News/Data
Databricks hits $4B revenue as AI drives 50% growth with $1B funding
Databricks has projected $4 billion in annualized revenue, marking a 50% increase from the previous year, driven by surging demand for its artificial intelligence products. The milestone coincides with the company's successful $1 billion Series K funding round at a valuation exceeding $100 billion, positioning it as a leading candidate for a potential public offering. Key financial metrics: The analytics firm has achieved impressive growth indicators across multiple areas. The company surpassed a $4 billion revenue run rate in the second quarter, with AI products specifically reaching $1 billion in revenue Databricks is targeting net revenue retention above 140% and...
read Sep 5, 2025Anthropic to pay $1.5B in first US AI copyright settlement, does not formally admit wrongdoing
Anthropic has agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a class action lawsuit brought by book authors alleging copyright infringement, marking the first AI copyright settlement in the United States. The company will pay approximately $3,000 for each copyrighted work it allegedly pirated from shadow libraries like LibGen while gathering training data for its AI models, setting a significant precedent for how AI companies must compensate creators for unauthorized use of their intellectual property. What you should know: This landmark settlement establishes the first legal precedent requiring AI companies to compensate copyright holders for unauthorized use of their...
read Sep 4, 2025African researchers release 9,000-hour speech dataset for AI in 18 languages
African researchers have released what's believed to be the largest known dataset of African languages for AI development, capturing 9,000 hours of speech across 18 languages from Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. This $2.2 million Gates Foundation-funded initiative addresses a critical gap in AI accessibility, as most current AI tools like ChatGPT are trained primarily on English and other European languages, leaving millions of Africans excluded from the AI revolution. Why this matters: With Africa home to over a quarter of the world's languages—more than 2,000 in total—the lack of African language representation in AI creates barriers to essential services...
read Sep 2, 2025AI shopping traffic surged 4,700% in July 2025, Adobe reports
Adobe's latest data reveals that AI-powered shopping traffic to U.S. retail sites surged 4,700% year-over-year in July 2025, based on analysis of over one trillion visits to retail websites. This dramatic growth signals that generative AI discovery tools—systems that help consumers research products using conversational interfaces—are rapidly becoming central to how consumers find deals and make purchasing decisions, fundamentally reshaping the retail landscape. What you should know: AI-referred shoppers demonstrate significantly more engaged behavior than traditional traffic sources. These consumers spend 32% longer on retail sites, view 10% more pages, and bounce 27% less than visitors from other channels. The...
read Sep 2, 2025Award-winning film examines AI’s reliance on marginalized data-labelers
Indian filmmakers Kiran Rao and Biju Toppo have joined as executive producers on "Humans in the Loop," the Fipresci India Grand Prix-winning feature about an indigenous Adivasi woman working as an AI data-labeller. The move represents a significant boost for the indie drama, which explores how technological progress can entrench exclusion while sidelining indigenous knowledge systems—themes increasingly relevant as AI's hidden labor force gains scrutiny. What you should know: The film follows Nehma, an Oraon Adivasi woman whose AI data-labelling work exposes the hidden labor powering "smart" technologies in Jharkhand, northern India.• Adivasis are India's indigenous tribal communities, comprising roughly...
read Sep 1, 2025NBA star Tristan Thompson launches TracyAI for real-time basketball analytics
NBA star Tristan Thompson has launched TracyAI, an artificial intelligence platform that provides real-time NBA analysis and predictive insights using professional-level data typically unavailable to the public. The venture positions Thompson as an early mover in applying AI to sports analytics, targeting what he sees as an underserved market within the rapidly growing AI industry projected to reach $3.6 trillion by 2034. What you should know: TracyAI differentiates itself by accessing professional team-level analytics that aren't available through traditional sports media channels.• "Imagine a sports analyst or commentator on steroids," Thompson explained. "What I mean by that is having all...
read Sep 1, 2025Techno Digital opens $175M AI-ready data center in Chennai
Techno Digital, the digital infrastructure arm of Techno Electric and Engineering Company Limited, has opened a 36MW AI-ready hyperscale data center in Chennai with a $175 million investment, marking a significant expansion of India's digital infrastructure capabilities. The facility is part of the company's ambitious $1 billion commitment to building sustainable, future-ready digital infrastructure across the country, positioning Chennai as a strategic hub for AI, cloud computing, and 5G-driven enterprise solutions. What you should know: The data center spans 200,000 square feet at SIPCOT IT Park in Siruseri, offering hosting capacity for over 2,400 high-density racks with flexible power densities...
read Aug 29, 2025Kuala Lumpur data centers to grow 31% annually through 2030
Malaysia's capital Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta, Indonesia's capital, are emerging as key data center markets in Southeast Asia, driven by hyperscale cloud expansion and surging AI infrastructure demand, according to new research from Structure Research, an independent research firm. The growth represents a strategic shift as both cities capitalize on regional spillover effects from Singapore and position themselves as critical hubs for the next wave of digital infrastructure deployment. What you should know: Both markets are experiencing explosive growth trajectories, with Kuala Lumpur leading the charge in percentage terms while Jakarta offers larger absolute market value. Kuala Lumpur's data center...
read Aug 28, 2025Old Town, Maine uses new AI to track residents for local business enhancement
Old Town, Maine, will begin using artificial intelligence to track residents and visitors later this year through a smartphone data collection program called Placer.ai. The initiative aims to gather demographic and behavioral insights to enhance local marketing efforts and attract new businesses to the downtown area. How it works: Placer.ai collects data from smartphones in specific geographic areas, building comprehensive profiles of user behavior and demographics. The system tracks where people were before entering an area, how long they spend there, where they go afterward, and personal information like annual income. AI aggregates the data, recognizes patterns, and creates mapping...
read Aug 27, 2025Snowflake raises 2026 forecast to $4.4B as AI drives analytics demand
Snowflake raised its fiscal 2026 product revenue forecast to $4.40 billion, up from $4.33 billion, driven by strong enterprise demand for AI-powered data analytics services. The cloud analytics company's shares jumped 11% in extended trading as organizations increasingly prioritize artificial intelligence spending and modernize their data infrastructure. Key financial results: Snowflake's second-quarter performance met expectations while showing strong growth momentum. Product revenue reached $1.09 billion for the quarter ended July 31, aligning with analyst estimates compiled by LSEG, a financial data provider. Remaining performance obligations—a key metric for booked revenue—hit $6.9 billion, representing 33% growth year-over-year. The revised annual forecast...
read Aug 21, 2025Delphi scales AI chatbots to 100M vectors using Pinecone database
Delphi, a San Francisco AI startup that creates personalized "Digital Minds" chatbots, has successfully scaled its platform using Pinecone's managed vector database to handle over 100 million stored vectors across 12,000+ namespaces. The partnership enabled Delphi to overcome critical scaling challenges that were threatening its ability to maintain real-time conversational performance as creators uploaded increasing amounts of content to train their AI personas. The scaling challenge: Delphi's Digital Minds were drowning in data as creators uploaded podcasts, PDFs, and social media content to train their personalized chatbots. Open-source vector stores buckled under the company's needs, with indexes ballooning in size...
read Aug 20, 2025Vantage Data Centers builds $25B AI campus in rural Texas the size of 900 football fields
Vantage Data Centers is making the largest investment in its corporate history: a $25 billion artificial intelligence campus in rural Texas that signals just how dramatically the AI boom is reshaping America's digital infrastructure landscape. The massive project, dubbed Frontier, will span 1,200 acres in Shackelford County, Texas—roughly the size of 900 football fields. When complete, this hyperscale facility will deliver 1.4 gigawatts of power capacity, enough electricity to power roughly one million homes, making it the largest data center campus in Vantage's global portfolio. Why this matters This investment represents more than just corporate expansion—it's a window into the...
read Aug 19, 2025Databricks raises funding at $100B+ valuation as AI demand soars
Databricks is set to raise funding at a valuation exceeding $100 billion, marking a 61% jump from its $62 billion valuation less than a year ago. The analytics firm's rapid valuation increase underscores the intense investor appetite for AI companies, as businesses worldwide rush to harness artificial intelligence capabilities from their data. What you should know: Databricks, a San Francisco-based data analytics company, has signed a term sheet for a Series K funding round but hasn't disclosed the specific amount being raised.• The company serves 15,000 customers, including major enterprises like payments firm Block, energy giant Shell, and electric-vehicle maker...
read Aug 15, 2025Apple’s UICoder AI masters SwiftUI by generating its own training data
Apple researchers have developed UICoder, a specialized large language model that teaches itself to generate high-quality SwiftUI interface code through automated feedback loops. The breakthrough demonstrates how AI models can overcome training data limitations by creating their own curated datasets, potentially revolutionizing how developers approach UI code generation across multiple programming frameworks. What you should know: The research team started with StarChat-Beta, an open-source coding model, and used an innovative self-improvement process to create nearly one million SwiftUI programs. Researchers instructed the model to generate SwiftUI code from UI descriptions, then filtered outputs through Swift compiler checks and GPT-4V visual...
read Aug 15, 2025NVIDIA releases 1M-hour speech dataset for 25 European languages
NVIDIA has released Granary, an open-source multilingual speech dataset containing approximately one million hours of audio, alongside two new AI models designed for transcription and translation across 25 European languages. The release addresses a critical gap in speech AI development, as only a tiny fraction of the world's 7,000 languages are currently supported by AI language models, with particular focus on underrepresented European languages like Croatian, Estonian, and Maltese. What you should know: The Granary dataset represents a massive leap forward in multilingual speech AI training data, providing developers with ready-to-use resources for production-scale applications. The dataset includes nearly 650,000...
read Aug 14, 2025Google quietly expands Gemini data use for AI training—here’s how to opt out
Google is quietly expanding how it uses customer data to train its artificial intelligence models, and users who don't pay attention to their privacy settings might inadvertently become part of the training process. Starting September 2, files, photos, videos, and screen captures that users share with Gemini, Google's flagship AI assistant, could be sampled and used to improve the company's AI services. This represents a significant shift in how Google handles user-generated content within its AI ecosystem, bringing the search giant's data practices more in line with competitors like OpenAI. The change arrives as Google races to keep pace with...
read Aug 13, 2025LG CNS partners with Vietnam telecom giant to build hyperscale AI data center
LG CNS has partnered with Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications Group (VNPT) and Korea Investment Real Asset Management to develop a hyperscale artificial intelligence data center in Vietnam. The collaboration represents a significant expansion into Southeast Asia's rapidly growing data center market, projected to reach $30.5 billion by 2030, while supporting Vietnam's national digital transformation priorities. What you should know: The partnership will establish a comprehensive AI infrastructure project spanning facility construction, hardware deployment, and network systems.• The three parties signed a Memorandum of Understanding at the Korea-Vietnam Business Forum in Seoul to advance the AI facility construction.• A dedicated technical...
read Aug 12, 2025MIT startup helps police connect crimes across jurisdictions with AI
Multitude Insights, a three-year-old Somerville startup founded by MIT graduates, has developed AI-powered software to help police departments modernize crime bulletins and identify patterns across jurisdictions. The platform has been piloted by Boston, Brookline, and Watertown police departments among dozens of agencies across 10 states, representing a significant shift from traditional paper-based and faxed crime reporting systems. What you should know: The software replaces antiquated paper bulletins with digital templates and uses AI to connect crimes across multiple jurisdictions. Police officers can create digital crime bulletins using template forms instead of printed papers, PDFs, or faxed copies. AI analyzes multiple...
read Aug 8, 2025Screenshot-to-caught: AI uses criminal screenshots to track malware campaigns
Cybersecurity researchers at Black Hat demonstrated how artificial intelligence can analyze screenshots left behind by cybercriminals to identify and track infostealer malware campaigns. The breakthrough technique uses dual large language models to process images that hackers inadvertently create while stealing data, potentially enabling earlier detection and prevention of these attacks. What you should know: Infostealer malware campaigns often leave digital breadcrumbs in the form of screenshots, which researchers can now analyze using AI to understand attack patterns. The malware typically spreads through fake cracked software downloads, stealing everything from crypto wallets to password manager data without requiring administrator privileges. Cybercriminals...
read Aug 7, 2025AI agents and AI-ready data hit peak hype, claims report
Gartner's 2025 Hype Cycle report identifies AI agents and AI-ready data as the most overhyped technologies currently at the "Peak of Inflated Expectations," warning that generative AI disillusionment is approaching. The research firm, which analyzes emerging technology trends, emphasizes that while these technologies show promise, they require precise strategic application rather than broad organizational deployment to deliver meaningful results. What you should know: Gartner named four main technologies dominating the AI landscape: agents, AI-ready data, multimodal AI, and AI trust, risk and security management (TRiSM). AI agents refer to increasingly autonomous systems that can carry out tasks for humans, though...
read Aug 5, 2025Rose-Hulman launches computer science major with AI and cybersecurity tracks
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, a private engineering school in Indiana, has launched a redesigned computer science major featuring specialized tracks in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and data science. The restructured program offers two distinct pathways—one focused on industry-ready software development and another emphasizing research and theory—allowing students to tailor their education around emerging technologies and high-demand career fields. What you should know: The new unified computer science major replaces Rose-Hulman's previous program structure with a more flexible approach that addresses current industry needs. Students can choose between a Developer pathway for real-world software development and industry careers, or a Researcher pathway...
read Aug 1, 2025onsemi transforms customer support pipeline with AI, hits 90% accuracy
Semiconductor company onsemi has successfully transformed its operations using AI-driven digital transformation, achieving remarkable improvements in customer support accuracy and setting ambitious sales targets. Under CEO Hassane El-Khoury's leadership since 2020, the company shifted from being a fast follower to a leader in power and sensing technologies by implementing seven comprehensive "digital threads" that integrate AI and automation across all business processes. What you should know: onsemi developed a systematic approach to AI transformation by creating interconnected digital workflows spanning the entire organization. The company established seven "digital threads" covering Idea to Market, Lead to Order, Plan to Fulfill, Source...
read Jul 30, 2025AI is making traditional manager-employee 1:1 meetings obsolete as performance is already known
Organizational psychologist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic argues that artificial intelligence and modern workplace technology are making traditional one-on-one meetings between managers and employees increasingly obsolete. His analysis suggests that real-time performance analytics, AI-powered feedback tools, and asynchronous communication platforms now provide better insights than scheduled check-ins, fundamentally challenging a management practice that has dominated corporate culture for decades. The big picture: Traditional 1:1 meetings evolved from early 20th-century scientific management principles into a cornerstone of modern leadership, but they're now struggling to justify their existence in an AI-driven workplace. Frederick Taylor's Scientific Management (1911) laid the groundwork for formal manager-employee check-ins focused...
read Jul 29, 2025ByteDance’s Trae IDE sends 26MB of user data to China despite opt-out
A developer has discovered that ByteDance's Trae AI-powered IDE continues collecting extensive user data and sending it to Chinese servers, even when users disable telemetry settings. The findings raise significant privacy and security concerns about data sovereignty, particularly given ByteDance's persistent data collection despite user preferences and the lack of transparency about what information is being gathered. What you should know: Trae's telemetry toggle appears to be non-functional, with data collection continuing regardless of user settings. A GitHub report documented around 500 network calls in just seven minutes, transferring approximately 26MB of data to ByteDance servers on the byteoversea[.]com domain....
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