let any company design its own AI chip

Designing a chip is hard. It takes years, hundreds of millions of dollars, and a tiny pool of experts. Most of them sit inside a few large companies. Architect Labs wants to change that with AI. The P [...]

Gradial raises $65M to be the ‘AI glue’ for enterprise marketing

Every software company is racing to bolt an AI agent onto its own product. Gradial is betting the real money is in the gaps between them. The Seattle startup has raised $65mn in Series C funding to bu [...]

‘It’s literally the gulag’: inside the revolt at Meta’s AI unit, where elite engineers were drafted to label data

It takes a particular kind of dysfunction for an employee to hijack a company-wide livestream and demand the hosts pass a message to a senior executive: that he is, in not so many words, garbage. That [...]

Your email landed in the inbox. Your links didn’t.

Watching email marketers obsessively monitor their sender IP, checking it daily, warming it carefully, treating it like a rare orchid, is not only relatable, it’s a reminder of how much conventional [...]

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, [...]

BMW slashes profit forecast as China’s EV makers squeeze European carmakers on two fronts

BMW on Tuesday cut its full-year profit forecast for the car business, lowering its expected automotive EBIT margin to a corridor of 1 to 3 per cent from prior guidance of 4 to 6 per cent. The compa [...]