Latest AI News
Former Infosys chief has a new startup that wants to challenge the IT services world
For decades, IT services firms made billions of dollars by allowing companies to outsource tech tasks like customizing, integrating, and maintaining enterprise software. Vishal Sikka, former CEO of Infosys, one of the largest such firms in India, is now betting that AI can do much of that work instead. His new startup,Hang Ten Systems, has raised a $32 million seed round led by Mayfield,it said Wednesday, with a strategic investment from Aramco Ventures and participation from angel investors. The startup, whose board includes Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, said it helps enterprises continuously build, modify, and operate software using AI-driven development and automation. Hang Ten enters a market where IT services firms, including Infosys, are racing to adapt to AI through partnerships with companies likeAnthropicandOpenAI. The startup’s launch comes amid a growing debate over whether AI will expand the industry’s addressable market or fundamentally alter how enterprise software is built, maintained, and delivered. Clearly, some enterprises are eager to try the AI-services idea, especially from someone as experienced as Sikka, who spent 12 years building enterprise software at SAP, and later as a board member for Oracle. Mayfield Managing Partner Navin Chaddha told TechCrunch that the company “just got started a month back” and already has customers. The startup said it is working with customers including Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy and Fresenius on AI-native project delivery. In a separateblog postannouncing the venture, Sikka, 59, said Hang Ten was already helping large enterprises “hang ten on the biggest wave of our lifetimes.” Headquartered in the Bay Area, Hang Ten told TechCrunch that it is hiring across delivery, engineering, sales, and leadership and plans to expand across multiple locations globally to meet enterprise demand. The early crew at the startup includes executives who have worked with Sikka for years across SAP, Infosys and his previous enterprise AI startup,VianAI, according to their LinkedIn profiles. Among them are co-founders Navin Budhiraja, the startup’s CTO, Sanjay Rajagopalan, its chief design officer, and Tao Liu, its senior vice president of forward deployed engineering. After stepping down as Infosys’ chief executive in 2017, Sikka founded VianAI, which emerged from stealth in 2019 with$50 million in seed fundingandlater raised $140 millionin a 2021 round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. Chaddha told TechCrunch Hang Ten is distinct from VianAI, describing Sikka’s earlier venture as focused on a different market. VianAI focused on enterprise AI applications and analytics tools designed to help businesses use artificial intelligence in decision-making. Hang Ten, by contrast, describes itself as an enterprise AI services company built around agentic code generation, reusable AI skills, and domain expertise. Mayfield backed Hang Ten because of Sikka’s career experience, as well as its belief that the startup’s AI-native model can scale differently from traditional services firms. “Traditional services scale linearly with headcount,” Mayfield said. “Hang Ten is built so its leverage grows with every project.” Hang Ten emerges as investors debate how AI will affect the economics of the IT services industry. Analysts at Jefferiesarguedearlier this year that IT services may be among the first sectors to face meaningful AI disruption. Infosys chairman Nandan Nilekani, however, this weeksaidAI could expand the industry’s addressable market. Infosys itself has sought to position AI as an opportunity rather than a threat, telling investors this month that “AI-first services” couldrepresent a $300 billion-$400 billion marketby 2030. The debate comes as investors reassess the outlook for traditional IT services firms, with Infosys shares down over 35% this year.
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Europe is pushing back on Washington’s chip war
Dutch Trade Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma visited Washington this week to meet with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and members of Congress to oppose theMATCH Act, a bill that would bar Chinese chipmakers from accessing Western semiconductor equipment, and one that would hit ASML especially hard. ASML, based in the Netherlands, is Europe’s most valuable company and the only maker in the world of the sophisticated lithography machines that are used to make cutting-edge AI chips. “It’s exceptional that I’m coming here to broadly outline our concerns to Congress,” Sjoerdsmatold Bloombergafter the meetings. “The stakes for the Netherlands may be very high.” China accounts for 19% of ASML’s net system sales. The MATCH Act would go further than existing controls, extending curbs to ASML’s deep ultraviolet immersion machines on top of the long-standing ban on its most advanced extreme ultraviolet, or EUV, tools reaching China. As ASML CEO Christophe Fouquettold TechCrunchin May, what China can currently buy are older-generation deep ultraviolet tools — gear first shipped about a decade ago — the same machines the MATCH Act would now relegate off limits. The bill, introduced in April, hasn’t yet faced a full House or Senate vote; Bloomberg notes it would likely need to be folded into a larger package to pass.
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Companies are scrambling to stop employees from maxing out AI budgets with small tasks
The era oftokenmaxxingis over. After the AI industryencouraged companiesto max out their AI budgets earlier this year, and some companieseven built employee leaderboards to encourage internal AI usage— they are now realizing just how easy it is to spend huge sums of money on AI and get little in return. We now appear to be entering the era of token rationing. Recent news has been rife with stories aboutAI cutbacksand now 404 Mediareports thatconsulting firm Accenture has been attempting to stop its employees from depleting its token reserves by using AI to do basic tasks — like converting PDFs into presentation slides. The cutbacks take place not long after Accenture threatened that employees would “risk losing out on promotions” if they didn’t use AI, 404 writes. 404’s reporting is based on leaked audio from a recent internal meeting involving Accenture’s agentic AI strategy lead, Justice Kwak. “We’re hitting this inflection point where AI is becoming material to the cost structure,” Kwak says. “Spend is becoming very unpredictable; and leadership, especially at the CFO, COO, and CIO level, are still asking the question of whether they’re getting value from what we’re spending on in the context of AI.” The cost of tokens has thrown into doubt the AI business model — as evidenced by what’s being called the “AI selloff” which has battered some AI-dependent businesses the last few days, especially memory chip makers. The AI industry has reached the stage where it can’t just be exciting and new anymore. It has to prove its worth.
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The memory chip crunch is paying off for this US company
The AI boom has fueled dozens of new startups and minted a new class of billionaires. It has also produced a serious shortage of memory chips — a critical component for compute-hungry AI models — which some predict could persistthrough 2027. This era ofRAMageddonisn’t just a corporate problem. As demand spikes and squeezes supply, prices are rising and trickling down to consumers. Apple CEO Tim Cook warned just a week ago thatprice increasesfor its products are unavoidable. But amid this Mad Max-esque fight for memory chips, some companies are coming out ahead. Micron, the largest U.S. computer-memory chip maker — with a market cap of $1.2 trillion — is one of them. That hasn’t always been the case. The company’s shares were trading around $83 in early 2024 (with a market cap of about $91 billion) and closed today at $1,048.51. The company reportedthird-quarter earningsafter markets closed Wednesday, and the results sent shares soaring more than 13%. Revenue quadrupled to $41.45 billion compared with the same period a year ago. The company’s profit, meanwhile, rose from $1.88 billion to an incredible $28.2 billion year-over-year. The Idaho-based company also gave investors a positive outlook, forecasting fourth-quarter revenue of between $49 billion and $51 billion. The strong results arrive the same week Microninked a dealto supply AI lab Anthropic with memory and storage chips. Micron also disclosed that it participated in Anthropic’s Series H funding round, though it didn’t disclose how much it invested.
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AI researchers continue to leave Google for its rivals
Top AI researchers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel are leaving Google for Anthropic, according toBloomberg. Per the report, Adler and Pritzel played key roles in the development of Google’s Gemini model. TechCrunch reached out to Google for comment. These departures are part of a concerning trend for Google. Last week, legendary AI researcherNoam Shazeerannouncedthat he wasleaving Googlefor OpenAI. Shazeer had been at Google since 2000, save for the three years he spent building hiscontroversialchatbot startup, Character.AI (which Google effectively acqui-hired for $2.7 billion, in part to bring Shazeer back to work on Gemini). Just days after Shazeer made his announcement, Google DeepMind directorJohn Jumpersaid he was leaving Google for Anthropic. Alongside DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, Jumper won the 2024Nobel Prize in Chemistryfor his work on AlphaFold, which can predict 3D protein structures from animo acid sequences. As OpenAI and Anthropicprepare to go public, this trend could continue — it’s a great time for the companies to recruit top AI talent with a promise of equity.
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AI was supposed to kill engineering jobs, but new data suggests they’re the most resilient
Whether AI is already replacing jobs is the subject of fierce debate. Tech layoffs hit theirhighest single monthtotal in years in May, and AI was the most-cited reason, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Software engineering, in theory, is the professional field most vulnerable to automation, given the rapid adoption of AI-powered coding tools. However, researchers at venture firm SignalFire say the hiring data tells a different story. “The rationale given for lots of layoffs is consistently AI, and specifically they’ll say AI with respect to code; they’ll say one engineer could do the job of however many engineers in the past,” said Asher Bantock, SignalFire’s head of research. “What we’re seeing on the ground is a little inconsistent with that.” SignalFire’s analysis, which tracked the careers of millions of employees across more than 80 million companies, suggests that engineering was the most resilient job function in 2025. Instead of focusing on layoffs, which are difficult to track because people often delay updating their employment status after job cuts, SignalFire examined hiring data as a more accurate indicator of real-time workforce trends. While total hiring across large tech companies dropped 25% compared to 2019 levels, engineering roles saw a much smaller decline of just 11%, according to SignalFire’s latest “State of Talent Report.” In fact, engineers comprised 55% of all new hires in 2025 across the 12 companies SignalFire classifies as “Tech Majors” — Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia, Tesla, Uber, Airbnb, Block, and Stripe. This is a significant jump from 2019, when engineers represented only 46% of new recruits, according to the report. The continued need for engineers was even more evident at early-stage startups, which collectively brought on 7% more engineers in 2025 than they did in 2019, SignalFire’s data shows. If AI were truly substituting for engineering talent, Bantock argued, engineering hiring would be the first to fall amid the current tech hiring contraction. Instead, SignalFire’s data shows that engineering headcount is growing faster than most other job functions in tech. While Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned last year that AI couldwipe out halfof all entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment as high as 20% within five years, the company’s own head of economics, Peter McCrory,told TechCrunchin March that he had not yet seen any significant AI-driven effects on the workforce. Said McCrory at the time: “There’s at least no larger material difference in unemployment rates” between workers who use Claude for the “most central task of their job in automated ways” — like technical writers, data entry clerks, and software engineers — and workers in jobs less exposed to AI that require “physical interaction and dexterity with the real world.” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang went further still, outright rejecting the theory that AI will replace engineers. “Somebody said that AI is going to destroy all of the software engineering jobs,” Huang said in aninterviewat the Stanford Graduate School of Business in April. He then argued the opposite is true. Now that all engineers at Nvidia are using agentic AI, “software engineers are busier than ever,” he said. Huang added that while agents are writing code near instantaneously, they are constantly pushing engineers to generate “the next idea.” For now at least, it seems that armed with AI, engineering has become a classic example of the Jevons paradox — the idea that greater efficiency doesn’t reduce demand for a resource; it increases it, because the work expands to fill the new capacity. As Bantock said of engineering talent in this moment: “They’re suddenly a lot more productive, and there’s endless work for them to do.”
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OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom
On Wednesday, OpenAIunveiledits first custom-built inference processor, designed and manufactured in collaboration with Broadcom. Named Jalapeño, the new processor was designed specifically for the unique needs of OpenAI’s inference systems. OpenAI’s own AI models assisted in the development of the chip, the company said. While the chip is still being tested, OpenAI says early results show significantly better performance-per-watt than current state-of-the-art alternatives. The partnership wasofficially announced in October, but OpenAI’s chip plans havelong been rumoredas a way to reduce the company’s dependence on Nvidia’s GPUs.GoogleandAmazonhave both built custom chips to serve a similar purpose, often called “AI accelerators” — silicon designed specifically to speed up machine learning workloads. OpenAI president Greg Brockman explained the company’s approach to chip developmenton its in-house podcast, shortly after the Broadcom partnership was announced. “We have a deep understanding of the workload,” Brockman said in the episode. “We’ve really been looking for specific workloads that are underserved, [and asking] how can we build something that will be able to accelerate what’s possible?” Jalapeño is specifically designed for inference, the process of running pre-built AI models in response to user commands. In the announcement, OpenAI emphasized the chip’s low operating cost when running real-time coding models. It’s likely that more performance-intensive tasks like pre-training will still rely on Nvidia hardware, but even small reductions in inference costs could do a lot to improve the company’s bottom line. Optimizing that inference system may prove to be a crucial factor in the economics of AI going forward — and it’s likely to take place at every level of the stack. OpenAI is already building agentic products like Codex and the models that power them, as well as data centers to run those models. Moving into purpose-built chips lets the company go even further in that process, as the company explained in its announcement. “OpenAI is not only developing frontier models or building products on top of them; it is designing the infrastructure underneath them: chip architecture, kernels, memory systems, networking, scheduling, deployment systems, and product experience,” the company wrote. “Because OpenAI operates across the stack, each layer can be optimized around the same goal: making its models faster, more reliable, and more affordable for users.”
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Figma adds code layers, support for animations, more AI features in new update
Figma on Wednesday showed off an update that adds a new code layer, support for motion and shaders, and the ability to create custom plug-ins for various tasks using AI. The design platform has been working on bringing code integration into its tool for a while. Last year, it unveiled an AI prompt-based prototyping tool, Figma Make, and has since launched integrations withClaude Code and Codexto improve the hand-off between coding and design. The company is now adding code layers directly to the collaborative canvas, helping teams clone repositories and extract flows from code to design layers for testing. Figma’s chief product officer, Yuhki Yamashita, said code layers make it easier for designers, product managers, and programmers to iterate on ideas rather than focus on creating pristine code that goes into production. “We think the multiplayer canvas is really powerful because this is an environment where you don’t really care about the quality of the code. If you’re rapidly exploring or need to kind of explore a bunch of new directions, you can do that in this spatial way. We hope that this feature produces different behavior not just with designers, but also with engineers and PMs,” he said over a call. Figma now also supports animations, transitions, and 3D transforms. Previously, designers had to create animations in other software and convert it to code that the app could understand. Now designers can integrate animations and transitions directly into Figma. You can now use AI to create some of these assets, and the update is adding support for adding shader effects and fills using AI, too. Last year, Figmaacquired node-based tool Weavy, which helped designers run workflows through different models to compare outputs, and is now working to integrate the two apps better. In an update rolling out later in the year, users will be able to generate Weavy workflows directly within Figma. The company’s also adding new skills to makeits AI assistantmore useful with its collaborative canvas. Users can now write text prompts to create repeatable skills that AI agents can use. You can also connect tools like Notion, Granola, Excel, and GitHub, or attach files to give the AI bot more context about what you want it to do. The company is also adding a feature to help users create custom plug-ins, like layout generators or vector path tracers, with prompts.
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Agility Robotics plans to go public via SPAC in a $2.5B deal
Agility Robotics, the humanoid robotics startup that spun out of Oregon State University in 2015, plans to go public through a merger with special purpose acquisition company Churchill Capital Corp XI in a deal that values the company at roughly $2.5 billion. The transaction is expected to generate more than $620 million in proceeds, including about $200 million from a group of new and existing institutional investors,the company said. Agility is best known for Digit, a bipedal robot that is being used across nine customer sites, including with Schaeffler, GXO,Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, and Mercado Libre. The company has enjoyed backing from high-profile tech companies and funds like Amazon, Nvidia, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, DCVC. Now it plans to use the capital raised in the SPAC merger to increase production capacity of its next-generation Digit v5, fulfill existing orders, and expand to new and existing customers. The company said it has secured more than $300 million in multi-year orders for the new model and a pipeline of more than 30 potential customers evaluating large-scale deployments. “Humanoid robots are poised to become a critical driver of productivity, supply chain resilience, and American technology leadership,” Agility CEO Peggy Johnson said in a statement. “With commercially deployed humanoids already operating in customer environments today, Agility is helping enterprises address labor shortages, improve efficiency, and safely integrate AI-powered automation into their operations.” The combined company is expected to trade under the ticker symbol AGLT on a North American stock exchange that has not yet been announced.
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Facebook rolls out an AI companion app for creators
Facebookannouncedon Wednesday that it’s reimagining its Creator Studio tool as a stand-alone AI companion app designed to help creators grow their audiences on the social network. By giving creators access to this AI companion app, Meta is looking to keep creators active on Facebook as it competes for their attention against rivals like TikTok and YouTube. The company also likely hopes that the app will eliminate the need for creators to turn to third-party tools like ChatGPT when brainstorming content ideas and analyzing performance. Thenew app, which is currently being tested with select creators, will have Facebook’s recently launchedAI creator assistantbuilt into it. The assistant provides creators with personalized recommendations based on their content style, performance, audience engagement, and goals. Creators often have to sift through charts and dashboards to understand their performance, but with the AI assistant, they can get quick answers to questions like “When should I post?” and “What are people saying in my comments?” Since the AI assistant is conversational, they can also ask follow-up questions, like how their audience has shifted over time. Beyond the built-in AI assistant, the Creator Studio app will include a set of several new features, such as an AI-powered comment tool that will help surface the most important comments and draft replies in the creator’s own tone. Creators can edit and approve the drafted replies before posting them, Facebook says. When creators open the app each day, they will see a feed of daily priorities: reviewing their newest post’s performance, tracking progress toward goals, and flagging comments in need of a reply. Wednesday’s announcement adds to Meta’s recent wave of app launches. Last month, the company rolled out a stand-alone app for Facebook Groups calledForumthat functions similarly to Reddit. In April, Meta launched anew app called Instantsthat lets users share disappearing photos with Instagram friends. The pipeline keeps growing.The New York Timesreported on Tuesday that Meta isbuilding its own Polymarket-like app, internally called “Arena,” though it has yet to launch. The cadence is deliberate.The Wall Street Journalreported in April that CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees that AI-driven efficiencies would enable the company to build more apps than it has historically.
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Figma Unveils AI Agents and Code-Native Design Tools at Config 2026
Figma is repositioning its design canvas as a collaborative workspace for humans, code, and AI agents.
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OpenAI, Broadcom Unveil Custom Inference Chip Jalapeño for LLM Workloads
OpenAI claims Jalapeño went from design to manufacturing tape-out in nine months.
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