Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence
LMArena achieves US$1.7 billion valuation
Artificial intelligence (AI) start-up LMArena has achieved a US$1.7 billion valuation after raising US$150 million in new funding. The funding was led by Felicis and UC Investments (University of California), with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, The House Fund, LDVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Laude Ventures. "We're leading this round because LMArena has built the most trusted, reliable, real-world signal of AI performance,” Felicis General Partner Peter Deng said. “They have become essential infrastructure for every lab and enterprise." LMArena co-founder and CEO Anastasios Angelopoulos said the funding would accelerate the scientific work and community insights that made live evaluation from real users the gold standard for assessing AI in practice. "We cannot deploy AI responsibly without knowing how it delivers value to humans," Angelopoulos said. “Our evaluations use a transparent, open-source methodology to make these insights public for everyone.” The company has more than five million users in 150 countries after launching in September 2025. LMArena's annualised consumption run rate surpassed $30 million in December, less than four months after launching its AI evaluati
Artificial Intelligence
Meta buys Chinese-founded AI startup Manus
Meta Platforms is buying Manus, an artificial intelligence (AI) start-up company with Chinese founders that conducts deep research and performs other tasks for paying users. No price was disclosed, but the deal valued the Singapore-based company at between US$2 billion (A$2.98 billion) and $3 billion, Reuters reported in this story. “We are excited to announce that Manus is joining Meta to bring a leading agent to billions of people and unlock opportunities for businesses across our products,” Meta Platforms said in an announcement on its Facebook social media platform. Meta said Manus had built one of the leading autonomous general-purpose agents that could independently execute complex tasks like market research, coding and data analysis. “We will continue to operate and sell the Manus service, as well as integrate it into our products,” Meta said. Manus Chief Executive Officer Xiao Hong said joining Meta allowed Manus to build a stronger, more sustainable foundation without changing how it worked or made decisions. “We’re excited about what the future holds with Meta and Manus working together and we will continue to iterate the product and serve users that have defined Manus from the beginning,” Xiao said in
Artificial Intelligence
SoftBank to buy DigitalBridge for US$4bn
SoftBank Group Corp has announced it will purchase digital infrastructure investor DigitalBridge Group in a deal with an enterprise value of US$4 billion (A$6 billion). The Japanese technology investment company said it would pay $16 cash per share, which represented premiums of 15% to the closing price on 26 December and 50% to the unaffected 52-week average closing price on 4 December. The transaction, which reflects SoftBank's increasing focus on artificial intelligence (AI) and is expected to close in the second half of 2026, has been unanimously recommended by a committee of DigitalBridge’s independent directors. SoftBank Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son said the acquisition would strengthen SoftBank’s ability to build, scale, and finance the foundational infrastructure needed for next-generation AI services and applications. “As AI transforms industries worldwide, we need more compute, connectivity, power, and scalable infrastructure,” Masayoshi said in a press release. “DigitalBridge is a leader in digital infrastructure, and this acquisition will strengthen the foundation for next-generation AI data centres, advance our vision to become a leading ASI platform provider, and help unlock breakthroughs that move h
Artificial Intelligence
NVIDIA completes Intel rescue with placement
NVIDIA Corporation has taken a US$5 billion (A$7.5 billion) stake in its smaller rival computer chip maker Intel Corp, formalising a deal announced more than three months ago. Intel said it had completed the issuance and sale of 214,776,632 shares at $23.28 each to the world’s largest company. In a filing with the Securities and Investments Commission, Intel said the private placement was pursuant to a Securities Purchase Agreement dated 15 September between the two companies. United States antitrust agencies had cleared the investment in Intel, according to a notice posted by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission in December. The announcement of the investment, which was seen as ⁠a financial rescue for Intel after strategic mistakes left it weak, had put a rocket under the Intel price, which soared almost 23% at the time. The share purchase was disclosed with the news that the two companies would work together to develop ratification intelligence (AI) infrastructure and personal computing products. Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) shares closed 48 cents (1.33%) higher on Monday (Tuesday AEDT) at $36.68, giving it a market value of $174.960 billion. NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) shares ended $2.31 lower at $188.22, capitalising the l
Artificial Intelligence
NVIDIA hires Groq team, licenses its chips
Artificial intelligence (AI) giant Nvidia has expanded its push into the inference market by licensing the technology of emerging technology company Groq and hiring its executive team. The cost of the deal was US$20 billion (A$29.9 billion) cash, according to this CNBC article quoting Alex Davis, CEO of Disruptive, which led the startup’s latest financing round in September. Groq said it had entered into a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Nvidia for inference technology, and its founder, Jonathan Ross, President Sunny Madra and other employees would join Nvidia to help advance and scale the technology. But Groq, a company whose hardware and software run AI models fast, would continue to operate independently with Simon Edwards as Chief Executive Officer. “The agreement reflects a shared focus on expanding access to high-performance, low cost inference,” Groq said in a news release. The agreement is consistent with the trend of tech giants licensing the technology of new companies and hiring their best employees without buying them. Groq specialises in ‘inference’, which is when AI models make predictions or generate outputs, rather than Nvidia’s specialist and dominant area of ‘training’, where models learn

Artificial Intelligence
Amazon in talks to invest US$10bn in OpenAI
Amazon is in talks to invest more than US$10 billion (A$15.1 billion) in ChatGPT creator OpenAI. If the investment goes ahead, OpenAI’s market investment could rise to over US$500 billion, according to The Information. It would also help Amazon afford some of the commitments it made to rent servers from cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services. Last month, OpenAI announced it would spend US$38 billion renting servers from AWS over the next seven years, making AWS one of at least five cloud providers OpenAI uses to develop its artificial intelligence. OpenAI planned to use Amazon’s Trainium chips, which compete with Nvidia and Google’s chips. The Information also reported that Amazon’s financing could lead to a broader fundraising round with other investors. Over the next eight years, OpenAI plans to spend US$1.4 trillion on the chips and servers that power its chatbot, which is well above its reported US$13 billion in annual revenues. This has led the loss-making company to seek further funding and convert its main business into a for-profit corporation. Its main backer, Microsoft, has taken a 27% stake in a deal that valued OpenAI at US$500 billion. The ChatGPT owner is also considering an initial
Artificial Intelligence
Oracle shares drop 5% after data centre partner exit
Oracle’s data centre partner Blue Owl Capital has reportedly withdrawn from the company’s planned data centre in Michigan, sending Oracle’s shares down 5.4%. Blue Owl was previously considering an investment in the US$10 billion 1 gigawatt data centre, but withdrew after negotiations stalled, the Financial Times reported. The facility would be part of OpenAI’s Stargate artificial intelligence infrastructure project. “Our development partner, Related Digital, selected the best equity partner from a competitive group of options, which in this instance was not Blue Owl,” Oracle said in a statement to media. “Final negotiations for their equity deal are moving forward on schedule and according to plan.” Oracle has reportedly not yet confirmed a deal with its new partner and did not name them. Blackstone has discussed joining as a financial backer, per the Financial Times, though it has not signed an agreement. Construction on the data centre is still scheduled to start in early 2026, Related Digital said. Blue Owl reportedly withdrew as lenders sought stricter leasing and debt terms, partly due to Oracle’s escalating artificial intelligence spending. Oracle reported $248 billion in lease commitments from data centres
Artificial Intelligence
US suspends tech trade deals with the UK
The United States suspended the implementation of a technology deal it struck with the United Kingdom during Donald Trump’s visit to Britain. The news was first reported by the Financial Times and comes at a time when frustrations are growing in Washington over the progress of trade talks with London. The U.S.-U.K. “technology prosperity deal” was announced in September with the aim of spurring co-operation between the countries in the area of AI, quantum computing and nuclear energy. British officials confirmed that the deal was suspended by the U.S. last week, with one saying the Trump administration was pushing for UK concessions in areas of trade outside the tech partnership. “Our special relationship with the US remains strong, and the UK is firmly committed to ensuring the Tech Prosperity Deal delivers opportunity for hardworking people in both countries,” a UK government spokesperson told CNBC. Trump has also been critical of digital services taxes imposed on companies by tech trading partners. A UK official told the Financial Times that Britain’s digital services tax, which affects U.S. tech companies, was a serious problem. “The digital services tax is a red herring,” the official briefed on the trade
Artificial Intelligence
Google's Albert Lee moves to OpenAI
OpenAI has announced the appointment of Albert Lee, Senior Director of Corporate Development at Google, as its Vice President of Corporate Development. An OpenAI spokesperson told Reuters that the goal of bringing on Lee was “to ensure we have a senior leader with broad visibility across the company who is empowered to move quickly”. At Google, Lee led the corporate development for Google Cloud and DeepMind, and the strategy and scouting team. According to his LinkedIn profile, he worked on Google’s US$5.4 billion acquisition of cybersecurity firm Mandiant and its US$2.6 billion purchase of data analytics provider Looker. Lee will start at OpenAI in January and will report to Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar. This follows an ongoing poaching war between the big players in AI. Meta has been especially guilty of this, even offering US$100 million signing bonuses to those who join them. Meta has poached talent from Alphabet’s Google, Apple and Anthropic.

Artificial Intelligence

LMArena achieves US$1.7 billion valuation

Meta buys Chinese-founded AI startup Manus

SoftBank to buy DigitalBridge for US$4bn

NVIDIA completes Intel rescue with placement

NVIDIA hires Groq team, licenses its chips

Amazon in talks to invest US$10bn in OpenAI

Oracle shares drop 5% after data centre partner exit

US suspends tech trade deals with the UK

Google's Albert Lee moves to OpenAI

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