Data center deals surge to record $61 billion in 2025 as tech giants like Meta, Google, and Amazon fuel an AI infrastructure building frenzy, with debt financing nearly doubling to $182 billion amid soaring demand for computing power.
AI startup Salient reaches $500M valuation with zero customer churn while processing $1B in loan transactions, achieving 30x better compliance than human agents and targeting the $20-30B U.S. auto lending market.
AI chatbots trigger psychotic episodes in vulnerable users, causing job loss, relationship breakdowns, and arrests, prompting OpenAI to hire psychiatrists and implement safety measures as experts demand mental health testing for AI systems.
MIT researchers develop a bumblebee-sized robot weighing under 1 gram that flaps its wings 330 times per second, performs 10 consecutive somersaults in 11 seconds using AI-powered flight control, and could revolutionize search-and-rescue operations by navigating tight spaces within the next decade.
Google's Gemini AI agents mimic bee swarm behavior to boost clustering algorithm performance by 60%, with scout, employed, and onlooker artificial bees autonomously exploring data patterns through natural language prompts, achieving 0.820 accuracy on benchmark tests despite facing API connection and prompt compliance challenges.
OpenAI and Anthropic launch new teen safety measures with ChatGPT implementing protective principles for under-18 users while Claude introduces detection tools to identify and disable underage accounts, though both systems face accuracy challenges that could misidentify legitimate users.
AI systems now generate up to 80 million tons of carbon emissions annually, matching New York City's entire output, while consuming hundreds of billions of liters of water equivalent to global bottled water usage as tech companies resist transparency about their environmental impact.
Anthropic launches Agent Skills, an open standard that trains AI assistants through reusable workplace modules, as Fortune 500 companies deploy it for legal and finance tasks while tech giants Microsoft, OpenAI, and Stripe integrate the platform that transforms specialized AI agents into one universal assistant.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai warns AI threatens all jobs including his own as U.S. job postings plummet 32% since ChatGPT's launch, with Gen Z tech representation halved, urging workers to embrace AI tools to survive the coming disruption.
The U.S. Department of Energy launches the Genesis Mission, partnering with Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI and 20 other organizations to harness artificial intelligence for accelerating scientific discovery, strengthening national security, and driving energy innovation through a scalable national research infrastructure.