Waymo, a leader in autonomous driving, has secured $16 billion in fresh funding, valuing the company at a whopping $126 billion—nearly three times its most recent valuation of $45 billion in 2024. “This infusion of capital will ensure we are positioned to move forward with unprecedented velocity,” Waymo’s co-CEOs Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov said…
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the philanthropic organization founded by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, last year announced plans to reposition itself as a science-first organization. Now, the group is cutting dozens of roles while hiring for new ones as it moves toward that direction. The Redwood City, Calif.-based philanthropy is…
The rules of online visibility have changed. For decades, digital commerce strategy rested on a relatively stable bargain: brands optimized for ranking and bids, Google surfaced links and ads and consumers clicked through to evaluate options. That model is being rewritten with a new gatekeeper standing between brands and customers. Artificial intelligence has become an…
The rapid rise of A.I. is reshaping global infrastructure demands, pushing data centers from around the world to scale at unprecedented speed to support increasingly compute-intensive workloads. What was once a steady expansion has become a sprint, driven by generative A.I., large language models and real-time inference applications that strain existing power, cooling and connectivity…
Jeff Bezos has found his next climate-focused philanthropy target: nuclear power. The billionaire’s Bezos Earth Fund, which aims to distribute $10 billion to fight climate change by the end of the decade, is granting $3.5 million to a new initiative to streamline nuclear reactor construction across the country. The funds will support the Nuclear Scaling…
Job seekers often have to jump through hoops throughout the recruitment process. At Anduril, they’ll have to fly through courses—drone courses, to be exact. The defense tech company is offering engineers the opportunity to secure a job interview and compete for a cash prize of $500,000 in the AI Grand Prix, a new racing competition…
Microsoft this week (Jan. 26) unveiled its latest in-house A.I. chip, Maia 200, calling it “the most efficient inference system” the company has ever built. Microsoft claims the chip outperforms rival Big Tech processors such as Amazon’s Trainium 3 and Google’s TPU v7 on key benchmarks, while delivering 30 percent better performance per dollar than…
Self-driving startup Waabi has spent the past five years becoming a dominant force in the world of autonomous trucking. Now, armed with $1 billion in new funding, it’s gearing up to take on a new challenge: the robotaxi market. The Toronto-based venture raised $750 million in an oversubscribed Series C round co-led by Khosla Ventures…
At this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, artificial intelligence was no longer framed as an emerging technology. It was treated as infrastructure. Across panels, private dinners and side conversations, the debate had clearly shifted: the question is not whether A.I. will transform economies and institutions, but who can operationalize it at scale under tightening…
On Jan. 28, 1986, the world stood still. Seventy-three seconds after liftoff, Space Shuttle Challenger was lost, along with its seven-member crew: Francis “Dick” Scobee, Michael Smith, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Gregory Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe. The tragedy unfolded live on television, imprinting itself on a generation and forever changing the trajectory of…
