For years, electricity costs at the Belden Brick Company in Sugarcreek, Ohio, barely moved. Last year they jumped by 90%, driven largely by the data centres multiplying across the region to feed the AI boom. The 141-year-old manufacturer, whose bricks feature in landmarks including the Alamo and the University of Notre Dame, traced most of […]

AI agents can write code and answer questions, but they still fall apart on long, messy jobs. A Mountain View startup just raised $40M to build the training grounds that fix that. Bespoke Labs, which builds the environments that train and test AI agents, has raised $40 million, the company announced. The total spans a […]

DeepSeek is designing its own artificial-intelligence chip, according to a Reuters report published on Monday that cited people familiar with the matter. The move, if it holds up, would push China’s most closely watched AI lab from writing software that runs on other companies’ silicon to specifying the silicon itself. The Hangzhou startup has spent the […]

Nobel Prize-winning economist has poured cold water on the idea that artificial intelligence will haul Western economies back into an era of rapid productivity growth, warning that the fast-growth years may already be gone for good. Christopher Pissarides, who shared the 2010 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics and teaches at the London School of Economics, […]

Texas can now make Apple and Google check how old you are before you download an app. The Supreme Court just let the rule stand. The US Supreme Court has refused to block a Texas law aimed at app stores, the Associated Press reports. The rule forces Apple and Google to verify users’ ages and […]

Expeditions, the Warsaw-based venture firm backed by BAE Systems and the NATO Innovation Fund, has closed a €197m ($225m) fund to back the next wave of European defence startups. The raise caps a boom that has seen defence prime BAE commit €50M to outside VCs and venture capital pour into the continent’s defence tech at record speed. The […]

A Google executive told an Australian inquiry that a video smearing a shooting survivor as a “crisis actor” meets YouTube’s standards. So it stays online. Google has defended keeping up a conspiracy video about a mass shooting in Sydney, the Associated Press reports. The clip falsely paints a wounded survivor of the antisemitic massacre as […]

60-second summary Jama Connect – Best for supplier-OEM requirements exchange and live traceability across the automotive supply chain Visure – Best for mid-size suppliers needing compliance templates on a tighter budget Codebeamer – Best for software-centric ALM with ASPICE compliance templates Polarion – Best for teams embedded in the Siemens PLM ecosystem IBM DOORS – Best […]

Somalia has thrown its weight behind India’s objection to WhatsApp’s plan to let people connect through usernames rather than phone numbers, widening a dispute that now spans two continents. The backing, makes Somalia the second national government in a week to formally query Meta over the usernames feature it began rolling out at the end of […]

A former Tesla scientist who helped build the intelligence behind Elon Musk’s Optimus robot wants to do it all again from Paris, only this time for Europe. Rémi Cadene, chief executive and co-founder of the startup UMA, has unveiled plans for a lightweight, AI-powered humanoid called Northstar, Bloomberg first reported. he machine is being designed […]