Author: Advanced AI Editor

By Ateev Bhandari and Arasu Kannagi Basil (Reuters) -Glean said on Tuesday it was valued at $7.2 billion in its latest funding round – the third capital raise for the U.S. enterprise AI search startup in less than two years. The round marks a nearly 57% jump in valuation for Glean, underscoring strong investor appetite for startups leveraging AI use cases. In the previous funding in September, the company’s valuation had more than doubled in just over six months. Businesses and governments worldwide are rushing to adopt artificial intelligence, with applications ranging from enterprise productivity and drug discovery to infrastructure…

By Stephen Nellis SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Nvidia and artificial intelligence search firm Perplexity on Wednesday said they are partnering with more than a dozen AI firms in Europe and the Middle East to refine those firms’ AI technologies and distribute them to local businesses. Nvidia said it will work with model makers in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and Sweden to help make AI models in local languages become what are called reasoning models, which are capable of carrying out more complicated tasks. AI technologies built in English and Chinese have started to shift to that technology, but that transition…

By Yantoultra Ngui SINGAPORE (Reuters) -Temasek has joined a consortium backed by Microsoft, BlackRock and tech investment company MGX to invest and expand artificial intelligence infrastructure, according to BlackRock’s investor day presentation slides on Thursday. The Singapore state investment company has joined AI Infrastructure Partnership, a group that also includes BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners, the slides showed. AIP, formed in September with a goal to initially invest more than $30 billion in AI-related projects, is one of the world’s largest efforts to invest in data centres and energy facilities needed to power AI applications such as ChatGPT. It aims to…

(Reuters) -Mattel has teamed up with OpenAI to develop toys and games with artificial intelligence, and expects to launch its first AI-powered product later this year, the Barbie-maker said on Thursday. The company, which also makes Hot Wheels and Uno cards, plans to “bring the magic of AI to age-appropriate play experiences with an emphasis on innovation, privacy, and safety,” it said. The move comes at a time when toy manufacturers are battling muted demand backdrop as consumers rein in spending to brace for the economic fallout of U.S. President Trump’s shifting trade policy. Mattel will also incorporate OpenAI’s advanced…

(Reuters) -Telus said on Thursday it intends to acquire the shares in its listed digital services subsidiary it does not currently own, as the Canadian telecom firm seeks greater control of the unit’s artificial intelligence capabilities. The company has offered $3.40 per share to acquire the shares it does not own in Telus Digital, valuing the unit at $946.8 million, according to Reuters’ calculation. Telus currently holds about 57% of the digital unit’s outstanding shares directly and through its other units. This is a 15% premium to the last closing price of the subsidiary’s U.S.-listed stock. U.S.-listed shares of the…

(Reuters) -Meta has finalized a $14.3 billion purchase of a 49% stake in data labeling startup Scale AI, according to sources familiar with the matter. Scale AI said late on Thursday that the deal would value it at $29 billion and that the startup’s chief executive, Alexandr Wang, would join Meta to head a new team focused on artificial general intelligence, the latest twist in Silicon Valley’s race toward the cutting-edge technology. Founded in 2004 by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow Harvard University students and originally called “TheFacebook”, the company dropped “The” from its name after securing the Facebook.com…

By Krystal Hu, Rishabh Jaiswal and Kenrick Cai (Reuters) -Facebook-owner Meta has invested in Scale AI in a deal that values the data-labeling startup at $29 billion and brings in its 28-year-old CEO, Alexandr Wang, to play a prominent role in the tech giant’s artificial intelligence strategy. Meta will take a 49% stake for $14.3 billion, according to two sources familiar with the matter. “We will deepen the work we do together producing data for AI models and Alexandr Wang will join Meta to work on our superintelligence efforts,” Meta said in a statement that did not disclose financial terms.…

(Reuters) -Weighed down by tariffs and geopolitical uncertainty, dealmaking has slowed to a crawl across most industries except one: the unglamorous world of data infrastructure. The companies that process the data used to build advanced AI models have become highly sought after targets for legacy tech companies like Meta, Salesforce, and ServiceNow in the scramble to stay competitive against the likes of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. “AI without data is like life without oxygen, it doesn’t exist,” said Brian Marshall, global co-head of software investment banking at Citi. “Because of that, data is having a zeitgeist moment right now driven…

By Jody Godoy (Reuters) -Facebook owner Meta’s $14.8 billion investment in Scale AI and hiring of the data-labeling startup’s CEO will test how the Trump administration views so-called acquihire deals, which some have criticized as an attempt to evade regulatory scrutiny. The deal, announced on Thursday, was Meta’s second-largest investment to date. It gives the owner of Facebook a 49% nonvoting stake in Scale AI, which uses gig workers to manually label data and includes among its customers Meta competitors Microsoft and ChatGPT creator OpenAI. Unlike an acquisition or a transaction that would give Meta a controlling stake, the deal…

By Anna Tong, Kenrick Cai and Krystal Hu SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Alphabet’s Google, the largest customer of Scale AI, plans to cut ties with Scale after news broke that rival Meta is taking a 49% stake in the AI data-labeling startup, five sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. Google had planned to pay Scale AI about $200 million this year for the human-labeled training data that is crucial for developing technology, including the sophisticated AI models that power Gemini, its ChatGPT competitor, one of the sources said. The search giant already held conversations with several of Scale AI’s rivals…