Latest AI News
Groq Raises $350 Mn to Scale AI Inference Cloud
Groq plans to increase its data centre capacity from 54 MW to more than 200 MW in 2027.
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HCLTech Didn’t Want Data Centres. Then AI Changed the Math
HCLTech is breaking from its asset-light playbook to own AI data centre infrastructure, betting that a full-stack model can deliver higher returns.
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Yotta Partners With IntelliDB Enterprise to Offer Sovereign AI Database Services
The partnership adds PostgreSQL and vector database capabilities to Yotta’s cloud stack, targeting RAG, AI agents and application modernisation for regulated organisations.
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Razorpay Announces India’s First AI Payments Foundation Model
Razorpay’s Vulcan is positioned as the intelligence layer for the company’s broader AI push, with the model using payment-level signals across routing, fraud, risk and checkout rather than operating as a standalone application.
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AI automation startup Relay shuts down, staff joins Google’s Chrome team
Relay, an AI-powered workflow automation tool that was launched in 2021 with thegoal of becoming the new Zapier, is shutting down, and some of its staff — including its top executive — are joining Google’s Chrome team. Jacob Bank, Relay’s founder and CEO, shareda company announcementMonday that reveals the app will be shutting down access for paying customers on September 14. Free customers would have already lost access as of August 15. The app’s closure wasinitially announcedin July. Bank, who previously spent a little over six years at Google,revealed thathe would now be rejoining the tech giant as VP of Product for Google Chrome, where he will lead the product and developer relations teams for Chrome, according to hisLinkedIn. “I’ve spent my whole career doing one thing: building tools that help people get more done with AI, without sacrificing their personal creativity or insights,” said Bank in aposton X. “And joining the Chrome team is an ideal opportunity to bring those experiences to many, many more people.” “We have some really ambitious plans to help you work with AI in Chrome to get things done, and I’ll have more to share soon,” he added. Bank originallyjoined Google in 2015after his previous startup, a scheduling app called Timeful, was acquired by the search giant. At Google, he worked in a number of different areas, including as product lead for Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Chat, before eventually leaving to launch Relay. Similar to Timeful, Relay offered users productivity upgrades via workflow automation, allowing businesses to streamline repetitive tasks like document drafting and copyediting, as well as various project management tasks. TechCrunch reached out to Google and to Relay for more information. Just how Bank and others plan to further integrate AI into Chrome is a hanging question, though Bank calls Chrome “a perfect place to collaborate with agents.” The move follows a steady path of AI integration into Google’s user experience. The integration of Gemini into search has fundamentally altered Google’s front end — not to mentionthe rest of the internet. Gemini has also beenintegrated into Chrome, where it serves as an optional in-browser assistant. Overall, users seem to be responding well to these integrations, as Google recently reported that Geminihad crested 1 billion users.
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Anthropic’s annualized revenue surges to $65B
Anthropic’s revenue continues not just to grow at an historic pace but to accelerate. The model maker’s annualized revenue run rate — a projection of a full year’s revenue based on a recent, shorter period —surpassed$65 billionat the end of July, Bloomberg reported on Monday, up from$47 billionin May and just $9 billion at the end of last year. Anthropic didn’t immediately respond to our request for comment. The company’s investors expect it to continue to grow at approximately the same rate for the remainder of the year, finishing 2026 between$100 billion and $120 billion, the Financial Times reported. Meanwhile, rival OpenAI has doubled its revenue to $40 billion, from $20 billion at the end of 2025, Bloomberg reportedlast week. The two companies may calculate their revenue metrics differently, but Anthropic’s growth rate has captivated investors far more than OpenAI’s has. Both companies have filed confidential IPO paperwork, Anthropic is expected to hit the public markets ahead of OpenAI —possibly as soon as this fall. Anthropic will be seeking a public valuation of $2 trillion or more, according to the Financial Times, which would make it the largest market debut on record. Anthropic was last valued at$965 billionin late May, when it raised a $65 billion round.
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Claude Text Watermark Explained: How Anthropic Will Detect AI Content
Anthropic has provided more details about the text watermarking system it is introducing for Claude, explaining how the invisible marker will work and what it can reveal. The company says the system will rely on word-selection patterns rather than adding characters or other visible elements to generated text. The watermark will not affect the quality, meaning or readability of Claude's responses and will not require additional tokens. Anthropic is implementing the technology as part of its compliance with the EU AI Act.
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Groq raises $350M to fuel its pivot from AI chips to neocloud
Startup Groq hasraised$350 million as it continues to pivot from an AI chipmaker to a neocloud company that provides powerful GPUs and AI infrastructure services. The new capital, led by investment firm Disruptive with planned participation from Nvidia, values the company at $3.5 billion. That’s down from the$6.9 billion Groqwas valued at last September, just a few months before Nvidiahired the startup’s founderand CEO, Jonathan Ross, and other top talent as part of a $20 billion licensing deal that the company paid out to investors. A spokesperson for the company told TechCrunch that despite the difference in valuation, the company doesn’t see it as a down round, but rather as establishing a new valuation for the “post-Nvidia-licensing-deal version of Groq.” Groq was focused on building its own chips, dubbed LPUs (language processing units), to compete with Nvidia on inference — the type of compute needed to run AI workloads in real time. After it lost its star team, Groq shifted from being a pure AI chipmaker into a cloud and data center provider that operates Nvidia systems. In June,Groq raised a $650 millionround to kick off its pivot. Groq intends to scale from 54 megawatts to more than 200 megawatts in 2027. Today, Groq operates 13 data centers across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific, serving more than 6 million developers, enterprises, and AI-native companies. Groq says the fresh funds will support “those seeking usage of medium and larger sized clusters of Nvidia accelerated computing for training and inference.” “We are building Groq into the world’s leading AI inference cloud,” Alex Davis, Groq’s chairman and CEO of Disruptive, said in a statement. “Inference will without a doubt become the largest and most critical layer of AI infrastructure.” While inference is in high demand as enterprises scale AI workloads, it’s an open question whether neoclouds will be a profitable enough business to provide returns on their considerable investment in the long term. CoreWeave reported strong second-quarter revenue growth and recently landed major contracts, including with Meta and Anthropic. However, investors remained concerned about the company’s high capital expenditures,heavy reliance on debt, and exposure to rapidly depreciating hardware, and its ability to turn growth into free cash flow. Groq’s financials are still private for now, but its pivot puts the company directly inside Nvidia’s AI infrastructure ecosystem. That’s not exactly a unique relationship among neoclouds today. Nvidia supplies the GPUs powering clouds fromCoreWeave, Lambda, and Nebius, while also investing billions into some of those companies as they race to build more capacity. TechCrunch has reached out to Groq for more information.
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Amazon, which started off selling books, is destroying rare texts to train AI
Amazon is buying tons of rare books, cutting off their spines, and scanning them for AI training, according to404 Media, which placed a tracking device in a rare book that ultimately arrived at an Amazon facility in Las Vegas. The facility, known as VGT3, identifies itself with a symbol of a dinosaur holding a book in its claws. Amazon told 404 Media in a statement that it “purchases books through commercial channels to improve the products and services customers use.” Companies like Amazon need unfathomably large amounts of text to train their LLMs, which have already ingested what they can from the internet (and, in Anthropic’s case, illegallypiratedbooks). Rare books, especially ones that are out of print or impossible to find on the internet, offer a new source of coveted training data. These texts are especially valuable since there’s no chance that anything published before 2022 was written by an LLM. When LLMs train on AI-generated text, they risk “model collapse,” which can occur when the quality of an LLM’s outputs degrade after ingesting too much AI-generated text.
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Wispr raises $280M at $2B valuation as it looks beyond dictation
Wispr, a startup known for its AI dictation tool, raised $280 million in Series B funding, led by Menlo Ventures, at a $2 billion valuation, the company announced on Monday. The funds will allow Wispr to increase its footprint as it ventures into new areas, such as meetings, with its newly released note-taker tool. With this latest round, the company has raised $361 million to date. Its last roundwas less than 10 months ago. The new capital comes at a time when there is increased competition in the dictation space from apps likeWillow, Monologue, Aqua, and Superwhisper, among others. In addition, several developers are creating free or lower-priced tools for prosumers. Existing investors, including Notable Capital, NEA, Neo Ventures, 8VC, and MVP Ventures, doubled down in the latest round. The company also gained new investors such as Acrew, Forerunner, Goodwater, Peak XV, Together Fund, and PLUS Capital. Alongside the funding news, Wispr announced it’s launching a new model to improve the quality of speech understanding. For the last few weeks,severalusershave complained about a quality dip in Wispr Flow’s dictation output. The company said its new model, called Canto, will reduce error rates from 30% to less than 10%. Since last November, Wispr has released itsdictation app on Androidand has scaled its go-to-market teams in regions like India and the U.K. It’s also partnering with hardware makers, like theOasis ring, to let customers dictate on their devices without speaking loudly. Separately, with its meeting notetaker, it’s taking on others in the space like Granola, Fireflies, and Read AI. While Wispr’s notetaker can display summaries and action items, there is scope for it to integrate with other tools and make updates or create documents or email drafts. Last month, the startup announced Wispr Interface Labs under Ariya Rastrow, who was one of the people to work on Amazon Alexa in its early days. With this lab, Wispr aims toexplore new interfacesfor human-computer interaction.
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Nvidia investing $1.5B in SoftBank data center developer behind OpenAI project
Nvidiasaidon Monday that it will invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy, a data center linked to SoftBank and OpenAI. The investment ensures that Nvidia will be the sole supplier of compute infrastructure at OpenAI’s Ports-Pike data center near Cincinnati, Ohio. Nvidia will also provide up to $105 billion in credit to help build the facility, which could scale from an initial 4.25 gigawatts to 8 gigawatts in size, according todocumentsthe company filed with the SEC. SB Energy’s existing investors include SoftBank and OpenAI. SoftBank had previously held $5.8 billion worth of Nvidia stock, which itsold in Novemberto help fund other AI investments. The data center and power developer willbuild a 9.2 gigawatt natural gas power planton the site, which is land owned by the U.S. Department of Energy. The site previously enriched uranium for the U.S. nuclear arsenal and for U.S. Navy submarines. The power plant isexpected to cost $33 billion. The steep sum reflects the skyrocketing costs of building natural gas power plants, which haverisen 66% in the last two years, according to BloombergNEF. By the time SB Energy’s power plant and others are completed, they’ll be competing for natural gas with export markets, a confluence that couldtriple natural gas pricesin some parts of the country.
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From $92 Mn to $608 Mn: What is Fuelling Andhra's Investment Surge?
At the heart of Andhra Pradesh’s strategy is the administration's Policy 4.0 framework, and the willingness of the government to work as a startup.
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