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Good Morning! Semiconductor stocks, artificial intelligence, campus salaries and cryptocurrency are among today’s key headlines. Japanese shares are gaining amid a chip-sector rally, while Berlin-based Deepslate has raised €7.7 million in seed funding for its speech-to-speech AI model. An Aon study expects median salaries at IITs and IIMs to remain largely unchanged for the Class of 2027. Google has unveiled Gemini 4 Argon, while softer US inflation briefly pushed Bitcoin above USD 85,000.
What’s New Today? Japanese stocks are benefiting from renewed strength in semiconductor and AI-linked shares. Deepslate, a Berlin-based voice AI laboratory, has secured €7.7 million in seed funding led by 42CAP, with Alstin Capital and others participating. The startup is developing a speech-to-speech model designed to process audio directly.
In India, Aon’s Campus Study Report 2026-27 projects median compensation for IIT graduates at Rs 16.46 lakh per annum and for IIM MBA graduates at Rs 26 lakh, both unchanged from the previous year. Meanwhile, Google has introduced Gemini 4 Argon, which it says is its most capable AI model so far. Bitcoin briefly moved above USD 85,000 after softer-than-expected US PCE inflation data.
Fast Track Insights: The latest developments highlight continued momentum in AI-linked semiconductor demand, investment in specialized AI models, and changing requirements in graduate hiring. Google’s new model targets long, multi-step professional tasks, while Bitcoin’s latest move remains closely tied to inflation data and Treasury yields.
Japanese shares are gaining as AI and semiconductor-related stocks track the broader global chip rally. Recent market coverage shows Japan’s Nikkei benefiting from strength in AI-linked shares, with semiconductor-related companies among those supporting the index. The move follows renewed interest in technology stocks after gains in the US semiconductor sector. The semiconductor rally continues to keep Japanese technology and chip-related stocks in focus as investors assess demand linked to artificial intelligence and data-center infrastructure.
Berlin-based Deepslate has raised €7.7 million in seed funding, equivalent to about USD 8.8 million, with Munich-based 42CAP leading the round. Alstin Capital, SIVentures and several business angels also participated. The company has developed its own speech-to-speech model and runs it on servers in Germany. Deepslate says its model can understand and generate speech directly without converting speech into text first. Its architecture combines a speech encoder, a reasoning core based on an open-weights language model, and a speech decoder. The company says its model produces a response 250 milliseconds after the end of a user's sentence, while Artificial Analysis measured time to first audio at 0.44 seconds.
Median compensation for IIT graduates from the Class of 2027 is projected at Rs 16.46 lakh per annum, unchanged from the Class of 2026, according to Aon’s Campus Study Report 2026-27. For MBA graduates from IIMs, the median salary is projected to remain at Rs 26 lakh. At Tier-1 engineering colleges, median salary packages are projected to increase from Rs 13.85 lakh to Rs 14.75 lakh per annum. Tier-1 management institutes are expected to see median packages rise from Rs 20.89 lakh to Rs 21.50 lakh. Overall campus pay is projected to rise between 2% and 7% year-on-year across major streams. Aon said employers are becoming more selective about skills and job readiness. The study found 56% of organizations plan to increase hiring of CA and CS graduates, while 51% expect to hire more interns.
Google has unveiled Gemini 4 Argon, its most capable AI model so far and the first model in the Gemini 4 series. The model is designed for long, multi-step tasks across software engineering, legal and finance work, and cybersecurity. Argon currently tops 13 of 18 benchmarks against models from OpenAI and Anthropic. It scored 77.9% on DeepSWE v1.1, compared with 74.2% for Claude Opus 5.5 and 74.1% for GPT-6 Astra. Google has also increased its output limit from 64,000 to 1 million tokens. Google says thousands of employees have already used Argon internally. Google is initially providing the model to trusted cyber defenders through its Fairwind Program, followed by paid API customers and Google AI Ultra subscribers.
Bitcoin briefly climbed above USD 85,000 after US PCE inflation data came in softer than expected. BTC reached USD 85,500 before retreating and was trading around USD 84,100, up 1.3% over 24 hours, according to the report. August headline PCE inflation rose 3.4% year on year, while core PCE increased 3.0%. Monthly core inflation came in at 0.2%, below the 0.3% forecast. The data reduced market expectations for an October Federal Reserve rate hike and briefly lifted risk-asset demand. The move later faded as the 10-year Treasury yield remained near 5.3%, while the 30-year yield stayed close to its highest levels since 2002. Bitcoin was trading below the report’s identified resistance band of USD 84,800-USD 85,800, with support at USD 82,500-USD 83,000.
