Web design news

• Alibaba’s profit fell 75% as quarterly AI spending hit $10bn

  20-08-2026 16:05 via thenextweb.com
  
  Alibaba’s net profit fell 75% in the June quarter, to $1.54bn. The cause was not a weak business. It was the bill for building one. Capital spending reached $9.98bn in three months, up 75% on the same quarter last year, according to the results announcement. In the same accounts, the cloud unit that spending pays […]
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• Octopus Charge puts 210,000 US chargers in one app, without Tesla, Ionna or Electrify America

  20-08-2026 18:13 via thenextweb.com
  
  Octopus Energy has launched Octopus Charge in the US, Canada and Mexico, aggregating more than 210,000 chargers from over 20 networks with no markup on energy prices. Its European equivalent covers 1.5 million chargers across more than 40 countries. A British energy company has put more than 210,000 North American chargers behind a single login. […]
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• Cinemas, schools and ICE are all banning Meta smart glasses

  20-08-2026 18:03 via thenextweb.com
  
  Cinemas became the latest institution to move against Meta smart glasses on Thursday. The UK Cinema Association said many operators are introducing policies to restrict camera-enabled eyewear. It gave two reasons: film piracy, and customer privacy. Taken alone, that is a trade body managing a risk. Taken with the past fortnight, it is something else. […]
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• Milan’s Domyn raises over $1bn Europe’s largest AI round, mostly in debt

  20-08-2026 17:55 via thenextweb.com
  
  Domyn has raised more than $1bn, which makes it one of the largest financings a European AI company has ever announced, yet only about a tenth of it is equity. The Milan company took roughly $1.1bn in total, split about 10% equity and 90% debt, according to Sifted. That structure is the story, because it is […]
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• Slack launches Slack Code, where teams and AI agents build together

  20-08-2026 17:45 via thenextweb.com
  
  Slack launched a coding product on Thursday. Slack Code adds project-specific channels where teams and AI agents write, review and ship software together. The work happens inside the chat app rather than in a separate browser tab. The mechanic is simple. Tag a coding agent from any conversation and it spins up a dedicated code […]
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• Waymo built its own robotaxi chip and published its supplier list

  20-08-2026 17:00 via thenextweb.com
  
  Waymo has published what is in the boot of its robotaxis. A blog post on Thursday set out the architecture of its onboard computer, introduced a custom 5-nanometer chip of its own design, and named the seven suppliers it builds the system with. The company calls it the first look under its trunk. For a […]
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• Tesla’s Austin robotaxis are now fully driverless, tracking shows

  20-08-2026 16:43 via thenextweb.com
  
  Tesla’s robotaxi service in Austin appears to have gone fully driverless. Over the past fortnight, every one of the 170 rides logged by an independent monitoring project ran with no human safety monitor on board, across 54 different cars. Two days earlier, a passenger filmed one of those cars driving straight through a line of […]
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• Baidu’s Apollo Go is now on Uber in Dubai, with no safety driver

  20-08-2026 16:26 via thenextweb.com
  
  Uber has put Baidu’s driverless robotaxis on its app in Dubai. Book an UberX or an Uber Comfort there now and the app may match you with an Apollo Go vehicle that has nobody in it. A dedicated “Autonomous” option raises the odds for anyone who wants one on purpose. The service went live on […]
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• Two senators give TikTok until 1 September to explain its safety test

  20-08-2026 15:53 via thenextweb.com
  
  Two US senators have written to TikTok about an experiment that switched off a safety feature for roughly 15 million American users. Their letter runs to four pages and sets out 13 questions. It gives the company until 1 September to reply. The senators call the decision to run the test “depraved”. Republican Marsha Blackburn […]
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• AI can recommend a deal. Governed execution decides whether it should happen

  20-08-2026 15:48 via thenextweb.com
  
  Every revenue leader now has AI somewhere in the deal cycle. It drafts the proposal, suggests the discount, recommends the next move, and does it all in seconds. The speed is real. But a recommendation is not a decision. When AI proposes a price or a deal structure, something still has to answer the harder […]
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• White House tech strategy leaves open-weight AI off its critical list

  20-08-2026 15:38 via thenextweb.com
  
  The White House has published a new National Security Science and Technology strategy. It names 15 critical technology areas the United States intends to lead. Artificial intelligence and autonomy is one of them, with 12 subfields listed underneath. Open-weight AI is not among them. Neither open weights nor open-source software development appears anywhere in the […]
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• OpenAI previews Private Safety Processing to keep zero data retention

  20-08-2026 14:57 via thenextweb.com
  
  OpenAI has told enterprise customers that its promise not to keep their data will survive the next generation of models. The company set out the position on Wednesday in a post titled “Offering Zero Data Retention for frontier models”. In it, it previewed Private Safety Processing. The system looks for misuse across several related interactions […]
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• Munich Re is buying cyber-insurer At-Bay for $575mn, half its 2021 price

  20-08-2026 14:40 via thenextweb.com
  
  Munich Re has agreed to buy At-Bay, a cyber-insurance startup, for $575mn. The deal values the company at less than half what it was worth in 2021. The German insurance group announced the acquisition on Wednesday, in a statement. The price is a reset. At-Bay was valued at $1.35bn in its last funding round in […]
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• OpenAI’s CFO told staff it will go public in 2027, or sooner

  20-08-2026 14:24 via thenextweb.com
  
  OpenAI has finally put a date on its stock market debut. The company “will be a public company in 2027,” or sooner if its business keeps growing fast, chief financial officer Sarah Friar told staff at an all-hands meeting. CNBC reported the comments, citing two people familiar with them. Friar tried to play down the […]
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• Comcast is turning tens of millions of routers into motion detectors

  20-08-2026 14:16 via thenextweb.com
  
  Comcast is turning tens of millions of its home routers into motion detectors. The feature, called WiFi Motion, uses a home’s own WiFi signal to sense movement, without any cameras. It is part of a new service called Xfinity Shield, which the company began rolling out on 18 August. It set out the details in […]
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• Prosus is putting $100mn into Navi, at a lower price than it once wanted

  20-08-2026 14:04 via thenextweb.com
  
  Navi, the Indian fintech founded by the Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal, has raised $100mn from the investor Prosus. It is the first outside institutional funding for the eight-year-old company, TechCrunch reported. Navi is preparing to go public. The deal values Navi at about $1.3bn, according to people familiar with the matter cited by TechCrunch. Navi […]
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• A $1.3bn loan will help build a Texas data centre for Anthropic

  20-08-2026 13:44 via thenextweb.com
  
  An investment firm is lending about $1.3bn to help build a giant AI data centre in Texas that will house Anthropic. It is one of the latest jumbo deals fuelling the AI boom. Eagle Point Credit Management is providing the loan, Bloomberg reported. The loan is one slice of a much larger deal. It sits […]
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• OpenAI is bringing ChatGPT ads to 31 European countries

  20-08-2026 13:30 via thenextweb.com
  
  OpenAI is bringing ads inside ChatGPT to 31 European countries, in its largest expansion of the ad business so far. The rollout starts next week, the company said in a blog post. The list runs from Germany, France, Spain and Italy to Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium, Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic and […]
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• Muon Space raises $250m from backers including Google and Salesforce

  20-08-2026 13:30 via thenextweb.com
  
  Muon Space has raised $250m in a round backed by Google and Salesforce, according to their announcement. It is the largest cheque yet written to a company whose best-known product is a constellation that watches for wildfires. The rise had been visible for a while. Axios reported in June that the California company was gathering $250m […]
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• A “private and secure” face-search tool left 9 million photos exposed

  20-08-2026 13:20 via thenextweb.com
  
  A people-search tool that promises “private and secure” searches left more than 9 million image files exposed online, including photos of people’s faces. A security researcher found the unprotected database, according to reports by WIRED and Digital Trends. The tool is ClarityCheck, a service that lets someone upload a photo to identify the person in […]
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• Relativity Networks raised $22mn to make AI’s fibre run at nearly light speed

  20-08-2026 13:09 via thenextweb.com
  
  Relativity Networks has raised $22mn and landed a $40mn order from a large cloud provider. The company is pitching a faster kind of fibre for AI data centres. The Orlando-based company announced the funding and the commercial deal on Tuesday, in a press release. The money came in as a $22mn SAFE. That is a […]
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• Big Tech is on a charm offensive to get its data centres built

  20-08-2026 12:58 via thenextweb.com
  
  Big Tech is pouring money into local PR campaigns to win support for the data centres it needs. Opposition to the buildings is spreading across the United States. They are holding town halls, dropping tax demands and sponsoring community groups. That is according to a Bloomberg feature and a Wall Street Journal report. The scale […]
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• The Justice Department is backing xAI against Minnesota’s nudify ban

  20-08-2026 12:47 via thenextweb.com
  
  The US Department of Justice has stepped into a court fight on the side of Elon Musk’s xAI. It is backing the company’s challenge to a Minnesota law that bans AI “nudification” tools. A federal judge heard arguments on Wednesday and said he would rule soon, according to Courthouse News Service. xAI wants a preliminary […]
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• YouTube starts funding shows directly to keep creators from licensing to Netflix

  20-08-2026 12:05 via thenextweb.com
  
  YouTube is offering some of its largest creators multi-million-dollar packages to keep their work off Netflix, according to reporting first published by Bloomberg. Several agreements are said to be close, and none have been signed. The offers reportedly take three forms: direct financing for a creator’s shows, a share of the platform-wide brand deals YouTube […]
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• Skanska takes a $1.2bn order to build four US data centres for an unnamed client

  20-08-2026 11:18 via thenextweb.com
  
  Skanska has signed a $1.2bn contract to build four data centres in the southeastern United States, the largest single data centre order the Swedish construction group has announced. The client is an existing customer, and Skanska is not saying who it is. The four buildings will total around 75,000 square metres, or roughly 808,000 square […]
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• Meta, Google, TikTok, and LinkedIn now face an Australian news law whether they carry news or not

  20-08-2026 11:08 via thenextweb.com
  
  Australia’s parliament passed the News Bargaining Incentive on Thursday, closing a five-year argument that began when Meta worked out it could avoid paying for news by simply not carrying any. The new law removes that option. Platforms with a significant search or social media service in Australia and more than A$250mn (about $178mn) in local […]
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• Callosum raises $100m to make AI workloads cheaper, with the British state on the cap table

  20-08-2026 10:50 via thenextweb.com
  
  Callosum has raised $100m, six months after leaving stealth with a tenth of that, and the round includes money from the British state. Bloomberg reported the raise, describing the UK’s public AI fund as a backer. The Cambridge company came out of stealth in February with $10.25m led by Plural, the fund founded by former Wise executive […]
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• A Berkeley professor wrote about students cutting corners, but a detector flagged her op-ed

  20-08-2026 10:44 via thenextweb.com
  
  Zvezdelina Stankova published an op-ed on 15 August arguing that Berkeley admits students who cannot do middle school mathematics. Within days, the argument had been overtaken by a question about how the op-ed itself was written. Zvezdelina Stankova, a teaching professor of mathematics at UC Berkeley, made her case in the San Francisco Standard under […]
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• China’s robot traffic police can do almost everything except stop you

  20-08-2026 10:29 via thenextweb.com
  
  China’s robot traffic police can direct cars, scold jaywalkers, and give a lost tourist directions to the nearest metro station. What they cannot do is stop anybody, and that limitation is written into the design rather than left to the machine’s discretion. The clearest deployment sits in Hangzhou, where the local traffic police put 15 humanoid […]
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• Revolut wants to let Nik Storonsky borrow $250mn against his own shares

  20-08-2026 10:00 via thenextweb.com
  
  Revolut has asked its shareholders to let Nik Storonsky borrow up to $250mn against his stake in the company, five times what the current rules permit. The request went to investors last week as part of a governance exercise the fintech has codenamed Project Shasta. Storonsky owns roughly 29% of Europe’s most valuable private technology […]
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