Author: GT

IBM on Monday said that it has acquired Seek AI, an AI platform that allows users to ask questions about enterprise data using natural language, for an undisclosed sum. Seek CEO and founder Sarah Nagy said that the startup’s technology will be a key part of Watsonx AI Labs, IBM’s new NYC-based AI accelerator, which IBM also announced today. “[W]e’ll scale our platform, deploy mission-critical solutions for IBM clients, empower the next generation of AI developers, and grow our team significantly,” Nagy wrote in a LinkedIn post. IBM’s acquisition of Seek comes as the former looks to grow its investments…

A cyclist rides past the Meta sign outside the headquarters of Facebook parent company Meta Platforms in Mountain View, California, on Nov. 9, 2022.Peter Dasilva | ReutersMeta has signed a 20-year agreement to buy nuclear power from Constellation Energy, continuing the wave of tech giants teaming up with the industry in order to meet the growing power needs of data centers.Beginning in June 2027, Meta will buy roughly 1.1 gigawatts of energy from Constellation’s Clinton Clean Energy Center in Illinois, which is the entire output from the site’s one nuclear reactor. The companies said the long-term agreement will support the…

SXSW had branding all around the neighbourhood of Shoreditch in London.Arjun Kharpal | CNBCSouth by Southwest (SXSW) may be a well-known event in the United States, but it certainly hasn’t reached the same level of recognition in Britain.”What’s that?” asked a pedestrian who was passing by a SXSW London sign.SXSW is a festival held in Austin, Texas, every year that brings together big names in music, film, art and technology. The organizers have brought the event to London for the first time this week, and CNBC took at look at what’s going on.CNBC’s Tania Bryer moderated a discussion with London…

Microsoft’s new sustainability report, released late last week, shows how a carbon-heavy economy can weigh on a company that wants to be carbon light. Since 2020, the company’s carbon emissions are up 23.4%, mostly a result of breakneck data center buildout to support its growing cloud and AI operations. Buying enough clean electricity is actually the easy part — it’s the facilities themselves that are laden with carbon-intensive materials and products, including steel, concrete, and computer chips. “We reflect the challenges the world must overcome to develop and use greener concrete, steel, fuels, and chips,” a Microsoft spokesperson told TechCrunch…

Chime, whose pending IPO is expected to be one of 2025’s blockbuster hits, issued a share price range on Monday of $24 to $26. That a market cap of up to $11.2 billion. At the midrange, the company will raise $800 million for itself and a handful of investors, including European VC powerhouse Cathay Innovation, who plan to sell some shares in the IPO. Even in these slow IPO times, this wouldn’t be the biggest IPO of 2025. CoreWeave, which raised $1.5 billion and was valued at $23 billion, holds that title. This, even though CoreWeave had hoped for far…

Updated 1:13 p.m. Pacific: A Salesforce spokesperson told TechCrunch that Moonhub has not, in fact, been acquired (by the company’s definition of the term). Rather, Moonhub is shutting down, and only some of the company’s team — not the whole team, as MoonHub implied in its post about the news — will be joining Salesforce. The original story follows. Salesforce has quietly snapped up Moonhub, a startup building AI to vet and hire talent. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. In a post on Moonhub’s website on Monday, the company said that its entire Menlo Park, California-based team will…

A platform for chatting and role-playing with AI-generated characters, Character.AI announced in a blog post on Monday that it is rolling out a slate of multimedia features. These features include AvatarFX, Character.AI’s video-generation model, plus Scenes and Streams, which allow users to create videos featuring their characters and then share them on a new social feed. “Character.AI started as 1:1 text chat and today we’re evolving to do so much more, inspired by what our users have told [us] they want to see on the platform,” the company wrote in the blog post. Character.AI began rolling out AvatarFX to subscribers…

The rebooted version of social site Digg aims to bring back the spirit of the old web at a time when AI-generated content is threatening to overwhelm traditional social media platforms, drowning out the voices of real people. This presents an opportunity to build a social site for the AI era, where the people who create content and manage online communities are given a bigger stake in a platform’s success, Digg’s founders think. A Web 2.0-era news aggregation giant, Digg was once valued at $175 million at its height back in 2008 and is now being given new life under…

The surge in data company acquisitions continued Monday with Snowflake’s purchase of Crunchy Data. Cloud data platform Snowflake announced its intent to acquire Crunchy Data, a Postgres database partner, late this afternoon. A source familiar with the matter estimated the deal to be worth around $250 million. The terms weren’t disclosed. Snowflake declined to comment on the deal’s valuation. It’s the latest in a string of tech giants buying data startups to bolster their underlying database offerings that power AI agents. Last week, Salesforce acquired decades-old Informatica to fortify its data management tooling for AI agents. A few weeks ago,…

Microsoft Bing announced Monday that it is introducing the Bing Video Creator to its app, which uses OpenAI’s Sora model to let users generate videos from text prompts. OpenAI, which has a long-standing partnership with Microsoft, has locked down access to Sora‘s video generation for paying customers only. Its integration in Microsoft Bing represents the first time that it will be available for free. Image Credits:Microsoft Bing At launch, Bing Video Creator is not yet available on desktop, and videos can take hours to generate, even when using the “fast” mode, which is supposed to take just a few minutes.…