News — 2026-11-12

London-based chip designer Fractile has raised $720 million in a Series C round, valuing the four-year-old company at $7 billion, according to the Financial Times. The funding, led by Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Lightspeed and Redpoint, backs a bet that memory bandwidth, not raw computing power, is the main limit on AI performance. Fractile has not yet released a commercial product, and its first chip is planned for next year. The round is one of the largest for a British AI hardware startup and comes as the company faces a crowded field that includes Nvidia, Etched and MatX. Read more

A developer has built a sensor network and data platform that lets AI agents run a two-square-metre vegetable garden. Eight soil probes, a weather station and a security camera feed a lakehouse of Apache Iceberg tables, and a hosted agent reviews the data each morning before deciding whether to change the watering schedule. The agent makes changes through an old Android phone that operates the irrigation controller's official app. The setup costs about €300 in sensors and stores more than four million readings, but the developer says guardrails for the watering system are not yet built into the hardware and the data remains private. Read more

Google has released the Gemini Decisions API, a new endpoint that lets developers get fast, structured answers to bounded questions such as tool selection, policy checks, model routing and context grading. The API runs on a new model, Gemini Decision 1, which scores candidate options in a single pass instead of generating text token by token. Google says it returns results in 150 to 250 milliseconds end to end, charges $0.10 per million input tokens and bills no output tokens. The API is available now through the Gemini API in Google AI Studio, and Google says several of its own products already use it. Read more

A developer has released TinyGPT Visualizer, an open-source tool that lets people watch the inner workings of a small large language model on screen. The project is aimed at anyone who wants to try interpretability techniques firsthand rather than just read about them. The release comes as researchers study what happens inside AI models, a field that has grown from a handful of researchers in 2021 to hundreds of active contributors. Interest in the question has also reached beyond computer science, after Anthropic held a conference last April with religious scholars and philosophical thinkers to discuss the nature of the soul in its Claude models. Read more

Ring confirmed its Drone Cam, a home security camera drone set to launch in January, will fly only on its own. The drone uses an “AI Pilot” system to follow preprogrammed routes and avoid obstacles, with no option for customers to pilot it manually. The decision follows a demonstration for CBS News in which the drone crashed twice while a reporter was flying it by hand. Ring said the first crash involved a collision avoidance malfunction and that the second happened after the drone lost internet connectivity, which it relies on to fly autonomously. Read more

SE3, a Munich startup building spatial intelligence software for autonomous systems, has raised a $30 million Series A led by Accel. Keen, Lakestar, and Seedcamp also participated. The round comes five months after the company emerged from stealth with a €5.5 million seed. SE3's software links drones and ground vehicles from different manufacturers into a shared 3D picture of the battlefield or terrain, and it already operates in Ukraine and with Germany's Bundeswehr. The company plans to use the new capital for hiring, a UK office, and a deeper presence in Germany and Ukraine. Read more

SoftBank Group swung to a net loss of about $7.1 billion in the July to September quarter, driven largely by a $3.7 billion writedown on power equipment for U.S. AI data centers. The company had paid turbine makers deposits to secure orders in advance, then changed its plans and found that much of that money was effectively lost. The results cast doubt on Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son's bet that his investment firm could corner a large share of the natural gas market as AI companies seek power. Even so, SoftBank continues to spend heavily on AI projects, and analysts are focused on rising borrowing costs. Read more

Pomerado, a startup from the YC F26 batch, has launched a self-serve platform that converts any website into a deterministic API that AI agents can call through the Model Context Protocol. Founders Alan and Akshay, both former McKinsey and Scale AI staffers, say the tool lets developers build integrations for sites they do not own, including airline, banking, and government portals that have no API. Developers describe their workflow in plain language, and the platform produces a working integration in less than an hour. The company says the resulting tools return results in 5 to 30 seconds, far faster than browser-based computer use. The project is available as open-source software under the MIT license and as a free hosted service. Read more

A writer who describes themselves as a non-archaeologist says a team of AI agents scanned publicly available lidar data covering about 1,200 square kilometers of jungle in the Maya region and flagged a hilltop with what appeared to be a plaza, a pyramid and a raised courtyard. Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History said its records held no registered site at the location. The author later learned that archaeologists had already mapped the site in a 2025 study. The agents had missed that study during their literature search, so they rediscovered the site rather than discovered it. The episode shows how quickly AI tools can produce plausible leads, and where those leads can fall short. Read more

Samsung, Warby Parker and Gentle Monster have released smart glasses powered by Google's Gemini AI and the Android XR platform, and Google is positioning them as a privacy-first alternative to Meta's dominant glasses. Hands-on testing found the glasses handle live translation well and automatically blur faces and bystander audio. Preorders open now, with shipments expected to begin December 10. Warby Parker models start at $395 and Gentle Monster models at $449. Read more

SpaceX plans to spend $74 billion on two artificial intelligence computing sites: a $50 billion campus in Cochise County, Arizona, and a $24 billion site near its Starbase headquarters in Texas. The company announced the plans on its website, months after selling bonds to fund its AI buildout. The Texas site will include a gas-fired power plant that SpaceX will build, own and run. The spending reflects a sharp shift for the company, whose AI unit now out-earns Starlink and rents computing power to firms including Anthropic and Google. Local residents in Arizona have voiced concerns over water, power bills and wildlife. Read more

Norwest, a multi-stage investment firm backed solely by Wells Fargo, has raised a $4 billion fund and plans to put more of it into artificial intelligence. The 65-year-old firm says the fund is its eighteenth and largest to date. Norwest will invest across sectors and countries, including the United States, India, and Israel, and aims to back AI startups in consumer, healthcare, and technology. The firm says it will keep expanding into physical AI, voice AI, agentic cybersecurity, and aerospace. Its portfolio already includes Plaid, Spotify, Uber, and Vuori. Read more

ByteDance is preparing an AI assistant that could be unveiled in the coming weeks, positioning the TikTok parent against Meta's Muse, according to Bloomberg. The report says the agent will serve a similar role to Muse, which has more than 10 million users. The report does not say what the agent will be called or how it will work, and ByteDance did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The launch would be part of the company's broader effort to compete with leading AI companies, a push its cofounder has said could take years to pay off. Read more

Google has added its Gemini app directly to Apple CarPlay, letting iPhone users talk with the chatbot hands-free from their car's display. The company also opened preorders for its first Gemini smart glasses, made with Samsung and the eyewear brands Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. The nine styles cost $395 to $489 and ship December 10. Google is stressing privacy features as it competes with Meta, which dominates the AI glasses market. Read more

Organizations have spent heavily on artificial intelligence, but many leaders still can’t point to a clear return. A survey of more than 800 workplace learning professionals in over 25 countries suggests the problem goes beyond training. Most teams say AI has sped up content creation, but only 11% report improved on-the-job performance. The survey points to a core issue: many organizations have not agreed on what success looks like, and they lack the permissions, data and measurement tools to prove impact. The report lays out three structural changes leaders can make to turn AI adoption into results. Read more

A new iOS app from Phota Labs uses artificial intelligence to turn ordinary smartphone snapshots into images that look like a professional photographer took them. Rather than offering another manual editing tool, the app works to fix the shot itself while keeping the people in the picture looking like themselves. The startup, backed by a16z and founded by two former Adobe engineers, is launching the app for free and plans an Android version later. Its founders say the goal is to make better photos accessible to people who have never edited a picture. Read more

United Airlines will no longer let AI agents complete flight bookings on its website, through third-party travel agencies or on flight aggregators. Agents can still show United flights, but they cannot finish a purchase on a customer's behalf. The airline cites privacy risks, possible violations of federal rules and the chance of unintended purchases. United CEO Scott Kirby said at an event on Tuesday that he does not want to "create another middleman," and the airline says it may reconsider as the technology improves. Read more

Shoppers who use AI chatbots to find places to buy products may be directed to impostor sites, knockoff sellers, and abandoned domains, according to a new study. Intellectual property protection firm Podqi tested ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity with shopping questions about 151 brands and found that all three engines cited or showed risky sites at least some of the time. Perplexity performed worst, with risky sites appearing in 15 percent of answers. Gemini performed best at 4 percent. The findings arrive ahead of the holiday shopping season, when many consumers are expected to rely on AI tools to shop. Read more

Forty percent of video game developers now use generative AI as part of their jobs, according to the GDC Festival of Gaming’s latest annual industry survey. That is up from 36 percent in 2025. Usage is higher among developers on free-to-play games, at 58 percent, and among mobile-only studio workers, at 70 percent. The findings come as the industry continues to debate the technology. The survey also found that 34 percent of respondents had been laid off at some point in the past two years. Read more