Google’s next data center in Minnesota will have the world’s largest battery

Google’s energy in Minnesota won’t lead to higher electricity costs for consumers, they say. (Picture: Google)
The data center in Pine Island will have 1.9 gigawatts of capacity, sourced from new wind and solar power from Xcel Energy.

This will then be attached to a 300 megawatt iron-air battery from Form Energy, ensuring continuous service to operations.

That will be the world’s largest commercially deployed battery, and can provide power to the data center for a whopping 100 hours, TechCrunch notes.

As part of their buildout, Google is announcing that they will pay for their electricity in full, and will also invest $50 million in Xcel Energy’s green energy program to place batteries across their grid.

— Google’s partnership with Xcel Energy reimagines how data centers can be served, Google writes.

Read more: Google’s announcement, Xcel’s presser, CNBC and TechCrunch.

Claude Cowork gets task-specific plugins, to assist ten professions

Anthropic is announcing big news almost daily these days. (Picture: Anthropic)
Cowork, Anthropic’s everything agent, just got a whole lot more productive, and can support ten specific workloads for specific industries in surprising detail.

The app now has plugins for HR, design, engineering and banking purposes — and can work across Excel and PowerPoint.

That means you can run the «analysis in one and build the presentation in the other,» Anthropic says.

Anthropic also added connectors for Google Workspace, DocuSign, WordPress and Slack, to mention a few.

On top of that, there is now a private marketplace for plugins on the web, letting admins distribute new functions across an organization.

Shares of the partner companies in the launch rose 4-6% on news of the announcement, Reuters notes.

Read more: Anthropic’s announcement, writeups on CNBC, Reuters, and The Verge.

Meta to purchase 6GW of custom AMD AI chips, take up to 10% ownership

Joining forces with AMD, Meta is set to receive hundreds of thousands of custom inference chips. (Picture: Meta)
According to Reuters, the deal is worth $60 billion, runs over five years, and comes hot on the heels of another Meta deal with Nvidia earlier this month.

The agreement will see the first gigawatt of GPUs and CPUs delivered in the second half of 2026, and includes several as-yet-to-debut rackable chips.

AMD and Meta have long been partners in developing custom chips, but these are specifically built for inference, the process of creating answers for user queries.

— This is an important step for Meta as we diversify our compute, says Mark Zuckerberg on the deal.

AMD entered into a similar deal with OpenAI in October, 2025, meaning it might soon be 20% owned by AI labs.

Read more: AMD press release, Meta’s release, and Reuters report.

xAI agrees to Pentagon contract where Anthropic won’t

It’s unclear whether xAI will be able to fully replace Anthropic inside the Pentagon. (Picture: generated)
xAI models will become available in the Pentagon’s classified networks after having agreed to the «all lawful use» contract, Axios reports.

That means no restrictions on mass surveillance and autonomous lethality that Anthropic refused due to ethical concerns.

It’s not immediately clear whether xAI will be able to replace all Anthropic functions or how soon it can come online, Axios says.

Anthropic is due for a meeting with Secretary Pete Hegseth this Tuesday, where he is expected to present CEO Dario Amodei with an ultimatum to lift its safeguards or be banned.

ChatGPT and Gemini are available on the Pentagon’s unclassified networks, but onboarding them to the classified parts would take time, and dropping Anthropic would be a difficult process, sources tell Axios.

Read more: Axios, New York Times (paywalled). See also Tag: Grok.

Chinese AI labs created 24K accounts and «distilled» 16 million messages from Claude

Chinese attacks risk bypassing the safeguards Anthropic builds into its models. (Picture: Anthropic)
Anthropic claims to have discovered industrial scale extraction of Claude data from DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax.

The massive attacks were used to improve their own models with agentic reasoning, tool use, and coding capabilities, violating Anthropic’s Terms of Service and creating a national security risk, they say.

Distillation works by sending millions of prompts to an AI to incorporate its techniques and capabilities into their own models, drastically reducing training time and costs.

They also circumvent Anthropic’s protections for use in developing bioweapons and malicious cyber activities, Anthropic says. Once these models are open sourced, this becomes available to anyone.

OpenAI said the same just last week, accusing DeepSeek of distillation.

— These campaigns are growing in intensity and sophistication. The window to act is narrow, and the threat extends beyond any single company or region, Anthropic writes.

Read more: Anthropic’s announcement, writeups on Reuters, TechCrunch, Engadget and The Verge.

Samsung planning to integrate Perplexity on upcoming Galaxy phones

Samsung is diversifying its agents, and hints of more of them in the future. (Picture: Samsung, manipulated)
8 in 10 users use more than one AI agent, Samsung’s research has found. So they are bringing in one more of them to their coming Android phones.

Galaxy AI will in the future act more as a conductor, shoveling tasks to the best agent, rather than as a gatekeeper serving tasks to a single one, says Won-Joon Choi, President, Chief Operating Officer at Samsung Electronics:

— Galaxy AI acts as an orchestrator, bringing together different forms of AI into a single, natural, cohesive experience.

Continue reading “Samsung planning to integrate Perplexity on upcoming Galaxy phones”

Anthropic finds most agent use in software, with users interrupting often

Anthropic’s agents are overwhelmingly used for coding, but is also making inroads elsewhere. (Picture: Anthropic)
The AI lab has analyzed millions of human-agent interactions with Claude Code and their API. Unsurprisingly, they found most of the usage to be for coding work, with uptake in other sectors lagging far behind.

They discovered that while most of the usage is for one-shot code snippets, more users are letting Claude Code work autonomously, up to 45 minutes at a time after three months.

Continue reading “Anthropic finds most agent use in software, with users interrupting often”

The hundreds of billions in AI investments flowing into India

The Indian AI Summit was a great success for the country, securing hundreds of billions in investments. (Picture: AI Impact Summit)
After the conclusion of the Indian AI Impact Summit, the chips are in on massive investments into data centers in the country.

It’s OpenAI’s second biggest market and looks set for a massive buildout of AI capacity in the years leading up to 2035.

Adani dishing out the dollars
First out is the Adani Group, pledging $100 billion to build data centers by 2035, which they expect to trigger «an additional $150 billion in secondary investments.» This should scale their data center portfolio from 2 gigawatts to 5 GW.

Continue reading “The hundreds of billions in AI investments flowing into India”

OpenAI’s first device will reportedly be a pocket-sized AI speaker, due in 2027

Does the world really need another smart speaker? Ive and Altman certainly think so. (Picture: screenshot)
After buying former Chief Apple Designer Jony Ive’s Io design lab in May, 2025, Altman and Ive have been teasing a breakthrough hardware device said to be something to take a bite of — and speculation has abounded.

Now The Information (paywalled) is citing sources from an all hands meeting at OpenAI touting an early prototype of a smart speaker.

Continue reading “OpenAI’s first device will reportedly be a pocket-sized AI speaker, due in 2027”

Big brands are hitting ChatGPT ads — but only show in 0.8% of responses

Ads from Expedia, Qualcomm, Best Buy, and Enterprise Mobility have started appearing in relation to ChatGPT queries, Adweek reports.

The «early tests» have been ongoing since February 9th, and OpenAI is asking advertisers to pay a $200,000 minimum to join in.

— We believe ads play an important role in continuing to support broad access to AI, Asad Awan, ads and monetization lead at OpenAI, tells Adweek in a statement.

— By working closely with partners in this pilot, we’re able to thoughtfully test new ad experiences, he continues.

The advertising intelligence platform Adthena ran a test on over 500 prompts in ChatGPT and found ad placements on only 0.8% of responses, according to Adweek.

Adthena also found ads were clearly labeled, sometimes triggering on the first prompt, that OpenAI is surpisingly focused on privacy and user control, and that the text format seemed familiar and trusted.

Read more: Adweek, and Adthena on LinkedIn.

Google announces Gemini 3.1 Pro: «a step forward in reasoning»

Expect more, rapid one-point releases from the frontier labs going ahead. (Picture: Google)
The new model is a «smarter, more capable baseline for complex problem-solving,» Google says.

It’s the new leader on the benchmarks, almost solving ARC-AGI with 98% and hitting 77% on ARC-AGI 2, the problem solver benchmark, more than doubling Gemini 3’s results.

It also scores 44.4% on Humanity’s Last Exam, which is the best yet and definitly makes it the new state-of-the art.

Gemini 3 Pro was only released last November, so this new point-release might well signal where frontier labs are heading next — incremental updates every few months rather than full blown giant steps every six months to a year.

Gemini 3.1 Pro is rolling out today «in preview» to Pro and Ultra plans, and it’s also in NotebookLM for those users. Developers should also get a taste soon. Pricing is the same as Gemini 3 Pro.

Read more: Google’s announcement, launch thread. See also 9to5Google, Ars Technica and TechCrunch. Discussion on r/Singularity.

Faux pas at Indian AI summit as Amodei and Altman refuse hands

Whoever thought it was a good idea to have these guys hold hands? (Picture: Government of India Press Information Bureau)
In what was expected to be a show of unity with Indian PM Narendra Modi on stage, AI leaders were asked to hold hands in solidarity.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amedei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were, however, for some reason, placed right next to each other on stage — and the acrimonious rivals promptly refused the gesture.

Continue reading “Faux pas at Indian AI summit as Amodei and Altman refuse hands”

Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs raises $1 billion for spatial intelligence, world models

Marble can make intricate 3D worlds from prompts or pictures, and Autodesk wants in. (Picture: World Labs)
As «the godmother of AI’s» world-building Marble model is taking off, some say World Labs has hit a $5 billion valuation, according to Reuters.

Most notably, they collected $200 million in funding from Autodesk — which makes 3D CAD software in a somewhat overlapping fashion.

They will now officially become advisors to World Labs, and are starting up a collaboration, writes TechCrunch.

— You might want to take an object that you’ve designed in our [platform], and put it in a context that you create through one of [World Labs’] prompts, says Daron Green, Autodesk’s chief scientist, to the website.

World Labs themselves have not provided a valuation from the funding round.

Read more: Autodesk’s announcement, World Lab’s announcement. More detail from TechCrunch, Reuters.

Google launches custom music generation in Gemini with Lyria 3 model

Gemini can now make you thirty seconds of music based on prompts or photos, and will even use Nano Banana for custom art for it.

They say the feature is for fun and games, and very specific music requests that can be personal, like making a tune about your mum’s home cooked plantains.

Continue reading “Google launches custom music generation in Gemini with Lyria 3 model”

Nvidia strikes «multi-year strategic partnership» with Meta for AI chips

Likely costing a significant measure of Meta’s capital expenditures, the deal is expected to be in tens of billions dollars or more.
Both Meta and Nvidia are announcing a long-term, multi-generational strategic partnership today — without mentioning the price.

Meta, already a top customer for Nvidia, will use their chips in a «large-scale deployment» to build out data centers «optimized for AI training and inference,» they say.

The cost of the deal will likely run into the tens of billions of dollars or more, CNBC reckons, and includes access to future chips as well as the current Blackwell and Vera Rubin generations.

— We do expect a good portion of Meta’s capex to go toward this Nvidia build-out, chip analyst Ben Bajarin of Creative Strategies tells CNBC.

Reuters notes that Meta is likely one of the top three customers accounting for more than half of Nvidia’s sales.

Read more: Meta announcement, Nvidia announcement. Writeups on CNBC, Reuters and The Verge.