Microsoft pledged to invest US$17.5 billion on artificial intelligence and cloud computing in India over four years, targeting the world’s most populous nation to help fuel its growth. Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella made the announcement Tuesday after meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi, ahead of a tour through the country. Microsoft said the investment will focus on three pillars – scale, skills and sovereignty – which align with Modi’s goal of building a broad...

OpenAI said Tuesday it has picked Slack CEO Denise Dresser as its first chief of revenue, a message to wary investors that the ChatGPT maker is serious about making a profit from its artificial intelligence technology. OpenAI said Dresser will oversee global revenue strategy and “help more businesses put AI to work in their day-to-day operations”. Dresser had already spent more than a decade at Salesforce when the software pioneer announced in 2020 it was buying work-chatting service Slack for...

Alibaba Group Holding said on Tuesday that it will set up a new division to push the consumer use of artificial intelligence applications based on its Qwen family of large language models. The new business unit, Qwen Consumer Business Group, led by Alibaba vice-president Wu Jia, will oversee the Qwen chatbot app, the Quark AI assistant and cloud drive, AI hardware products, the UC Browser and the online reading platform Shuqi. The move marked a significant organisational change at Alibaba to...

China’s artificial intelligence developers are expected to welcome Washington’s go-ahead for Nvidia to ship its H200 AI chips to approved customers on the mainland, according to analysts, even as Beijing continues to drive the country’s tech self-sufficiency efforts. In a post on his Truth Social platform on Monday, US President Donald Trump said he had informed his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, of that decision “under conditions that allow for continued strong national security”. Xi had...

Chinese social media and gaming giant Tencent Holdings has pulled out of US media group Paramount Skydance Corp’s takeover bid for Warner Bros Discovery to avoid heightened scrutiny of foreign investment in the United States, according to a filing on the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s website. Tencent had pledged US$1 billion as part of Paramount’s December 1 proposal to acquire Warner Bros, but the Shenzhen-based company was removed as a financing partner in Paramount’s latest all-cash...

Ant International, the Singapore-based affiliate of Chinese fintech giant Ant Group, has named US basketball star Sabrina Ionescu as its global brand ambassador in a fresh partnership between sports and tech. The four-time all-star in the US Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) was chosen as part of an effort to expand access to financial tools via innovative technology, the digital payments provider said on Tuesday. The 28-year-old point guard – an Olympic gold medallist and the top...

Chinese entrepreneur Liang Wenfeng, the founder and CEO of DeepSeek, appears to have made a big score from the initial public offering of chip designer Moore Threads Technology, whose shares surged more than fivefold in its trading debut in Shanghai. High-Flyer Quantitative Fund, a hedge fund co-founded by Liang, had subscribed to a total of 82,244 shares of Moore Threads, at 114.28 yuan per share, via two entities: Zhejiang High-Flyer Asset Management and Ningbo High-Flyer Quant Investment...