Ambi, founded by former Plaud executive Peter Mo, has raised $26 million across multiple rounds led by Luminous Ventures and manufacturer Huaqin, TechCrunch reported. The app listens continuously, by user choice and off by default, to offer suggestions during meetings, and is launching on iPhone, Mac and Apple Watch, with its own hardware planned. Mo acknowledged the disclosure problem for people recorded by others remains unsolved across the industry. Single-sourced to TechCrunch.
Toronto-based Xanadu is building out the infrastructure around photonic quantum computing, EE Times reported: a multiyear partnership with GlobalFoundries to industrialize its photonics and single-photon detectors on a 300mm line in Malta, New York, a multimillion-dollar cooling collaboration with Bluefors, and C$195 million, about $136.7 million, in Canadian federal support for Project OPTIMISM, plus a planned Toronto photonics facility called Inception. Xanadu is also in Stage B of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative.
Europe’s advanced packaging gap is a volume problem, EE Times reported from Fraunhofer IZM and Swissbit: specialized firms may need only 20 to 100 wafers a year, too little for large outsourced packaging providers, leaving a missing middle between pilot lines and mass manufacturing that platform-based, low-volume producers such as Swissbit in Berlin are trying to fill.
Memphis City Council voted 7-5 to postpone, for a second time, a decision on a proposed 12-month data center moratorium, with a vote now likely on October 20, Datacenter Dynamics reported. More than 100 residents attended in protest. The city hosts several facilities operated by xAI, now rebranded SpaceXAI, which have faced lawsuits over gas turbine permits.
Princeton Digital Group has signed a definitive agreement to sell its Indonesian enterprise data center business, five operational facilities across Greater Jakarta, Bandung, Surabaya and Pekanbaru, to SM+, the digital infrastructure arm of Sinar Mas, Datacenter Dynamics reported. Terms were not disclosed. PDG retains its Indonesian hyperscale portfolio of about 400MW, and SM+ will operate 31 sites across 25 markets after closing.
Nebius has signed a letter of intent to be the first offtaker at Volt’s planned AI campus in Rotterdam, now described as a 600MW, six-building site, Datacenter Dynamics reported. The first phase is two 100MW data centers with total investment of approximately 7 billion euros, split between construction and compute hardware, with energy supplied by Eneco. Terms of Nebius’s capacity purchase will be set later.
In people moves reported by Datacenter Dynamics, Microsoft’s senior director of AI systems hardware architecture has joined OpenAI, and Google’s Jacqueline Dory Prescott has been named data center portfolio lead at Anthropic, two more data points in the talent flow from hyperscalers to model labs.