Infrastructure company Azio AI Holdings signed a master services agreement (MSA) with AT&T worth roughly $2.4 million to provide enterprise fibre connectivity for its first AI data centre campus.

The deal covers a 500-megawatt site and establishes a standardised connectivity framework across the campus, delivering the high-capacity, low-latency network infrastructure needed to support AI training, inference, GPU cloud computing, enterprise colocation, and other high-performance computing workloads.

Azio said the connectivity buildout is intended to streamline network deployment as it brings on additional customers under its hyperscale AI strategy. The company pointed to a recent power purchase and hosting agreement with a GPU customer, which it said will require a rapid, modular buildout at the Texas site.

“This agreement establishes the networking framework supporting our initial 500-megawatt Texas AI platform while creating a scalable operating model that can support future expansion as additional projects move forward under our hyperscale AI strategy,” Azio COO Elgin Tracy stated.

The company’s broader strategy centres on scalable, liquefied natural gas-backed energy capacity intended to meet rising demand for GPU cloud and AI workloads.

It stated the Texas site was picked in part due to the location being able accommodate large-scale industrial infrastructure without the land-use and community constraints which can complicate data centre projects in urban areas.

The agreement adds AT&T to the growing list of telecoms operators positioning themselves as connectivity partners for the AI infrastructure buildout, as data centre operators race to secure the fibre capacity needed to link GPU clusters to enterprise and hyperscale customers.

Azio did not disclose a timeline for construction completion or when the Texas campus is expected to become operational.

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Anthropic disclosed it is investigating three instances of its Claude AI models conducting hacks into companies during a testing process, a week after OpenAI revealed a similar incident.

The company explained its Claude models “reached the internet” from within or while interacting with a third-party evaluation environment and then gained access to the real systems of three different organisations.

Anthropic blamed a “misunderstanding” between it and a partner, which resulted in the model being able to access the internet during a cybersecurity testing process.

This then led the model’s search to real systems on the open internet, treating them as part of the exercise.

“Operating under the false belief that all accessible entities were intended to be in-scope for the exercise, Claude compromised the impacted organisations’ infrastructure using basic techniques, such as exploiting weak passwords and unauthenticated endpoints,” Anthropic stated.

Anthropic added it did not find or “exploit any complex weaknesses”.

It did not reveal which companies had been attacked.

Review
The company stated the OpenAI incident, in which two models attacked Hugging Face, prompted it to conduct a large-scale retrospective review of its own cybersecurity evaluations.

In particular, it looked for evidence Claude, like the OpenAI models, was able to access “the internet from the testing environments that should have been sealed off”.

It found the breaches after reviewing 141,006 evaluation runs where Claude could have obtained internet access.

The incidents occurred on Claude models Opus 4.7, Mythos 5 and an internal research test model.

“Ultimately, many factors contributed to these incidents, but consistent with a blameless post mortem culture, we’re approaching the fixes as if the responsibility were ours alone,” the company added.

Nvidia this week led the way in the formation of an AI safety coalition in response to the OpenAI incident.

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Meta Platforms revealed a dramatic acceleration in its infrastructure commitments, disclosing in a regulatory filing it has secured $279 billion in off-balance sheet lease obligations primarily dedicated to expanding its AI capabilities.

The future costs, which exist on top of its active leases, comprise short- and long-term agreements covering data centres, co-location facilities and certain network infrastructure.

The total for uncommenced lease commitments as of the quarter ended 30 June represents a 53% surge from the $183 billion reported in the previous period.

The social media giant is showing no signs of slowing its aggressive AI buildout, adding an extra $68 billion in commitments during July alone, with those leases slated to commence in 2027 and 2028.

The disclosure comes alongside mounting investor pressure on CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Meta’s stock fell today (30 July) following a disappointing Q3 revenue forecast yesterday which heightened investor scrutiny over the company’s massive capital expenditures on AI.

During the Q2 earnings call, Zuckerberg said Meta could sell compute directly to large enterprises but stated the social media giant believes there will be a “significantly higher margin on selling [super]intelligence rather than selling compute directly”.

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Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg (pictured) outlined his high-stakes vision for AI across consumer and enterprise markets during a Q2 investor call, casting the technological transition as a massive commercial opportunity despite heavy infrastructure outlays and operational charges weighing on profitability.

Zuckerberg detailed three primary expansion pillars driving Meta’s long-term strategy. He noted AI investments are actively boosting performance across the main portfolio by improving user experiences, optimising return on investment for advertisers and enabling internal product teams to ship software faster.

Looking ahead, Zuckerberg stated that Meta is “developing new personal agents that will be the foundation for our next wave of products and revenue lines in the months and years ahead”.

Expanding beyond consumer applications, he highlighted a growing commercial footprint, pointing to “a large enterprise opportunity to sell to businesses, including APIs, business agents, potentially selling compute directly, and other services that we’re building for large customers”.

Q2 financial performance
Meta delivered strong Q2 top-line performance, driven by continuous gains across its AI-enhanced advertising suite, though rapid infrastructure spending and operational charges squeezed overall profitability below Wall Street expectations.

Meta generated $60.8 billion in revenue, representing a 28% increase compared to $47.5 billion in the same period last year. However, net income dropped 14% to $15.8 billion.

Advertising revenue accounted for $59.8 billion of total sales, up 28% year-over-year. This growth was supported by high adoption of AI automated ad features, with ad impressions growing 14% year-over-year across its Family of Apps and the average price per ad climbing 12%.

Family Daily Active People reached an average of 3.6 billion in June, reflecting a 3% increase year-over-year.

Total costs and expenses surged 55% to $42 billion, heavily weighed down by $2.4 billion in legal proceeding charges as well as $1.2 billion in severance expenses following restructuring in May.

Driven by the aggressive capex ramp and operational charges, free cash flow dropped 91% year-over-year to $784 million, compared to $8.5 billion in the prior-year period.

Capital expenditures jumped to $31 billion from $17 billion, including principal payments on finance leases, as Meta continued to scale its computing infrastructure, servers, and data centres to expand generative AI capabilities.

Looking ahead, the social media giant issued a Q3 revenue forecast of $61 billion to $64 billion.

For the full year, Meta maintained its capital expenditure guidance at $130 billion to $145 billion and anticipates total expenses between $165 billion and $169 billion, while reiterating full-year operating income is expected to exceed prior-year levels.

Highlighting engagement growth across its app suite, Zuckerberg noted Threads crossed 500 million monthly active users, “making it the fastest-growing conversation app ever,” while Facebook reached more than 2 billion daily active users a while ago.

“WhatsApp just hit an all-time messaging record, peaking at 30 million messages sent per second during the World Cup final,” he said.

Meta’s Reality Labs division, which houses the company’s VR and AR hardware efforts including Quest headsets and smart glasses, continued to weigh on overall profitability.

The unit posted an operating loss of $4.6 billion, widening slightly from a year earlier, on revenue of just $431 million, up from $370 million in the same period last year.

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One NZ advised businesses to rethink their approach to responsible AI after research showed consumers are growing worried about the environmental impact of companies’ use of the technology.

Research by the operator involving 1,001 New Zealanders found 45% have concerns over the sustainability of business use of AI, making it a key factor alongside transparency and privacy in overall trust ratings.

Head of corporate affairs and sustainability Nicky Preston said One NZ’s findings “highlight a shift” in attitudes.

“The conversation around AI has largely focused on productivity and innovation to date. But this research shows New Zealanders are starting to consider a broader question”.

Preston noted trust “has always been fundamental to technology adoption” and said sustainability is now part of the “equation”.

One NZ’s research found those worried about environmental impacts believe businesses should prioritise using renewable energy alongside cutting power consumption.

Consumers also want companies to be transparent about the environmental impacts, explain their reasons for employing AI and be open to independent audits.

“Customers and employees increasingly want evidence that organisations are managing AI responsibly through governance, infrastructure choices, supplier decisions and thoughtful deployment,” Preston explained.

The research highlighted consumption of electricity and water as key environmental concerns. Other factors include electronic waste and carbon emissions.

One NZ highlighted more traditional concerns about AI continue to rank highly: it noted respondents are worried about the technology taking jobs away from people, personal data being employed without consent and a lack of human oversight.

Preston said the findings indicate the businesses likely to be the most successful in using AI would be those which show they are “thinking carefully” about social and environmental impacts.

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Mobile World Live brings you our top three picks of the week as OpenAI’s models hacked an AI start-up during testing, Samsung unveiled its latest AI-powered foldables, and Verizon and AT&T logged record World Cup network traffic.

OpenAI models hack AI start-up

What happened: OpenAI revealed that a combination of its advanced AI models autonomously breached a controlled testing environment and launched a cyberattack on AI start-up Hugging Face.

Why it matters: During an internal benchmark designed to evaluate advanced cyber capabilities, the models exploited vulnerabilities in OpenAI’s research infrastructure to gain internet access before using stolen credentials and zero-day flaws to access Hugging Face’s systems. OpenAI said it had intentionally relaxed cyber safeguards in the sandboxed environment to test the models’ capabilities, stating the models were “hyperfocused” on completing the evaluation task and went to “extreme lengths”, though the company warned such events are likely to “become more commonplace” as models grow more capable.

Jason Goode, VP at IT service AppViewX, argued “this is the wake-up call the industry needed”, as the models “didn’t defeat their guardrails so much as exploit what their environments already permitted”. He said the episode underlined the “why model governance alone was never going to be enough” and how “the control point has to be the agent’s identity and what it’s actually allowed to touch”. Meanwhile Dan Gray, chief systems architect at technology R&D firm ChronoDyne Systems, added the incident should not be viewed as AI “going rogue”, but as a “cross-organisational control-chain failure” in which the models provided the “speed, persistence and adaptive exploitation capability”, while the organisations supplied “the objective, permissions, infrastructure and attack surface”.

OpenAI models hack AI start-up

Samsung unveils 3 new foldables packed with AI

What happened: Samsung Electronics expanded its foldables portfolio with three new smartphones at its latest Galaxy Unpacked event in London.

Why it matters: The lineup washeadlined by the Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra, Samsung’s first foldable to carry the Ultra branding. The vendor also refreshed the Galaxy Z Fold8 and Galaxy Z Flip8, placing AI capabilities and slimmer designs at the centre. Alongside the handsets, Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Watch9 and Galaxy Watch Ultra2, while teasing AI-enabled smart glasses developed with Google and Qualcomm. Futuresource Consulting principal analyst Rasika D’Souza noted that despite forecasts smartwatch shipments will top 200 million units in 2026, the market is maturing as growth shifts to wearables including smart glasses and rings, an opportunity targeted by Samsung. She added the event showed Samsung’s strategy “has evolved from simple integration of AI features to now creating AI assistants that can assist meaningfully in daily tasks”. Meanwhile, FDM CCS Insight chief analyst Ben Wood said Samsung is “doubling down on foldables at exactly the moment the category is about to get its biggest credibility boost”, arguing Apple’s rumoured launch of a foldable iPhone later this year “could also be the moment that turns foldables from a niche premium category into a mainstream flagship battleground”.

Samsung unveils 3 new foldables packed with AI

Verizon, AT&T tally massive data usage during World Cup

What happened: Verizon and AT&T outlined the scale of network infrastructure deployed to support connectivity during the FIFA World Cup, reporting record data traffic and major capacity upgrades across US host venues.

Why it matters: Verizon said its network carried almost 500TB of data across all US host stadiums. The operator boosted stadium capacity by three to five times, installed thousands of under-seat and overhead antennas, and deployed nearly 140 small-cell projects and temporary sites beyond venues. Verizon described the World Cup as an opportunity to “test, refine, and validate our enterprise network capabilities, stressing that many upgrades will remain after the tournament to extend the value of the infrastructure into long-term assets for host cities. Meanwhile, AT&T reported it carried around one petabyte of nationwide traffic during the tournament after preparing its network for two to three times normal demand across 11 US host cities and 146 venues. Verizon’s deployment supported live broadcast production alongside fan connectivity, while AT&T highlighted the role of its FirstNet public safety network in coordinating emergency services.

Verizon, AT&T tally massive data usage during World Cup

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Indian IT company HCLTech teamed with AI start-up Sarvam to build a data centre in the eastern state of Odisha, tapping increasing demand for the technology and cloud computing.

The project is expected to cost around INR142.6 billion ($1.5 billion), with financial assistance from the government of Odisha, HCLTech stated.

It pitched the data centre as central to boosting sovereign AI and the local developer ecosystem, employing the full-stack of its capabilities with the technology along with Sarvam’s foundation models to tailor services for private and public sector enterprises.

The company stated the data centre would also help to deliver multi-lingual AI-based services in line with calls from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the technology to benefit all citizens.

HCLTech is building its relationship with Sarvam AI after acquiring a 10.5% stake in the business for $150 million.

This month, it struck a $1.1 billion deal with an unnamed European company.

HCLTech CEO and MD C Vijayakumar said the data centre in Odisha is an important milestone in its full stack AI play, explaining the state offers “a progressive policy environment backed by excellent infrastructure”.

In November 2025, rival Tata Consultancy Services also announced plans to develop AI data centres in partnership with private equity company TPG and investing around $2 billion.

HCLTech separately outlined a plan to open a technology centre in the city of Bhubaneswar, also in Odisha.

It intends for the site to be operational by 2028, housing around 5,000 employees.

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Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai (pictured) rejected concerns Google is losing ground in the AI race after delays to the Gemini 3.5 Pro model, as the company posted a strong second quarter on booming demand for AI and cloud services.

Speaking on the company’s Q2 earnings call, Pichai acknowledged Google needed to improve in areas including AI coding, but said it remained “very committed and very confident of being at the frontier”.

The chief faced repeated questions over whether Gemini could keep pace with rivals in the AI race after Google delayed the launch of its next advanced model in June. He said Google is “committed to being at the full parade of frontier,” offering models at multiple price points including its more affordable Flash models.

Pichai argued “the frontier is an incredibly dynamic space, and it’s fiercely moving forward”, stressing “there are many attributes on which we are still at the frontier”.

He pointed to Gemini 3.6 Flash, released this week, explaining it improved by more than 10 points on a coding benchmark over its predecessor while using fewer tokens. He also revealed the company has begun training Gemini 4, describing it as its “most ambitious pre-training run yet”.

Once Gemini 4 lands, he added the company plans on “picking up pace and releasing models almost at a monthly cadence”.

Strong demand
In Q2 2026, Alphabet pinpointed Google Cloud, which continued to benefit from enterprise demand for AI infrastructure and services.

Revenue from the unit soared 82% to $24.8 billion and operating income more than tripled to $8.8 billion. Google Services revenue increased 15% to $94.5 billion, driven by a 17% spike in Search, 15% in Google subscriptions, platforms and devices, and a 13% rise in YouTube advertising.

Total revenue rose 24% year-on-year to $119.8 billion, Alphabet’s 12th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth.

Net income surged 298% to $112.1 billion, as it benefitted from a net gain of $98 billion on equity securities. It did not disclose further information, but the company is known to have a sizeable stake in SpaceX and has investment in Anthropic.

“Our AI investments are redefining what’s possible across every part of our business,” Pichai explained, adding ballooning demand for AI infrastructure and enterprise AI solutions helped drive the results.

The search giant also continued ramping AI investment, expecting to spend between $195 billion and $205 billion in capital expenditure this year, up from its previous forecast of $180 billion to $190 billion.

“We have increased ​our capacity quite significantly over the past three years. The demand still outpaces that investment,” explained Alphabet CFO Anat Ashkenazi, adding that although “we’re still in a supply constraint environment”, the company is “seeing very strong demand, both from external cloud customers as well as across the business”.

Looking ahead, the company added it expects capex to “increase significantly” in 2027 as AI demand swells.

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Rockwell Automation and industrial AI company Augury spotted an opportunity to help industries make sense of the vast pools of data the technology is now generating, teaming on a product focused on delivering usable information to manufacturers.

The US-headquartered automation company explained the partnership with Augury would benefit businesses seeking to employ AI in predictive ways spanning maintenance, reliability and overall industrial performance.

Rockwell Automation’s own research indicates less than half of all data collected is being used in effective ways, despite the growing ability for AI to execute on the insights it provides.

“Manufacturers don’t need more alerts, they need a faster path to action,” Angela Rapko, VP and GM of Visualisation and Asset Management at Rockwell Automation explained.

The set-up uses relevant products from each company to provide the route highlighted by the executive: Rockwell Automation stated it enables manufacturers to go beyond “early issue detection and diagnosis”.

It emphasised the use of an Augury reliability agent and its own maintenance assistant as a key differentiator.

The Augury agent “continuously analyses machine conditions” for potential problems and generates ideas on how to avoid or fix them. Rockwell Automation’s assistant is used to make sense of the recommendations to provide “maintenance workflows, work orders and orchestration of execution activities”.

Rockwell Automation indicated the partnership could be foundational in future agentic AI developments in addition to the companies’ more practical aim of helping industrial players to improve the efficiency of their manufacturing operations.

The companies aim to provide initial access to the set-up from September.

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AMD outlined plans to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic as part of a wider deal for the AI company to add 2 gigawatts of computing capacity to its platform, with deployment set to begin in the first half of 2027.

The duo stated it had struck the strategic partnership to address the extraordinary pace of AI adoption, which is driving rapid growth in demand for training and inference capacity,

Anthropic said it was scaling up its compute infrastructure to serve strong and growing demand for Claude and acquiring AMD’s latest AI server chips “represents a major expansion of AMD’s position at the centre of the global AI infrastructure buildout”.

Deployment of the first gigawatt of AMD’s Helios platform will begin in the first half of 2027. No timescale was given to complete deployment.

In addition, the pair stated they are launching a multiyear engineering collaboration to accelerate AMD software deployment with Claude and the company will adopt the model across its engineering and product development teams.

Details on the $5 billion commitment from AMD into Anthropic were sparse, but it will be dependent on meeting certain milestones. Anthropic has also secured billions in investment from Google and Amazon.

Lisa Su, CEO and chair at AMD, said the deal will help it establish “Helios as a major platform for the next generation of AI infrastructure”.

Chief compute officer and co-founder of Anthropic Tom Brown added access to compute is “central to keeping Claude at the frontier and meeting demand from our customers”.

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Intel and Google Cloud broadened their multi-year strategic collaboration with plans to deploy Gemini Enterprise and Google Cloud infrastructure across the chipmaker’s global operations as part of a wider AI-driven transformation.

Under the expanded partnership, Intel will roll out Gemini-powered generative AI tools across engineering, supply chain and corporate functions, aiming to scale workforce capabilities through agentic workflows.

The hyperscaler’s infrastructure will also support Intel’s semiconductor development environment, with custom agentic workflows intended to speed up the chip design lifecycle and improve cross-functional execution.

Intel CIO Cindy Stoddard stated the collaboration gives employees a central hub to build and deploy agents through Gemini Enterprise, alongside elastic cloud infrastructure to scale silicon development, as part of the company’s push to move faster and more efficiently.

Karthik Narain, chief product and business officer at Google Cloud, described the partnership as an effort to pair Intel’s engineering expertise with agentic AI tools to create what he called an autonomous foundation for how the chipmaker designs, operates and scales its business.

The companies stated the deployment moves Intel beyond isolated AI pilot programmes. Through the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, Intel’s business units will be able to build and run tailored line-of-business agents aimed at automating core processes and speeding up data-driven decision-making.

Gemini’s reasoning capabilities will also power dedicated coding assistance and engineering automation tools designed to streamline software development pipelines and automate multi-step workflows.

Intel is separately piloting Google Cloud-powered tools for marketing and communications, including agents that can identify relevant subject matter experts, draft executive-ready messaging, and generate supporting content across communications channels.

On the infrastructure side, Intel is extending its on-premises compute capacity into Google Cloud’s C4 and N4 instances to support silicon development simulations and core engineering workloads, letting engineering teams run high-performance computing simulations concurrently to shorten chip development cycles.

The tie-up builds on a partnership which has deepened steadily this year. In April, Google committed to using multiple generations of Intel’s Xeon processors, including the 18A-manufactured Xeon 6, to support AI training and inference in its data centres, alongside a plan to co-develop custom infrastructure processing units.

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China President Xi Jinping (pictured) set out his vision for the country to assume a leadership role in AI, calling for increased international cooperation and promotion of open-source technology while taking aim at the US over attempts to govern the sector.

Xi made the comments in a speech at the World AI Conference in Shanghai, where it was announced China, Brazil, Russia and Indonesia are among 30 countries to have joined the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organisation.

Chinese state media describe the new group as an intergovernmental organisation headquartered in Shanghai to promote global AI governance.

Of the new group, Xi said AI should not be a “solo performance by one country, but rather a symphony of global cooperation”.

He said the initiative is a response to the call of the Global South to unite the international community in promoting development and governance of AI, “and it will become a major milestone in the history of artificial intelligence development”.

To further support this, Xi said China will provide 5,000 training opportunities in AI-related fields for developing countries, in addition to establishing AI application cooperation centres.  

In his speech, Xi noted that as AI continues to develop at “staggering speed”, there was a greater need for positive direction.

“We must more precisely grasp the scale of oversight and governance, and more promptly refine measures to forestall loss of control.”

Overstretch
While not naming the US directly, Xi said countries should oppose “overstretching the national security concept in the field of AI, or placing one country’s security over that of others”.

The US has notably placed several restrictions on China, impacting companies in the country from accessing high-end technology.

XI continued to state he was committed to promoting cooperation, bridging the digital divide, promoting sustainable development and avoiding “creating new historical injustices in the field of artificial intelligence”.

Finally, he called on the countries to “seize this rare historical opportunity, encourage open source and open collaboration”, in turn upgrading traditional industries and ensure AI can “empower all sectors”.

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NTT and Japanese media company TBS identified AI as a potential danger to children’s decision-making abilities and outlined an intention to form a company to tackle the issue using digital games and smartphone apps.

The pair plan to commence operations of their e6 joint venture on 8 August to help children form clear ideas in a world where AI offers myriad possible answers to questions. The business is to be used to commercialise a namesake project NTT and TBS launched in February to provide an experience-based educational approach using various technologies.

NTT stated the companies created Emotional Knight, a story-based “original IP” emotive education game employing AI and extended reality to teach decision-making.

NTT President and CEO Akira Shimada said the companies believe huge volumes of information are not necessarily the best thing for children.

Instead, they need “the ability to think for themselves and make their own decisions while interacting with a wealth of information and AI”.

The companies intend to expand the line-up of educational games, develop relevant IP and add more “entertainment experiences” which foster children’s “ability to make independent decisions”.

NTT is contributing group resources including its innovative optical and wireless network, tsuzumi 2 LLM, R&D and social implementation capabilities. TBS brings content creation, IP development and distribution elements.

The Japanese conglomerate stated feedback from an event held in March showed a high level of satisfaction.

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Micron Technology secured strategic supply agreements with major automotive partners including Qualcomm and Harman to guarantee long-term chip access for software-defined vehicles.

The deals come during an aggressive industry-wide race to expand manufacturing capacity to meet a massive surge in memory chip demand driven by rapid AI adoption.

As the only US-based manufacturer of high-bandwidth memory chips used in Nvidia’s AI processors, Micron occupies a unique market position alongside South Korean rivals Samsung and SK Hynix, allowing it to command premium prices while solidifying long-term commitments during ongoing hardware shortages.

Micron also struck deals with Visteon, Joynext, Denso, Astemo, and Hyundai Mobis. It stated the agreements would improve visibility and help optimise production planning. It expects greater stability in pricing and supply chains for increasingly sophisticated AI-enabled vehicle platforms.

Demand for high-performance DRAM and NAND flash memory has grown as the automotive sector transitions toward highly connected, autonomous and intelligent designs.

Modern vehicle architectures require robust computing hardware to support advanced driver assistance systems, infotainment services and high-speed connectivity.

Sanjay Mehrotra, chair, president and CEO of Micron, emphasised the next phase of automotive innovation hinges on the strength of the ecosystem behind it. He noted “memory and storage serve are critical enablers” for the sophisticated digital experiences consumers expect.

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon highlighted the collaborative effort required to deliver advanced digital cockpit and driver assistance technologies. He stated working with Micron provides a strong hardware foundation as vehicles become more intelligent and connected.

The automotive sector is a key area for increasing Qualcomm’s revenue beyond mobile chips. In its April Q2 earnings, it reported Automotive sales rose 38 per cent to $1.3 billion.

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Consumer hardware company Aina raised millions of dollars in seed funding to finance development of an interface it argues is required to fully unlock the potential of AI on smartphones and PCs.

The company believes current device hardware lags the progress of software and AI, resulting in a disconnect between expectation and reality in terms of the interface with apps and services.

It raised $5.5 million in the recent funding round to advance development of experimental interfaces which adapt to the app being used.

Aina stated it already shipped hundreds of experimental keypads called Dune to early adopters, a product for Mac computers it describes as “context-aware” which primarily focuses on work tools.

It is using the feedback from Dune to develop a general-purpose interface for smartphones and computers.

Aina founder and CEO Apoorv Shankar (pictured) said current smartphones and PCs “are still primarily designed for browsing” and use manual inputs requiring users to “figure out what you need”.

He argued this is laborious when users are “doing hundreds of tasks” per day.

The company believes there is room within the broader AI assistant space for a contextualisation system which makes it easier for people to interact with the technology. Shankar explained the general-purpose interface on the drawing board is being designed to “capture human approval”.

Shankar was previously VP of hardware at smart ring company Ultrahuman.

The seed funding round was led by Redstart Labs (Infoedge) and 360 ONE Asset, with two other investment companies and a host of angel investors.

Along with launching its interface, Aina intends to use the backing to grow its team in the US and India.

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TSMC raised its investment budget in the US by a further $100 billion, driven by strong demand for AI technology through to 2030.

In an announcement tied to its quarterly results, the Taiwanese chipmaker revealed it would spend the sum in the US state of Arizona, adding to an investment of $165 billion which it has already committed.

TSMC has pledged to build eight manufacturing sites in Arizona, and with the additional investment, could now set up another four focused on manufacturing advanced 2nm chips, in addition to facilities for advanced packaging.

CEO CC Wei stated its raised outlook was based on demand mainly from cloud service providers, which provide a “strong signal and positive outlook”.

“Thus, our conviction in the multi-year AI mega-trend remains very high.”

He added the investment “will help further foster the development of the US semiconductor ecosystem, strengthen the supply chain and support an increasing number of high-tech, high-paying jobs” in the country.

In Q2 2026 the company reported a year-on-year revenue increase of 36% to TWD1.3 trillion ($40.4 billion), with net income increasing 77% to TWD706.6 billion.

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Thinking Machines Lab unveiled its first AI model more than a year after former OpenAI executive Mira Murati (pictured) founded the start-up, moving it from research previews to a full launch.

The Inkling model is designed to reason natively across text, images and audio, while balancing cost against performance through variable, adjustable effort.

Thinking Machines stated the model is trained to exhibit safe behaviour across all modalities.

The company noted Inkling is a mixture-of-experts transformer with 975 billion total parameters and 41 billion active parameters, supporting a context window of up to 1 million tokens.

Thinking Machines described it as the first in a family of models of varying sizes.

Rather than chasing state-of-the-art performance in a single domain, Thinking Machines said it trained Inkling for solid capabilities across agentic tasks, reasoning, coding, instruction-following, factuality, vision and audio, positioning it as a foundation model for future releases.

The company acknowledged Inkling is not the most performant model available today, closed or open.

Inkling is open-weight, meaning developers can download and customise the model without access to training data or source code.

It is available for fine-tuning on Tinker, Thinking Machines’ developer platform, alongside a so-called Inkling Playground for testing the model directly.

Bloomberg reported Thinking Machines is not aiming to monetise the model itself; the company currently generates revenue through Tinker, which it sells to customers including hedge fund Bridgewater Associates for financial-task fine-tuning.

The news outlet noted Murati’s company raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation last year and was reportedly in talks over a larger subsequent round, though it added several employees have since departed for firms including Meta Platforms and OpenAI.

Bloomberg also reported the launch could help fill a gap in the US open model market, as Meta shifts focus on proprietary offerings and rising AI spending pushes some users toward freely available Chinese models.

Thinking Machines was founded in early 2025 by Murati and a host of other former OpenAI employees, with the company initially focused on collaboration between the technology and people.

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Anthropic is reportedly seeking to meet with investors ahead of a potential mega-IPO, as the company prepares to join a wave of AI-driven stock market debuts.

Bloomberg reported the banks leading the offering are scheduling meetings between investors and the Claude chatbot maker in the coming weeks, citing people familiar with the matter. The news outlet previously stated Anthropic is considering an IPO as soon as October.

Deliberations remain ongoing and details including timing could still change, Bloomberg stated.

Moving ahead on the timeline would put Anthropic ahead of rival OpenAI, which is now eyeing a debut in 2027 after earlier targeting 2026.

The news site noted an IPO in October would also see Anthropic list before DeepSeek, the Chinese AI company which has been steadily gaining market share.

DeepSeek is reportedly preparing its own IPO and could file this year.

Bloomberg stated Anthropic is working with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase on its IPO.

The AI player is also navigating uncertainty tied to its relationship with the Trump administration, which briefly imposed foreign access restrictions on two of Anthropic’s top models.

Anthropic separately sued the US Department of War after it declared the company posed a risk to the nation’s supply chain.

The company was valued at $965 billion following a funding round in May, making it one of the world’s largest private companies and pushing its valuation past OpenAI’s for the first time.

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The US government launched a cybersecurity coordination group allowing AI developers and service providers a formal way to work together to respond to threats emerging from the technology.

The White House stated it, along with the Department of the Treasury, Homeland Security, Department of War and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency worked closely with industry partners to detect threats faster and develop a rapid and prioritised response to cyber vulnerabilities across critical infrastructure sectors.

The group, called Gold Eagle, has been spearheaded by President Donald Trump as part of his vision to secure and accelerate American AI innovation.

It was first revealed as part of Trump’s executive order in June to promote advanced AI innovation and security, which includes plans for the release of a new operational model for cyber defence.

The model aims to tap into frontier AI capabilities to continue advancing faster than adversaries, reduce duplicative scanning efforts and “deliver prioritised and actionable threat and remediation information to defenders” across the government and private sector.

The White House statement explained Gold Eagle will help government and industry collectively identify risks, prioritise action and strengthen the resilience of systems that power the economy, national security and daily life.

Companies involved in the coordination group were not disclosed.

Trump’s administration has taken a hands-on approach to AI regulation.

In May it unveiled a legislative framework to create uniform security and safety guardrails. This followed another executive order at the end of 2025 to secure control of AI regulation away from individual states.

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OpenAI is reportedly preparing to enter the consumer hardware market with a portable, screen-free smart speaker designed to serve as an AI companion in the home.

Sources told Bloomberg the device will access ChatGPT’s AI capabilities to control smart home appliances, play media, answer questions and respond to messages. It will utilise OpenAI’s GPT-Live voice technology to listen and adaptively respond at the same time to support more natural conversations and incorporate AI models beyond those used in existing smart speakers.

In addition, the hardware will apparently feature a camera and sensors to enable the AI to read its surroundings. Unlike conventional smart speakers, the rechargeable device will be portable and feature moving mechanical elements.

It will also draw on user data such as emails to become increasingly personalised over time. OpenAI envisions the speaker developing a humanlike personality, proactively surfacing information, anticipating users’ needs and acting as a physical embodiment of ChatGPT.

OpenAI’s hardware unit is reportedly developing around five products in total, with the speaker set to be the first to market.

Last year, the company splashed $6.5 billion to acquire io Products, the device startup co-founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive. Ive’s creative design studio LoveFrom is also working on the hardware line.

A hardware launch would put the ChatGPT-maker in direct competition with Apple, Amazon and Google in consumer devices.

Trade secrets
Last week, Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and io Products, alleging “theft of trade secrets” obtained through former employees during hiring to accelerate the development of its AI devices. According to its lawsuit, more than 400 former Apple employees have joined OpenAI’s hardware effort.

Drew Pusateri, a spokesman for OpenAI, told the BBC OpenAI has “no interest in other companies’ trade secrets” and is “focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere”.

Apple is seeking an injunction that could delay the AI giant’s device sales. According to Bloomberg, OpenAI is aiming to unveil the speaker later this year, with release targeted for 2027, subject to the lawsuit.

Meanwhile, Apple is reportedly developing its own AI-focused home devices including a smart home hub with a 7-inch display and facial recognition tied to the upcoming AI-powered Siri revamp in iOS 27.

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