Tech

Pine Labs, an Indian merchant-commerce startup backed by PayPal and Mastercard, is going public this week at a valuation about 40% lower than its last private round — even as it doubles down on plans to take its fintech platform global. The Gurugram-based fintech has set a price band of ₹210–₹221 (about $2.00–$2.50) a share, valuing the company at approximately …

TikTok announced on Monday that it’s launching its first-ever TikTok Awards show in the U.S. The awards will include “Creator of the Year,” “Video of the Year,” “Muse of the Year,” “Breakthrough Artist of the Year,” and more. The announcement comes just weeks after Instagram introduced its “Ring” awards program. Unlike Instagram, however, TikTok is taking a more traditional approach …

OpenAI isn’t done securing the AI infrastructure it needs to rapidly scale agentic workloads. The ChatGPT-maker on Monday said it has reached a deal with Amazon to buy $38 billion in cloud computing services over the next seven years.   OpenAI said it will immediately start using AWS compute, with all capacity targeted to be deployed before the end of …

Microsoft will invest $15.2 billion in the United Arab Emirates over the next four years, the company announced Monday at the first annual Abu Dhabi Global AI Summit. The investment will include the first-ever shipments of the most advanced Nvidia GPUs to the UAE. As part of the deal, the U.S. has granted Microsoft a license to export Nvidia chips to …

Microsoft is leaving no stone unturned in its quest to secure more compute capacity for meeting its customers’ heavy demand for AI services. On Monday, the Redmond-based tech giant signed a $9.7 billion, five-year contract with Australia’s IREN to secure further AI cloud capacity. The deal will give Microsoft access to compute infrastructure built with Nvidia’s GB300 GPUs, which will …

Other Wireless Headphones We’ve Tested Wireless headphones are the default these days, and there are roughly 1 gazillion of them (and counting). We do our best to test them all, but not everything we test can make the big list. Here are some other good options worth trying. Status Audio Pro X for $249: The Status Audio Pro X are …

Chicago always has something to prove. When it went up against New York for the 1893 World’s Fair, a New York Sun reporter called out its “windbag” campaigners. Illinois ended up hosting the fair, and Chicago embraced its new identity as the Windy City. That chip-on-the-shoulder energy still defines this metropolis, a city that builds, innovates, and competes like it …

As I browse the web in 2025, I rarely encounter captchas anymore. There’s no slanted text to discern. No image grid of stoplights to identify. And on the rare occasion that I am asked to complete some bot-deterring task, the experience almost always feels surreal. A colleague shared recent tests where they were presented with images of dogs and ducks …

By the standards of the San Francisco Bay Area’s hard left, Casey Goonan’s crimes were unremarkable. A police SUV partially burned by an incendiary device on UC Berkeley’s campus. A planter of shrubs lit on fire after Goonan unsuccessfully tried to smash a glass office window and throw a firebomb into the federal building in downtown Oakland. But thanks to …

Kevin Rose has a visceral rule for evaluating AI hardware investments: “If you feel like you should punch someone in the face for wearing it, you probably shouldn’t invest in it.” It’s a typically candid assessment from the veteran investor, and one born from watching the current wave of AI hardware startups repeat mistakes he’s seen before. Rose, a general …