Apps & Smartphones news

• NextEra and Brookfield plan a $100bn data campus in Kentucky

  29-07-2026 16:37 via thenextweb.com
  
  NextEra Energy and Brookfield plan to build a data-centre campus in Kentucky worth as much as $100 billion, Bloomberg reported. The project would rank among the largest single commitments yet in the American build-out of computing capacity for artificial intelligence. The companies are joining the largest utility in the United States with one of the […]
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• Microsoft’s AI spending became cloud revenue. Meta’s became a cash-flow hole.

  29-07-2026 22:42 via thenextweb.com
  
  Two of the biggest AI spenders reported on the same day. Microsoft’s spending showed up as cloud revenue. Meta’s showed up as a hole in its cash flow. Meta’s revenue rose 28% to $60.8bn, beating forecasts, CNBC reported. But profit fell 14% to $15.8bn, earnings per share missed, and the shares dropped about 5% after […]
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• Microsoft’s Azure just crossed $100bn a year, and the AI bet mostly paid off

  29-07-2026 22:34 via thenextweb.com
  
  Microsoft went into its earnings facing one question: is the vast AI spending working? The numbers said yes, mostly. Revenue rose 18% to $90bn for the quarter to 30 June, and net income climbed 31% to $35.8bn, the company reported. Microsoft Cloud brought in $59.3bn, up 27%. The shares rose about 2% after hours. Azure […]
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• OpenAI is giving 100,000 scientists free AI. Here’s how it can afford to.

  29-07-2026 22:18 via thenextweb.com
  
  OpenAI made two announcements this week that look unrelated. One is generous. The other explains how it can afford to be. The generous one: OpenAI is giving 100,000 academic researchers free access to its frontier models through 2027, Axios reported. The programme, ChatGPT for Academic Researchers, starts with 10,000 users this summer and scales from […]
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• She left the AI race over her health. Two days later, OpenAI had her back.

  29-07-2026 22:01 via thenextweb.com
  
  On Tuesday, Lilian Weng said she was stepping down from Thinking Machines Lab because the job was making her ill. On Wednesday, she was back at OpenAI. Weng co-founded Thinking Machines Lab with Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former chief technology officer. She is rejoining OpenAI to work on recursive self-improvement, or using AI models to build […]
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• BMW is cutting 8,000 jobs and handing its cars’ brains to Qualcomm

  29-07-2026 21:30 via thenextweb.com
  
  BMW had two messages for staff this week. It is cutting about 8,000 jobs. And it is handing the brains of its future cars to Qualcomm for the next decade. The German carmaker will shed the roles in Germany by the end of 2027 through a voluntary redundancy scheme, Reuters reported. The cuts hit administration […]
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• This Cambridge startup is building a ‘foundation model’ for the chest to speed drug trials

  29-07-2026 21:04 via thenextweb.com
  
  Most AI imaging startups build one model per disease. A Cambridge company has raised $20m to build a single model for the whole chest. Then it can spin the rest out of that. Qureight makes AI imaging tools for lung and heart clinical trials. It closed a $20m Series B led by Molten Ventures, the […]
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• OpenAI ‘open-sourced’ its AI security scanner. The scanner is still locked up.

  29-07-2026 20:52 via thenextweb.com
  
  OpenAI has open-sourced an AI tool that hunts for security holes in your code. There is a catch: the part that does the hunting is still locked behind its approval. The company quietly released the Codex Security CLI this week, before it had even announced it. The code is public, under an open licence. It […]
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• DeepMind won a Nobel for AlphaFold. Then it broke up the team.

  29-07-2026 20:44 via thenextweb.com
  
  Less than a year ago, AlphaFold won Google DeepMind a Nobel Prize. Now DeepMind has taken the team that built it apart. The lab has reassigned most of the original AlphaFold-paper authors over the past year, the Financial Times reported. Nearly a quarter of them have left the company altogether. DeepMind confirmed the moves, and […]
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• As AI Generates More Messages, Human Recognition Becomes More Valuable

  29-07-2026 20:44 via thenextweb.com
  
  As organizations embrace AI to communicate faster and at greater scale, the companies preserving trust aren’t sending more messages; they’re creating more meaningful human moments. Artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed how organizations communicate with employees. Announcements can now be drafted in seconds. Leadership updates can be personalized automatically. Internal newsletters, summaries, FAQs, and policy changes […]
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• The Verification Imperative in Recruitment’s Trust Crisis

  29-07-2026 20:36 via thenextweb.com
  
  Recruiters used to open a resume to look for a reason to say yes. Now they open it to look for a reason to doubt it. Nearly two-thirds of job candidates use AI in their applications, while 87% of US hiring managers admit to using AI in their hiring process, resulting in a double-edged sword […]
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• PwC sells advice on using AI responsibly. Its own reports were written by a careless one.

  29-07-2026 20:34 via thenextweb.com
  
  The world’s biggest consultancies are selling companies expensive advice on how to adopt AI without getting burned. Their own reports keep getting burned. PwC is the latest to be caught. Four of its Middle East “thought leadership” reports were a mess, the Financial Times reported. The reports, on AI and electric vehicles, carried fake footnotes, […]
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• Audi bet its future on EVs. Now it’s selling America a V8 with cupholders.

  29-07-2026 20:18 via thenextweb.com
  
  Audi spent years betting its future on electric cars. Its new flagship for America runs on a V8, with big cupholders and a ChatGPT assistant. The German brand unveiled the Q9 this week. It is a full-size three-row luxury SUV built, in Audi’s own words, for the US market. It starts at about $89,000, with […]
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• OpenAI hit its billion-user goal, just seven months late

  29-07-2026 20:10 via thenextweb.com
  
  ChatGPT is about to hit 1 billion weekly active users. OpenAI wanted to be here seven months ago. The chatbot is on the verge of the milestone, based on figures OpenAI has shared internally, The Information reported. The company had hoped to reach a billion weekly users by the end of last year. It is […]
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• AI agents don’t log in like people. That problem just sold for $1bn.

  29-07-2026 19:56 via thenextweb.com
  
  Every AI agent a company switches on needs an identity to log in and reach data. Enterprises now run millions of them, with almost no way to keep track. That gap just sold for $1bn. The data-security firm Cyera has agreed to buy Oasis Security for around $1bn, the Wall Street Journal first reported. It […]
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• xAI says the First Amendment protects the right to build ‘nudify’ tools

  29-07-2026 19:47 via thenextweb.com
  
  xAI has a novel argument for why it should get to keep building tools that digitally undress people. The First Amendment. Elon Musk’s AI company, now owned by SpaceX, sued Minnesota’s attorney general on Monday, CBS News first reported. It wants a federal court to strike down the first US law banning “nudification” technology. The […]
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• BuzzFeed bet on AI to save it. It just cut another third of its staff.

  29-07-2026 19:33 via thenextweb.com
  
  BuzzFeed bet on AI to rescue itself. This week it laid off another third of its staff. The bet, it turns out, was never the thing that could save it. The company cut about 180 jobs on Monday, roughly a third of its remaining workforce, the New York Times reported. The cuts hit the news […]
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• Runlayer showed Rippling its source code. A Rippling insider called the result ‘a 1 to 1 copy.’

  29-07-2026 19:02 via thenextweb.com
  
  Runlayer spent nearly a year showing Rippling how its product worked, down to the source code. It now says Rippling used that access to build a near-copy. The New York AI-security startup sued Rippling on Tuesday in a Manhattan federal court, the New York Post first reported. The complaint alleges trade-secret theft, unfair competition and […]
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• Anthropic is alone in every AI policy fight. It’s winning anyway.

  29-07-2026 18:48 via thenextweb.com
  
  Six months ago, Anthropic was the darling of America’s AI boom. It led on the models and was loudest on the ethics. This summer, it finds itself alone. The Claude maker is now the odd one out in nearly every big AI policy fight, Axios reported. It is the most valuable startup in the world, […]
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• Shein’s app runs on the tricks the FTC calls ‘dark patterns.’ Now the FTC is investigating.

  29-07-2026 18:40 via thenextweb.com
  
  Shein wanted its Hong Kong listing to be about growth. Instead, the filing meant to sell that story revealed a US regulator is investigating the company, and Shein will not say why. The disclosure sits in the draft prospectus for Shein’s planned IPO, Reuters reported. Its US business, the filing said, is under investigation by […]
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• The AI boom needs power and rockets. Trump just exempted both from environmental law.

  29-07-2026 18:28 via thenextweb.com
  
  The Trump administration spent Tuesday clearing environmental law out of the way of the tech boom. It did so twice, on two fronts, with the same justification. The first move exempts data centres from the rules meant to stop acid rain. The second frees rocket launches from federal environmental review. Together they show how far […]
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• Apple hit $5tn by refusing to play the AI game everyone else is losing

  29-07-2026 18:02 via thenextweb.com
  
  Apple has become the second company in history worth $5tn. It got there by being the one big-tech giant that refused to bet its balance sheet on AI. The iPhone maker briefly touched a $5.04tn market value on Tuesday. Shares hit a session high of $342.89 before easing to close at $340.08, just under the […]
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• eBay sent them a bloody pig mask. Now it owes $56m, and no NDA.

  29-07-2026 17:36 via thenextweb.com
  
  The most disturbing corporate harassment campaign in recent tech history has a price. eBay and three of its former executives will pay nearly $56m to the couple they set out to destroy for writing a critical newsletter. David and Ina Steiner of Natick, Massachusetts, run EcommerceBytes, a small newsletter that covers online selling. In 2019, […]
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• The AI coding fight just moved from the model to the harness

  29-07-2026 17:24 via thenextweb.com
  
  The most expensive part of AI coding is no longer the model. It is the software wrapped around it, and enterprises have started to notice. The immediate fight is over price. Cursor, the AI coding tool SpaceX has agreed to buy for $60bn, moved most customers to usage-based billing last year. The renewal bills are […]
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• PayPal turned down $53bn, and pointed to a beat and a $70 target

  29-07-2026 17:09 via thenextweb.com
  
  PayPal finally addressed the $53bn offer sitting on its table. Its answer was: not at that price. The company gave its first public response on Tuesday’s Q2 earnings call, alongside a beat. Chief executive Enrique Lores would not comment on Stripe and Advent’s bid directly. He said only that PayPal would “carefully consider” any path […]
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• DoorDash gets FAA clearance for in-house drone programme, DoorDash Air

  29-07-2026 17:02 via thenextweb.com
  
  DoorDash has won approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to run its own delivery drones, and promptly made clear that most of your food will still arrive by human. The company unveiled an in-house programme called DoorDash Air on 29 July, built around a custom drone of its own rather than the partners it has […]
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• Fish Audio gives its voice AI away, and charges for the latency

  29-07-2026 16:57 via thenextweb.com
  
  Fish Audio, a Palo Alto voice-AI startup, has raised $52m in a round it still calls a seed, first reported by TechCrunch. It arrives at a company with an unusual shape. It gives its best models away, and charges for the wiring around them. The startup is a year old. It says more than 8 […]
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• AI agents can browse the web. Now they need a way to pay for it.

  29-07-2026 16:52 via thenextweb.com
  
  For the past two years, the AI industry has focused on making models smarter. Every new release promises better reasoning, longer context windows, or more capable autonomous agents. Increasingly, people assume that software won’t just answer questions; it will also complete tasks for us. This raises a concern that has received far less attention: what […]
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• AI broke the patch. This $60m startup is betting on not patching.

  29-07-2026 16:41 via thenextweb.com
  
  A new Israeli security startup has emerged from stealth with $60m. It arrives with an argument the industry has resisted for decades. You cannot patch your way to safety any more, so stop trying. Act Security launched on Tuesday, Calcalist reported. It was founded in 2025 by the team that sold Medigate to Claroty for […]
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• Apple raised its prices, then offered to rent you the phone instead

  29-07-2026 16:21 via thenextweb.com
  
  Apple has a new answer to the complaint that its products cost too much. Do not buy them. Lease them. On Tuesday the company launched Apple Upgrade in the US, a leasing programme run by the buy-now-pay-later firm Klarna. It covers the iPhone, Apple Watch, Mac and iPad, and it starts at $17.99 a month […]
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