Groq, a chipmaker, is raising $650 million in internal funding as it pivots away from hardware to focus more on AI inference, the process of refining how AI models respond to prompted requests. The round comes after Nvidia announced a $20 billion deal that was characterised as a not-acquisition of AI talent. Source
A South Korean chip startup, XCENA, raised $135 million, betting that memory rather than compute is artificial intelligence's real bottleneck. The company's thesis challenges the prevailing assumption that processing power is the primary constraint limiting AI performance. Source
ClickUp cut 22 per cent of its workforce in favour of AI agents, exemplifying what Aaron Levie, founder of Box, has termed "AI psychosis"—the tendency of executives to replace jobs without understanding what those jobs entail. Tech layoffs in 2026 are already nearly matching the total for all of 2025, according to Levie. Source
Shift, an AI training startup, is offering free home cleaning in exchange for recorded footage of cleaners at work. The company plans to use the video to train robots and has announced the unusual offer initially for New York, with plans to expand to other cities including London. Source
Amazon is producing an AI-animated television series based on The Good Advice Cupcake, a character created by Loryn Brantz for BuzzFeed years ago. BuzzFeed licensed the character to Amazon for the new series without obtaining Brantz's consent, prompting her to express fury at the decision. Source