A Computerworld analysis examines the wave of calls to 'slow down' AI from leaders of Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI. The author argues the real motives are not safety but saving on R&D, eliminating competitors, and hiding lack of profit: per a McKinsey survey, 80% of employees report productivity gains from AI, but only 37% of companies see it in revenue.
EQT Infrastructure has backed a $2 billion investment in small batteries to reduce electricity costs for industrial consumers and accelerate data center connections to the largest US power grid.
Verizon has asked the FCC for permission to shut down traditional copper-line telephone service in certain US regions. The company is migrating customers to fiber and wireless services, preserving numbers and offering alternatives where available.
Mitsubishi Electric's ME Innovation Fund invested in Japanese startup OptQC, which develops an optical quantum computer. The amount is undisclosed. OptQC spun out of the Furusawa lab at the University of Tokyo and has delivered its first commercial system to a public research institute.
Bitdeer AI signed a 10-year lease for the 65.1 MW A202 data center in Johor Bahru, Malaysia. The liquid-cooled facility will house Nvidia GB300 and NVL72 equipment; total campus capacity will reach 86.8 MW.
Blockfusion signed a 15-year anchor lease with CoreWeave at its Niagara Falls, New York campus, with two five-year extension options. The guaranteed 85 MW of capacity will generate about $2.8 billion over the initial term and up to $5.4 billion with extensions.
KPMG UK is cutting about 4% of Advisory staff from AI, Cyber, SAP and Testing teams, with departures planned for next month. Employees call the offered severance 'insulting': partners received an average of £880,000 in the year to September 2025.
Lovable announced on September 18, 2026, the acquisition of Sutro, the company behind the SLang programming language and a platform for generating ready-made backends. Sutro founder Thomas Halgas and three engineers are joining Lovable; Halgas will focus on technical education. The deal amount was not disclosed.
Construction of Tesla's Optimus robot factory at North Campus Gigafactory Texas is nearing completion of the steel frame: about five column grids remain to the north beam. Concrete is being poured on the top three floors, with foundation work ongoing in parallel. Mass production is planned for summer 2027.
Asiana Fund and Taiwan's JC Capital created the Asiana-JCC Advanced Manufacturing & Innovation Fund at ₹1,000 Cr (₹600 Cr base corpus plus ₹400 Cr option) for Indian startups in semiconductors, robotics, materials, aerospace, and defense. Plans include 12–15 deals at Series A and B stages and connecting startups with Taiwan's semiconductor ecosystem.
Reuters reports that Solidigm, a subsidiary of SK hynix, is considering building a NAND flash memory plant in the US, with an area north of New York named as the main candidate. Currently Solidigm's only fab is in Dalian, China; the new plant would reduce dependence on China and exposure to US tariffs and export restrictions.
Chinese AI product developers reached a combined annual recurring revenue of $10.7 billion, according to an industry report. ByteDance led with $4 billion ARR as of July.
Anthropic and OpenAI, which previously signed deals for hundreds of megawatts and gigawatts, are now seeking sites of 20–30 MW in the UK, Scandinavia, and the US. Smaller contracts allow faster deployment of capacity for inference, whose share is projected to grow to 37% by 2030 from 13% for training.
Startups in Africa, the Middle East, and Israel raised $950.3 million in disclosed funding during the week, mostly in fintech and AI. Two Saudi deals, Barq and Tabby, accounted for $562.5 million: Barq was valued at $1.85 billion, Tabby at $6.5 billion.
Asian startups raised $534.32 million during the week in robotics, industrial AI, cybersecurity, and digital health. The largest round was a $400 million Series C for China's D-Robotics; Japan's CADDi received $114 million Series D at a valuation of 182 billion yen.
SK hynix announced the creation of SK hynix Ventures to expand investments in AI. The new entity develops the corporate venture capital operation that has been running since 2015.
At Dreamforce 2026 Salesforce announced AIforce, a "living interface layer" for the AI agent era. The platform gives AI agents from Claude and OpenAI direct access to Salesforce data and workflows, potentially removing the need for users to log in.
SoftBank Group raised an additional $450 million, bringing its existing credit line to $6.5 billion. The company is expanding AI investments amid a growing debt load.
On September 3 an Azure East US outage disrupted ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Copilot for about 90 minutes. Downdetector logged over 66,000 complaints, including 37,000+ for ChatGPT, 1,300+ for Claude and 1,365 for Grok. Gemini stayed up on Google's own infrastructure.
Software stocks recovered after strong quarterly reports, easing investor fears that AI would destroy their business. The AI warnings proved exaggerated.
K-water and six organizations signed an agreement to build an AI data center in the hydrothermal energy special zone at Daecheong Dam in Chungcheongbuk-do. The project worth about 352.5 billion won will provide 20,000 RT cooling capacity, saving over 30% energy on air conditioning.
Dangote Refinery on September 14 opened Nigeria's largest-ever public offering at ₦2.15 trillion ($1.62 billion): 4.1 billion shares at ₦525. More than 30 fintech platforms, including Bamboo, Cowrywise and PiggyVest, waived purchase fees to attract up to 10 million retail investors.
Springshot filed an objection in Spirit Airlines' bankruptcy court: part of the archive Google bought for $10 million may contain its proprietary data and trade secrets. The lot includes about 100 million emails, 500 million Teams messages, spreadsheets, and code. A hearing is scheduled for September 30.
Lonely Kids Club founder Warwick Levy said thousands of his T-shirt designs were copied and listed for sale on Temu, possibly via AI scraping. Listings were removed only after a trademark complaint, not a copyright one.
World (the Worldcoin project) launched World Money, a self-custodial financial super app available in more than 150 countries. It combines stablecoin payments, trading, earning and virtual accounts.
Disagreements among tech CEOs over slowing AI development increased investor caution: a rotation out of tech stocks began early in the week. Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX and Google DeepMind called for self-checks, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta are developing risk control tools, and Trump called the warnings a "scam".
SoftBank Group increased its margin loan backed by Arm Holdings shares by $5 billion to $25 billion. The funds will finance the conglomerate's growing AI investments.
In week 37 (September 7-13), Huawei took first place in China's smartphone market with a 27% share on the launch of Mate XT 2 and Pura X View, as the overall market fell nearly 10%. Apple dropped to sixth despite the start of iPhone 18 Pro and first foldable iPhone sales.
L&T Semiconductor CEO Sandeep Kumar said at Semicon 2026 India that India needs hundreds of companies, not one, for a competitive semiconductor industry. He said the market has over 20,000 chip products and the path will take about 20 years.
Apple plans to launch Apple Pay in India next month in partnership with Axis Bank, the country's fourth-largest credit card issuer. Three sources familiar with the situation reported the plans.
