Latest AI News
Google Unveils New Gemini-Powered Features, Workspace Intelligence and More at Google Cloud Next 2026
Google has unveiled a broad set of updates for its Google Workspace at Google Cloud Next 2026, with a strong focus on AI-powered productivity and smarter collaboration. The company introduced Workspace Intelligence, a system that can interpret relationships between files, projects, and collaborators across apps like Docs, Slides, and Gmail to enable more advanced, automated workflows. These updates are said to highlight Google's effort to make Workspace more intelligent and automated, though some features may continue to be updated before they are widely released.
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Deeptech's Hardware Problem: ‘Make in India’ Can't Survive Without Scale
India’s deeptech hardware ecosystem has largely been built on the assumption that domestic demand will follow innovation. But that is increasingly being challenged.
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India’s app market is booming — but global platforms are capturing most of the gains
India’s mobile app market is generating record revenue, with in-app purchases crossing $300 million in the first quarter, up 33% year-over-year, according to Sensor Tower — but much of that spending is flowing to global platforms. Non-gaming apps were the main driver of growth in Q1, generating over $200 million in in-app purchase revenue — rising 44% year-over-year and increasing their share of overall spending, Sensor Towersaidin its report. The gains were led by categories including utilities, video streaming, and generative AI. The progress reflects a broader shift in India’s app market, where annual in-app purchase revenue has risen from $520 million in 2021 tomore than $1 billion in 2025and is projected to reach $1.25 billion this year, per Sensor Tower. While downloads have stabilized at around 25 billion a year, time spent on apps continues to grow, pointing to deeper engagement and a greater willingness among users to pay for digital services. Much of India’s spending in Q1 was captured by global platforms, with Google One, Facebook, ChatGPT, and YouTube among the top earners. Domestic players were more prominent in video streaming, with JioHotstar and SonyLIV ranking highly. A similar pattern emerged in downloads, where ChatGPT, Instagram, and the Chinese short-drama app FreeReels led the market, followed by Indian apps including Story TV, JioHotstar, and Meesho. India’s app market has matured on the download side, but monetization is strengthening as usage deepens and digital payment habits become more embedded, Donny Kristianto, principal market insights manager at Sensor Tower, told TechCrunch. Despite the gains, India remains a relatively low-spending market, generating about $0.03 in revenue per download, compared with more than $0.20 in Southeast Asia and Latin America, Sensor Tower data shared with TechCrunch showed. While newer categories are driving growth in India’s mobile app market, spending remains concentrated in a handful of mature segments, particularly productivity, social media, and video streaming apps, which dominate the top rankings. Video streaming alone accounts for about half of the top 10 revenue-generating apps, underlining its outsized monetization power, the data showed. Even so, shifts in user demand suggest room for further growth. Generative AI apps saw downloads rise 69% year-over-year, with ChatGPT ranking among the top apps by both installs and revenue. India has long been ChatGPT’slargest marketby users, while other AI apps are alsogaining ground. Short drama platforms are growing even faster, with downloads up more than 400%, led by apps like FreeReels. The trend suggests India’s app market is still early in its monetization journey, even as new categories expand what users are willing to pay for.
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India’s Data Centres Grow Fast, Water Risks Grow Faster
Water costs under 2% of a data centre’s operating budget, yet up to 60% of that comes from already stressed cities, with no requirement to measure or disclose usage.
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Infosys Partners With OpenAI to Push Enterprise AI Adoption
Infosys has partnered with OpenAI to deploy its AI coding agent Codex across enterprise workflows, as clients move from AI pilots to scaled adoption.
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Hands on with X’s new AI-powered custom feeds
Bluesky isn’t the only companyleaning into AIto help build custom feeds, it seems. Amid aslateof recentproductreleases, X this week announced the launch of Grok-powered Custom Timelines, which let you dive into one of over 75 specific topics through curated feeds that can be pinned to your home tab. The company touted the feature as one of the “biggest changes” to the app to date, saying it uses Grok’s AI to not only build these custom timelines but also personalize them for individual users. The custom feeds are arriving at the same time as X has announced it isshutting down X Communities, a feature that had allowed people to create their own member-based communities around various topics, but saw declining use. Today we're announcing two product changes for organizing communities on X:1. XChat now supports joinable links for groupchats. Create a public link & share direct to Timeline. With support for 350 members per chat (and growing), Groupchat Links are the fastest way to bring…pic.twitter.com/GNcRB99Opc On X, the company’s head of product,Nikita Bier, notedthat the custom timelines work even better for topics you already engage with. A rep for X explained to TechCrunch that the custom timelines aren’t based on traditional signals like keywords or hashtags. Instead, the company said, Grok reads every post, understands it, and then adds topic labels. This is made possible by the AI models from Grok owner xAI, the company thatacquired X last year, tying the two services even closer together. At launch, the custom timelines are available only to Premium subscribers on iOS. Android support is in the works. All Premium subscription tiers can access this feature. To use the feature, simply scroll to the right past your “For You” and “Following” feeds on X, as well as any other personal lists you may have pinned. Then tap the plus ( + ) sign to choose which custom timelines you want to pin to your home tab. (Choose wisely, because you can only pin up to 10 topics or lists!) You can also reorder your selected topics from the same screen. Once pinned, you can tap on any of the feeds from your home tab across platforms to browse your pinned custom feeds. Notably, the second position in each feed was filled by an ad — which suggests X just found a way to increase its ad inventory. That matters: X’s ad business has reportedly beenstrugglingsince Musk’s acquisition, withconflictingreportsabout whether things have improved. Ladies and gentlemen, today we're launching one of our biggest changes to 𝕏Introducing Custom TimelinesThis feature allows you to pin a specific topic to your home tab. With support for over 75 topics, you can dive deep into your favorite niche on X.It's powered by Grok's…pic.twitter.com/9jkIEXvubj The initial topics are broad and fairly standard — high-level categories similar to the type of sections you might find on news sites. These include subjects like Business & Finance, Sports, Technology, Politics, Stocks & Economy, News, Science, Movies & TV, Food & Drink, Art, Real Estate, Home & Garden, Beauty, Education, Gaming, and others. Beyond the broader sports category, there are also options for following specific sports, including American football, baseball, basketball, boxing, soccer, golf, MMA & wrestling, racing & motorsports, rugby, snow sports, ice hockey, tennis, cricket, Formula 1, cycling, and the Olympics. (Oh, and esports, if you want to count that.) Pop culture and tech topics also make up many of the available categories, with the former allowing you to pin topics like celebs, music, concerts, country music, dance, electronic music, fashion, pop, K-pop, J-pop, podcasts, hip-hop, and jazz. Alongside the Technology category, you can also follow special interests like Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrency — two perennially popular topics on X. There are also categories for things that overlap with Elon Musk’s various businesses and interests, like robotics, software development, space, and biotech. Other general categories include things like anime, digital art, photography, career, pets, design, marriage & family, shopping, mental health, and more. Worth flagging: The initial set of news-related topics leads with the Iran conflict, crime, and elections at the top of suggestions. While this likely reflects the current conversations taking place on X, it’s also an example of how a product decision can influence what news people see. A cleaner solution might be to organize the dozens of options into larger high-level categories listed in alphabetical order, with the subcategories appearing when you tap each. That would allow X to greatly expand its “news” categories beyond these big three. There could also be concern about these timelines being built by Grok, which was ostensibly created to be politically neutral and “truth-seeking,” but inpractice has often skewed rightor amplifiedmisinformation. In our own testing though, the custom timelines did not seem to lean obviously right or left. In a handful of test scrolls, the feeds drew from a range of outlets like ABC, CBS, CSPAN, AP, Reuters, AFP, Daily Beast, The Hill, Foreign Policy, Puck, The Atlantic, The Economist, Bloomberg, Al Jazeera, Forbes, and the BBC (not all of which I follow), alongside commentary from various pundits. Whether these custom feeds will dramatically change how people use X remains to be seen. For the most part, people tend to want to see the things they care about appear in their main algorithmic feed. But the custom feeds do allow for exploring new interests or dipping into topics only when they’re relevant — like pulling up a sports feed when the game is on. Combined with X’s new “Snooze Topics” option for the For You feed, you can more precisely tailor your X to your liking. Today we're also rolling out a tool to snooze topics on your For You tab—if you ever want to crank up or turn down the slop.Rolling out now on iOS and Web for Premium subscribers.https://t.co/fXIHmwhKO4pic.twitter.com/xESabDu295
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Google updates Workspace to make AI your new office intern
At Google Cloud Next this week, the tech giant announced a bevy of new updates to Workspace, its subscription-based productivity suite aimed at professionals. As you might expect, the updates are heavy on AI, integrating new automation tools into various workflows — everything from drafting emails to organizing Google Sheets. Overall, the changes are clearly designed to give office workers a leg up in their pursuit of less busy work. Here’s some of what is new: Workspace Intelligence. Workspace Intelligence,a new AI systembuilt into Google’s office suite, is designed to automate assistance across various tasks. The system draws on a user’s Workspace data, including their Gmail, Calendar, Chat, and Drive (Docs, Slides, and Sheets). Google has given users administrative control over what the AI system can see and access. Users can disable Workspace Intelligence’s access to particular data sources at any time. The tradeoff: The more data the system has access to, the more it’s able to assist in those particular areas. Build and fill out Google Sheets with Gemini. A number of new features allow users to both build and fill out Google Sheets, the company’s spreadsheet tool. Users can construct sheets by prompting Gemini to construct them. Prompts can include things like formatting and data retrieval, allowing Google’s AI system to do much of the work a human would’ve previously needed to do. At the same time, Gemini also helps with data entry,automatically filling out Sheetswith “prompt-based” filling. Google claims that its new feature allows users to populate the spreadsheets “9x faster” than manual entry, because the system is designed to infer what you’re going to enter. Anothernew Sheets featureallows users to convert unstructured data into organized tables. AI writing capabilities. Google has also brought newnew AI writing toolsto Google Docs. Users can now use Gemini to “generate, write, and refine” documents. The feature is powered by the company’s Workspace Intelligence system, which draws on data from a user’s Drive, Chat, and Gmail archives, as well as the internet, to assist with editorial tasks. Users merely prompt Gemini to help them write or edit their documents. Users can prompt Gemini to “help me write” or ask it to “match” their writing style so that it can effectively mimic their voice. Realizing thatenterprise customersare where the money is, tech companies are racing to deploy the most convenient and efficient office tools — applications that can make the average worker’s life a matter of degrees easier. Google has a certain advantage; its office products are already deeply embedded in workplaces worldwide, giving it a built-in audience for these AI upgrades. But Microsoft, Apple, and a growing field of startups are all competing for the same turf.
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Tesla just increased its capex to $25B. Here’s where the money is going.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk kicked off the company’s first-quarter earnings call with a monetary heads-up — or depending on the mindset of the investor, a warning. Tesla’s capital expenditures will skyrocket to $25 billion in 2026, far outpacing its previous annual spend as it races to stay ahead of the competition and transitions to an AI and robotics company, according to itsfirst-quarter earnings report. That figure, which covers what Tesla plans to spend on physical assets outside of its day-to-day operating expenditures, is three times higher than its annual capex budget in previous years. For comparison, Tesla’s annual capital expenditures were $8.5 billion in 2025, $11.3 billion in 2024, and $8.9 billion in 2023. Tesla had announced in January that it expected capital expenditures to be in excess of $20 billion in 2026, already a substantial increase meant to cover its AI initiatives, including investments in compute infrastructure and data centers, and the expansion and ramp of its manufacturing and R&D production lines, among other items. This $5 billion uptick suggests these initiatives will require more money than previously planned. But so far, its quarterly capital expenditure, which was $2.5 billion, was in line with previous quarters, the report shows. Of course, Musk views this as a positive, a sentiment many other shareholders will likely also share since it positions Tesla as a company investing in its future, namely AI and robotics. “With 2026 we’re going to be substantially increasing our investments in the future,” Musk said in the earnings call Wednesday. “So you should expect to see significant, a very significant increase in capital expenditures, but I think well justified for a substantially increased future revenue stream.” Musk was quick to note that Tesla isn’t the only company raising its capital expenditure budget. Amazon, for instance, has projected$200 billion in capital expendituresin 2026, across “AI, chips, robotics, and low earth orbit satellites.” Google is slated to spend between $175 billion and $185 billion in capital expenditures in 2026, up from $91.4 billion the previous year. The increase in Tesla’s capital expenditures is linked to Musk’s desire and ambition to evolve the company beyond building and selling EVs, solar, and energy storage. Some of the capex spend will go towards Tesla’s core technologies such as its battery and AI software, according to Musk. The company plans to invest in AI training, chip design, and “laying the groundwork” for increasing manufacturing production, as well as invest in its robotaxi operations and its new semiconductor research fab in Austin. The Fremont, California factory will likely suck up some of that capital as the company ends production of the Tesla Model S and Model X and begins building its Optimus humanoid robot at scale. The company said Wednesday it has also cleared ground outside its Austin factory for a dedicated Optimus manufacturing facility. Tesla plans to increase its internal production of Optimus for testing and then “probably” make Optimus “useful outside of Tesla sometime next year,” he said. Tesla is also putting money towards strengthening its supply chain “across the board,” Musk said, adding that this covers batteries, energy, and AI silicon. All of this spending, which CFO Vaibhav Taneja said will last a couple of years, comes with a literal cost. The company, which enjoyed a brief 4% share price bump due, in part, to an unexpected$1.4 billion in free cash flow, will head into negative territory later this year, Taneja said. Tesla shares erased their gains in after-hours trading as Musk and Taneja laid out these plans to investors. Still, Tesla is still on loads of cash. At the end of the first quarter, Tesla reported $44.7 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments. “While this may seem like a lot, and we will have the impact of negative free cash flow for the rest of the year, we believe this is the right strategy to position the company for the next era,” Taneja said.
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AI Overviews are coming to your Gmail at work
During its Google Cloud Next conference on Wednesday, the company announced a slew of Workspace-focused updates, including the addition of its AI Overviews feature to Gmail. The feature, which today uses AI to summarize Google Search results, will now do the same for Gmail users in the workplace. According to Google, this will allow Gmail users to ask questions in search using natural language and then get concise answers without having to open and read different emails. The company suggests the feature could be used to ask business-related questions about topics typically shared in emails, like those about performance improvements, project milestones, invoices, comments on decks, trip details, and more with straightforward answers. The AI Overview will create an instant summary pulled from across multiple emails and conversations. While not everyone prefers to have AI as their first step to finding an answer, it is rapidly becoming the norm, both within Google’s products and elsewhere on the web. In this case, Google says the AI Overviews in Gmail will be the default setting if the company hasGemini for Workspace in Gmail enabled,and ifWorkspace Intelligence access to Gmail is enabled. (End users must have “Smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet” and “Google Workspace smart features” enabled, too.) The feature was previously available to consumers with Google AI Pro and Ultra subscriptions. Google says it will also now come to business, enterprise, and education customers as well through the following products: Alongside the launch, Google said it’s also making AI Overviews in Drive broadly available toeligibleWorkspace and Google AI plans. It was previously inbeta.
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Google makes an interesting choice with its new agent-building tool for enterprises
Google CEO Sundar Pichai opened the Google Cloud Next conference on Wednesday with a video in which he announced one of the company’s biggest new products:Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. Google’s tool is intended for building and managing agents at scale. This is Google’s answer to Amazon’s Bedrock AgentCore and to Microsoft Foundry. Given that AI, and agents in particular, are furthest along for technical tasks like coding, and that the tech is so new to the enterprise that security remains a real concern, Google has made an interesting choice with this tool. Agent Platform is particularly geared at IT and technical teams. The business folks, meanwhile, are directed toward what Google calls its Gemini Enterprise app, introduced in the fall. They can work with agents built by IT or build their own for tasks like scheduling meetings, performing trigger-based processes, creating shortcuts for repetitive tasks, or creating and editing files without needing to switch apps, Google says. Google also underscored that the underlying models these tools tap into include Google’s own Gemini LLM and Nano Banana 2 image generator, as well as Anthropic’s Claude. The company announced support for Claude Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku — in other words, flagship, reasoning, and lower-cost models, including the new Opus 4.7 that launched last week.
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Google turns Chrome into an AI co-worker for the workplace
As part of its slate ofGoogle Cloud Nextannouncements on Wednesday, the company shared plans to bring “auto browse” agentic capabilities to Chrome users in the enterprise, along with enhanced security measures. With auto browse, Chrome users can take advantage of Gemini to understand the live context in their open browser tabs, and then use the AI to handle various tasks like booking travel, inputting data, scheduling meetings, and others related to web-based work. Google suggests the tool could be used for things like inputting information in the company’s preferred CRM system based on content in a Google Doc, comparing vendor pricing across tabs, summarizing a candidate’s portfolio before an interview, pulling key data from a competitor’s product page, and more. The company notes that its workflows will still require a “human in the loop,” meaning that the user will have to manually review and confirm the AI’s input before any final action takes place. However, the idea is to help speed up these types of more tedious tasks to free up people to focus on what Google refers to as more “strategic work.” This is the larger promise from AI advocates: that you’ll get your time back by using this new technology. But in practice, studies have shown thatAI isn’t reducing work — it’s intensifying it.It remains to be seen how this will play out at the enterprise level as AI becomes a standard part of the workflow. Presumably, that could mean managers will expect that people can get more tasks done in less time. Google says the new feature will initially be available to Workspace users in the U.S., as a part of Google’s push to infuse its AI into one of its most-used apps in the workplace, the web browsernearly everyoneuses. It can be enabled via apolicy, and Google states that an organization’s prompts won’t be used to train its AI models. (A disclosure that is increasingly necessary these days, given thatMeta is even using its own employees’ keystrokesto train its AI.) Like theconsumer-facing version of the feature,Workspace users will be able to save their most common workflows for later use. These “Skills,” as they’re called, can be pulled up by either typing a forward slash (” / “) or by clicking the plus sign to access the needed Skill. In addition to the infusion of AI into Chrome, Google is touting its ability to detect unsanctioned AI tools in the workplace viaChrome Enterprise Premium. Now, it’s expanding those capabilities to help IT teams look for compromised browser extensions or other AI services — specifically “anomalous agent activity.” Google is correct to position this as a security feature, but it has another advantage, too. The tech giant is essentially leveraging corporate IT to shut down any other AI agents that could be taking root in the enterprise world organically. Years ago, this was how many web services established themselves in the workplace, amid an employee-driven “Enterprise 2.0” rush to adopt new technology like cloud storage, collaborative docs, or file sharing. This new feature, which Google somewhat ominously dubs “Shadow IT risk detection,” will give IT teams visibility into the usage of both sanctioned and unsanctioned GenAI and SaaS sites across their organization. IT teams will also receive a “Gemini Summary” of the Chrome Enterprise release notes and other AI-powered suggestions. This will surface critical changes, new policies, and upcoming deprecations, along with recommendations about things like configuring new settings or reviewing managed browsers. The company also announced an expanded partnership with Okta to secure the agentic workplace with added features to reduce session hijacking and other protections. It’s also upgrading its security controls for extensions and introducing Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) integration to help organizations enforce consistent security policies.
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Google Cloud launches two new AI chips to compete with Nvidia
Google Cloud on Wednesdayannouncedthat its eighth generation of custom-built AI chips, or tensor processing units (TPUs), will be split in two. One chip, named the TPU 8t, will be geared for model training and another, the TPU 8i, is aimed at inference. Inference is the ongoing usage of models, aka what happens after users submit prompts. As you might expect, thecompany toutssome impressive performance specs for these new TPUs compared to the previous generations: up to 3x faster AI model training, 80% better performance per dollar, and the ability to get 1 million+ TPUs to work together in a single cluster. The upshot should be a lot more compute for a lot less energy — and cost to customers — than previous versions. It calls these chips TPUs, not GPUs, because its custom low-power chips were originally named Tensor. But Google’s chips are not a full frontal assault on Nvidia’s future, at least not yet. Like the other giant cloud providers, including Microsoftand Amazon, Google is using these chips to supplement the Nvidia-based systems it offers in its infrastructure. It is not flat-out replacing Nvidia. In fact, Google promises its cloud will have Nvidia’s latest chip, Vera Rubin, available later this year. One day the hyperscalers building their own AI chips (which includes Amazon, Microsoft, and Google) may grow to need Nvidia less, as enterprises move their AI needs to their clouds and port their apps to these chips. Still, as things stand today, it’s not profitable to bet against Nvidia. As notable chip market analystPatrick Moorhead jokingly posted on X, he had predicted that Google’s TPU could be bad news for Nvidia (and Intel) back in 2016 when the search giant launched its first one. Nvidia is now a nearly $5 trillion market cap company, meaning that prediction didn’t exactly hold up to the test of time. If all goes according to Nvidia’s plan, Google’s growth as an AI cloud provider would result in more business for the chip maker not less, even if many a workload runs on Google’s chips. In fact, Google also says it has agreed to work with Nvidia to engineer computer networking that allows Nvidia-based systems to perform even more efficiently in its cloud. In particular, the two tech giants are working to beef up the software-based networking tech called Falcon,which Google created and open sourced in 2023under the godfather of all open source data center hardware organizations, theOpen Compute Project.
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