AI news flash: Rivian’s $5.8 billion joint venture with Volkswagen Group is expanding again, this time to include AI voice assistant technology. According to Rivian’s Q3 investor presentation released Thursday, Rivian will license part of its AI voice assistant technology to Volkswagen, but the licensing fee, payment terms, and which VW models will get it are all still undisclosed…
AI news flash: Chinese shipping and coal stocks moved against the trend and strengthened this week, in contrast to the heavy selling pressure on AI suppliers. According to the source, tight fuel supply and supply chain disruptions have boosted these companies’ earnings, and part of the rally is linked to spillover effects from the Iran war. COSCO, for example, saw its third-quarter profit jump 80%, partly due to higher freight rates. Overall, the earnings outlook for shipping and coal stocks…
AI news flash: Foxconn Chairman Young Liu said in Taipei on Friday that market worries about an AI bubble are overblown. As a key supplier of Nvidia servers, Foxconn sees customer demand that is clear and strong, and it expects double-digit revenue growth in 2027. He made the remarks at Foxconn’s annual tech day, where he also stressed that Foxconn is not just a ‘box-moving’ assembler but can build advanced equipment such as Nvidia’s DSX POD…
AI news flash: Reddit has long relied on Google Search for traffic, with many users even adding ‘Reddit’ to their search queries to find answers, but as search shifts toward AI, traffic from search is drying up. On its Q3 earnings call, Reddit announced it will move toward a logged-in experience. The goal is to protect its content from AI scraping and instead negotiate licensing deals with model providers, while also helping lift revenue as US daily active users decline…
AI news flash: Pope Leo XIV has criticized AI as a threat to human dignity, but devout believers aren’t the only ones worried about AI clashing with their beliefs. David Durman, an administrator at the University of Kentucky and a non-theistic humanist, recently won a religious exemption that lets him skip AI at work. He told TechCrunch that humanism is a set of beliefs about human experience and how people engage with the world, centered on the well-being and flourishing of individuals and communities. He argues that people become moral agents by actively using their minds, and that using AI undermines that ability and can create an overreliance that hurts critical thinking.
AI news flash: Marubeni, one of Japan’s five major trading houses, says in an interview with Nikkei Asia that the physical bottlenecks in energy and natural resources created by the AI boom will be a growth opportunity for the company. As demand for computing power keeps climbing, the power, metals, and communications infrastructure behind that compute is under supply pressure, and Marubeni plans to turn these constraints into a source of profit rather than treating them as pure risk. The concrete strategy is…
AI news flash: On Amazon’s Q3 earnings call, Andy Jassy reiterated his belief that AWS can become a business with $1 trillion in annual revenue, noting that no company has ever reached that scale. But before getting there, Amazon has to ramp up capital spending sharply to build out infrastructure. He said 2026 cash capex is still expected to be about $220 billion, mostly going to AWS, with 2027 ’noticeably higher,’ and that he has clear visibility into the financial returns.
AI news flash: Japan’s exports of chip-related products rose 41% year on year in April to September 2026, according to government statistics. The main driver was strong AI data center demand, which pushed memory prices sharply higher, with export prices for some memory products rising to about five times their previous level. Export prices for both DRAM and NAND flash memory jumped noticeably. Semiconductor demand also helped cushion the widening of Japan’s trade deficit, which was driven mainly by persistently high crude oil prices. The original summary only provides these figures and doesn’t cover export values by product category, key export markets, or how individual companies benefited. See the original article link for details.
AI news brief: Phase is a newly launched blockchain that lets smartphone users earn tokens by helping run AI services. Unlimit founder Kirill Eves has committed $45 million in funding, and Phase says it has no outside investors. The money covers the first two years of development plus a two-year operating buffer. Phase also launched Phase …
AI news flash: Ropes & Gray is working with OpenAI to build AI tools for transactional diligence, aiming to help lawyers handle the huge, tedious document review work in deals like M&A. Per the source summary, the system first sorts documents into groups, then produces document summaries and reports for lawyers to review before they advise clients. In other words, …