TL;DR Bristol Myers Squibb signed a $15.2 billion deal with China’s Hengrui Medicine for 13 early-stage drug programmes, as Big Pharma’s patent cliff makes Chinese innovation the fastest path to commercial survival — even as the BIOSECURE Act tries to decouple the two countries’ biotech sectors. Bristol Myers Squibb has signed a deal worth up […]
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Kevin Hartz’s A* takes a ‘less-is-more’ approach with new $450m fund
While AI peers chase billion-dollar megafunds, the Eventbrite founder’s venture firm has gone the other way. Kevin Hartz, the Eventbrite co-founder turned long-time seed investor, has closed a $450m fund at A*, his San Francisco venture firm, according to Bloomberg. The vehicle pointedly avoids the multi-billion-dollar AI megafund template that has dominated venture fundraising for […]
Read MoreeBay tells GameStop to keep the carpet: $56bn bid “neither credible nor attractive”
Ryan Cohen offered $125 a share, partly to be funded by a $20bn TD Securities commitment letter and, briefly, by selling old store signs on eBay itself. The eBay board, which had to ban and then unban him during the process, says no. eBay has formally rejected GameStop’s $56bn takeover bid, telling the video-game retailer’s […]
Read MoreNHS England gives Palantir contractors broader access to patient data
A leaked internal briefing note describes a new admin role on the £330m Federated Data Platform that lets external staff bypass case-by-case data approvals. Patient groups and Labour MPs have called the change dangerous. NHS England has decided to allow external personnel from contractors, including Palantir, to access identifiable patient data through a new administrative […]
Read MoreChina is earning roughly $500m an hour from exports, and AI-related goods are doing the heavy lifting
China’s export earnings have reached roughly $500m an hour, according to a Bloomberg calculation based on the latest customs data, with AI-related goods accounting for about half of the year-on-year growth that has driven the figure to record levels. Total Chinese exports rose 14.1% year-on-year in April to a record $359.4bn, comfortably ahead of consensus […]
Read MoreIlya Sutskever discloses $7bn OpenAI stake during Musk-OpenAI litigation
The former OpenAI chief scientist, who now runs Safe Superintelligence, gave the figure under oath. It places him among the largest individual shareholders in the company. Ilya Sutskever, the former chief scientist of OpenAI who now runs Safe Superintelligence Inc., disclosed during testimony in the Musk-OpenAI litigation on Monday that his ownership stake in OpenAI […]
Read MoreThe US Commerce Department deletes website details of Microsoft, Google, and xAI security-test deal
The US Commerce Department has removed from its website the details of an agreement under which Microsoft, Google, and xAI agreed to submit new AI models to government scientists for security testing before release, Reuters reported on Monday. The original page, posted on 5 May, said the three companies would hand over their frontier AI […]
Read MoreJensen Huang skips Trump’s China business delegation
The Nvidia CEO is not on the list of US executives travelling to Beijing for the Trump-Xi summit. Apple’s Tim Cook and Tesla’s Elon Musk are among those attending; the trip’s focus is reportedly agriculture, manufacturing, and aviation. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang will not join President Donald Trump’s business delegation to China this week, Reuters […]
Read MoreZoomInfo beat earnings, cut 600 jobs, and lost 29 per cent of its stock price. Its database is being repriced by AI.
TL;DR ZoomInfo beat Q1 earnings but cut full-year revenue guidance by 62 million dollars, announced a 600-job restructuring (20 per cent of headcount), and lost 29 per cent of its stock price as AI-native competitors reprice B2B sales intelligence. ZoomInfo beat its first-quarter earnings estimates, cut its full-year revenue guidance by 62 million dollars, announced […]
Read MoreSanta Clara County sues Meta over scam ads on Facebook and Instagram
The complaint, filed on behalf of California residents, alleges Meta earns up to $7bn a year from “high-risk” scam ads and tolerated the practice. The county wants restitution, civil damages, and an injunction. Santa Clara County has sued Meta Platforms in California state court, alleging the company profits from scam advertising on Facebook and Instagram […]
Read MoreOpenAI launches $4bn Deployment Company with TPG, Advent, Bain, and Brookfield
OpenAI has set up a new venture called OpenAI Deployment Company, with more than $4bn in initial funding from a syndicate of 19 firms led by TPG and including Advent International, Bain Capital and Brookfield as co-lead founding partners, the company said on Monday. The new entity, which will be majority-owned and controlled by OpenAI, […]
Read MoreClaude AI agents are driving record Mac mini demand
Tyler Cadwell runs a small Arizona business called Everything Etched. He sells custom-engraved glassware on Etsy and Shopify. When he wants to brainstorm or build something new, he drives his Ford Bronco out into the canyons around Flagstaff and Tucson with a Mac mini in the passenger seat. The desktop is wired to a portable […]
Read MoreA $13,500 Unitree robot was ‘ordained’ at Seoul’s Jogyesa Temple
At about ten in the morning on Wednesday, in the courtyard of Daeungjeon Hall at Jogyesa, a 130-centimetre humanoid in brown robes pressed its palms together and bowed. A monk asked the figure whether it would devote itself to the holy Buddha. The reply, in a recorded voice supplied by a temple manager, was “Yes, […]
Read MoreAnthropic says Claude learned to blackmail by reading stories about evil AI
The company has traced its model’s most uncomfortable behaviour to the corpus of science fiction it was trained on. The fix it describes is unsettling in a different way: teaching the model the reasons behind being good, not just the rules. In a fictional company called Summit Bridge, a fictional executive named Kyle Johnson is […]
Read MoreAlibaba integrates Qwen AI with Taobao for end-to-end agentic shopping
The Qwen app gets access to Taobao and Tmall’s catalogue of more than 4 billion items, plus Alipay-native checkout, in what is the largest agentic-commerce launch yet from a Chinese platform. Alibaba is integrating its Qwen AI app with Taobao and Tmall, the company’s two largest consumer marketplaces, in what amounts to the most ambitious […]
Read MoreThe University of Michigan invested 20 million dollars in OpenAI before ChatGPT existed. Court documents show the stake is now worth two billion.
TL;DR Court documents from the Musk v. Altman trial revealed that the University of Michigan invested 20 million dollars in OpenAI before ChatGPT existed. The stake is now worth two billion dollars. The University of Michigan invested 20 million dollars in OpenAI before ChatGPT existed, before Microsoft committed billions, and before the company was worth […]
Read MoreUber’s robotaxi partner crashed 16 times in four months. The regulator called it “excessively assertive and insufficiently capable.”
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened an investigation into Avride, Uber’s autonomous vehicle partner, after identifying 16 crashes and one minor injury in the four months since the company launched its robotaxi service in Dallas. The regulator’s language is unusually blunt: the vehicles displayed “excessive assertiveness and insufficient capability,” a phrase that could […]
Read MoreTrump’s H-1B proposal would push entry-level tech salary floor near $162,000
An entry-level software engineer in San Francisco would need to be paid at least $162,000 a year to qualify for an H-1B visa under a Trump-administration proposal published in March, The same role in Dallas would jump to about $113,000; in New York, $132,000. The increases run nearly 30% above the current minimums in each […]
Read MorePR & Media lessons from EU-Startups Summit 2026: what works, what does not
A panel in Valletta laid out a working playbook for startup PR, from the friends-and-family headline test to the case for hiring an agency. Founders looking for media coverage at this year’s EU-Startups Summit in Valletta got a fairly direct briefing from the people who decide what gets published. The session, titled “The Startup Media […]
Read MoreAWS was hit by overheating in northern Virginia, knocking Coinbase offline and rattling CME
A single data centre’s cooling system fell behind. AWS shifted traffic away from the affected zone and warned that fully restoring the remaining services would take longer than expected. Amazon Web Services said on Thursday that one of its data centres in northern Virginia was running hot enough to disrupt customer workloads, and that engineers […]
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Intel is bringing a chip to every computing category at Computex. The last time it could do that, it was the company everyone was trying to catch.
TL;DR Intel is taking Panther Lake handhelds, a 52-core Nova Lake desktop preview, and 288-core Clearwater Forest servers to Computex 2026, all built on the 18A process that underpins its foundry pitch to Apple, Amazon, and Musk’s Terafab. Intel will arrive at Computex 2026 in Taipei on 2 June with something it has not had […]
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Half of young Europeans turn to AI to talk about intimate matters
Before we talk about the technology, we need to talk about what it is taking from us, or teaching us to give away. As journalists and writers covering tech, our job is not only to report what is being built, funded, launched, or regulated. It is also to pay attention to what these systems are […]
Read MoreOpenAI recruits Cognizant and CGI to take Codex into enterprise software shops worldwide
OpenAI is building a systems integrator channel for Codex, enlisting large consulting firms to carry the coding agent into organisations it cannot reach through direct sales. Cognizant and CGI are the first named SI partners in the programme, announced on the same day. Codex has grown 6x among ChatGPT Business and Enterprise users since January. […]
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Seapoint raises €7.5M and opens to all UK and Irish founders
The Dublin and London-based fintech, founded by ex-Stripe and ex-Tide engineers, has processed over 100,000 transactions and 40,000 invoices across 80+ early customers. Its €7.5M seed round, led by 13books, brings total funding to €10M and opens the platform to any startup in the UK and Ireland. Seapoint, the AI-powered financial operations platform for startups, […]
Read MoreOp-Ed: SaaS is not dead. You are just being sold the funeral
The “AI has killed software” narrative has a handful of very loud beneficiaries and a lot of quiet evidence against it. The companies that will survive the next five years are the ones that refuse to treat the hyperscalers as the new gods. Whenever I make an affirmation, I like to do my research first, […]
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The question AI providers hope VPs of Engineering never ask
AI coding adoption is exploding. But most engineering leaders are still measuring usage instead of outcomes. That creates a costly blind spot. There is a question that nobody in the AI industry wants you to ask. Not OpenAI. Not Anthropic. Not Google. Not the dozens of startups selling AI coding agents to your engineering team. […]
Read MoreAustralia’s NEXTDC launches A$2.2 billion capital plan
The ASX-listed data centre operator is raising A$1.5 billion in a fully underwritten equity offering and expanding its hybrid securities programme by A$700 million, with La Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec now committed to a total of A$1.7 billion. The raise will fund accelerated development of the S4 Western Sydney campus, where contracted […]
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EU awards its €180 million sovereign cloud contract to four European providers
Post Telecom (with CleverCloud and OVHcloud), StackIT, Scaleway, and Proximus (with S3NS, a Thales – Google Cloud joint venture, plus Clarence and Mistral) have won the European Commission’s six-year sovereign cloud framework contract. The Proximus consortium’s inclusion signals that non-European technology can qualify as ‘sovereign’ under the Commission’s framework if operated within a sufficiently strict […]
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Musk is asking chip suppliers to move at ‘light speed’ for his Terafab AI chip plant
According to Bloomberg, teams from SpaceX and Tesla have approached Applied Materials, Tokyo Electron, Lam Research, and Samsung for price quotes and delivery times on chipmaking equipment. Teams working for Elon Musk have reached out to major chip industry suppliers including Applied Materials, Tokyo Electron, and Lam Research, as well as chip manufacturing partner Samsung […]
Read MoreStanford’s annual AI report finds a widening gap between AI insiders and everyone else
The 2026 AI Index from Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI documents a deepening disconnect between expert optimism and public anxiety. Gen Z anger about AI is rising fast. Employment in AI-exposed fields among younger workers is already declining. And the US has the lowest trust in its government to regulate AI of any country surveyed. […]
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OpenAI’s $852 billion valuation is under scrutiny from its own investors as the company pivots to enterprise
Some backers say OpenAI has revised its product roadmap twice in six months and risks losing focus ahead of an IPO expected as early as Q4 2026. OpenAI’s new CRO has accused Anthropic of overstating its $30B run rate by $8B through gross accounting on cloud partner revenue. Both companies say they follow standard accounting […]
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