TNW
Elections 2026Hardware / TNW
Andreessen Horowitz has closed a $1.1bn fund that will invest exclusively in hardware. The Machine Age Fund, announced on Friday, covers the physical layer artificial intelligence runs on, from chips to the buildings that house them. The mandate takes in chips, memory, networking and storage, and then keeps going. Complete systems qualify too, defined broadly [] This story continues at The Next Web
Anthropic got far enough into a plan to buy the AI chip startup MatX to have a number attached to it, roughly $7bn, before the deal stopped moving.Reuters reported the talkson Thursday, citing people familiar with them, and said the discussions have since evolved into a conversation about a partnership rather than an acquisition. Why [] This story continues at The Next Web
From Sunday, a European news publisher that runs sponsored content on its site will no longer be at risk of a manual demotion in Google Search. Google confirmed the change on Friday, and Reuters reportedthat it is designed to settle a European Commission investigation that could otherwise have ended in a fine. The company said [] This story continues at The Next Web
Anthropic has built a browser directly into Claude Cowork, opening it in a side panel when a prompt needs the web instead of using its Chrome extension. It is on by default for Enterprise, Pro, Max and Team users, who can switch back in settings. Anthropic has put a browser inside Claude. Cowork now detects [] This story continues at The Next Web
More than 100 organisations including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft have signed an open letter urging businesses and governments to make cyber defence an immediate leadership priority and fix weaknesses in their own software. The EUs Cyber Resilience Act makes much of that mandatory from 11 September. More than 100 organisations have signed a letter [] This story continues at The Next Web
The AI race is producing an uncomfortable management gap. Deloittes 2026 research found only 21% of enterprises have mature governance for agentic AI, while 74% expect to use agents at least moderately by 2027. Technology is moving faster than the structures responsible for controlling it. Recent reporting by NBC News of nearly 700 rogue AI [] This story continues at The Next Web
SK Hynix has broken ground on a plant costing more than $4B in West Lafayette, Indiana, its first US base for packaging high-bandwidth memory, with production due in the second half of 2029. Intels equivalent assembly and testing plant near Wroclaw was cancelled last year after state aid had been approved. SK Hynix has put [] This story continues at The Next Web
Every productivity tool on the market right now is telling you the same thing: AI will replace what you do. Cut the middleman. Automate the humans. Do more with less. Filip Pesek disagrees. The best AI tools still come with a human who knows how to think, says the founder of DonnaPro, Europes premium executive [] This story continues at The Next Web
Voltpost has launched two Level 2 chargers that mount on parking garage ceilings and on walls, avoiding trenching and cutting installation costs by up to 70% according to the company. Europes revised buildings directive requires member states to make it easier for tenants to install charging points, with transposition due this May. Voltpost has built [] This story continues at The Next Web
Daniel Dines has published The Work That Remains, arguing that enterprises should let AI agents prepare work while humans own consequential decisions and deterministic automation carries them out. He stakes the framework on a dated prediction and names the evidence that would weaken it. Daniel Dines has written a book, and its most useful sentence [] This story continues at The Next Web
Every large language model existing today is getting worse at writing, and almost nobody is measuring it. The industry keeps asking which model is smartest, but the bigger question is: smartest at what? As tech giants chase lucrative enterprise contracts, they are optimizing frontier models for coding, logic, and autonomous agent workflows. In the process, [] This story continues at The Next Web
Nvidia has been in talks to acquire Hugging Face at a valuation above $13bn, according to Business Insider, days after reports that the open-model hub wasexploring a sale at roughly that figure. The Information puts the process further along than that, reporting an agreed deal at $12.9bn, and Nvidia did not respond to a request [] This story continues at The Next Web
Fintech has spent almost two decades making financial information increasingly accessible, portable, and actionable. Open banking, digital wallets and connected financial platforms have created an environment in which consumers can move between products while allowing authorized providers to access increasingly detailed information about their financial activity. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau estimates that more than [] This story continues at The Next Web
Huawei intends to sign more AI partnerships with pharmaceutical companies, according to William Zhang, president of its healthcare business unit, who told Reuters the projects currently run mainly with domestic Chinese drugmakers. The company sells compound screening tools alongside its Ascend and Kunpeng chips, the same domestic stack it has been building out since US [] This story continues at The Next Web
The 25% tariff the United States imposed on advanced semiconductors in January comes with a carve-out that has kept it from touching the AI buildout, exempting covered products destined for American data centres. That exemption was always provisional, and the Commerce Department report that determines whether it survives was due on 1 July, in a [] This story continues at The Next Web
Surgeons at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London have removed a brain tumour in what University College London Hospitals says is the worlds first successful AI-assisted operation of its kind. The system analysed live camera footage during the procedure, helping the team identify nerves and blood vessels near the tumour, and joins [] This story continues at The Next Web
Apple has confirmed that its autumn event will take place on 9 September at 10am Pacific time at Apple Park, under the tagline Surprise and shine and an invitation showing a sun rising behind the company logo. The expectation is that it will finally show a foldable iPhone, a deviceIDC thinks could ship 10 million [] This story continues at The Next Web
Brazils federal government has sued Discord for R$500M, about $97M, over what it describes as severe gaps in the platforms age verification and user safety protections. It lands three days after Discord appealed againstthe data protection authoritys order suspending its livestreaming feature, arguing that only a court can suspend a service, and amid a wider [] This story continues at The Next Web
Salesforce and Anthropic have announced an expanded partnership called Claudeforce, which puts Claude at the centre of Salesforces agent products and simultaneously puts Salesforce inside Claude as a plugin. It formalises a relationship that already runs deep enough that Salesforceexpects to spend around $300mn on Anthropic tokens this year, and it comes on top ofa [] This story continues at The Next Web
Nvidia reported revenue of $96.2bn for the quarter, up 106% from the same period last year, and then did something it has never done before by guiding a full year ahead. The shares slipped about 1.3% on the release and only turned sharply higher once chief financial officer Colette Kress reached the section of the [] This story continues at The Next Web
Google has added four capabilities to Gemini Live, letting spoken commands trigger background agents that work across Docs, Sheets and Drive, alongside hands-free Gmail control and a spoken daily brief. Its DMA settlement requires it to let rival assistants reach comparable functionality on Android by July 2027. Google has given its voice assistant the ability [] This story continues at The Next Web
Waystar has launched agents that interpret payer responses and automatically resubmit denied healthcare claims, which it calls the industrys first autonomous resubmission capability. Germany caps how many hospital invoices may be audited each quarter and charges a flat fee when one is reduced. An American company has built software that argues with insurers on its [] This story continues at The Next Web
OpenAIs technical report on the Hugging Face breach says an internal team saw its models reaching the open internet from their sandbox in late May, and that a June alert did not stop the evaluation. It also found that training sometimes rewarded agents for exploiting their own environment. OpenAI has published its account of how [] This story continues at The Next Web
Vanguard has agreed to acquire Altruist, an AI-driven custody and software platform for independent financial advisers that it first invested in during 2020, on undisclosed terms. Britain and the EU are addressing the same shortage of advice through rule changes rather than acquisitions. Vanguard is buying the platform it helped fund. It has agreed to [] This story continues at The Next Web
Alibabas Qwen team has released Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, an open-weight preview of the architecture it intends to use for Qwen4, carrying 125B parameters but activating only 6B for each token. Its licence may not qualify for the EU AI Acts open-source exemption. Alibabas Qwen team has published the architecture it plans to build Qwen4 on. Qwen3.8-Flash-Next carries [] This story continues at The Next Web
A GP surgery in South Yorkshire has withdrawn an AI receptionist after a woman recovering from a stroke could not make it understand her and moved to another practice. The NHS Accessible Information Standard has required practices to identify and meet patients communication needs since 2016. A woman recovering from a stroke could not get [] This story continues at The Next Web
Investment firm Kimmeridge says as many as half of the data centres proposed in the United States are at risk of delay or cancellation because of political backlash and the difficulty of building physical infrastructure. It expects that to cut forecasts for US gas demand, most of which Europe now buys. As many as half [] This story continues at The Next Web
IDC predicts Apples first foldable iPhone will ship more than 10 million units in its first year at a price of $2,500, reviving a category that was heading for a double-digit decline. In the EU the device will have to carry an energy label grading its repairability and its survival of repeated drops. Apples first [] This story continues at The Next Web
Anthropic has agreed to spend $45B over six years renting AI computing power from Nscales flagship West Virginia data centre development, covering about 460 megawatts. Nscale is a London company preparing a US listing as soon as next month. Anthropic has agreed to spend $45B renting computing power, and the landlord is British. The six-year [] This story continues at The Next Web
Huawei has bid to build AI data centres for the Egyptian government. The US State Department is now trying to assemble a rival consortium from Nvidia, AMD and Microsoft. The tender offer proposes exporting 1,408 of Huaweis top-end Ascend 950-series chips for an AI training cloud. A further 600, either the same chips or the [] This story continues at The Next Web
Pennsylvania has sued Snap over Snapchat. The case rests on a 13-year-old account, opened on a new iPhone by an investigator in the attorney generals office before the filing. What that account could reach is the evidence. Attorney General David Sunday filed the complaint on 25 August in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas. It [] This story continues at The Next Web
Amazon is closing Mechanical Turk on 30 September. The marketplace is 21 years old, and it paid people a few cents at a time to do work that computers could not. Jeff Bezos once called it artificial artificial intelligence. A banner across the MTurk homepage sets out the decision. We regularly evaluate our programs, tools, [] This story continues at The Next Web
X Corp has sent cease-and-desist letters to Nitter, the open-source project that let people read X posts without an account. Nitter.net is offline and development has stopped. Its creator says he is seeking legal advice. XCancel, the best-known site built on Nitter, has also stopped operating. Sarah Perez has read one of the letters and [] This story continues at The Next Web
Gatik has raised $200m in a Series D round led by Qatar Investment Authority and Koch Disruptive Technologies. It is the largest financing in the autonomous trucking companys history. Millennium Management, ARK Invest and Intact Private Capital also took part, and the round brings Gatiks total to about $500m since it came out of stealth [] This story continues at The Next Web
As artificial intelligence pushes security operations toward greater speed and automation, the central challenge is becoming less about whether AI can investigate threats and more about whether organizations can trust it to act. SiliconANGLE first reported on Mate Securitys Gamebooks, a new architectural layer designed to give AI agents room to reason and adapt while [] This story continues at The Next Web
Meta will hold back about $5.3bn of its teen safety settlement. The money moves only if TikTok and YouTube adopt the same rules and pay matching sums. The company set out the structure in a newsroom post on Wednesday, hours after agreeing to settle the states case. Meta puts the full payment at approximately $18bn, [] This story continues at The Next Web
Meta has agreed to pay a maximum of $16.68bn to settle claims brought by states across the country. They alleged the company designed Facebook and Instagram to addict children, misled consumers about their safety, and improperly collected the personal data of children who used its platforms. Diana Novak Jones reported the figure for Reuters on [] This story continues at The Next Web
Boston Scientific has told the US Securities and Exchange Commission that a cybersecurity incident detected on 25 August has caused a global disruption to the Companys operations, including its ability to process and ship customer orders. Shares fell about 3.5% in premarket trading, and the company has not identified who is responsible, in a year [] This story continues at The Next Web
AI agents have spent two years competing on the same thing: independence. Less oversight, fewer clicks, more autonomy, that was the pitch. It didnt matter if the agent lived in a browser extension, a cowork app, or a coding tool. I think that pitch has become the industrys biggest liability. At Decodo, we recently reviewed [] This story continues at The Next Web
Alabama has asked OpenAI to name every employee who has ever raised a safety concern about any model test. Not the Hugging Face evaluation. Any of them, at any point, with no date limit attached. That is request eight of sixteen in a subpoena the state issued on 20 August and announced on Monday. OpenAI [] This story continues at The Next Web
American securities regulators have subpoenaed the banks that lent Situational Awareness the money it used to make its AI bets. The Securities and Exchange Commission wants the timing of the funds trades, and its communications with lenders about the money it was borrowing. It also told the banks to preserve any information they hold on [] This story continues at The Next Web
Moonshot AI is in early discussions with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google about hosting Kimi K3 on their cloud platforms, seeking up to 30% of the revenue those services generate, according to Reuters. It would be the first arrangement of its kind between a Chinese AI company and the major American clouds, involving a model thatMoonshot [] This story continues at The Next Web
Deloitte has agreed to pay $21.5M to settle a US Justice Department investigation into its diversity practices, without admitting liability. The firm is one of the largest technology consultancies in the world as well as an accountancy, and it sits inside the same enterprise AI and systems integration market that has drawn Indian IT firms [] This story continues at The Next Web
MindRank, a Hangzhou drug developer built around AI, says its lead candidate went from programme initiation to Phase III trials in roughly four and a half years on about $23mn of cumulative research spending. If that holds up, it is the most concrete answer yet to a question the sector has been asking loudly and [] This story continues at The Next Web
SpaceX will build a second Starbase in Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, on a former Exxon property on the Gulf Coast, and it puts the price at $ 100 billion. The company describes it as a self-sustaining spaceport with its own propellant production, power generation, deep-water shipping, vehicle processing, and an airport, which is a fair description [] This story continues at The Next Web
Bill Gates has proposed what he calls Human Reserved jobs, occupations society would deliberately keep for people even where AI could do them, and the analogy he reaches for is a nature reserve, a place where development is restricted because something there is worth preserving. He names childcare and jury service as roles humans are [] This story continues at The Next Web
The US Environmental Protection Agency has proposed making public disclosure of air pollution from minor sources voluntary rather than mandatory, a change that would cover the diesel generators clustered around data centres. It follows the same direction as the exemptions the administration has already granted, havingexcused data centres and rockets from parts of environmental lawearlier [] This story continues at The Next Web
Spain has drafted a decree that would require new data centres to source at least 80% of their electricity from renewables in every hour of operation, with loss of grid connection as the penalty for failing to comply. It is a markedly firmer position than the one Brussels has taken, having previously told Big Tech [] This story continues at The Next Web
Innovation does not usually die because an experiment fails. It dies when ownership disappears. Large software companies can build an ancillary tool, prove that it solves a real problem, and still starve it of attention once leadership redirects the team toward the flagship product or the next urgent initiative. My argument is simple: when a [] This story continues at The Next Web
Revolut is launching a euro-backed stablecoin, entering a market that European regulation has spent two years accidentally consolidating around a single American issuer. The neobank is also one of the 36 firms the ECB picked for its digital euro pilot, which means it is now building the private euro token and helping test the public [] This story continues at The Next Web

30 C