OpenAI has hired Mike Liberatore, the former finance chief of Elon Musk's AI startup xAI, as its new head of business finance.
According to the company, Liberatore will oversee OpenAI's rapidly growing budget for data centers and infrastructure. He will report to CFO Sarah Friar and work closely with Greg Brockman's team, which manages contracts and investments tied to OpenAI's compute strategy.
At xAI, Liberatore helped organize a $10 billion funding round and led efforts to expand its data center footprint before leaving the company in July. OpenAI, recently valued at $500 billion, also signed a cloud deal worth $300 billion with Oracle.
Google plans to invest 5 billion pounds (about 6.78 billion US dollars) in AI infrastructure and other projects in the UK over the next two years, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The company says the funds will also support energy supply, research, engineering, and workforce training. At the same time, Google has opened a new data center north of London to meet the growing demand for services like Cloud, Maps, Workspace, and Search.
Other US tech giants are also ramping up their investments across Europe. Oracle has announced 3 billion dollars for projects in Germany and the Netherlands, Microsoft is putting 4.75 billion dollars into Italy, and Amazon is making multi-billion dollar investments in cloud and logistics centers in Germany and Spain. OpenAI is moving ahead with a major European project as well, called "Stargate Norway."
Wired reports that OpenAI is stepping back into robotics, with new hiring pointing toward work on humanoid machines.
According to job postings, the company is assembling a team focused on training robots through teleoperation and simulation. OpenAI is also seeking engineers specializing in sensing and prototyping. The listings describe the team’s mission as building "general-purpose robots" that could help push progress toward AGI.
It’s not confirmed that the effort targets humanoids, but signs point that way. New hires include Stanford researcher Chengshu Li, who worked on benchmarks for humanoid household robots. That makes it likely OpenAI’s robotics push could center on humanlike systems.
OpenAI shut down its robotics work in 2020, citing a lack of training data. But the company began posting robotics roles again in January, signaling a renewed focus on physical AI after a five-year pause.
According to Bloomberg, Chinese regulators say Nvidia violated conditions of its 2020 acquisition of Mellanox.
China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) announced Monday that the deal had been approved only on the condition that Nvidia would not discriminate against Chinese firms. The agency now claims Nvidia failed to comply. The original approval was granted during trade talks between the US and China in Madrid. Nvidia’s stock slipped about 2 percent in premarket trading after the news.
At the same time, Beijing launched an anti-dumping investigation into US-made semiconductors from companies including Texas Instruments. The move comes against the backdrop of US restrictions on the export of Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips to China. Regulators did not say what new penalties Nvidia might face.
OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor sees strong echoes between today's AI boom and the dotcom era.
"I think there are a lot of parallels to the internet bubble," Taylor said in a conversation with The Verge. "If you look at the internet, some of the world's biggest companies like Amazon and Google came out of it. At the same time, a lot of big failures like Pets.com and Webvan happened right alongside them. Both existed together - massive winners and dramatic losses."
For Taylor, the key point is that AI will reshape the global economy in the same way the internet did, but it's also going to produce plenty of failed bets. "I think it's absolutely true both at once - that AI will transform the economy, and that we're in a bubble where a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money."
Google’s "Nano Banana" image editing model has gone viral, pushing the Gemini app to the top of the app store charts. In the US, Canada, the UK, and Germany, Google Gemini now holds the number one spot, ahead of ChatGPT at number two.

According to Google, Gemini reached nearly 450 million monthly active users in July, a number that has likely increased since then. During this time, the "Nano Banana" model, also known as "Gemini 2.5 Flash Image Generation," was used more than 500 million times.