S&P downgraded Oracle to BBB- on July 9, placing the company one notch above junk status, as a $250 billion data-centre expansion plan burns through cash faster than revenue can replace it. Oracle is now the second-largest non-financial debt issuer in the Bloomberg US Corporate Bond Index after Amazon, with $117 billion outstanding. Shares fell […]

Google is months behind schedule on delivering the next version of its flagship AI model, Gemini Pro, because the technology has fallen short of internal goals in coding, Bloomberg reported on Thursday citing 10 current and former employees. The company was widely expected to release the upgrade at its May developer conference but has been […]

GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen dismissed the decline of physical video game sales as “totally, totally irrelevant” to the company’s business in an interview on Bloomberg TV on Thursday. Cohen was responding to Sony’s announcement earlier this month that it will end physical disc production for new PlayStation games in 2028. “It doesn’t matter at all,” […]

Visa launched the Visa Stablecoin Platform on Thursday, a new infrastructure product that lets banks and payment processors issue, manage, and settle stablecoin transactions through Visa’s network. The platform launches with native support for Open USD, the stablecoin backed by a consortium of more than 140 firms including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and BlackRock. Jack Forestell, […]

Google will have to let rival AI assistants run on Android the way its own Gemini does. It must also hand some of its search data to competitors. The European Commission set out both requirements on Thursday. The two decisions fall under the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), the Commission said. The law forces “gatekeeper” […]

Researchers have restored hand movement and the sense of touch to a man paralysed from the chest down. The results, published in Nature Medicine, suggest the technology partly rewired his nervous system. The system, called a “double neural bypass,” comes from the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, the research arm of Northwell Health, the team […]

Verizon is cutting about 3,000 employees from its corporate-owned retail stores and transferring 274 locations to independent operators, Bloomberg reported on Thursday. The changes take effect on August 16 and will leave the largest US mobile carrier with 1,000 company-owned stores alongside roughly 5,000 independent franchises. A company spokesperson said many of the workers at […]

Twenty-nine countries signed an agreement on 16 July to establish the World AI Cooperation Organization (WAICO), Reuters reported. China says the intergovernmental body aims to promote international cooperation and global governance in AI. China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, signed on behalf of Beijing. UN Secretary-General António Guterres attended the ceremony. The founding members include Russia, […]

Google is renaming NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook, folding one of its most popular AI products into the Gemini brand while keeping it as a standalone tool. The company said on Thursday that the rebrand reflects how deeply the research assistant has been woven into the broader Google ecosystem, including the Gemini app and Google Search. […]

Most space-hardware startups raise money because they are burning it. SWISSto12 raised $70m while turning a profit, an unusual thing in the satellite business. The Swiss company closed the €61m round days after ESA member states put $84.8m into its HummingSat programme, it said. That is more than $150m of fresh capital in a month. […]