Big Tech built its reputation on mountains of cash. It is building its AI empire on debt, and the bill is starting to land in Europe. The five biggest builders of AI data centres in the US have doubled their debt over five years. Together, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle have piled on about […]

The letter reads like a founder’s article of faith. The share sale underneath it tells a harder story. The founder of MiniMax has told staff he will take no salary until the Chinese AI company builds artificial general intelligence. On the same day, MiniMax moved to raise as much as $2bn from investors. Its shares […]

A three-year-old startup run by a 23-year-old is in talks to double its worth to $20bn. The numbers are dazzling. Read the footnotes. Mercor, the AI training marketplace, has told investors it can raise at a $20bn valuation. It says it already holds at least one term sheet at that price, Bloomberg reports. The talks […]

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 into a club with only two other members. On Friday, the booster of a Long March-10B lifted off […]

Anthropic is the hottest stock in private tech. It is also one of the hardest to buy, and that is exactly why the price keeps climbing. Shares in Anthropic are changing hands on secondary markets at an implied valuation of $1.2 trillion, Business Insider reports. That is a 550% jump in a year. It puts […]

First the Royal Navy shoved a robot boat out of a transport plane at 1,300 feet. Then its maker became Europe’s newest defence unicorn. Kraken Technology Group, a British maker of uncrewed surface vessels, has raised $175m (€152.9m) in a Series B round. It values the company at more than $1bn. Kraken announced the raise […]

Walk into a shop with the wrong face on file, and the police could know within four seconds. That is the pitch, and the problem. A facial recognition system in more than 100 UK shops is about to start calling the police in real time. It will fire the moment it spots a flagged shopper. […]

Britain’s banks run on four American clouds. The Treasury reckons two-thirds of UK firms lean on the same handful. Now the regulators are stepping in. The UK has named Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Oracle as “critical third parties” to its financial system, as Reuters first reported. The designation takes effect on 13 July. These are […]

Three Chinese tech giants are on a US military blacklist. All three can still buy America’s best AI, as long as they buy it in the right country. Three of China’s biggest technology companies sit on a US military blacklist. All three can still reach some of America’s most advanced artificial intelligence. The trick is […]

Brussels has decided that infinite scroll is not a feature but a hazard. On Friday, the European Commission told Meta to dismantle the design tricks that keep people glued to Facebook and Instagram, or risk a fine that could run into billions, in a fresh set of charges under the EU’s Digital Services Act. The […]