Category: Biz Tech

OpenPayd has agreed to merge with Titan Acquisition Corp in a deal that would take the London-based financial infrastructure company public on Nasdaq at a pro-forma equity value of $1.145 billion, giving the payments group fresh capital to expand across the United States and deepen its stablecoin-linked services.The proposed combination with Titan, a Nasdaq-listed special purpose acquisition company, has been approved by both boards and is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to Titan shareholder approval,

Positron AI has opened its first office outside the United States at Dubai International Financial Centre, placing the AI infrastructure developer inside one of the region’s fastest-growing technology and financial ecosystems.The move gives the US-based company a licensed presence in DIFC as it seeks to expand demand for AI inference systems across the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. Positron AI has raised more than $300 million, including a $230 million Series B round completed this year at a valuation

Amazon Web Services has begun replacing parts of its data centre networking system with a flatter, quasi-random architecture aimed at moving cloud traffic faster while reducing the amount of equipment, electricity and physical cabling needed inside its facilities.The shift marks a notable change in the way one of the world’s largest cloud operators builds the internal networks that connect servers, storage systems and routers across its data centres. The new design, called Resilient Network Graphs, moves away from the conventional

Nvidia is moving into the Windows laptop processor market with a new chip designed to challenge Intel and AMD at the centre of personal computing, extending its reach beyond graphics processors and data-centre AI accelerators into one of the industry’s most contested hardware segments.The move marks a direct attempt to reshape the premium PC market around artificial intelligence, battery efficiency and on-device processing. Nvidia’s planned Windows machines are expected to use Arm-based technology, placing the company in competition not only

Samsung Electronics has begun shipping samples of its HBM4E memory chips to global customers, moving faster than rivals in the race to supply the next generation of high-bandwidth memory for artificial intelligence servers.The 12-layer HBM4E product delivers bandwidth of up to 3.6 terabytes per second per stack, with stable pin speeds of 14 gigabits per second and scalability to 16 gigabits per second. The chip is built using Samsung’s sixth-generation 10-nanometre-class DRAM process, known as 1c, and a 4-nanometre logic

Traffic to DuckDuckGo’s AI-free search page has more than tripled after Google outlined a broader artificial intelligence overhaul of Search, signalling a sharp user reaction against answer-first search tools and strengthening the appeal of services that promise more control over automated summaries.The privacy-focused search company said visits to its No AI page crossed three times their pre-announcement level after Google set out plans to expand AI-powered search features at its developer conference. The page, which operates separately from DuckDuckGo’s main

Huawei has appointed GAPP as its official cloud solutions distributor in Saudi Arabia, widening access to cloud infrastructure, artificial intelligence tools and disaster recovery services as the kingdom intensifies its push to build a locally anchored digital economy.The strategic partnership gives GAPP’s network of enterprise clients and secondary distributors a formal channel to Huawei Cloud’s portfolio, including cloud-native systems, AI platforms, backup services and business continuity tools. The arrangement is designed around local regulatory and operational requirements, an increasingly important

OpenRouter has raised $113 million in Series B funding, marking one of the strongest investor endorsements yet for the fast-growing layer of artificial intelligence infrastructure that helps developers and companies route work across competing AI models rather than rely on a single provider.CapitalG, Alphabet’s independent growth fund, led the round, with participation from NVentures, the venture capital arm of NVIDIA, as well as ServiceNow Ventures, MongoDB Ventures, Snowflake Ventures, Databricks Ventures, AMP PBC and Pace Capital. Existing backers Andreessen Horowitz

Paris-based Mistral AI has struck partnerships with BMW and Airbus, marking a significant move by Europe’s best-known artificial intelligence start-up into industrial engineering, aerospace, defence and automotive safety systems.The agreements place Mistral at the centre of a widening European effort to build AI capability around strategic industries rather than relying mainly on US and Chinese technology providers. The company, founded in 2023, is seeking to turn its large language models and industrial AI tools into practical systems for manufacturers, aerospace

Spotify has expanded its mobile app with playlist folders, bulk editing, queue management, reshuffle controls and background downloads, marking one of its most practical upgrades for listeners who organise large music, podcast and audiobook libraries on phones.The update brings several desktop-style controls to iOS and Android, with playlist folders and in-playlist bulk actions being rolled out globally to all users. Premium subscribers gain additional tools, including queue bulk editing, one-tap reshuffling and background downloads on iOS, a change aimed at

Meta Platforms has launched paid “Plus” subscriptions for Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, marking a wider shift by the social media group towards recurring consumer revenue while keeping the core versions of its apps free.The new plans, announced by Meta head of product Naomi Gleit, add optional premium features across the company’s three biggest consumer services. Instagram Plus and Facebook Plus are priced at $3.99 a month, while WhatsApp Plus costs $2.99 a month. The rollout is global, though feature availability

Google Cloud has moved deeper into AI-native cybersecurity with Google AI Threat Defence, an autonomous security platform aimed at helping enterprises detect, prioritise and remediate attacks at machine speed as rivals Anthropic and OpenAI push frontier models into vulnerability discovery and code defence.The launch marks a sharper contest in enterprise security, where artificial intelligence is shifting the centre of gravity from manual patching and alert handling to continuous analysis, contextual triage and automated response. Google Cloud is positioning its platform

ByteDance is weighing capital expenditure of as much as $70 billion this year as the TikTok owner accelerates an artificial intelligence push aimed at strengthening its position in China’s intensifying technology contest.The Beijing-based group is discussing one of the largest spending programmes by a private technology company outside the United States, with funds expected to go into data centres, AI chips, networking equipment and model development. The scale under review would mark a sharp escalation from earlier plans that placed

Microsoft is preparing to scale back internal use of Anthropic’s Claude Code and move thousands of developers towards GitHub Copilot CLI, marking a sharper push to consolidate AI coding work around tools it owns and governs more directly.The reported shift affects the company’s Experiences and Devices division, which covers major product groups including Windows, Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams and Surface. Engineers using Claude Code have been given a June 30 deadline to move their workflows to Copilot CLI, aligning the

Qualcomm has secured a major opening in artificial intelligence infrastructure through a deal to supply ByteDance with chips for AI data centres, giving the San Diego-based group a high-profile customer as it pushes beyond its traditional smartphone processor business.The agreement covers application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, designed to support AI workloads in ByteDance’s expanding data-centre operations. The chips are expected to be used for AI agent software, a fast-growing area in which companies are racing to lower inference costs while

Microsoft has opened a clearer path for Windows 11 users and administrators to remove Copilot, marking a notable shift in its handling of artificial intelligence features that have become increasingly visible across the operating system.The change means Copilot can be removed like a conventional app on many devices, while IT administrators managing business PCs now have policy tools to uninstall or prevent the Microsoft Copilot app across fleets. The move forms part of a wider Windows 11 clean-up effort aimed

Microsoft’s early lead in AI-assisted software development is coming under pressure as outages at GitHub, leadership changes, security incidents and fast-moving rivals reshape one of the most important contests in enterprise technology.GitHub Copilot gave Microsoft a commanding start in the AI coding race. It was launched before many competitors had mature developer products, and it benefited from GitHub’s position at the centre of global software collaboration. More than 150 million developers use GitHub, while Copilot has become one of Microsoft’s

Security researchers have flagged a privacy weakness in WhatsApp’s Apple apps, warning that chat databases on macOS and iOS may sit unencrypted inside shared app group containers, creating a gap between the platform’s end-to-end encryption claims and the way messages are handled after they reach a user’s device.The concern centres on local storage, not message transmission. WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption is designed to prevent outsiders, network operators and even the company itself from reading messages while they travel between sender and

Vibe coding has moved from a developer shortcut to a mainstream software-building habit, with non-developers now making up 63 per cent of users creating applications through natural-language prompts rather than conventional programming.The shift is drawing writers, students, founders, investors, teachers and small businesses into a field that had long required technical training. These users are building websites, internal dashboards, classroom tools, workflow apps and lightweight commercial products in hours, helped by AI platforms that translate plain English into code, databases,

OpenAI-generated images are now easier to trace after the company added two embedded provenance signals to pictures created through ChatGPT, Codex and its application programming interface, marking a significant shift for users who rely on AI visuals but cannot openly disclose generative AI use.The change, introduced on May 19, places OpenAI’s image tools inside a widening industry push to label synthetic media as platforms, publishers, regulators and technology firms confront the spread of realistic AI-made pictures. The system combines C2PA

Huawei has deepened its Saudi Arabia cloud strategy through a distribution partnership with Gulf Applications, widening enterprise access to cloud infrastructure, artificial intelligence tools and disaster recovery services as the kingdom pushes ahead with its Vision 2030 digital agenda.The agreement appoints GAPP as Huawei Cloud’s official cloud solutions distributor in Saudi Arabia, placing the company at the centre of Huawei’s channel expansion in one of the Gulf’s fastest-growing technology markets. The arrangement is designed to give enterprises and secondary distributors

Texas has sued Meta Platforms and WhatsApp, accusing the messaging service of misleading users over the strength of its encryption and privacy protections, opening a fresh legal front in the global debate over encrypted communications, consumer rights and platform accountability.The lawsuit, filed in Harrison County, alleges that WhatsApp has assured users their messages are protected by end-to-end encryption while Meta and WhatsApp retain access to “virtually all” private communications on the app. The claim strikes at the centre of WhatsApp’s

Anthropic PBC is moving towards closing a funding round that could exceed $30 billion at a valuation above $900 billion, a transaction that would place the Claude maker among the world’s most valuable private companies and intensify the capital race reshaping artificial intelligence.The San Francisco-based company is expected to complete the round as soon as next week, though final terms could still change. The deal, if sealed near the levels under discussion, would more than double Anthropic’s valuation from the

Google and Blackstone have agreed to create a $5 billion TPU-powered cloud company, widening the battle for artificial intelligence infrastructure as enterprises seek alternatives to graphics processing units that dominate AI training and inference.The US-based venture will offer data centre capacity, operations, networking and Google Cloud’s Tensor Processing Units through a compute-as-a-service model. Blackstone is making the initial equity commitment, with the first 500 megawatts of capacity expected to come online in 2027. Google will supply the TPUs, software and

Google has begun replacing the Fitbit app with Google Health 5.0, marking one of the company’s biggest consumer health software changes since it completed the Fitbit acquisition and moved the brand deeper into its devices and services ecosystem.The update, rolling out from 19 May to 26 May, turns the existing Fitbit app into Google Health rather than requiring users to install a separate application. It brings a redesigned interface, a Gemini-powered Health Coach, a new Android home-screen widget and a

Core42 has secured $550 million in structured trade finance from HSBC to accelerate artificial intelligence cloud and compute deployments across the United States and Europe, strengthening the Abu Dhabi group’s position in the global race to build large-scale AI infrastructure.The financing, arranged through two non-equity dilutive facilities, gives the G42 company additional capital without requiring a share sale. The first facility, worth $240 million, was completed in February 2026, while the second, worth $310 million, was completed in May 2026.

SpaceX is pitching its planned public listing as a bet on artificial intelligence as much as rockets, telling prospective investors that AI services could open a $26.5 trillion market opportunity and transform the company from a launch-and-satellite operator into a global computing platform.The shift marks a striking turn for Elon Musk’s space company as it prepares for what could become the largest stock-market debut on record. The offering is being built around three linked businesses: reusable rockets, Starlink satellite internet

Cisco has issued an urgent security fix for a maximum-severity flaw in Secure Workload that could let unauthenticated attackers obtain Site Admin privileges and reach sensitive enterprise resources through internal REST API endpoints.The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20223, has been assigned a CVSS v3.1 base score of 10.0, the highest rating under the widely used severity system. It is classified as CWE-306, or missing authentication for a critical function, a category that signals a failure to enforce identity checks before allowing

Samsung Electronics is preparing one of the largest employee bonus packages in the global technology sector after a last-minute wage agreement with unions averted a threatened strike at its South Korean chip operations, where soaring demand for artificial intelligence memory has transformed the company’s earnings outlook.The tentative deal could channel about 40 trillion won, or roughly $26.6 billion, to semiconductor employees this year, implying an average payout near $340,000 for eligible workers if profit targets are met and the distribution

OpenAI will commit more than S$300 million, or about US$234 million, to build its first Applied AI Lab outside the United States in Singapore, marking a significant step in the company’s international expansion and the city-state’s push to become a global centre for practical artificial intelligence deployment.The multiyear partnership with Singapore’s Ministry of Digital Development and Information will operate under the “OpenAI for Singapore” initiative, aimed at bringing frontier AI into public services, finance, healthcare, digital infrastructure, education and small

Elon Musk has lost a major legal battle against OpenAI after a federal jury in Oakland, California, found that he waited too long to bring claims accusing the artificial intelligence company and its leaders of abandoning its founding mission.The unanimous verdict delivered a significant courtroom victory to OpenAI, chief executive Sam Altman, president Greg Brockman, the OpenAI Foundation and Microsoft, all of whom were targeted in Musk’s case. Jurors found that the claims were barred by statutes of limitations, ending

Ultra-light gaming laptops are moving from niche showpieces to a mainstream performance category as chipmakers, display suppliers and PC brands push more power into thinner machines without abandoning battery life or portability.The shift is being driven by a convergence of faster mobile graphics processors, AI-assisted rendering, high-efficiency CPUs, brighter OLED displays and more sophisticated cooling systems. Models weighing around 1.5kg to 2kg are now targeting users who want credible AAA gaming performance, content creation capability and everyday mobility in the

OpenAI and Anthropic have pushed their rivalry deeper into corporate technology budgets by launching dedicated enterprise deployment ventures aimed at turning powerful AI models into production systems for businesses.The moves mark a shift from selling access to chatbots and application programming interfaces towards embedding engineers, consultants and workflow specialists inside companies that want AI to reshape operations rather than sit on the edge of office software. Both companies are trying to solve the same problem facing large organisations: many executives

KnowBe4 has launched CAPY, a free online family cyber safety hub aimed at helping children, parents, older adults and everyday internet users build stronger defences against scams, phishing, cyberbullying, sextortion and AI-driven abuse.The programme, formally called Cyber Awareness Program for You, marks a shift by the Tampa Bay-based digital workforce security company from corporate training into a broader public education model. It arrives as online risks once treated as workplace security issues are increasingly reaching homes through messaging apps,