Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Apple’s fiscal third-quarter results are Tim Cook’s last as CEO, and he’s going out on a high note.As the rest of the Magnificent Seven companies struggle with questions about what all of their AI capex is actually for, Apple has largely sidestepped the debate this year by focusing on their core offerings: consumer hardware. The stock is the best performer in the elite group of mega-cap tech names this year, up 25%. The company topped a $5 trillion market cap for the first time earlier this week before falling slightly.Apple’s outlook has some challenges, though. Cook said earlier this year…

Meta has more than a quarter trillion dollars in future lease obligations — largely tied to AI data centers — as the tech giant races to build out its artificial intelligence infrastructure, a new regulatory filing shows.In its quarterly securities filing released a day after its earnings report, Meta said it had approximately $278.99 billion in operating and finance leases that have not yet begun and were not yet included on its balance sheet.The lease agreements cover “data centers, colocations, and certain network infrastructure” and were scheduled to begin between the remainder of the year through 2036, Meta said in…

Meta is using AI to quickly launch apps, and more are on the way. During this week’s second-quarter earnings call, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the social giant has new apps in the works, following a recent spate of other launches that included an app for Marketplace sellers, one for Facebook Groups, a vibe-coded gaming app, a new photos app from Instagram, and an experiment involving AI bedtime stories. Meta has spent years trying and failing to produce new, stand-alone social apps to complement its core platforms. Now, the company says that large language models (LLMs) make it possible to ship software faster, allowing…

Microsoft wants its employees to know that it considers prediction markets to fall under its insider trading policy.In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Microsoft included an updated copy of its “General Insider Trading Policy,” which now mentions both “prediction markets and events contracts.””If you are in possession of such material, nonpublic information the securities laws and/or Microsoft prohibit you from trading in (or gifting) the securities of that company or engaging in other transactions that provide economic exposure to such company, including through prediction markets or event contracts,” the policy reads.It’s not clear when exactly the tech…

In a bid to capture more of its customers’ AI spending, British AI neocloud Nscale is buying software startup Anyscale, which helps companies scale their AI workloads across data centers and servers. Nscale is paying $1.65 billion for Anyscale, Bloomberg reported, citing an anonymous source. Founded by the same team that built the open-source Project Ray distributed programming Python framework, Anyscale started by building a platform that allowed people to run projects that needed large amounts of computing power. But after the launch of GPT-3 in 2022 brought AI into the spotlight, the company pivoted to offer scaling services for…

Executive search firm Christian & Timbers estimates that there are only about 2,000 engineers in the U.S. with the special cocktail of sector know-how, gravitas, and hands-on applied AI experience needed to consistently help enterprises see a return on their AI expenditures.  “Not 2,000 available,” reads the study, shared exclusively with TechCrunch. “2,000 total.” As enterprises move from trying to access the best models to figuring out how to implement them into workflows that meaningfully improves their bottom line, it appears the forward-deployed engineer (FDE) — engineers who work within client organizations to build, implement and deploy software or AI…

Earlier this month, AI dataset platform Hugging Face shocked the world when it revealed that it had fallen victim to a fully autonomous AI-powered cyberattack. Days later, the story took another dramatic twist when OpenAI admitted that the hacker behind the breach was one of its AI models, which broke out of a testing environment and into protected Hugging Face systems in an effort to circumvent a benchmark. It’s an alarming incident for anyone even slightly concerned about rogue AI models — and the days since the event have been full of predictions about a new cybersecurity paradigm in which…

The Disrupt Stage is where many of the biggest conversations in technology happen, with a legacy that stretches back for more than a decade. The names that have taken to the stage are so big, they are synonymous with the past era of startups and the new era of AI and major incumbents: Zuckerberg, Benioff, Musk, Kalanick, Mayer, Dorsey.   And at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, we’re tackling the biggest topic of the year with some of the biggest names to match. We’re homing in on what it actuallytakes to build, fund, and scale in the age of AI. From October…

As tech giants aggressively build out compute to meet the demands of the AI boom, some face a tricky dilemma: how much should they hoard and how much should they sell?Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed the issue on the company’s Q2 earnings call this week. While Meta doesn’t currently have a business selling compute — the data center processing power used to run AI — to customers, Zuckerberg has said it’s on the cards.Zuckerberg said that a “significant portion” of its compute will go toward training Meta’s AI models, powering agents, and growing its core business. “But we also expect…

We already know that making AI work will mean bringing a lot of new data centers and power infrastructure online. But all those infrastructure projects may also need a bit of help from AI. On Thursday, a new AI compliance company called Dili that squarely targets the new crop of U.S. infrastructure projects, said it had raised $15 million in Series A funding. The round comes on the heels of a $6.7 million seed round, bringing the company’s total capital raised to $21.7 million. The Series A was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Allianz, Rebel Fund, Brick and…