Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence
Oracle announces mass layoffs as it invests in AI
Senior members from tech giant Oracle have announced the company has made significant job cuts as it makes big investments in artificial intelligence (AI). In a post to LinkedIn, Oracle senior manager Michael Shepard confirmed the job cuts. “Oracle conducted a significant reduction in force that impacted some of the most talented, dedicated, and high-performing people I’ve had the privilege of working alongside,” he said. “The individuals affected were not let go because of anything they did or didn’t do.” Oracle has been using AI tools internally, and executives said it enables fewer employees to do more work. "The use of AI coding tools inside Oracle is enabling smaller engineering teams to deliver more complete solutions to our customers more quickly," Mike Silicia, Oracle's other co-chief executive, said earlier this month. Oracle is one of the largest tech companies in the world and offers software and cloud computing infrastructure to other companies. One employee told the BBC that around 10,000 people are believed to have lost their jobs so far, citing the number of staff active on Oracle’s internal messaging system Slack. As of May 2025, the company employed 162,000 people. Oracle has been relyin
Artificial Intelligence
OpenAI closes US$122bn funding round as it eyes IPO
OpenAI has closed a US$122 billion (A$177.1 billion) funding round ahead of a potential initial public offering this year. The funding round, Silicon Valley’s largest ever, valued OpenAI at $852 billion. It was co-led by SoftBank and included Amazon, Nvidia, and Microsoft. “The fastest way to widen the benefits of AI is to put useful intelligence in people’s hands early and let that access compound globally,” OpenAI wrote in a statement. “This funding gives us the resources to continue to lead at the scale this moment demands.” The company is building a “superapp” that will include ChatGPT, its Codex coding tools, web browsing, and agentic features, it also said. OpenAI is preparing for an IPO and could list as soon as 2026’s fourth quarter, CNBC reported. It is aiming to pitch its AI offerings as productivity tools, CEO of applications Fidji Simo said, and increasingly targeting enterprise customers. As it has yet to turn a profit, it has also been cutting costs in recent months ahead of an eventual listing. Sora, an app for AI-generated short videos, was closed down last week, just six months after its launch. It similarly said in March that it would shutter its Instant Checkout feature that enabled users to
Artificial Intelligence
Meta increases data centre spending to US$10bn
Meta announced that it will boost its spending commitment on an upcoming data centre in West Texas by more than sixfold to US$10 billion (A$14.47 billion). The company aims to grow the El Paso Data Center to 1 gigawatt capacity by the time the facility comes online in 2028. Meta said the data centre will support more than 300 jobs once completed, and that it anticipates that there will be over 4,000 construction workers on-site at the peak of construction. “Since breaking ground last year, we have been proud to call El Paso home and are committed to being a good neighbour,” the company said in a blog post. The company also said it was committed to minimising the environmental impact of its data centres. “When it comes to water, we prioritise water stewardship, and our goal is to be water positive in 2030, where Meta will restore more water than we consume globally,” Meta said. “For El Paso, we will restore 200% of the water consumed by the data centre to local watersheds.” When Meta first started construction on the El Paso data centre in October, it planned to invest $1.5 billion. Meta has continued to ramp up spending on AI infrastructure to keep up with competitors and to meet what they say is unpreceden
Artificial Intelligence
Open AI to acquire Astral
OpenAI is set to acquire Astral, a startup company that creates open-source tools. These tools are used by software developers, and under the merger, OpenAI will assist in the development of Astral's artificial intelligence coding assistant, Codex. The deal still has to pass regulatory approval, but if successful, it will mark just the latest in a string of acquisitions from OpenAI. Over the last 10 months, the AI giant has onboarded cybersecurity startup Promptfoo, health-care startup Torch and AI device startup io. In a blog post confirming the acquisition, Astral CEO Charlie Marsh said that combining Codex with OpenAI will “push it forward”. “Through it all, though, our goal remains the same: to make programming more productive. To build tools that radically change what it feels like to build software,” he wrote.
Artificial Intelligence
Claude gets the keys to your Mac in AI agent push
Anthropic on Monday rolled out computer-use capabilities for its Claude AI assistant, allowing the system to click, scroll and navigate applications on a user's Mac. The move is a direct response to the viral open-source agent OpenClaw, which has reshaped the competitive landscape in a matter of weeks. The feature is available as a research preview for Claude Pro (US$20/month) and Claude Max ($200/month) subscribers on macOS, works through the company's Cowork and Code products. When Claude lacks a direct connector to a supported service such as Google Calendar or Slack, it falls back to controlling the screen the way a human would - pointing, clicking and typing its way through tasks. The update pairs with Dispatch, a mobile tool Anthropic released last week that creates a persistent conversation thread between a user's phone and desktop, letting someone message Claude a task from an iPhone, walk away, and come back to finished work. In one demo, a user running late for a meeting prompted Claude to export a pitch deck as a PDF and attach it to a calendar invite, and the agent handled the entire workflow without further instruction.Vercept fills the gapAnthropic has been laying the groundwork for months, and the acq

Artificial Intelligence
How the S&P 500 has become NVIDIA's AI funding mechanism
A dating app, a healthcare insurer, a frozen chip maker and a payroll software firm walked out of the S&P 500 on Monday, replaced by Vertiv Holdings, Lumentum, Coherent and EchoStar - three AI hardware suppliers and a satellite comms operator. Back at the start of this month, NVIDIA invested US$2 billion in Lumentum Holdings and another $2 billion in Coherent Corp - multi-year strategic deals bundling purchase commitments with future capacity rights for advanced optics and silicon photonics, the connective tissue inside AI training clusters. Three weeks later, on 23 March, both entered the S&P 500 as part of the quarterly index rebalance, alongside Vertiv Holdings and EchoStar. Here's where it gets mechanical: trillions of dollars in passive funds track the S&P 500, and when a name enters the index, those funds must buy it - regardless of price, timing or thesis. That mandatory buying bids up the share prices of Lumentum and Coherent, in which NVIDIA already holds freshly acquired stakes worth $4 billion combined. The chipmaker effectively funded two stocks into the benchmark and stands to gain as passive capital marks up its positions. It isn't an allegation of intent - it's a description of how cap-weighted ind
Artificial Intelligence
Tencent plugs OpenClaw AI agents into WeChat
The Chinese tech giant has embedded an open-source AI agent inside the world's most-used messaging app - and it is not the only one racing to do so. Tencent on Sunday launched ClawBot, a tool that surfaces the open-source AI agent OpenClaw as an ordinary contact inside WeChat, where more than one billion monthly active users can send natural language commands to trigger tasks like file transfers and email management. The launch extends an intensifying contest among China's largest technology companies to control the distribution layer for AI agents, a category the industry now treats as commercially larger than chatbots.From hobby project to arms raceOpenClaw began life in November 2025 as "Clawdbot", a project by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger derived from a personal AI assistant he had built and playfully named after Anthropic's Claude. A trademark complaint from Anthropic triggered two rapid renamings - first to "Moltbot," then to OpenClaw in late January 2026 - each generating fresh press coverage. Crypto scammers hijacking the abandoned social handles within seconds of each rebrand only added to the publicity, accelerating the project's viral growth. By early March, the repository had amassed 247,000 GitH
Artificial Intelligence
Tesla and SpaceX to build chip factories in Texas
Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, has announced that Tesla and SpaceX will jointly build advanced chip factories in Austin to support artificial intelligence, robotics and space-based computing. The project will consist of two specialised semiconductor fabrication plants at one site. “One fab will support Tesla’s vehicles and Optimus humanoid robots, while the other will produce chips designed for AI data centres in space,” Musk said during a presentation on the weekend. The previous day, he announced plans to build ‘Terafab’, an advanced AI chip complex in Austin. Musk is Chief Executive Officer and a major shareholder in both companies. “Terafab ⁠will technically be two fabs, each making only one chip design,” he wrote in a post on his X social media site. Musk said suppliers such as Samsung Electronics, TSMC and Micron Technology would remain critical partners, but demand from his companies could soon exceed global production capacity, according to Reuters. “We either build the Terafab or we don’t have the chips,” he said, adding that current worldwide output would meet only a fraction of future needs. Terafab will eventually produce one terawatt of computing capacity a year, compared with ⁠about ha
Artificial Intelligence
DOJ makes arrests over AI tech being smuggled to China
The United States Department of Justice has arrested two out of three wanted fugitives, over artificial intelligence technology being smuggled out of the country to China. The three are linked to U.S. based AI server maker company, Super Micro Computer (NASDAQ: SMCI), and shares fell by as much as 14.6% in after-hours trading, following the arrests. Prosecutors have not named Super Micro as the defendant, but they are cooperating with the investigation. The two arrested include the founder of the company, Yih-Shyan Liaw, who still serves as Senior Vice President of Business Development, and a sales manager for the Taiwan branch, Ruei-Tsang Chang. Ting-Wei Sun, who remains at large, was a company contractor. The charges will be linked to an alleged scheme for smuggling U.S. AI servers to China, with the States having had AI export restrictions in place against China since 2022.

Artificial Intelligence

Oracle announces mass layoffs as it invests in AI

OpenAI closes US$122bn funding round as it eyes IPO

Meta increases data centre spending to US$10bn

Open AI to acquire Astral

Claude gets the keys to your Mac in AI agent push

How the S&P 500 has become NVIDIA's AI funding mechanism

Tencent plugs OpenClaw AI agents into WeChat

Tesla and SpaceX to build chip factories in Texas

DOJ makes arrests over AI tech being smuggled to China

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