The owner of Facebook has agreed to buy $60bn (£44.5bn) of artificial intelligence chips from the US semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices despite fears over the vast sums being spent on the AI industry.Meta, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, has clinched the five-year deal in which it will also buy 10% of the chip company.AMD signed a similar pact with OpenAI last year, which was hailed as a vote of confidence in its chips and software, significantly boosting its stock price.A recent series of ...

Shelly Romero has early memories of going to her local supermarket and picking pulp fiction off the shelves. “We were very working class; my mom was working two jobs sometimes,” she recalls. “The appeal of books being cheaper and smaller and able to be carried around was definitely a thing.”For generations of readers, the gateway to literature was not a hushed library or a polished hardback but a wire spinner rack in a supermarket, pharmacy or railway station. There, amid chewing gum and cigarettes, sat the ...

Oil prices have reached seven-month highs, as traders reacted to heightened tensions between the US and Iran ahead of nuclear talks this week.US crude futures rose to $67.28 a barrel on Monday, while Brent crude touched its highest level since 31 July at $72.50 a barrel. Prices fell back late in the session, but were up again on Tuesday morning, approaching Monday’s highs.James Hosie, a research analyst at Shore Capital, said oil markets were “rationally trying to price in a risk premium for oil prices, giv ...

Stock markets stumbled on Monday as Donald Trump pushed ahead with fresh tariffs on the US’s trading partners despite a supreme court strike-down and growing opposition from domestic voters.Uncertainty over the status of global trade deals spooked investors, trigging a drop in US shares prices including on the Dow Jones industrial average, which tumbled 1.4% in morning trading. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 also fell 0.9% and 1.1%, after losses for European stock markets.Shareholders were struggling to discern ...

The boss of Netflix has launched a fresh defence of its $82.7bn (£61bn) takeover of Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) assets, as he defended the streaming company’s contribution to the UK film and TV industry.Ted Sarandos claimed Netflix buying WBD would bring “growth” to the entertainment industry, amid attempts by rival Paramount Skydance to launch a counter offer for the studio business which he said would do the opposite.“We’re buying a movie studio and a distribution entity that we don’t currently have,” he ...

Donald Trump has told Netflix to remove the Democratic foreign policy expert Susan Rice from its board or “face the consequences”, while the streaming platform is locked in an extraordinary corporate battle to take control of Warner Bros Discovery (WBD).In comments posted on his Truth Social platform, the US president described Rice – who served as national security adviser to Barack Obama and UN ambassador and White House adviser under Joe Biden – as a “political hack” and accused her of having “no talent ...

Donald Trump announced on Saturday that he would raise a temporary tariff rate on US imports from all countries from 10% to 15%, less than 24 hours after the US supreme court ruled against the legality of his flagship trade policy.Infuriated by the high court’s ruling on Friday that he had exceeded his authority and should have got congressional approval for the tariffs he introduced last year under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), the US president railed against the justices who str ...

It is refreshing to witness the US supreme court recover its spine and stand up to Donald Trump’s most extreme caprices. The 6-3 decision on Friday to strike down his barrage of tariffs on imports from virtually everywhere based on the preposterous argument that they addressed national emergencies will reassure the world that the US’s system of government – based on the separation of powers, checks and balances, and the rule of law – has not collapsed entirely.But let’s hold the (imported) champagne. The co ...

The US supreme court has struck down Donald Trump’s flagship policy of imposing tariffs on foreign imports in his bid to revitalise American manufacturing. The US president has reportedly called the decision a “disgrace”. Here’s what it means, and what could happen next.What did the court ruling say?The court ruled that Trump exceeded his authority and should have got congressional approval for the tariffs, which he announced on what he dubbed “liberation day” last April. The tariffs, set at varying rates, ...

Amazon’s huge cloud computing arm reportedly experienced at least two outages caused by its own artificial intelligence tools, raising questions about the company’s embrace of AI as it lays off human employees.A 13-hour interruption to Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) operations in December was caused by an AI agent autonomously choosing to “delete and then recreate” a part of its environment, the Financial Times reported.AWS, which provides vital infrastructure for much of the internet, suffered several outages ...