Category: Biz Tech

Amazon’s Sparrow robot is moving the company’s automation drive beyond lifting shelves and sorting parcels into one of warehouse robotics’ hardest jobs: selecting individual products of different shapes, sizes and surfaces from bins and placing them into totes for the next stage of fulfilment. Introduced as an AI-enabled picking arm, Sparrow marked a notable step in Amazon’s effort to automate item handling while keeping human workers in roles that require judgement, exception management and oversight. Smarter item picking changes warehouse

OpenAI is projecting a steep new revenue path built around advertising, with the ChatGPT maker expecting about $2.5 billion in ad revenue in 2026 and as much as $100 billion annually by 2030, according to a report by Axios citing investor presentation material. The same projections indicate ad sales could climb to $11 billion in 2027, $25 billion in 2028 and $53 billion in 2029, underscoring how central advertising may become to the company’s commercial model as it tries to

CoreWeave has expanded its artificial intelligence infrastructure relationship with Meta to $21 billion, extending a partnership that underlines how the biggest technology groups are leaning on specialist cloud providers to secure the computing power needed for the next phase of AI development. The enlarged agreement, announced on April 9, runs through December 2032 and builds on a prior deal valued at about $14 billion struck in September. The new arrangement centres on AI inference workloads, the stage at which trained

DataBank and Goodman Group have formed a 50-50 joint venture to build a 32MW data centre in Vernon, California, betting that one of the most capacity-starved digital infrastructure markets in the United States will stay tight as demand from artificial intelligence, cloud and enterprise customers keeps rising. The project is due to begin operations in December 2026 with an initial 6MW, with the remaining capacity scheduled to come online in phases through September 2027. The site, at 3094 E Vernon

Lumen Technologies has used its latest letter from chief executive Kate Johnson to sharpen a message it has been building for more than a year: the company wants investors, customers and partners to see it less as a legacy telecom carrier and more as a high-capacity digital networking platform built for artificial intelligence workloads. In the letter, Johnson said 2025 was a “pivotal year”, set out plans to make Lumen the “trusted network for AI”, and argued that the group’s

Google has begun rolling out vertical tabs and an upgraded reading mode to the desktop version of Chrome, adding two widely requested features aimed at users juggling large numbers of open pages and those seeking a cleaner full-screen reading experience. The company said the changes are arriving for Chrome on desktop platforms including Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS, with availability expanding gradually rather than landing for all users at once. Desktop Chrome gets a cleaner layout with the new tools focused

Anthropic has launched Project Glasswing, a controlled cybersecurity programme that gives a select group of large technology, finance and security organisations access to its unreleased Claude Mythos Preview model to identify and help fix serious software vulnerabilities in widely used systems. The company says the model has already uncovered thousands of significant flaws across operating systems, browsers and other foundational software, but has stopped short of making it generally available because of the risk that such capabilities could be misused

Alchemy, the blockchain infrastructure company often described in the sector as a crypto equivalent of cloud back-end provider AWS, has launched AgentPay, a new tool aimed at solving a fast-emerging problem in machine commerce: AI payment systems are being built on different rails and often cannot work with one another. The company says AgentPay gives merchants and service providers a single integration layer so they can accept payments from multiple agentic payment protocols without rebuilding their existing APIs. The timing matters

Kuka is stepping up its push into the United States and Asia as its leadership warns that too many manufacturers in Europe are moving too slowly on artificial intelligence, creating an opening for competitors in markets where automation spending and industrial policy are advancing at a quicker pace. The shift, outlined by chief executive Christoph Schell, comes as the Augsburg-based robotics group tries to reposition itself around what it calls “Automation 2.0” while navigating weak factory demand in parts of

  Google has quietly introduced a free iPhone app that pushes its on-device AI ambitions further into everyday productivity, offering voice dictation that works without a network connection while automatically cleaning up spoken text into more polished prose. The app, Google AI Edge Eloquent, is listed on Apple’s App Store as a Google-developed productivity tool for iPhone, described as free and built around local processing using the company’s Gemma technology. The launch is notable because Google has said little publicly about it,

Sony Interactive Entertainment has entered an agreement to acquire Cinemersive Labs, a UK-based machine learning and computer vision company, in a move that signals a deeper push into AI-driven graphics, rendering and visual tools for PlayStation. Sony said the team will join its Visual Computing Group and help advance visual computing inside games, with work aimed at enhancing gameplay visuals, improving rendering techniques and raising visual fidelity for players. The deal, announced on April 2, adds another specialist UK technology

GoDaddy has teamed up with LegalZoom to launch a system designed to give AI agents a verifiable identity on the open web, as companies move from chatbots towards software that can act, transact and communicate with other systems with less human intervention. The tie-up, announced on 2 April, centres on GoDaddy’s Agent Name Service, or ANS, which uses domain name system records and public key infrastructure certificates to assign agents a human-readable name and cryptographic proof of origin. LegalZoom said

OpenAI has asked the attorneys general of California and Delaware to investigate Elon Musk, accusing the billionaire and his associates of improper and anti-competitive conduct as a legal fight over the company’s structure moves towards a jury trial in Oakland later this month. The dispute marks a sharp escalation in a feud that has come to symbolise the wider struggle over who controls advanced artificial intelligence and under what public obligations. The letter, sent to California Attorney General Rob Bonta and

Dubai, UAE — At the forefront of Middle East’ innovative medical community is the name of talented surgeon Dr. Vardan Khachatrian, a visionary specialist and celebrity doctor, whose methods are increasingly shaping expectations across high-end patient segments not only in MENA region, but globally. Industry observers note a growing demand for natural, long-lasting results with minimal visible intervention, particularly among international patients travelling to Dubai for advanced procedures. Within this context, Dr. Vardan Khachatrian’s approach — anchored in controlled tissue handling

LinkedIn is facing mounting privacy questions after an investigation branded “BrowserGate” alleged the Microsoft-owned professional network scans thousands of browser extensions and gathers detailed device information from visitors without clear consent, raising fresh scrutiny over how large platforms monitor users and enforce their rules. Independent testing by a cybersecurity news outlet said it confirmed that LinkedIn’s site loads code able to detect more than 6,000 extensions in Chromium-based browsers, alongside a wider set of system characteristics. At the centre of the

  Telegram has rolled out a broad product update that adds a private AI writing tool, a major expansion of polling functions, support for Live Photos and Motion Photos, and a new system that lets bots create and manage other bots, in a move that sharpens the platform’s push into AI-assisted messaging and developer automation. The update was announced on March 31, 2026, with related bot-management changes added to Telegram’s Bot API on April 3. At the centre of the release is

Google has disclosed a coordinated takedown of UNC2814, a suspected China-linked cyber-espionage group, after investigators tied it to intrusions at 53 organisations in 42 countries, with telecommunications providers and government bodies forming the core of the victim set. The campaign centred on a custom backdoor called GRIDTIDE, which used Google Sheets as a covert command-and-control channel, allowing malicious traffic to blend with ordinary cloud activity rather than exploiting a flaw in Google’s products. The operation was made public on 25

Anthropic’s acquisition of Seattle startup Vercept, little more than a year after the company emerged from stealth, has become one of the clearest signs yet that the contest for elite artificial intelligence talent is reshaping the sector as quickly as the technology itself. The deal folds Vercept’s team and technology into Anthropic’s push to make Claude better at “computer use”, the industry term for AI systems that can navigate live software, spreadsheets and web interfaces much like a human operator.

Cash briefly replaced cards and QR payments across parts of Russia on April 3 after a widespread disruption hit banking and payment services, an outage that Telegram founder Pavel Durov said was triggered by Moscow’s efforts to block virtual private networks as part of a broader clampdown on online communications. The disruption affected shoppers, commuters and businesses, and has sharpened scrutiny of how far the Kremlin’s drive for tighter internet control is starting to spill into everyday economic life. The

3Commas has launched QuantPilot, a new AI-driven crypto trading platform aimed at giving retail traders access to tools more commonly associated with quantitative desks, as competition intensifies among trading software providers seeking to simplify strategy design, market research and execution. The company said the product is now in early access, with a public waiting list open through quantpilot. com, and positioned it as a no-code system that can turn plain-language prompts into backtested and deployable trading strategies. The Tallinn-founded firm,

Microsoft has rolled out three first-party artificial intelligence models aimed at speech transcription, voice generation and image creation, stepping up its push to offer developers and companies a broader in-house alternative to rival tools. The new systems — MAI-Transcribe-1, MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-Image-2 — are available through Microsoft Foundry, while the company’s MAI Playground has opened access for trials in the United States. The launch puts the spotlight on MAI-Transcribe-1, which Microsoft says is designed for enterprise-grade speech-to-text work across 25

du said its National Hypercloud has received certification and endorsement from the UAE Cybersecurity Council, a step the company described as making it the first compliant, secure and sovereign cloud infrastructure approved for deployment across both public and private sectors in the UAE. The announcement places the telecom group at the centre of a fast-moving contest over where sensitive data is stored, who controls the infrastructure, and how far cloud adoption can expand in government and highly regulated industries without

Alibaba has launched Qwen3.6-Plus, the latest entry in its Qwen model family, positioning it as a tool built to help companies move from chat-based assistants to AI systems that can execute multi-step work across coding, reasoning and visual tasks. The release lands as the group deepens its push into agentic AI for both enterprise clients and consumer applications, with the model set to power Alibaba Cloud’s Model Studio as well as its wider AI ecosystem. Alibaba said Qwen3.6-Plus is designed

Google’s YouTube is facing mounting pressure from child development experts and advocacy groups to stop artificial intelligence-generated videos from being shown or recommended to young children, opening a fresh front in the debate over how large platforms police automated content aimed at minors. A coalition led by Fairplay has urged YouTube chief executive Neal Mohan and Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai to keep such material off YouTube Kids, arguing that machine-made clips can distort children’s understanding of the world, weaken

Voltify has raised $30 million in seed funding to push an ambitious plan to electrify freight rail without the cost and disruption of stringing overhead wires across vast rail networks, positioning the startup at the intersection of climate technology, industrial infrastructure and freight logistics. The company said the round was co-led by venture capital firm Aleph and Fortescue, with backing from Menomadin, J-Impact, The Dock and other investors, as it seeks to turn a concept that has drawn attention in

Meta is testing a paid Instagram tier for everyday users, opening a fresh experiment in how far people will pay for privacy, reach and tighter audience control inside one of the world’s biggest social apps. The test, branded Instagram Plus, centres on Stories and includes anonymous viewing, expanded audience lists, replay insights, longer visibility windows and tools designed to push a Story closer to the front of followers’ feeds. Meta confirmed to one outlet that the subscription is being tested

Anthropic has acknowledged that an internal release mistake exposed part of the source code behind Claude Code, its AI coding assistant, in an incident that has sharpened scrutiny of the startup’s internal controls at a time when it is selling safety, reliability and enterprise trust as core parts of its pitch. The company said the exposure was caused by a packaging error linked to human mistake rather than an external intrusion, and added that no customer data or credentials were

Mistral has raised $830 million in debt financing to build a large AI computing hub near Paris, a move that places the French start-up at the heart of Europe’s effort to develop home-grown artificial intelligence infrastructure and rely less on overseas cloud providers. The funding, the company’s first debt raise, will be used to buy 13,800 Nvidia chips for a data centre at Bruyères-le-Châtel, south of the French capital, with operations expected to begin in the second quarter of 2026.

Apple has brought end-to-end encryption for RCS messages back into developer testing with iOS 26.5 beta, reviving a privacy feature that appeared in the iOS 26.4 beta cycle but was withheld from the public release. The move sharpens focus on how quickly Apple can close one of the last major security gaps between iPhone and Android texting, even as the feature remains labelled beta and is not yet available across all devices or carrier setups. The return matters because RCS

Samsung is betting that a minute of low-frequency audio can help settle uneasy stomachs on the move, launching its Hearapy app with a claim that a 100Hz tone played through earbuds can reduce motion-sickness symptoms for up to two hours. The pitch is simple: listen before or during travel, stimulate the inner ear’s balance system, and blunt the sensory mismatch that often triggers nausea, dizziness and cold sweats. The company’s own app listing ties the feature closely to the Galaxy

Apple has added a new safeguard in macOS Tahoe 26.4 that warns users before potentially dangerous text is pasted into Terminal, a move aimed at disrupting ClickFix-style scams that trick people into infecting their own devices. The feature appears in the latest macOS release even though Apple’s public feature summary for version 26.4 does not spell it out directly, while the company’s broader security pages confirm 26.4 is the current macOS version and list separate security fixes delivered with the

Apple has begun offering unusual stock awards worth as much as $400,000 to members of its iPhone product design team, moving to shore up one of its most prized groups as OpenAI and other artificial intelligence rivals intensify their push into consumer hardware. The bonuses, reported by Bloomberg, were granted outside Apple’s normal compensation cycle and are structured to vest over four years, tying the awards to employee retention. The move underscores how the contest over AI is no longer

Australia has moved towards court action against Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube after officials said the platforms may have failed to keep children under 16 off their services, escalating a world-first test of how far governments can force technology groups to police the age of their users. The warning follows the first compliance review of the law, which took effect on 10 December 2025 and allows penalties of up to A$49.5 million for each systemic breach. The five platforms

Big Tech’s plan to pour about $635 billion into artificial intelligence infrastructure this year is coming under sharper scrutiny as higher energy costs, grid bottlenecks and tighter financing conditions test the durability of the market’s enthusiasm for the sector. The warning, highlighted by S&P Global Visible Alpha, lands at a delicate moment for equity markets after AI-driven optimism helped lift major indexes through 2025 before momentum faded amid a broader energy shock linked to the Middle East conflict. Microsoft, Amazon,