Tech, in brief

Electricity, not chips, sets the pace

Microsoft's 38-gigawatt plan names no power source [1]; Finnish opposition parties want a permitting system after Google's EUR 13bn deal [6]; TAR raised $120m to build power that never joins the grid [8]

Approvals given one at a time

Spain's traffic agency issued a national robotaxi permit on its own [15]; Britain's grid operator gave Palantir GBP 21.2m with no competition [19]; Finland has no body checking total data centre demand [6]

Money going out before it comes in

Oracle spent $28.5bn in a quarter with free cash flow of minus $5.4bn [4]; Broadcom's chief forecast AI chip sales of $230bn by fiscal 2028 [11]; Nvidia's chief repeated a 70% growth forecast [13]

Rules chasing products already shipped

US lawmakers called for AI rules only after an Anthropic researcher went public [22]; a Portuguese group is suing four platforms over addictive design [21]; European founders say the EU company statute may be weakened before it passes [25]

2 pressures seen across the day run through Tech too.

• Rules written after the thing was already on saleBuilding ↑ · seen in 4 beats→
• Data centres needing more power than anyone has countedHigh ↑ · seen in 2 beats→

1. 1Microsoft wants 38 gigawatts of data centres by 2032. That is more electricity than New York state draws at its peak.
2. 2Oracle's cloud doubled, and so did its bills
3. 3Finland's opposition wants one desk for data centres
4. 4Spain issues the EU's first permit for these robotaxis
5. 5Driverless test rides start in Zagreb

Watch whether any of these plans names a power source: Microsoft's 38 gigawatts has none attached, and Nvidia's Australian announcement does not name one either. [1][7]

Each new data centre is approved on its own, by a body that only sees that one, and nobody adds up what all of them will need.

each data centre's protection system disconnects to save its own machines, and on 22 July more than 3 gigawatts left the grid together

Google's deal was agreed with Google, and a party leader says nobody there checks what all the sites will draw at once

eight partners were named with a 2-gigawatt target and no power source, so each site joins the connection queue on its own

one traffic agency cleared one company's cars, and how many driverless cars Madrid ends up with is the companies' decision

One official signs one permit, one engineer connects one site, and each of us opens one more account on a service that runs inside these buildings.

Nobody in that chain is asked what all of it adds up to.

Also seen in Climate.

Oracle said on Thursday that revenue from cloud infrastructure more than doubled to $7.4bn, and total revenue grew almost 30% in the quarter to 31 August. [3][4]

Oracle is a fifty-year-old American business-software company that has spent the past two years rebuilding itself as a landlord for AI computing. [4]

The shares rose nearly 7% after hours, off a 22% fall this year. [3][4]

Capital spending was $28.5bn against $8.5bn a year earlier, free cash flow was minus $5.4bn, and the company carries $125bn of debt. [4]

It is the clearest public accounting of what the buildout costs while it is being built.

Oracle's finance chief said most newly contracted revenue comes as prepayment or customers bringing their own hardware, so the orders do not need Oracle's own money. [3]

Two Finnish opposition parties called on Thursday for a national permitting system for data centres. [6]

The day before, Google said it would spend at least EUR 13bn on AI infrastructure in Finland over two years, including a deal to buy nuclear power. [6]

Finland has drawn data centres for years with cool air, cheap low-carbon electricity and a reliable grid. [6]

Antti Kaikkonen, who leads the Centre Party, said no one is really looking after the overall picture. [6]

It lands on Finnish households and factories, who share the same wires. Nobody in Finland currently checks what all the approved data centres will draw at once.

Spain's Directorate General of Traffic issued a national permit on Thursday for testing WeRide's GXR self-driving cars on public roads, with Uber and the Spanish fleet operator AVOMO. [15][16]

WeRide is a Chinese self-driving company; the permit is the first national approval in the European Union for that vehicle. [15][16]

The first phase puts 20 cars in busy parts of greater Madrid, each with a human specialist on board. [15]

Commercial rides are expected by the end of 2026, and Madrid is the fourth of 15 cities the two companies plan by 2030. [15]

It shows how a driverless fleet reaches European streets: one national agency signs off one company's vehicle, and the number of cars that follows is set by the companies.

Pony.ai and the Croatian operator Verne began fully driverless test rides with passengers on public roads in Zagreb on Thursday, along a 22-kilometre route between Verne's headquarters, a business district and the city's airport. [17]

Pony.ai is a Chinese self-driving company listed in New York and Hong Kong; it supplies the technology while Verne runs the service and Uber sells the rides. [17]

The service launched in April with a safety operator on board and has since driven more than 200,000 kilometres. [17]

The companies plan to widen the driverless routes over the coming months. [17]

Croatia, not Germany or France, is where the first fully driverless rides in Europe are happening, because that is where a small operator and a national regulator moved first.

Joby, Beta and Wisk began a week of test flights in Texas on Thursday, flying future routes between cities and regional airports including Dallas Fort Worth. [18]

They are flying electric aircraft that take off straight up, and no passengers are on board. [18]

The flights are the first of eight state-led projects picked by the US aviation regulator for a pilot programme created by the US president's office. [18]

Normal approval to carry paying passengers takes years, and the programme lets the companies gather data before that process finishes. [18]

It lands on air traffic controllers first: regulators want to see how Texas handles the extra flights before anyone decides how many of these aircraft a city can take.

The National Energy System Operator, the publicly owned body that runs Britain's electricity system, awarded Palantir a contract worth GBP 21.2m including tax, with no competition. [19]

The notice was filed on 26 August and runs to 31 July 2027; it covers two processes the operator runs on Palantir's Foundry software. [19]

The legal basis is a direct award for technical reasons, and the justification says moving to another supplier is not possible without significant cost, resource commitment and delivery risk. [19]

The operator says it is running a competition for a replacement. [19]

The body that has to plan Britain's electricity for every new data centre wrote down, in a public filing, that it cannot easily change the software it plans with.

Germany's armed forces are assessing 30 AI tools meant to speed up battlefield decisions using drone and satellite data, with a prototype due in the second quarter of 2027 and full deployment in 2028. [20]

Vice Admiral Thomas Daum, who runs the German military's cyber command, gave the timeline on Thursday. [20]

Most of the candidates are German; the French firm ChapsVision is one of the few foreign ones left in. [20]

Germany ruled out Palantir's Maven system in April, which is already used by the US military and several NATO members. [20]

Germany is paying for the alternative in time: the system it rejected is deployed now, and its own replacement is about 18 months from a prototype.

D3, a Portuguese digital rights group, filed four collective actions on Thursday against Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, accusing them of designing features that keep users hooked. [21]

A collective action lets an association sue on behalf of a large group of consumers, so individual users do not have to bring their own cases. [21]

The filings follow similar suits in other countries over addictive design, including one Meta settled in August over children's social media addiction. [21] No hearing date has been set. [21]

It lands on the four biggest video and social products in Europe at once, and it tests whether a small national group can force design changes the way a regulator would.

Members of the US Congress called this week for new rules on AI, after a researcher at Anthropic went public accusing the industry of gambling with our lives and warned that the technology could escape human control. [22]

Anthropic is one of the three largest AI labs in the United States. [22]

Democrats led the calls and a few Republicans joined, including lawmakers who rarely engage in AI arguments; Reuters reported the reaction was broader than after earlier warnings from OpenAI and Anthropic staff. [22]

OpenAI had published its own list of requested federal rules two days earlier. [23]

It lands on every AI company in the United States, because a federal rule written from a large lab's existing practice becomes a floor small companies must build to.

Also seen in Money, Cyber and Food.

OpenAI published two posts on 6 September, three days after shipping its newest model. [24]

One said its researchers now get 3.1 days of machine work for every day they put in themselves. [24]

The other, by chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, said no lab has solved alignment and monitoring well enough to keep scaling at maximum speed for much longer, and that he hopes voluntary slowdowns become common. [24]

Alignment means getting a model to want what its makers asked for; monitoring means being able to watch what it actually did. [24]

The argument for slowing down is coming from the person who runs research at the company shipping fastest, and it is on the company's own website.

Broadcom's chief executive Hock Tan told analysts that the company's AI chip and networking business will reach about $230bn in fiscal 2028, up from $2.6bn in fiscal 2022. [11]

Broadcom does not sell a rival to Nvidia's chips.

It designs custom accelerators for individual customers, and it was already building Google's own TPU chips for seven years before the AI boom started. [11]

Those custom chips let a buyer avoid paying Nvidia's margin on every unit. [11] The forecast came with the company's fiscal third-quarter results. [11]

It is a forecast, not a result, and it is the clearest statement yet that the biggest AI buyers intend to design their own chips rather than keep buying Nvidia's.

The startup d-Matrix said this week it will pair its Raptor processor with Nvidia's rack-scale systems. [12]

The company has worked since 2019 on running finished models rather than training them, the step called inference. [12] It has raised more than $500m, including from Microsoft's venture arm. [12]

Its approach builds the chip around memory rather than around raw arithmetic, which its executives say runs inference far faster. [12] Its first platform, Corsair, arrived in June. [12]

The fast-growing part of the AI bill is now answering questions rather than training, and this is a challenger choosing to sit inside Nvidia's racks rather than replace them.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive, said this week the company could grow revenue 70% next year, repeating guidance given last month. [13]

He said one of its systems now costs $8.5m, contains two million parts and draws 250,000 kilowatts, and that people still picture the $399 graphics cards the company started with. [13]

Orders for one product, a rack combining 36 Grace processors with 72 Blackwell chips, are growing 27% month to month, he said. [13]

These are the company's own figures and its own forecast, and they set the price expectation for everyone planning the gigawatts above.

DeepSeek, the Chinese AI lab, is preparing a large order of Huawei AI chips for a new data centre, Bloomberg reported. [14]

Neither the size of the order nor the chip model has been disclosed, and DeepSeek has not confirmed it. [14]

The site is roughly one gigawatt, at Ulanqab in Inner Mongolia, and could begin partial operations in late 2027 or early 2028. [14]

Nvidia's best AI chips cannot legally be sold in China, leaving Huawei's Ascend family as one of the main domestic options. [14]

China is building the same gigawatt-scale capacity on chips it makes itself, in a region chosen because the electricity there is cheaper.

TAR, an Austin company that builds off-grid power for data centres, raised a $120m Series A led by Spark Capital at a $1bn valuation, announced Thursday. [8]

Its systems combine solar panels, batteries and backup gas generators in West Texas and never connect to the public grid. [8]

Co-founder Pat Becker said the company can deploy in a matter of months, and is already building several hundred megawatts for an undisclosed Texas customer. [8]

Its staff come from power companies and from robotics firms including Zipline and Lucid Motors. [8]

Waiting for a grid connection is now the slow step in building a data centre, and investors valued a company that avoids the wait at $1bn before it has finished its first campus.

Bluecore Energy raised a $50m seed round eight weeks after launching, TechCrunch reported on Monday. [9]

The company, founded this year by Kofi Asante, puts small nuclear reactors on floating barges instead of fixed sites, so the power can be moved to ports and nearby infrastructure. [9]

Asante said the US Navy has run portable reactors for 70 years without an accident and that his version is smaller and movable in days. [9]

Silverton Partners led the round, with earlier backers including Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen doubling down. [9]

Two months from launch to $50m is a measure of how much money is now chasing electricity rather than software.

Cegid and Silae, both French and both majority-owned by the American private equity firm Silver Lake, announced on Wednesday that they intend to merge into a group valued at more than EUR 10bn. [26]

Cegid, founded in Lyon in 1983, sells accounting, tax and retail software to small businesses and accountants. [26]

Silae, from Aix-en-Provence, does payroll and produces more than 8 million payslips a month for close to a million French businesses. [26]

Together they handle the books of 2 million end-customers and serve more than 15,000 accountancy firms. [26]

The accounting and payroll of two million European businesses will sit in one group owned by one American fund.

European founders and venture investors published an open letter on Thursday urging lawmakers not to weaken EU Inc, a proposed EU-wide company status. [25]

It would be a single legal form a startup can incorporate under and then operate across the bloc, instead of registering in each country. [25]

The letter says the law could become unusable if its central features are weakened, and asks for one central registry. [25]

The European Parliament and Council have not settled a final text. [25]

It lands on anyone starting a company in Europe.

A startup that wants to sell across the bloc registers in each country separately today, and the letter says a weakened statute would leave that as it is.

Euno raised a $23m Series A led by N47, announced on Wednesday, taking its total funding to $29m. [27]

The company sells what it calls a context platform for AI agents inside large firms. [27] The problem it targets is mundane.

A big company holds several versions of a figure like last quarter's customer churn, built by different teams and some of them stale. [27]

Access to the database does not tell an agent which version the finance team trusts. [27]

Chief executive Sarah Levy argues this missing knowledge, not model quality, is what keeps agents out of production. [27]

It is a bet that the thing holding company AI back is the state of company data, which no new model fixes.

Linus Torvalds, who created Linux and still runs its releases, published version 7.3-rc2 on Sunday and noted it was far larger than a second release candidate usually is. [28]

He said nothing looked particularly odd and offered no diagnosis, writing that it might be just random but that everyone will obviously blame it on AI because it is an easy thing to blame. [28]

The shortlog carries 615 commits from 292 contributors. [28] A second release candidate is normally the quiet week after the merge window shuts. [28]

Linux runs most of the world's servers, and its own maintainers cannot yet say whether machine-written code is making it heavier.

Torvalds shipped the release with a joke instead of an answer.

Aisle, a small vulnerability-scanning startup, said its system found six previously unknown security flaws in curl, the open-source program that moves files between computers on almost every server. [29]

The curl maintainers accepted all six and assigned them CVE numbers, the public identifiers given to confirmed vulnerabilities. [29]

The findings came shortly after curl's founder Daniel Stenberg wrote publicly that Anthropic's Mythos and OpenAI's Codex security tools had found none. [29]

Greg Kroah-Hartman, one of Linux's most senior maintainers, has praised the tool. [29]

The tools that find real bugs in the code everything runs on are not necessarily the ones with the biggest models behind them.

Uber invested $10m in Carrum, an Indian company that owns cars and supplies them to Uber drivers, at a valuation of about $168m, up from about $63m in January. [30]

Uber now holds a stake in the mid-teens by percentage, founder Karan Jain said. [30]

Carrum owns about 5,100 vehicles across six Indian cities and has signed up more than 18,000 drivers, with annual revenue running at about $45m. [30]

About 70% of its fleet are small hatchbacks used for Uber's cheapest tier. [30]

In India, Uber increasingly owns a piece of the cars as well as the app, because most drivers there cannot buy a vehicle outright.

Ultraviolette Automotive, an Indian electric motorcycle maker, said on Thursday it will spend 7.79 billion rupees, about $82m, on a new plant at Hosur in southern India. [31]

The factory starts with room for 250,000 vehicles a year and is meant to support cheaper models aimed at ordinary buyers rather than enthusiasts. [31]

Electric two-wheeler sales in India are rising partly because owners of older petrol vehicles worry about their compatibility with E20, the fuel blend now standard there. [31]

The company is targeting 10,000 scooter sales a month. [31]

India's shift to electric is happening first on two wheels, which is what most Indian households actually buy.

inDrive, the ride-hailing company where passengers and drivers negotiate the fare, is expanding its advertising, delivery and financial-services businesses and has installed new leaders to run them. [32]

The company operates in more than 1,200 cities across 48 countries, mostly in emerging markets, from a base in Mountain View, California. [32]

Its advertising arm, piloted in July 2025, now runs in 25 markets, has served more than 2 billion impressions and signs over 2,000 paying advertisers a month, two-thirds of them repeat customers. [32]

It lands on brands trying to reach people the big platforms do not cover well, and it is the same move Uber made: rides first, then everything sold alongside them.

Google signed a four-year deal with Mitti Labs, an Indian startup, covering about 100,000 hectares of rice farms in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana at peak delivery. [33]

Farmers are paid to keep their fields flooded for shorter periods, which cuts the methane released while rice grows. [33]

Mitti Labs says the method reduces methane by about half and irrigation water by about 40% without lowering yields; financial terms were not disclosed. [33]

Google's own emissions grew 18% in 2025, to about 14.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. [33]

This is what the electricity above looks like on a company's environmental report: Google is buying reductions elsewhere while its own emissions climb.

Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund is weighing a merger of Electronic Arts with Savvy Games, which would put the Madden NFL and Pokemon Go franchises under one owner, Bloomberg reported. [34][35]

Nothing has been decided, and nothing is expected before Savvy closes its $6bn purchase of Moonton from ByteDance. [34]

The European Commission cleared the EA takeover on competition grounds and again under its foreign subsidies rules on 31 July. [34]

EU merger rules catch deals that change who controls a company, and both firms already have the same owner. [34]

Moving assets between two companies one fund already controls may need no European filing at all, which is a different thing from being approved.

Furo, a German company whose software runs industrial battery storage, raised $4m mostly from American investors and signed Deutsche Bahn, the German state railway, within a year of founding. [36]

Its three 28-year-old founders left Silicon Valley and moved home, and say they are moving faster in Europe than they would have in the United States. [36]

On paper the company is still a Delaware corporation, the standard American legal form, and the round was led by TQ Ventures with Sheryl Sandberg's fund taking part. [36]

American investors used to require foreign founders to relocate before writing a cheque, and this round did not.

Fluencify raised a $4.3m pre-seed, its first institutional money, six months after launch and after passing $2m of annual revenue. [37]

Wave Ventures took part, and Magnus Hambleton of the Nordic fund byFounders joins the board. [37]

The company automates influencer marketing: a brand describes the outcome it wants, and software agents find creators, handle the outreach, brief them and answer their questions before filming starts. [37]

It then schedules posts and handles payouts in more than 85 countries. [37] byFounders invests across the Nordics and Baltics and closed an oversubscribed fund of more than EUR 130m in June. [37]

The bet is that the work being automated in marketing is the coordinating, not the creative part.

Brian Armstrong, chief executive of the American crypto exchange Coinbase, said on Thursday that the Clarity Act is likely to pass the US Senate, citing support from crypto firms, law enforcement groups and several banks. [38]

The bill would set a federal framework dividing oversight of digital assets between the two main US market regulators. [38]

Armstrong said that even if the vote fails, both regulators have said they are ready to publish rules within days. [38]

This is the chief executive of the company most affected predicting the outcome, which is a claim rather than a count of votes.