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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. For a decade, one company has maintained a near-total stranglehold on the business of selling the advanced computer chips that power machine learning and artificial intelligence: Nvidia. Armed with the most advanced blueprints for graphics processing units, or GPUs, and helped by the rapid pace of innovation at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, the contract fabricator that makes 90% of the world’s advanced AI chips, Nvidia has become synonymous with AI processors.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman has explored putting together funds to either acquire or partner with a rocket company, a move that would position him to compete against Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Altman reached out to at least one rocket maker, Stoke Space, in the summer, and the discussions picked up in the fall, according to people familiar with the talks.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. If you’ve been getting into the holiday shopping spirit, you might have already met Amazon’s Rufus or Walmart’s Sparky. Artificial-intelligence chatbots are appearing all over retail websites and apps.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The AI revolution has created a unique and high-quality problem for Nvidia: The chip maker makes too much money. Nvidia has fallen under scrutiny over the past month as investors have come to worry about the sustainability of blowout artificial-intelligence spending.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Startups are offering higher salaries, bigger bonuses and more employee stock options (Esops) at the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) this year, but despite securing first-day slots too, they are struggling to attract top talent as campus hiring shifts from mass hiring to picking a few high-quality candidates amid an AI-led productivity boost.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The AI chatbot Estée Lauder Companies built for its Jo Malone London fragrance brand has a uniquely difficult task. Unlike the current barrage of agentic stylists and shoppers tasked with picking outfits and hunting down deals, the “AI Scent Advisor" must spin everyday language into the intangible and totally nondigital experience of smelling.

Companies like Google, Accenture, Diageo, Myntra, IKEA, and L’Oréal are including fertility treatments like IVF under insurance, offering emotional support through employee assistance programmes, organising seminars to drive awareness on infertility and available support systems. Egg and sperm freezing, too, are being added to medical insurance programmes for employees looking to delay their parenthood journey for career or personal reasons. India has a population of as many as 27.5 million infertile people, including men and women, according to the Indian Society of Assisted Reproduction. However, organisations are stepping up to drive the change. In November last year, Google India expanded its family building benefits in India, increasing reimbursements for expenses related to fertility treatments — including options like fertility preservation, IUI, and IVF.

It looked like a classic case of markets reacting to political risk. But Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent sees it differently. He’s pointing to something else entirely: the tech sector’s infatuation with artificial intelligence.

Google is replacing Sissie Hsiao, who led the development of the artificial intelligence chatbot Bard, now known as Gemini, the company told staff in its AI division on Wednesday. Hsiao will step down immediately, a company spokesperson confirmed. Josh Woodward, who leads Google Labs and oversaw the launch of NotebookLM — the company's popular tool that can turn text into a podcast-like show — will replace her. Hsiao plans to take a short break and return to Google in a new role, the spokesperson said. She did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

digital payment system, experienced its second major outage within a week, disrupting transactions and frustrating users nationwide. According to Downdetector, a website that tracks service disruptions, outage reports peaked at 520 at 7:23 PM. Around 53% of reported issues were related to fund transfers, while 44% involved payment failures. On March 26, UPI users across the country faced difficulties executing transactions due to what the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) described as an «intermittent technical issue». NPCI, which operates the UPI network, acknowledged the issue and stated that the system has since been restored.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The highly commoditized smartphone market in India rarely gets devices that stand out. Truth be told, it’s difficult to really call any smartphone ‘different’ in today’s market, but if they can get any different at all, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra is likely as far as it can get.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. A group of technology companies is investing in a new form of carbon capture that aims to cut emissions from household waste in an effort to reduce landfill usage and to lower the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that are emitted into the atmosphere. Frontier, an umbrella group of tech companies including payments firm Stripe, internet giant Google and Instagram parent Meta is investing just under $32 million in a carbon-capture-and-storage project in Norway in the hope of removing 100,000 metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere between 2029 and 2030.

Arm Holdings recently sought to acquire Alphawave, a UK-based supplier of semiconductor intellectual property, to secure a crucial technology that is crucial for building its own artificial-intelligence processors, according to three sources familiar with the matter. Alphawave, which has a market value of 707.1 million pounds ($913.36 million), has been working with its investment bankers to explore a sale after receiving acquisition interest from Arm and other potential acquirers, one of the sources told Reuters. Arm, however, has decided not to pursue a takeover of Alphawave after its initial discussions with the company, two of the sources said.

NPCI), which operates the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), on Tuesday announced that some banks were facing an issue, with UPI transactions being declined occasionally. In a post on X, the NPCI stated, “Today due to financial year closing, some of the banks are facing intermittent transaction declines.” The previous financial year closed on March 31 and a new financial year (FY26) commenced on April 1.

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which operates the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), confirmed the development in a post on X. “Today, due to the financial year closing, some of the banks are facing intermittent transaction declines. The UPI system is working fine, and we are working with the concerned banks for necessary redressal,” NPCI said.

OpenAI on Monday said it raised $40 billion in a new funding round that valued the ChatGPT maker at $300 billion, the biggest capital-raising session ever for a startup. The infusion of cash comes in a partnership with Japanese investment giant SoftBank Group and «enables us to push the frontiers of AI research even further,» the San Francisco-based company said in a post on its website. «Their support will help us continue building AI systems that drive scientific discovery, enable personalized education, enhance human creativity, and pave the way toward AGI (artificial general intelligence) that benefits all of humanity,» the company said.

Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day.” In India, which keeps getting pilloried by the US president as an exemplar of bad behavior in trade, the reciprocal tariff announcement of April 2 has acquired a fervent overtone. In preparation, New Delhi is offering one sacrifice after another, hoping that the angry god of the White House will let it go with nothing more serious than a slap on the wrist. The latest peace offering is the decision to do away with a 6% tax on ads that local businesses place with foreign search engines, social media and e-commerce firms. This is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s way of telling Trump, “Look, we aren’t China. Not only do we allow Alphabet Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. to hog our digital-advertising pie, if you want us to make it cheaper for them to operate, that’s fine, too.” Also Read: India open to clearing import duty hurdle for US auto parts The sacrifice is a win for Trump, though it isn’t much of a loss for Modi. Known colloquially as the “Google Tax,” the levy was a bad idea when it was introduced in India’s 2016 budget. Since then, domestic advertisers have had to withhold 6 cents on the dollar when they get their bills from places like Ireland, where online platforms typically book their revenue. Just like Trump’s tariffs will be mostly paid by American consumers, the burden of the so-called Indian equalization levy had to be absorbed not by the tech platforms, but by the advertisers. It pushed up costs for local businesses. Where would they advertise, if not on Google or Facebook?

Gemini 2.5 Pro (experimental) model will be available to all free users of the Gemini app. The tech giant shared the news on X, stating: “...we want to get our most intelligent model into more people’s hands asap. Which is why we decided to roll out Gemini 2.5 Pro (experimental) to all Gemini users, beginning today.” However, it’s still unclear whether the stable version of Gemini 2.5 Pro will be offered for free to all Gemini users.

This has put millions of American users and potential purchasers on tenterhooks as they wait for further news.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. MUMBAI : Financial influencers registered with the Association of Mutual Funds in India (Amfi) may face scrutiny from the market regulator as it continues cracking down on social media creators spreading financial misinformation. The regulator is looking at harmonising the advertisement code for different types of Sebi-regulated entities, Tuhin Kanta Pandey, chairperson, Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi), told Mint on Saturday.

Tech companies are now packing GPUs — which are ideal for running the calculations that power AI — as tightly as possible into specialized computers. The result is a new kind of supercomputer — a collection of up to 100,000 chips wired together in buildings known as data centres to hammer away at making powerful AI systems.