Mark Lanier, the folksy Texas litigator who doubles as a part-time pastor, held a jar of M&Ms in front of the Los Angeles jury and told them that each one represented a billion dollars of Meta’s market capitalisation. There were, by that maths, roughly 1,400 sweets in the jar. The jury awarded his client six […]
Isaiah Taylor was sixteen when he decided the nuclear industry had a size problem. Not that reactors were too dangerous or too expensive, though they are both, but that they were simply too big. The multi-gigawatt monuments to Cold War-era engineering that still dot the American landscape were designed for a grid that moved power […]
There is a number that keeps getting larger, and on Tuesday it got larger again. OpenAI announced that it had closed its latest funding round with $122 billion in committed capital, valuing the ChatGPT maker at $852 billion post-money. The figure is up from the $110 billion the company announced in February, when Amazon, Nvidia, […]
Shield AI, the San Diego defence technology company behind the autonomous pilot system Hivemind, announced on Wednesday that it has raised $2 billion in combined funding at a $12.7 billion valuation. The company will use part of the proceeds to acquire Aechelon Technology, a simulation platform that supports the Pentagon’s Joint Simulation Environment. The raise […]
A startup called Friending has launched a social platform built around a premise that sounds almost quaint in 2026: helping people make friends by meeting in person. The app, based in Raleigh, North Carolina, connects users by shared interests and geographic proximity, then deliberately limits chat functionality to push them toward face-to-face meetings rather than […]
In the sprawl north of Dallas, where data centres are multiplying and the Texas grid groans under record demand, Energy Vault has placed a new bet on battery storage, and on the idea that the companies powering AI’s insatiable appetite for electricity will need far more of it, far faster. The California-based energy storage company […]
The indictment of Super Micro’s co-founder exposes not just a $2.5 billion scheme, it exposes a system that was never built to stop one. Somewhere in a rented warehouse in Southeast Asia, a man was using a hair dryer on a server box. Not to dry it. To loosen the adhesive on a serial-number sticker, […]
The AI company filed two federal lawsuits on Monday, arguing the Trump administration’s ‘supply chain risk’ designation is unconstitutional retaliation for protected speech. There is a phrase in Anthropic’s court filing that sets the tone for everything that follows: “Anthropic turns to the judiciary as a last resort to vindicate its rights and halt the […]
The acquisition of Promptfoo, which counts more than 125,000 developers and 30-plus Fortune 500 companies among its users, is OpenAI’s most direct move yet into AI application security. Its technology will go into Frontier, the company’s enterprise agent platform launched just a month ago. When Ian Webster was leading the LLM engineering team at Discord, […]
OpenAI has reached an agreement with the Pentagon to deploy its artificial intelligence models in classified military systems, just hours after President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using rival Anthropic’s technology. The announcement came late Friday from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who said the company had secured terms with the Department of Defense […]
