Amazon and Microsoft are plowing billions of dollars of AI funding into India, with the e-retail giant pledging to spend $35 billion there by 2030, and Microsoft earmarking $17.5 billion over four years to develop the AI frontier and integrate the technology “at population scale.” The funds are expected to encourage AI-powered digitization, cloud growth, increased exports and new job creation — all national priorities for the South Asian territory. Amazon has already invested nearly $40 billion in India, which is emerging as a global AI and cloud hub. The new investment is Microsoft’s biggest yet in Asia and follows a $3 billion India commitment announced earlier this year. Continue reading India Attracts $52B in AI Investments from Amazon, Microsoft

Meta Platforms has acquired AI wearables firm Limitless, a five-year-old startup based in Denver. Limitless’ key product is an AI-powered pendant that records audio and generates summaries. “We’re excited that Limitless will be joining Meta to help accelerate our work to build AI-enabled wearables,” Meta said via a statement. Meta has had success in the wearables space with its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which feature a Meta AI digital assistant. Meta’s further push into AI devices that consumers can use casually in everyday situations comes as the company reportedly considers downsizing its metaverse investments. Continue reading Meta Platforms Acquires Limitless, a Startup in AI Wearables

Anthropic continues to close major deals as it reportedly moves toward an IPO, possibly coming as soon as Q1 (although Sasha de Marigny, the company’s chief communications officer, said there are no immediate plans to go public). The Amazon-funded AI startup’s latest contract provides its Claude models to cloud software firm Snowflake in a $200 million multiyear deal. Snowflake’s AI agents will use Claude to help businesses handle complex data analysis. As for the IPO, Financial Times reports Anthropic is working with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati — a law firm whose CV includes IPOs for Google, LinkedIn and Lyft — and may be in a race with OpenAI to see who can be first to offer its shares publicly. Continue reading Anthropic Secures $200M Snowflake Deal as IPO Talk Builds

Amazon’s Trainium3 accelerator chip — the company’s first AI silicon built on 3nm technology — is now in general release. It comes to market with the Trainium3 UltraServer, a high-density integrated system purpose-built for large-scale GenAI model training. Trn3 UltraServers can scale to 144 Trainium3 chips, delivering up to 362 FP8 PFLOPs. The Trn3 chips are viewed as challengers to Nvidia’s AI GPUs and Google’s Tensor TPUs. But Amazon also announced it will provide enterprises with turnkey AWS AI Factories that utilize key Nvidia components and support its AI chips, allowing customers to choose or combine brands. Continue reading Amazon Rolls Out New AI Chips, UltraServers and AI Factories

AI agents that can work for days on end without human direction and new Nova 2 models were the big announcements on day two of AWS re:Invent, where Amazon also introduced Nova Forge, a service that lets companies build their own models. The autonomous agents include Kiro for software development, the AWS Security Agent to protect against cyber threats and the AWS DevOps Agent, which monitors and improves the performance of applications across AWS, multi-cloud and hybrid environments. Amazon explains they are part of a new class of “frontier agents” that are autonomous, can operate for hours or days without requiring intervention, and are scalable. Continue reading AWS Frontier Agents Can Work for Days Without Human Help

Google has signed on to provide collaborative multi-cloud networking with Amazon using its new “AWS Interconnect – multicloud,” now in preview. Amazon says the new collaboration will simplify multi-cloud networking via managed, private, on-demand access to cross-cloud connectivity. The jointly engineered solution leverages Google’s Cross-Cloud Interconnect technology. The idea is “to enable customers to easily build enterprise-grade applications that span both Google Cloud and AWS environments,” Amazon explains, pointing out that the adoption of multi-cloud applications is rapidly accelerating, driven at least in part by the rise in use of AI. Continue reading Amazon and Google Team on High-Speed Multi-Cloud Service

Amazon has added agentic AI capabilities to Amazon Connect, the neural text-to-speech tool that provides AI-powered customer service support and analytics in real time. Connect is capable of neural text-to-speech in more than 30 languages and also delivers automated speech recognition. Leveraging advanced speech models from Nova Sonic, the Connect agents “deliver natural, human-like conversations, responding with the right pace, tone, and understanding across multiple languages and accents,” Amazon says. The company has also integrated third-party automated speech recognition and text-to-speech solutions from Deepgram and ElevenLabs with Connect. Continue reading Amazon Adds Agentic AI to ‘Connect’ Customer Service Tool

Amazon Web Services is marking its entry into the lucrative business of providing the U.S. government with artificial intelligence and high-performance computing services via purpose-built infrastructure for which it has committed up to $50 billion in construction and equipment. The investment “will add nearly 1.3 GW of compute capacity across AWS Top Secret, AWS Secret, and AWS GovCloud (U.S.) across all classification levels,” Amazon says, adding that the commitment “expands access to AWS’s trusted infrastructure” and advances America’s AI leadership and enables U.S. agencies “to accelerate discovery and decision-making.” Continue reading AWS Earmarking $50 Billion for Government AI Infrastructure

Amazon is playing catch-up to Elon Musk’s Starlink with its satellite-based Internet service Leo, the rebrand of Project Kuiper. Leo is previewing a gigabit-speed “Ultra” antenna for business customers. Amazon claims that Leo Ultra is “the fastest customer terminal in production,” with download speeds of up to 1 Gbps and upload speeds that max at 400 Mbps. Amazon Leo has “more than 150 satellites in orbit” with “initial network testing underway” and plans to have a total of 3,000 satellites. Because it’s satellite rather than terrestrially based, Leo is accessible in areas without reliable connectivity, anywhere on the globe. Continue reading Amazon Leo Ultra High-Speed Satellite Internet Is in Preview

Amazon Prime is providing viewers with Video Recaps, AI-powered highlight rewinds to bring them quickly up to date on seasonal episodes they may have missed for their favorite shows. Amazon is touting the new feature as a “first-of-its-kind application of generative AI,” thought it does follow the X-Ray Recaps — spoiler free text summaries Amazon AI began providing last year. Prime Video Recaps are now available in beta for select English-language Prime Original series in the U.S. It is likely Amazon will eventually extend the Recaps to premium licensed shows, too, if it can work out rights issues. Continue reading Amazon Prime Introduces GenAI ‘Video Recaps’ for TV Series

Determined not to be left behind in the race to own the future of AI-assisted online shopping — which has everyone from Walmart, Amazon and OpenAI to TikTok scrambling for digital shelf-space — Google is adding conversational shopping in Google Search. The new shopping features, accessible in AI Mode powered by Gemini, include agentic checkout and the ability to “Let Google Call” local stores to ask about product availability. “Say goodbye to endless filter clicks and picking perfect keywords” and hello to chatting with your search agent like you’re shopping with a friend, Google says, “just in time for this holiday season.” Continue reading Google AI Shopping Adds Chat Search and Agentic Checkout

AMC Networks launched a new streaming service called All Reality yesterday, featuring 2,500 hours of reality television from We TV and other AMC brands. The service is initially being offered as an add-on to Prime Video for $4.99 per month. Available series include “Love After Lockup,” “The Braxtons,” and “The Graham Norton Show,” while an updated version of “Bridezillas” will be the first original series. According to AMC, additional content will be introduced and the service will join more platforms in the near future. All Reality joins AMC’s other targeted streamers including AMC+ (scripted dramas), Acorn TV (international mysteries), Shudder (horror) and HIDIVE (anime). Continue reading AMC Launches ‘All Reality’ Streamer with Unscripted Content

San Francisco-based AI startup Anthropic, founded in 2021, announced plans to invest $50 billion in U.S. computing infrastructure, starting with the creation of data centers with Fluidstack in Texas and New York (with additional plans for future sites). Fluidstack builds and operates high-performance GPU clusters for researchers and AI teams. The new project with Anthropic is expected to create 800 permanent jobs and about 2,400 construction jobs. Sites are scheduled to come online throughout next year. “These facilities are custom built for Anthropic with a focus on maximizing efficiency for our workloads, enabling continued research and development at the frontier,” according to Anthropic. Continue reading Anthropic Plans to Invest $50 Billion in AI Data Centers in U.S.

A year after launching its ultra-low-price digital shopping destination Haul as a tab on its website and app, e-commerce giant Amazon is launching a standalone app called Amazon Bazaar that sells the same inventory. The Amazon Bazaar standalone will initially bow in 14 additional territories, bringing the total availability of the company’s ultra-low-priced inventory to 25. Haul sells a wide range of fashion, home goods, and lifestyle products, most priced under $10, and some as low as $2. The app has helped Amazon compete with Chinese bargain sites Shein, Temu and TikTok Shop. Continue reading Low-Price Retail App Amazon Bazaar Launches in 14 Regions

Samsung has begun rolling out conversational AI in several languages for its 2025 TVs using Vision AI Companion, a generative AI-based version of the company’s smartphone virtual assistant Bixby. The move, announced in September, lets viewers ask questions about what’s onscreen — or any topic — and receive customized recommendations or help managing tasks using natural two-way dialogue. Samsung describes the experience as interactive viewing that brings a visual element to query sessions and says it turns the TV into a connected community hub for the household powered by models from Perplexity and Microsoft. Continue reading Samsung Debuts Conversational Vision AI Companion on TVs