(A)bsolutely (I)ncredible Podcast

For those who were thinking Meta Platforms Inc. might back down from its heavy-spending ways in the wake of the DeepSeek news, think again. Not only did Meta stand by its forecast for $60 billion to $65 billion in capital expenditures this year, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg first shared on Facebook last week, but management also vowed to keep spending big on artificial intelligence in the years to co...

On Tuesday, the software company Block announced the launch of Goose, an open-source AI agent that allows developers to customize the tool for different purposes and using different large language models. The move comes just a week after the Chinese startup DeepSeek unveiled its R1 artificial intelligence model, a rival to U.S. leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic that boasted far lower development c...

As US tech stocks roiled on Monday from the hype about Chinese startup DeepSeek, the company's founder is being lauded as a hero back home. Hedge fund manager Liang Wenfeng, who started the artificial intelligence firm as a side project in 2023, went viral on Chinese social media on Tuesday largely because of the rout. DeepSeek's cost-effectiveness was already making waves in the tech industry ove...

A majority of senior executives across multiple industries expect artificial intelligence to fundamentally reshape their businesses in the next 12 to 24 months, according to KPMG’s latest AI Quarterly Pulse Survey . The report found that 56% of leaders anticipate significant transformation within the next year alone, jumping to 67% within two years—underscoring the swift pace at which AI is evolvi...

Following a resounding success at the Ingram Micro ONE Innovation Summit, Moving On IT is poised for an unprecedented year of growth. The company, a leading provider of cutting-edge IT, AI, and Cybersecurity solutions, has secured a coveted Ingram Micro Partnership, embarked on a comprehensive website redesign, and expanded its team with top-tier sales and administrative talent. Unleashing the Pow...

Mark Zuckerberg announced a huge leap in Meta Platforms’s capital spending this year to between $60 billion to $65 billion, an increase driven by artificial intelligence and a massive new data center. The plan to increase the company’s capital expenditures by as much as roughly 70% over 2024 comes days after tech rivals including OpenAI unveiled a $500 billion spending plan backed by President Tru...

Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries is set to build the world’s largest data centre in Jamnagar, Gujarat, according to a Bloomberg News report. The facility would dwarf the current largest data center, Microsoft’s 600-megawatt site in Virginia. The project could cost between $20 billion to $30 billion, the report added. This project marks a significant step in Reliance’s entry into India’s artific...

Databricks said on Wednesday Meta Platforms had joined as an investor in a $10 billion funding round intended to fuel the data analytics startup's expansion plans and new product development. The Series J funding round closed on Wednesday and valued Databricks at $62 billion. The company also secured a $5.25 billion credit facility led by JPMorgan Chase alongside Barclays, Citi, Goldman Sachs, and...

President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced a new $500 billion, private sector investment to build artificial intelligence infrastructure in the US, with Oracle, ChatGPT creator OpenAI, and Japanese conglomerate SoftBank among those committing to the joint venture. The joint venture, called Stargate, is expected to begin with a data center project in Texas, according to CBS News, which first repor...

Perplexity AI officially made a play for TikTok on Saturday, submitting a bid to its parent company, ByteDance, to create a new merged entity combining Perplexity, TikTok U.S. and New Capital Partners, CNBC has learned. The new structure would allow for most of ByteDance’s existing investors to retain their equity stakes and would bring more video to Perplexity, according to a source familiar with...

AI or Not, a widely covered AI fraud detection platform, has raised $5 million in a seed funding round to accelerate its use of “AI to detect AI” in images, audio video and deepfakes to prevent fraud and misinformation. Foundation Capital led the round, with participation from GTMFund, Plug and Play, and strategic angel investors. The company noted 85% of corporate finance professionals now view A...

Eve, an AI platform for plaintiff law firms, today announced it has secured $47 million in Series A funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures. This investment will support Eve's rapid market growth, enhance product development, and further its mission to help plaintiff legal teams become AI-native. Eve is a comprehensive AI-po...

François Chollet, an influential AI researcher, is launching a new startup that aims to build frontier AI systems with novel designs. The startup, Ndea, will consist of an AI research and science lab. It’s looking to “develop and operationalize” AGI. AGI, which stands for “artificial general intelligence,” typically refers to AI that can perform any task a human can. It’s a goalpost for many AI co...

Synthesia, a generative AI start-up based in Britain, has raised $180 million valuing it at $2.1 billion. The company uses artificial intelligence to create lifelike human faces and speech that are almost indistinguishable from real video but do not need cameras, actors or film studios. The latest fundraising round brings the total capital raised to more than $330 million. Synthesia added that the...

Macquarie will invest up to $5 billion in data centers being built by artificial-intelligence infrastructure company Applied Digital, adding to the Australian bank’s substantial AI-related investments. Macquarie’s asset-management arm agreed to invest up to $900 million in a data-center campus that Applied Digital is developing in North Dakota. Macquarie also has a right of first refusal to invest...

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the main global producer of advanced chips used in artificial intelligence applications, is expected to report a 58% leap in fourth-quarter profit on Thursday because of surging demand. The world's largest contract chipmaker, whose customers include Apple and Nvidia, has benefited from the megatrend towards AI. But the Taiwanese company faces head...

This year coding might go from one of the most sought-after skills on the job market to one that can be fully automated. Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta and some of the biggest companies in the tech industry are already working toward this on an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience on Friday. "Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going...

One of the biggest announcements in Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s CES keynote was the small “Project Digits” AI supercomputer. Nvidia’s Project Digits is a Grace Blackwell AI Supercomputer on your desk. With the NVIDIA AI software stack preinstalled and 128GB of memory, developers can prototype, fine-tune, and inference large AI models of up to 200B parameters locally, and seamlessly deploy to the dat...

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has struck a deal worth over $1 billion to provide Elon Musk's social media platform X with servers optimized for artificial intelligence work, Bloomberg News reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. The agreement was reached late last year, the report said, adding that competitors Dell Technologies and Super Micro Computer had also bid to sell the equ...