What’s New Today: Baidu is ready to launch processors including M100, M300 in 2026. The announcement was made at the annual Baidu World technology conference.
Fast-Track Insights: Forterra, a Maryland-based developer of autonomous military vehicle technology, has secured $238 million in a funding round led by Moore Strategic Ventures.
Here’s a quick rundown of the biggest tech headlines making waves today. Let's dive into the top tech stories, from Baidu's new processor launch to the crypto firms going toward a new strategy.
Baidu has unveiled two new AI processors which will be available by early 2026. The first one is an M100 processor focusing on inference and the second one is an M300 processor combining both training and inference capabilities. Baidu has also revealed that its'supernode' system will connect multiple chips. Overall, these moves are aimed at creating powerful AI infrastructure that is domestically controlled and more affordable for Chinese enterprises.
The defense startup Forterra, based in Maryland, has successfully raised a total of $238 million consisting of both equity and a $50 million debt part. These funding rounds have raised its valuation to over $1 billion. The company was founded in 2002 by Alberto Lacaze and Karl Murphy and is now dedicated to developing autonomous, coordinated military vehicle systems with various capabilities such as surveillance, transport, missile deployment, and mobile AI missions.
India's labour market is undergoing a dramatic change: the need for skilled, vocational and apprenticeship jobs is increasing at a higher rate than that of traditional white-collar jobs. A lot of Gen Z students are still determined to get university degrees even though costs, visa problems and automation are changing the job market and the time when people are able to start working.
With its new service, Private AI Compute, Google is giving access to AI at cloud-scale through its Gemini models. It is also making sure that personal data is safely stored in a dedicated environment which is hardware-secured and isolated. The service is operated in a highly secure cloud 'enclave' where the user data is encrypted and is inaccessibly even to Google and the processing occurs using exclusive infrastructure such as TPUs under the Secure AI Framework.
Publicly traded digital-asset treasury firms are changing their ways due to market fluctuations. Upexi sanctioned a share buyback worth $50 million and has about 2 million Solana (which is around $283 million) in its books. This action is part of a larger pattern where companies in the digital-asset treasury (DAT) space have liquidated portions of their fiat reserves to buy cryptocurrencies and so sold part of their equity at a discount due to very low equity valuations.