SoftBank Borrows $10 Billion Against OpenAI Stake
TOKYO—The loan has no collateral in the usual sense; its security is a stake in a company that did not exist five years ago. SoftBank Group has borrowed $10 billion…
Researchers Use AI to Design New Viruses
BOSTON—The virus did not exist anywhere in nature, and it was designed in a laboratory by a machine that learned biology from text. American researchers said this week that they…
Alphabet Sells $25 Billion in Bonds as AI Demand Surges
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—The order book closed at roughly $115 billion, a pile of demand so large that it ranked among the biggest of the year. Alphabet said Thursday it has…
Firmus Raises $2 Billion for Sovereign AI Cloud
SYDNEY—The pitch that Firmus makes to governments is simple: your data, your compute, your country. The Australian company builds cloud infrastructure designed to keep artificial-intelligence workloads inside national borders, a…
AMD to Acquire AI Inference Chip Startup Taalas
TORONTO—The startup’s pitch has always sounded slightly heretical in an industry built on general-purpose chips. Taalas, a company founded in 2023 in this city’s tech district, makes processors that are…
Memory Shortage Reaches Consumers: Graphics Cards Up 20%, Qualcomm Next
MSI’s price bulletins went out this week, and the numbers were blunt: graphics cards up more than 20%, with the company blaming the cost of memory. The move followed ASUS…
Microsoft’s AI Revenue Rides on OpenAI, New Filing Shows
The number had been the subject of months of investor guessing, and a new regulatory filing finally supplied it: about $24 billion. That is what Microsoft booked from OpenAI over…
Apple Buys Czech Materials Firm PlasmaSolve
The acquisition had been whispered about since early August; this week, trade publications including Photonics Spectra confirmed it. Apple has bought PlasmaSolve, a Czech materials-science company whose specialty is plasma…
SK Hynix Shares Flash-Crash Again on Nextrade, KOSPI Falls 4.6%
The circuit breaker tripped before the Seoul market had even opened. On Nextrade, South Korea’s alternative trading platform, SK Hynix shares plunged 30% in pre-market trading on Wednesday, triggering a…
SpaceX Lockup Expiry Piles Pressure on Shares After Earnings Drop
The calendar flipped to August 6, and the lockup that had kept nearly a billion SpaceX shares off the market expired at midnight. By morning, roughly 911.5 million shares held…
