Meta is giving $1bn to data centre towns. Its proof is a tax from 1968

Mark Zuckerberg announced a $1 billion Future Is For Everyone Fund on Monday. It will invest directly in the American communities where Meta builds data centres. The commitment sits inside a 6,500-wor [...]

Armenia just opened the region’s biggest AI factory. It exists because Washington signed a licence.

Firebird, a US-based AI cloud company, opened what NVIDIA calls the CIS region’s largest AI factory in Hrazdan, Armenia on Saturday. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan attended, alongside Kaz [...]

Gravity raised $30.5M to place ads inside AI chatbots. Its next product targets the bots themselves.

Gravity, an adtech startup that places ads inside AI chatbots, raised a $30.5 million Series A co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Committed Capital. The round brings total funding to $38.5 mill [...]

The New York Times falls short on digital subscribers as competition bites

The New York Times has hit a rare bump in an otherwise smooth climb. The publisher added 280,000 net digital subscribers in the second quarter, short of Wall Street’s forecasts, and its shares slipp [...]

Texas called itself the “epicenter of AI.” Now it won’t plug in a data centre until it’s audited

Texas spent years selling itself as the easiest place in America to build a data centre. This week it started making that harder. Governor Greg Abbott, who last year called the state the “epicenter [...]

China just caught a rocket in a net, and SpaceX should be watching

SpaceX lands its rockets on legs. Blue Origin uses a platform. China just caught one in a giant net. China has recovered the first stage of an orbital rocket for the first time. The milestone pulls it [...]

Dutch watchdogs urge Europe’s banks to pool buying power against US tech giants

A single European bank haggling with Amazon or Microsoft has almost no leverage. A few hundred of them haggling together might. That, stripped to its essence, is the recommendation Dutch regulators ha [...]

SAP averts an EU antitrust fine by opening up its support market

SAP has talked its way out of an EU antitrust fine. The European Commission said it would accept a set of commitments from the German software group, closing an investigation into how SAP handles main [...]

UN’s digital agency launches an initiative to make AI agents trustworthy

The United Nations’ digital agency has decided that AI agents are moving faster than anyone’s ability to trust them, and it wants to do something about it. On 9 July, the International Telecommuni [...]