Author: Advanced AI Bot

(Reuters) -CenterPoint Energy reported a fall in first-quarter profit on Thursday, but the U.S. utility raised its capital expenditure plan to meet expected demand from data centers used for artificial intelligence technologies. A winter storm in January across the U.S. Gulf Coast brought major cities like Houston and New Orleans to a near-standstill and broke records for the coldest day across the regions. The ensuing damage to power lines and widespread outages increased the operating and maintenance (O&M) costs for utilities. CenterPoint said its O&M costs rose 5.4% from a year ago to $747 million during the quarter. Costs for…

By Heekyong Yang and Joyce Lee SEOUL (Reuters) -SK Hynix, a key supplier of high-bandwidth memory processors to Nvidia, said quarterly profit more than doubled and demand for AI chips was so robust that it expects only limited impact on those products from potential U.S. tariffs. Washington has launched an investigation into semiconductor imports, arguing that extensive reliance on foreign production is a national security threat. There have also been concerns that increased U.S. export controls on chips to China, which have resulted in a $5.5 billion hit to Nvidia, could harm SK Hynix. “Regarding our HBM business, what we…

By Qiaoyi Li and Brenda Goh SHANGHAI (Reuters) -China-based robotaxi developer Pony.ai Inc said on Thursday that U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war with China was likely to dampen its international expansion plans, but it anticipated little direct impact on its supply chain. The Toyota-backed company has been exploring the deployment of its autonomous driving business in South Korea, Luxembourg, the Middle East and other countries after raising $260 million from listing on the Nasdaq in November. Trump’s move to impose a blanket 10% tariff on all other U.S. imports and a higher 145% levies on Chinese products has roiled…

SINGAPORE – China’s Zhipu AI is ramping up its overseas expansion through a partnership with Alibaba Cloud, an executive said on Wednesday, as the startup prepares for an initial public offering. The Beijing-headquartered startup is pitching governments globally to help them launch localised sovereign AI agents, vice-president Carol Lin told an audience at tech conference GITEX Asia. The company now has offices in the Middle East, Singapore, the United Kingdom and Malaysia, and is running joint “innovation centers” across Asia, including in Indonesia and Vietnam, she said. Founded in 2019 as a Tsinghua University spinoff, Zhipu AI has emerged among…

By Aditya Soni (Reuters) – Corporate America’s artificial intelligence investment frenzy has shrugged off fears of slow returns and doubts fueled by AI models built cheaply by China’s DeepSeek. But a global trade war started by the Trump administration threatens to stall the boom across industries from energy to software. Upcoming earnings reports from tech giants including Alphabet and Microsoft, as well as utilities that power massive data centers such as Vistra and Constellation Energy, will show whether tit-for-tat tariffs between the U.S. and China are forcing businesses to rethink their ambitious infrastructure plans. Their clients, which range from retailers…

(Reuters) -Dutch chipmaking parts supplier BE Semiconductor Industries (Besi) said on Wednesday that its order bookings, an important indicator of future growth, rose 8.2% against last quarter as orders from Asian subcontractors for AI related data centre applications picked up. Investors are banking on growing orders for Besi’s hybrid bonding solutions and its first-mover advantage amid a surge in demand for AI-enabling technology. Besi’s CEO Richard Blickman said in a statement the timing and trajectory of the upturn was more difficult to predict now given the uncertainties around the escalating trade war. “However, demand for advanced packaging for AI applications…

(Reuters) -Economic gains from artificial intelligence will boost global output by around 0.5% a year between 2025 and 2030, outweighing the costs of rising carbon emissions by the data centres needed to run AI models, the International Monetary Fund said on Tuesday. An IMF report released at its annual spring meeting in Washington nonetheless noted that those output gains would not be shared equally across the world, and called on policymakers and businesses to minimise costs to broader society. “Despite challenges related to higher electricity prices and greenhouse gas emissions, the gains to global GDP from AI are likely to…

By Fanny Potkin and Che Pan SINGAPORE/BEIJING (Reuters) – Huawei Technologies plans to begin mass shipments of its advanced 910C artificial intelligence chip to Chinese customers as early as next month, two people familiar with the matter said. Some shipments have already been made, they added. The timing is fortuitous for Chinese AI companies which have been left scrambling for domestic alternatives to the H20, the primary AI chip that Nvidia (NVDA) had until recently been allowed to sell freely in the Chinese market. This month, U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration told Nvidia that sales of the H20 would require…

By Stephen Nellis SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Intel’s new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, is flattening the semiconductor giant’s leadership team, with important chip groups reporting directly to him, according to a memo from Tan seen by Reuters. Intel has also promoted networking chip chief Sachin Katti to be chief technology officer and artificial intelligence chief, according to the memo. The leadership changes are the first major move under Tan, who took the top job last month, to turn around the venerable Silicon Valley chipmaker after years of problems. Intel’s data center and AI chip group, as well as its personal-computer chip group,…

(Reuters) – Micron Technology (MU) said on Thursday it is reshuffling its business segments to focus on the artificial intelligence-linked demand for its memory chips from large-scale cloud providers. The new segment, called “cloud memory business unit”, will focus on products used by hyperscalers, as well as its high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips that help perform data-intensive AI tasks quickly. HBM chips are closely watched by investors due to their use alongside AI graphic processors, particularly Nvidia’s. Micron is one the top three memory chipmakers in the world, besides South Korea’s SK Hynix and Samsung. NasdaqGS – Nasdaq Real Time Price…