Industry News

Epic Games is reportedly moving toward an AI-first workflow in its Disney collaboration, with models expected to generate code and guide art production. The Marvel and Star Wars shooter tied to the deal has reportedly been delayed indefinitely.

The U.S. Air Force plans to buy atmospheric data from WindBorne’s autonomous balloon fleet under a contract worth up to $49 million. The deal highlights how AI weather forecasting is becoming a contest over data collection as well as model design.

Ukrainian drone strikes damaged two Yandex data centers in Russia, including a facility housing two of the supercomputers used to train the company’s YandexGPT model. The incident also disrupted a range of consumer and public-facing online services.

Capcom says it is exploring a gradual evolution of the RE Engine toward AI-supported game development. For now, the company frames AI primarily as a way to improve workflows rather than generate in-game assets.

AI is gaining political attention and increasingly friendly product interfaces, yet consumer willingness to pay remains limited. TechCrunch’s latest Equity episode examines why enterprise customers still matter more to the AI economy.

The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association says hospitals’ use of AI tools in insurance claims was associated with an additional $942 million in healthcare spending over two years. The dispute centers on coding changes that insurers say are not matched by changes in care.

Crusoe is no longer moving ahead with Boom Supersonic’s planned stationary power turbine partnership, a deal valued at about $1.25 billion. The AI data center builder says it still plans to use gas turbines, but not Boom’s equipment.

Oracle has notified the developer of Project Jupiter, a major Stargate data-center campus in New Mexico. The notice does not signal an exit, but could let Oracle defer payments if the facility misses its 2028 launch target.

The FAA plans to introduce its SMART AI system as an advisory tool in the congested airspace around Washington, DC. A limited deployment will come before any nationwide expansion.

Microsoft’s September 2026 security update addressed more than 950 vulnerabilities, bringing its yearly total to about 2,750. Faster discovery and remediation are also creating a heavier burden for organizations that must assess, test, and deploy patches.

The FAA is preparing to roll out SMART, a cloud-based AI platform designed to help controllers forecast traffic and spot potential conflicts earlier. The system will begin in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.

A Pew Research survey of more than 42,000 people across 37 countries finds that most respondents expect AI to eliminate more jobs than it creates over the next 20 years. Yet public opinion is not purely negative: many people feel excitement and concern at the same time.

Emerald AI has formed the AI Energy Management Alliance with Google, Nvidia, Anthropic and several utilities. The group wants flexible data-center loads to create as much as 100 GW of additional grid capacity.

A new Basel Action Network report argues that AI’s electronic-waste footprint has been substantially underestimated. If data-center expansion continues, retired AI-related equipment could reach hundreds of millions of metric tons by 2050.

The expansion of AI infrastructure could make U.S. data centers one of the world’s largest natural gas consumers by 2035. The growth raises questions about power costs, grid capacity, and emissions.

OpenAI has reportedly acquired smartphone camera company Glass Imaging for more than $300 million. The deal could strengthen the AI company’s capabilities in on-device imaging as it explores new hardware.

Universal Music Group is partnering with ElevenLabs on an AI music platform that will let users create remixes, mashups, and new versions of tracks from a licensed catalog. The project signals a broader shift among major rights holders from resisting generative AI to shaping how it is used.

Google Cloud and Accenture are forming a joint business group to send forward-deployed engineers into enterprises and build custom applications on Gemini Enterprise. The move shows that AI implementation, not just model access, is becoming a central battleground among cloud and AI companies.

A fire at New York’s unfinished Lake Mariner campus highlights a broader problem: when ownership, operations, leasing, financing, and AI demand are split among several companies, responsibility can become difficult to assign.

The Seattle Times and Newsday accuse OpenAI of using their journalism to train AI models without permission and reproducing passages in responses. Microsoft is also named because Copilot relies on OpenAI technology.

Four widely used AI services experienced interruptions within the same morning, an unusual concentration of failures. The available evidence does not establish a shared root cause, but it highlights how heavily users depend on a small group of model providers.