Author: Daniel Wilson

Chipmaker TSMC said that it aims to invest “at least” $100 billion in chip manufacturing plants in the U.S. over the next four years as part of an effort to expand the company’s network of semiconductor factories. President Donald Trump announced the news during a press conference Monday. TSMC’s cash infusion will fund the construction of several new facilities in Arizona, C. C. Wei, chairman and CEO of TSMC, said during the briefing. “We are going to produce many AI chips … to support AI progress,” Wei said. TSMC previously pledged to pour $65 billion into U.S.-based fabrication plants and has…

Google has open sourced an AI model, SpeciesNet, designed to identify animal species by analyzing photos from camera traps. Researchers around the world use camera traps — digital cameras connected to infrared sensors — to study wildlife populations. But while these traps can provide valuable insights, they generate massive volumes of data that take days to weeks to sift through. In a bid to help, Google launched Wildlife Insights, an initiative of the company’s Google Earth Outreach philanthropy program, around six years ago. Wildlife Insights provides a platform where researchers can share, identify, and analyze wildlife images online, collaborating to…

Alberto Musalem, President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, speaks to the Economic Club of New York, in New York City, U.S., Feb. 20, 2025.Brendan McDermid | ReutersWASHINGTON — The risks for higher inflation are on the rise, St. Louis Federal Reserve President Alberto Musalem said Monday.During a keynote address at the National Association for Business Economics conference, Musalem noted that his baseline case is for inflation to gradually move toward the central bank’s 2% target. This scenario requires inflation expectations to remain anchored and stable, he noted.However, “near-term inflation expectations have risen substantially over the last…

Serena Williams, one of sport’s greatest champions, joins Canada’s first WNBA team as a managing partner.CNW Group | Toronto TempoTennis superstar Serena Williams is continuing her investment in women’s sports with a new ownership stake in the Women’s National Basketball Association’s Toronto Tempo, the team announced Monday.The Tempo, the WNBA’s first expansion team in Canada, will begin play in the 2026 season and is also owned by Larry Tanenbaum, chairman of Kilmer Sports Ventures.”I have always said that women’s sports are an incredible investment opportunity. I am excited to partner with Larry and all of Canada in creating this new…

Podcast recording and editing platform Podcastle is now joining other companies in the AI-powered, text-to-speech race by releasing its own AI model called Asyncflow v1.0. An API for developers will also be available, allowing them to directly integrate the text-to-speech model in their apps. Thanks to the new model, the company is able to offer more than 450 AI voices that can narrate your text. The startup said that it developed the technology and model in such a way that its training and inference costs are low, giving it an advantage against competitors. With the move, Podcastle joins a number…

C.C. Wei, TSMC Group CEO, stands on the future site of a chip factory under the name European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (ESMC) during a symbolic ground-breaking ceremony. Sebastian Kahnert | Picture Alliance | Getty ImagesTaiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing will pour $100 billion into bolstering chip manufacturing in the U.S., President Donald Trump announced Monday.The president called the investment a “tremendous move by the most powerful company in the world.” The new capital brings TSMC’s total investment in the U.S. to $165 billion and will go toward building five new fabrication facilities in Arizona.The announcement from TSMC, which supplies semiconductors to the likes…

Google Colab, Google’s cloud-based notebook tool for coding, data science, and AI, is gaining a new “AI agent” tool, Data Science Agent, to help Colab users quickly clean data, visualize trends, and get insights on their uploaded data sets. First announced at Google’s I/O developer conference early last year, Data Science Agent was initially launched as a stand-alone project. However, Google decided to integrate it into Colab with the goal of helping users access the agent directly from a Colab notebook, said Kathy Korevec, director of product at Google Labs, in an interview. Data Science Agent is available for free…

Reddit co-founder and investor Alexis Ohanian has joined billionaire Frank McCourt’s bid to acquire TikTok as a strategic adviser specializing in social media, Reuters reports. “He has that broad portfolio of experience … of where social media was and, I think, a keen understanding of where it’s evolving,” McCourt told Reuters. “Where he can help mostly is validating but also socializing what we’re doing.” McCourt’s internet advocacy group, Project Liberty, has organized a consortium called The People’s Bid to buy the U.S. assets of TikTok. In January, Project Liberty officially submitted a proposal to acquire the social media app, detailing plans to let…

“There’s scarcely a part of the company that is unaffected by AI,” said Vishal Sharma, Amazon’s VP of Artificial General Intelligence, on Monday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. He dismissed the idea that open source models might reduce compute needs and deflected when asked whether European companies would change their generative AI strategies in light of geopolitical tensions with the U.S. Sharma said onstage at the startup conference that Amazon was now deploying AI through its own foundational models across Amazon Web Services — Amazon’s cloud computing division — the robotics in its warehouses, and the Alexa consumer product, among…

Jaque Silva | Nurphoto | Getty ImagesAnthropic on Monday closed its latest funding round at a $61.5 billion post-money valuation, the company confirmed to CNBC.The $3.5 billion round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, and other investors included Salesforce Ventures, Cisco Investments, Fidelity Management & Research Co., General Catalyst, D1 Capital Partners and Jane Street, among others.Anthropic, the artificial intelligence startup backed heavily by Amazon, was founded by former OpenAI research executives. It launched Claude in March 2023, and like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, Claude has exploded in popularity as businesses incorporate generative AI chatbots across sales, marketing and customer…