By Aditya Soni and Arasu Kannagi Basil
Aug 19 (Reuters) - Payments firm Stripe said on Wednesday it had agreed to buy OpenRouter, which helps businesses ‌route and optimize token usage, its latest bet on the fast-growing AI industry.
While ‌the companies did not disclose the value of the deal, a source familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to discuss confidential information, told Reuters it was worth slightly more than $8 billion.
The deal comes as soaring bills drive companies toward cheaper models and routing tools like OpenRouter, and deepens a year-long push by the fintech into AI. The push has included launching ‌products like token billing to ⁠track AI model consumption.
AI marketplace platforms like OpenRouter allow developers to send queries to dozens of AI models through a single interface, ⁠making them a popular testing ground for new systems.

#aditya

By Aditya Soni
July 29 (Reuters) - Apple's decision to hold iPhone prices steady is set to power its strongest June-quarter sales growth in five years, but investors will want to know how long it can resist an increase.
The consumer ‌electronics giant raised iPad and MacBook prices last month as it sought to offset cost increases from a shortage of ‌memory and storage chips caused by massive AI datacenter buildouts.
But the company spared its cash cow, iPhones, even as rival smartphone makers were forced to pass on the higher costs that prompted a decline in global smartphone shipments in the April-June quarter, to the lowest in 13 years.
Apple's decision paid off: iPhone shipments rose 3% and the company's market share climbed to nearly a fifth, estimated research firm Counterpoint.

#june #shipments #soni

President Trump's campaign for lower interest rates in the U.S. faces another setback this week at the meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). Wall Street ***** ysts have generally come to the conclusion that the FOMC will hold rates steady, if not hike them—and Trump's own foreign policy is an underlying factor.

The FOMC, led by central bank chairman Kevin Warsh, will meet Tuesday and Wednesday of this week to discuss progress toward its targets of maximum employment and inflation at 2%.

It is the latter task that has caused the Fed some difficulty over the past few years. At the time of writing, inflation stands at 3.5%—a drop from May to June, but still elevated compared with the start of the year and the Fed's target.
Part of that reading has come from higher fuel prices, up 15.7% from a year ago. While pressure in this category is beginning to fade (down 4.9% May to June), prices remain elevated as a result of conflict in the Middle East, choking global oil supply as a result.
There is little sign of a resolution between Washington and Tehran in sight. While the two sides are not currently engaged in active military conflict, as they have been over the past fortnight, no official ceasefire has been announced. While the fragile pause of fire allows ***** e for diplomacy to proceed, neither side has indicated they will capitulate over control of the Strait of Hormuz—the key shipping lane in the movement of oil around the planet.
Trump's foreign policy is therefore standing in the way of Warsh's path to a cut—Wall Street ***** ysts highlighted at the start of the week.
Bank of America's base case is for a hold this month, wrote chief U.S. economist Aditya Bhave and his team: "With markets now pricing nearly 10 [basis points] of hikes in July, Chair Warsh faces a difficult choice. Not hiking could challenge the Fed's credibility on inflation. But raising rates would go against his framework of looking through supply shocks.

#bank

By Aditya Soni and Rashika Singh
July 22 (Reuters) - Advanced Micro Devices will sell Anthropic tens of billions of dollars' worth of AI servers and invest as much as $5 billion in the Claude ‌maker, in a deal that would strengthen its foothold in a market dominated by rival Nvidia.
The ‌announcement on Wednesday marks the latest so-called circular deal in the AI industry, where chipmakers invest in AI firms that are among their biggest customers. Nvidia has been in talks to invest $30 billion in ChatGPT creator OpenAI.
Buying AMD chips would secure Anthropic much-needed AI computing capacity. The startup has emerged as one of the leaders in Silicon Valley's artificial intelligence race, thanks to strong adoption of its enterprise tools such as Claude Code.
"It's strategically significant, as each win deepens AMD's credibility as the ‌number-two to Nvidia and supports the slow, ⁠steady share gains underpinning its AI growth story," said Emarketer ****** yst Jacob Bourne.

#NVIDIA #deal

By Aditya Kalra
NEW DELHI, July 9 (Reuters) - Google has challenged an Indian court ruling that it infringed on a company's trademark rights by allowing rivals to use its name as an advertising ‌keyword, arguing the decision will hurt consumers, documents reviewed by Reuters show.
The May decision could reshape the ‌online ads market in a country where Google last year earned $4.1 billion in gross advertising revenue but where it is also facing a raft of antitrust cases and court battles.
To ensure their ads are promoted by Google and target the right customers, companies bid on keywords that online consumers type into the search engine.
Indian bathroom fittings maker Hindware, however, accused its rivals of purchasing keywords related to its brand on the Google ads platform, so that their websites appear at the top of ‌searches when consumers typed in "Hindware".

With the start of the NFL’s regular season drawing ever closer, there remains one question hanging over the head of the Seattle Seahawks’ organization: Who will our next owner be?
It’s a question that could soon have its answer. According to a report from Front Office Sports’ Ben Horney, the bidding process appears to be down to two options. One group vying for ownership of the Super Bowl champions is led by San Francisco 49ers minority stake owner, Vinod Khosla, while the other is being championed by Boston Celtics minority owner Aditya Mittal and a former Celtics governor, Wyc Grousbeck.
Seahawks fans may want anyone ***** ociated with their vaunted NFC West rivals to stay far away from the franchise; however, there is a component to one of the groups that should bring a smile to their faces. Horney reports that at least one former Seahawks player is involved in one of the groups, though no specifics were mentioned in the article about which group or which player we might expect to see in a deal.
If Khosla is involved in purchasing the Seahawks, the family would be forced to sell their minority stake in the 49ers, which it acquired last spring. While these two groups appear to be the finalists, Horney says that a third suitor emerging is not out of the question.
The report from Horney keeps in line with the timeline discussed by NFL insider Ian Rapoport on the Pat McAfee Show in late May. Rapoport said in that appearance that the team could have a new ownership by August and that the sale could go for a record $10 billion.

By Aditya Soni
June 29 (Reuters) - Silicon Valley's powerful and pricey AI models have been a necessity for businesses looking to future-proof themselves. But now a growing number of tech CEOs are arguing that cheaper options would be crucial for their wider adoption.
Top executives such as Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Palo Alto Networks' Nikesh Arora ‌and Coinbase Global's Brian Armstrong have said smaller, cheaper models can handle a big share of corporate needs.
This view is the result of a reassessment within companies ‌that until recently encouraged heavy use of AI tools, often treating rising consumption as a proxy for productivity, dubbed "tokenmaxxing". Now, those bills are starting to bite.
Prices of tokens - the units used to measure AI usage - are falling, but the cost of completing a task is rising as AI firms shift from flat subscriptions to usage-based pricing. That is leaving companies with unpredictable and often higher bills as usage per task becomes harder to estimate.

For months, Kleiner Perkins partner Aditya Naganath had been mulling over his investing thesis that the next wave of AI wasn't going to be a chatbot—it was going to be software that does the work autonomously, for hours at a time, across thousands of tasks at once. The trouble was, **** ody had built the plumbing for it yet. Then he met Neil Movva.
"It felt obvious to both of us that you're going to need a different, specific inference platform built for these long-running agents," Naganath told Fortune.
Now, six months after Naganath and Movva first chatted, Movva's startup, Sail Research, has launched from stealth with $80 million in seed and Series A funding at a $450 million valuation, Fortune learned exclusively. Kleiner Perkins led the Series A. Sequoia, Redpoint, Theory Ventures, Vine Ventures, and CRV also participated.
Sail Research wants to fix one of AI's expensive problems. AI infrastructure was designed for quick, single exchanges—think a chatbot answering a question. But enterprises are increasingly deploying AI agents that run autonomously for hours, reading entire codebases, screening hundreds of job candidates, or researching complex topics without a human in the loop. At that scale, enterprise AI bills have tripled even as per-token prices have fallen, because agentic workflows consume tokens at a rate 50 to 500 times higher than simple chat. Goldman Sachs forecasts a 24-fold increase in token consumption by 2030.
Movva's solution is an end-to-end infrastructure platform built from the lowest level of the chip up. Sail writes the software that orchestrates and optimizes how AI models run on existing chips. Think of it like a highly efficient traffic system that tells the hardware exactly how to allocate its resources, squeezing far more work out of the same physical computing power.

By Stephen Nellis and Aditya Soni
SAN FRANCISCO, June 25 (Reuters) - Apple raised iPad and MacBook prices on Thursday, saying it could no longer shield customers from soaring memory and storage chip costs driven by the AI industry's datacenter buildout.
The move does not affect Apple's main cash cow, ‌the iPhone. But it would take starting price of the Neo - its lowest priced laptop aimed at winning marketshare from affordable Windows and Chromebook laptops - ‌from $599 to $699 months after launch.
The increase shows even the world's most valuable consumer electronics company with supply chain relationships that are the envy of the industry is not immune to a memory price surge that has dulled the outlook for smartphone and PC sales.
Memory makers such as Micron have in recent months prioritized orders from AI chipmakers like Nvidia, helping them earn record profit but leaving little supply for electronics makers that have been forced to increase prices.

By Aditya Kalra and Munsif Vengattil
NEW DELHI, June 24 (Reuters) - A fire at a New Delhi data centre owned by Singapore's ST Telemedia and India's Tata Communications caused "extensive damage" to parts of the facility, making data recovery challenging, a Tata letter seen by Reuters shows.
The firm, part ‌of the salt-to-aviation Tata conglomerate, told Indian stock exchanges on June 5 it had activated business continuity protocols to minimise disruptions after an early morning ‌fire at the STT Global Data Centres India facility.
One data centre client, India's Matrix Cellular, which provides international SIM cards, told Reuters it is struggling to recover two decades of data lost in the blaze.
Some of Google Cloud's intermittent network disruptions in India also relate to the incident, a source with direct knowledge of the matter said.

By Aditya Kalra and Munsif Vengattil
NEW DELHI, June 24 (Reuters) - A fire at a New Delhi data centre owned by Singapore's ST Telemedia and India's Tata Communications caused "extensive damage" to parts of the facility, making data recovery challenging, a Tata letter seen by Reuters shows.
The firm, part ‌of the salt-to-aviation Tata conglomerate, told Indian stock exchanges on June 5 it had activated business continuity protocols to minimise disruptions after an early morning ‌fire at the STT Global Data Centres India facility.
One data centre client, India's Matrix Cellular, which provides international SIM cards, told Reuters it is struggling to recover two decades of data lost in the blaze.
Some of Google Cloud's intermittent network disruptions in India also relate to the incident, a source with direct knowledge of the matter said.

A ‘triple whammy’ of chaos has triggered a downward spiral in Antarctica, scientists discover

For decades, it seemed Antarctica might be insulated from the kind of rapid ice melting unfolding in the Arctic. But in 2015, that changed when the sea ice fringing this vast, icy continent stopped expanding and began to decline dramatically. Now, scientists say they have figured out why this happened — and their findings spell deep trouble for a region whose fate affects us all.
Antarctic sea ice has been on a steep downward trend for nearly a decade. It reached a record low in 2022 and again in 2023, when it dropped to just 691,000 square miles, equivalent to an area of missing ice larger than Greenland compared to average levels. This year saw a higher amount of sea ice at the height of the Southern Hemispher summer, but it was still at its 16th lowest level in nearly five decades of record keeping.
Scientists have been working for years to understand what is driving the precipitous decline in sea ice and whether it is a sign Antarctica is entering a new state.
The new research identifies a series of different processes — driven by intensifying winds and warming water — which flipped the ocean surrounding Antarctica “out of balance.” It amounts to a “triple whammy of climate chaos,” the report authors wrote in a press release accompanying the paper, which was published in the journal Science Advances on Friday.
The chain of events began decades ago, when westerly winds around Antarctica started to get stronger, said Aditya Narayanan, a study author and research fellow in physical oceanography at the University of Southampton in the UK.

https://www.yahoo.com/news...

A 'K-shaped' economy is emerging: What that could mean for 2026

A growing chorus on Wall Street is warning that the US economy is becoming increasingly K-shaped, with higher-income households powering spending while lower-income consumers struggle with affordability. It mirrors what investors have seen in the stock market, where Big Tech continues to drive the major indexes even as other sectors lag behind.
The concern: How long can those two realities coexist before something breaks?
“I don't think they're going to coexist forever,” Bank of America senior US economist Aditya Bhave told Y

A growing chorus on Wall Street is warning that the US economy is becoming increasingly K-shaped, with higher-income households powering spending while lower-income consumers struggle with affordability. It mirrors what investors have seen in the stock market, where Big Tech continues to drive the major indexes even as other sectors lag behind.
The concern: How long can those two realities coexist before something breaks?
“I don't think they're going to coexist forever,” Bank of America senior US economist Aditya Bhave told Yahoo Finance during the firm’s 2026 outlook call this week. “Our vi