Brett Adcock’s AI hardware startup Hark raises $700m at $6bn valuation
Brett Adcock’s AI hardware startup Hark raises $700m at $6bn valuation

Two months out of stealth, the founder of Figure and Archer has a chip-and-model stack and a chip-and-model-stack-sized cheque to match. Hark, the AI hardware company that Brett Adcock began funding out of his own pocket late last year, has raised more…

Spotify and Universal sign licensing deal for AI covers and remixes
Spotify and Universal sign licensing deal for AI covers and remixes

Premium subscribers will be able to generate AI versions of songs by participating UMG artists. The financial terms were not disclosed. Spotify and Universal Music Group have signed licensing agreements that will let premium subscribers generate AI cov…

Anthropic to open a Milan office, lining the Italy push up behind a Vatican-led repositioning
Anthropic to open a Milan office, lining the Italy push up behind a Vatican-led repositioning

EMEA is already Anthropic’s fastest-growing region, with run-rate revenue up roughly 9x and large-business accounts up 10x year-on-year. The Milan office is the commercial operationalisation of an Italy strategy the company has been seeding politically…

Grok’s federal stall is undercutting SpaceX’s IPO growth story
Grok’s federal stall is undercutting SpaceX’s IPO growth story

Downloads have fallen from 20m in January to 8.3m in April, paid conversion is a fifth of ChatGPT’s, the $0.42-per-agency GSA deal is now stalled, and SpaceX has rented out the Memphis Colossus 1 cluster to Anthropic for $1.25bn a month. SpaceX’s S-1 f…

Trump administration moves to underwrite US AI exports with billions in EXIM financing
Trump administration moves to underwrite US AI exports with billions in EXIM financing

EXIM has more than $100bn of unused statutory lending capacity that the White House wants channelled into US-built, full-stack AI export packages, with the Commerce Department running a public solicitation for industry-led consortia. The Trump administ…

Samsung chip workers offered a $340,000 average bonus as union pushes toward $1m and an 18-day strike
Samsung chip workers offered a $340,000 average bonus as union pushes toward $1m and an 18-day strike

Leaked transcripts show memory-line staff offered up to 607% bonuses worth $477,000, while logic-chip employees get as little as 50%. The 45,000-person walkout, if it lands, would be the largest in semiconductor-industry history. Samsung Electronics wi…

Starling’s FY26 profit dips again as the neobank provisions for more credit losses
Starling’s FY26 profit dips again as the neobank provisions for more credit losses

The Goldman-backed UK challenger has booked a second consecutive annual decline as it takes additional expected-credit-loss provisions, on top of the FY25 fallout from the BBLS Covid-loan compliance issue and the FCA’s £29m anti-money-laundering fine. …

Manus eyes $1bn raise to buy itself out of Meta acquisition after Chinese block
Manus eyes $1bn raise to buy itself out of Meta acquisition after Chinese block

Beijing has ordered the Singapore-via-China agentic AI startup to reverse Meta’s $2bn-plus December acquisition. Manus’s response, on Bloomberg’s reporting, is to raise the capital required to buy itself back out. Manus AI, the Singapore-headquartered …

China blocks NVIDIA’s RTX 5090D V2 imports while Jensen Huang was in Beijing
China blocks NVIDIA’s RTX 5090D V2 imports while Jensen Huang was in Beijing

The ban on the China-only Blackwell card landed during the Trump delegation’s state visit, on which the Nvidia CEO was a late addition. Chinese AI buyers had been using the 5090D V2 as a workaround for the H200 procurement vacuum. China stopped grantin…

SpaceX files S-1, opening the path to what would be the largest IPO in history
SpaceX files S-1, opening the path to what would be the largest IPO in history

The prospectus shows $18.7bn of 2025 revenue, a $4.27bn Q1 net loss, an accumulated deficit of $41.3bn, and a balance sheet that includes 18,712 bitcoin worth $1.29bn at quarter-end. SpaceX will list on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. SpaceX has filed it…