Google plans to hire hundreds of engineers to help customers start using its business-focused AI products, according to a person familiar with the situation. Google’s new “forward deployed engineers” will form a new team within Google Cloud, the unit’s chief, Thomas Kurian, said on LinkedIn on Tuesday, without disclosing the size of the effort. Matt Renner, Google Cloud’s chief revenue

For three years, Microsoft was the only cloud provider to sell OpenAI’s large language models to other businesses, an exclusive right it fought hard to preserve after investing $13 billion in the startup. But businesses bought more access to those models from OpenAI directly than from Microsoft ...

The House Oversight Committee has opened an investigation into OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s personal investments and their ties to OpenAI’s commercial partnerships ahead of the company’s planned initial public offering. At the same time, 10 Republican attorneys general—including from Florida, Montana, Nebraska, Iowa, Arkansas and West Virginia and Louisiana—also asked the Securities and Exchange

Google is considering using SpaceX or another rocket launch to launch its experimental orbital data centers, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday. Google was an early SpaceX investor and owned 6.1% of the company at the end of 2025, regulatory filings show. Google aims to launch two prototype satellites this year through a moonshot research project called Project Suncatcher. Using

Google will start offering buy now, pay later services Affirm and Klarna for AI-powered shopping transactions in its Gemini app and its AI search mode, the rival fintechs announced on Tuesday. The launch is an expansion of both firms’ existing relationships with Google—Affirm has already incorporated its pay-over-time options into Google Pay and in its Chrome browser, and Klarna’s installment

Alex Shan may not have been old enough to legally buy alcohol in 2023, but he was still old enough to start his own company and join the AI boom.Shan was 20 when he was first introduced to James Alcorn, an investment partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, through a fellow Stanford University ...

Ebay told investor Ryan Cohen his $56 billion cash and stock bid for the online auction marketplace was “neither credible nor attractive,” delivering an expected rejection. Cohen, the founder of Chew.com who now controls struggling game retail chain GameStop, made the bid early last week. As eBay noted, the cash portion didn’t have definitive financing and the stock portion of the bid rested

BuzzFeed is separating its film and TV production studio and its Tasty food video unit into a separate company, BuzzFeed Studios, and will look to attract new investors, the company said in a securities filing. The restructuring coincides with media mogul Byron Allen’s planned purchase of a majority stake in the company. BuzzFeed mentioned the separation in Monday night’s announcement of the

Chipmaker Cerebras brought in one of the greatest pitchmen in tech, Sam Altman, to appear in a video to promote its $5.5 billion initial public offering. Seated on a gray upholstered couch and speaking softly, the OpenAI chief executive touted Cerebras’ chips as “the best high-speed inference ...

Chinese social media giant Kuaishou Technology said in a regulatory filing on Tuesday that the company’s board of directors is assessing a restructuring of its Kling AI video business that may involve raising outside capital for the unit, confirming an earlier report by The Information. The Information on Monday reported that Hong Kong-listed Kuaishou, a rival to ByteDance in the short video

OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar has plenty of things to worry about. But paying OpenAI’s early backer Microsoft as much as $135 billion through 2030 as part of a revenue-sharing deal is no longer one of them. OpenAI’s initial agreement to pay 20% of its revenue to Microsoft could have ...

Digital media historians will be intrigued by news this afternoon that media mogul Byron Allen is buying control of once-important media outlet BuzzFeed. For more on this unusual deal, see below. Meanwhile... if you’re using mass layoffs as an indicator for AI’s impact on the job market, you may ...

Billionaire media mogul Byron Allen is to buy control of BuzzFeed for $120 million, rescuing the struggling digital media firm from likely extinction. The company announced the deal while reporting a 12.4% drop in first quarter revenue and a slightly increased net loss. As part of the deal, Allen will succeed Jonah Peretti as BuzzFeed CEO. Peretti, who founded BuzzFeed in 2006, will get a new

Circle, the stablecoin issuer of USDC, jumped 16% Monday after reporting revenue growth and announcing a fundraising for its planned blockchain. The company said it raised $222 million for Arc, a stablecoin-focused blockchain, at a $3 billion valuation from investors including a16z crypto, Apollo Funds, BlackRock, and Intercontinental Exchange by pre-selling the ARC tokens. The blockchain is

Ilya Sutskever, the OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist who left two years ago, owns a stake now worth close to $7 billion, he testified on Monday. The figure emerged during the trial in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. A lawyer asked Sutskever to confirm that his stake in OpenAI was worth $5 billion as of last November, and has now increased to as much as $7 billion.

Satisfying AI’s ravenous appetite for power and compute has kicked off a once-in-a-generation infrastructure expansion that is also one of the most expensive in modern history. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has estimated a single gigawatt of capacity can cost as much as $50 billion. With McKinsey ...

In his lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, Elon Musk has claimed that the two companies’ deals amounted to Microsoft and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman trying to “steal the charity.” But Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified in court Monday that Musk never raised those concerns to him before or after the deals were negotiated. “We have each other’s phone numbers,” Nadella said, noting that Musk

OpenAI on Monday announced its $10 billion private-equity joint venture called the OpenAI Deployment Company, which aims to help businesses deploy and integrate AI into their operations. As part of the new company, OpenAI also announced it had bought Tomoro, an AI consulting and engineering firm, whose acquisition would also bring on around 150 forward deployed engineers to the new joint

Critics of the AI build-out are picking the wrong fight when they attack data centers for their water use. But they are right when they say the digital economy is getting thirstier and the tech industry should answer for it.The whole AI supply chain is water intensive, and reducing use in one ...

AI chip designer Cerebras Systems raised its preliminary IPO pricing range to between $150 and $160 a share, from between $115 and $125, in a sign that investor demand for the company is strong. At the new pricing range, Cerebras would raise about $4.5 billion. It would also value Cerebras at $33 billion, not including options and restricted stock that will vest with the IPO. That would push