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Sources: Stanford University professor James Zou aims to raise ~$100M at a ~$1B valuation for Human Intelligence, which aims to use AI to study physiology (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg)

Maine's governor vetoes a bill that would have led to US' first state pause on data centers, citing its failure to exempt a project in a distressed mill town (Jenna Russell/New York Times)

Source: Meta has a system in India to "automatically restrict content, at scale" to meet local law, massively expanding the country's censorship powers (Aroon Deep/The Hindu)

X launches its standalone messaging app XChat on the App Store, saying it supports end-to-end encryption and has no ads (Zac Hall/9to5Mac)

Sources: AI startups are struggling to access Nvidia GPUs as Microsoft and other cloud providers divert supply to internal teams and large customers like OpenAI (The Information)

Sources: JPMorgan and other banks struggled to spread the risk of billions in loans they made to build data centers leased to Oracle in Texas and Wisconsin (Wall Street Journal)

The DOJ joins xAI in its legal challenge to a new Colorado law that seeks to prevent discrimination by AI tools in employment and other areas (Madlin Mekelburg/Bloomberg)

Anthropic says Google is committing to invest $10B now in cash at a $350B valuation and will invest another $30B if Anthropic hits performance targets (Bloomberg)

France's forecasting office refers suspected weather sensor tampering at Paris airport to police, after detecting unusual readings alongside Polymarket betting (Joe Wertz/Bloomberg)

India's central bank cancels Paytm Payments Bank's banking license, after imposing business curbs over non-compliance with rules in January 2024 (Gopika Gopakumar/Reuters)

Helsinki-based Verda, formerly Datacrunch, which aims to become Europe's first AI cloud hyperscaler, raised €100M in debt and equity (Mimi Billing/Sifted)

Meta and Amazon reach a multibillion-dollar, multiyear deal for Meta to rent hundreds of thousands of Amazon's Graviton chips for its AI inference needs (Matt Day/Bloomberg)

Meta inks deal to use more Amazon chips (Ina Fried/Axios)

Huawei plans to spend up to ~$11.7B over five years to boost compute for training and testing autonomous cars, with ~$2.64B for autonomous driving R&D in 2026 (Daniel Ren/South China Morning Post)

Sources: in recent weeks, China told tech companies, like ByteDance and Moonshot AI, to reject US capital without state approval, after Meta's Manus acquisition (Bloomberg)

Alibaba says its Qwen AI model will be integrated into select car models from BYD, Volkswagen, and others, letting users buy food and tickets via voice commands (Evelyn Cheng/CNBC)

As part of the Cohere-Aleph Alpha deal, Aleph Alpha backer Schwarz Group plans to invest $600M in Cohere's Series E, which a source says is set to close in 2026 (Kai Nicol-Schwarz/CNBC)

Norway plans to ban children from using social media until they turn 16; the government says it will introduce a bill in parliament by the end of 2026 (Terje Solsvik/Reuters)

Canada-based Cohere and Germany-based Aleph Alpha agree to a merger valuing the combination at ~$20B, to work on sovereign AI; both governments support the deal (Financial Times)

EY survey of 18,000 people across 23 countries: ~49% of consumers have used AI over the past six months to support their savings and investment decisions (Emma Dunkley/Financial Times)

Tracxn: global edtech funding fell from $16.7B in 2021 to $2.6B in 2025, while the number of startups launched dropped from 7,178 in 2021 to just 645 in 2025 (Ananya Bhattacharya/Rest of World)

Sources: India is piloting ~10 schemes to test whether its CBDC, the e-rupee, can deliver welfare payments more efficiently, as it looks to boost e-rupee usage (Reuters)

DeepSeek V4 Pro costs $1.74/1M input and $3.48/1M output tokens while V4 Flash costs $0.14/1M input and $0.28/1M output tokens, both the cheapest in their class (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

Staffing experts say India's IT sector is seeing a rise in replacement hiring as companies adapt to Gen Z staff leaving jobs faster than previous generations (Tanya Pandey/The Economic Times)

Sources: Cursor hit $2.7B in annualized sales in March, up ~14x from a year ago, and reported a nearly $900M loss in its past fiscal year on ~$770M in revenue (The Information)

China's top market regulator says it is launching a six-month crackdown on the country's online ad sector, targeting malpractices including the misuse of AI (Ben Jiang/South China Morning Post)

The AI boom has pushed the market cap of Shenzhen-listed Zhongji Innolight, a leading optical communications device maker, close to $146B, a record high (Bloomberg)

DeepSeek V4 Pro has 1.6T total parameters, its largest model by that metric, and V4 Flash has 284B parameters; both models have a context window of 1M tokens (South China Morning Post)

Huawei says its Ascend supernode based on the Ascend 950 AI chips will fully support DeepSeek V4, as DeepSeek launches a preview of its V4 model (Reuters)

DeepSeek releases its new flagship models V4 Pro and V4 Flash in preview, saying V4 Pro trails the performance of state-of-the-art models by about 3 to 6 months (Bloomberg)

S-1 excerpts: SpaceX warns multiple investigations into sexually abusive AI imagery created with xAI's Grok may hurt the company's global market access (Reuters)

Q&A with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian on building infrastructure for AI agents, balancing internal needs and the demands of customers like Anthropic, and more (Ben Thompson/Stratechery)

Trump threatens to "put a big tariff on the UK" if it does not drop its digital services tax, which he views as unfairly targeting US tech companies (Connor Stringer/Telegraph)

SAP reports Q1 revenue up 6% YoY to €9.56B, vs. €9.53B est., non-IFRS operating profit up 17% to €2.87B, cloud revenue up 19% to €5.96B; SAP up 10%+ after hours (Reuters)

Singapore is slowly emerging as a neutral ground for AI companies, offering an alternative place to build without worrying about US or Chinese regulations (Reuters)

Sources: AI coding firm Cognition is in early talks to raise hundreds of millions of dollars at a $25B valuation, up from $10.2B announced in September 2025 (Bloomberg)

The US DOJ arrests a soldier involved in the capture of Nicolás Maduro for allegedly making $400K+ on Polymarket by betting on his removal from office (ABC News)

Texas Instruments stock rose 19% on Thursday, its best day since 2000, after upbeat Q2 guidance driven by high demand for analog chips used in AI data centers (Katie Tarasov/CNBC)

Shenzhen-based Pudu Robotics, which makes commercial service robots, raised ~$150M, bringing its total funding to $300M+, and says its valuation exceeds $1.5B (The Robot Report)

Intel reports Q1 revenue up 7% YoY to $13.58B, vs. $12.42B est., and forecasts Q2 revenue and adjusted EPS above estimates; INTC jumps 15%+ after hours (Katie Tarasov/CNBC)

Music publishers including UMG, Warner Music, and Sony drop a copyright suit against Verizon following a SCOTUS decision limiting ISP liability in Cox's suit (Kyle Jahner/Bloomberg Law)

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and Chief Content Officer Matt Booty detail their "return of Xbox" strategy, including daily active players as its "new north star" (Tom Warren/The Verge)

Instagram launches Instants, an app for sharing disappearing photos, in Italy and Spain, after rolling out an Instants feature in its main app in some regions (Sydney Bradley/Business Insider)

OpenAI says "GPT-5.5 matches GPT-5.4 per-token latency in real-world serving, while performing at a much higher level of intelligence" (OpenAI)

Anthropic says it has fixed three causes of recent Claude Code quality issues: reduced default reasoning, a caching bug, and a system prompt to reduce verbosity (Anthropic)

GPT-5.5 is priced at $5/1M input tokens and $30/1M output tokens, double GPT-5.4's pricing; GPT-5.5 Pro costs $30/1M input tokens and $180/1M output tokens (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)

GPT-5.5 is rolling out to Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users in ChatGPT and Codex, and GPT-5.5 Pro to Pro, Business, and Enterprise users in ChatGPT (The Verge)

OpenAI says GPT-5.5's improvements are strongest in agentic coding, computer use, and early scientific research, which require reasoning across longer contexts (Madison Mills/Axios)

OpenAI launches GPT-5.5, designed to handle complex tasks with minimal guidance; the model will be used to power the company's upcoming "super app" (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg)

At a town hall, Asha Sharma said Microsoft is returning to using Xbox for its gaming division, instead of Microsoft Gaming, as "Xbox needs to be our identity" (Tom Warren/The Verge)