- - **Microsoft Scout:** A new always-on personal agent for work built on OpenClaw and Work IQ.
- Scout is designed to operate across Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint, and local device actions, with governed Entra identity and admin policy controls.
- It is available to Frontier organizations through an early experimental release.
AMD
25 stories mentioning AMD
- - **Rayfin:** Preview open-source SDK and CLI for generating typed, governed enterprise app backends--database, auth, storage, and access policies--and deploying them as managed services in Microsoft Fabric.
- Data lands in OneLake by default.
- Microsoft highlighted Replit integration for natural-language app prototyping to governed Fabric deployment.
- - **GitHub Copilot app:** Preview of a native desktop app for agentic development.
- It can start from issues, pull requests, existing sessions, or ideas; uses git worktrees to separate agent sessions; supports pausing and resuming work; and can orchestrate multiple agent sessions in parallel through review, CI, and merge.
- - **Maia 200:** Microsoft's second-generation AI accelerator is running in production in Iowa and Arizona, with Italy, Australia, and South Korea next.
- Microsoft framed Maia 200 as improving tokens per dollar per watt in its fleet. - **Cobalt 200:** New Cobalt 200 VMs are in preview, and Cobalt 200 is deployed in more than 10 global regions.
- - **Teams platform for collaborative agents:** Build collaborative agents where work happens.
- Link: [Teams Platform Build](http://aka.ms/TeamsPlatform-Build). - **Microsoft Marketplace:** Updates to help developers build, scale, and monetize apps and agents through Microsoft Marketplace.
- Link: [Marketplace Build blog](https://aka.ms/MarketplaceBuildBlog2026). - **Microsoft for Startups:** Clearer path from AI development to enterprise growth.
- - **MAI-Thinking-1:** Microsoft AI's first reasoning model, described as a 35B active-parameter model with a 256K context window, trained from scratch on clean, commercially licensed data without distillation from third-party frontier models.
- It is open on Foundry in private preview / available to select early partners.
- - **Microsoft IQ:** Announced as the shared intelligence foundation for the agent era, bringing Work IQ, Fabric IQ, and Foundry IQ together across GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Foundry, and Copilot Studio.
- Microsoft said Microsoft IQ is generally available and designed to let developers build agents that reuse trusted organizational context across surfaces. - **Work IQ:** The workplace intelligence layer for agents, covering people, emails, documents, meetings, files, and work relationships across Microsoft 365 and organizational systems.
- Microsoft Build 2026 was framed as a full-stack developer platform event for the agentic AI era.
- The announcement set spans Microsoft IQ and grounding, new Microsoft AI models, Microsoft Foundry agent infrastructure, local and cloud agent runtimes, Windows developer updates, GitHub Copilot workflows, Azure data and infrastructure, security governance, scientific discovery, and quantum computing.
- - **Microsoft Discovery:** Generally available agentic AI platform for research and development workflows, with Discovery Engine agents that mimic the scientific method across knowledge, hypotheses, validation, and iteration.
- Microsoft cited examples from BHP, Syensqo, and GSK.
- Links: [Microsoft Discovery](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/discovery), [Discovery GA and app preview](https://aka.ms/MicrosoftDiscoveryBlog). - **Microsoft Discovery local app:** Free local app in preview for the broader scientific community, requiring a GitHub Copilot account. - **Majorana 2:** Next-generation quantum chip with topological qubits that Microsoft says are 1,000x more reliable than its previous generation, with average qubit lifetime of 20 seconds and instances up to one minute.
- - **Agent 365 for local agents / Windows 365 for Agents:** Control plane and managed Cloud PC approach for observing, governing, and securing agents across frameworks and hosting environments. - **Agent Control Specification:** Open specification for where and how to apply controls in agent loops and runtime governance.
- - **Surface RTX Spark Dev Box:** New compact AI developer box powered by NVIDIA RTX Spark, with up to 1 petaflop of AI compute, 128 GB unified memory, support for large local models, WSL2 with GPU passthrough and CUDA, VS Code, GitHub Copilot, and a custom Windows 11 Pro developer configuration.
- Available later this year in the US via Microsoft.com.
- Networking-software firm DriveNets closed a $410M Series D at an $8.5B valuation, led by Bessemer and Atreides, with AMD joining as a strategic investor.
- Its Ethernet-based "AI Fabric" is pitched as an open alternative to Nvidia/Mellanox InfiniBand for connecting large GPU clusters.
- The round, and AMD's participation, reflect intensifying competition over the interconnect layer of AI data centers — an area where Nvidia's lock-in is most contested. --- ## AI Safety & Policy **Tags:** `BREAKING` `POLICY`
- Nvidia unveiled its RTX Spark superchip at Computex 2026, pairing a Grace-class CPU with an RTX GPU (in collaboration with MediaTek) to bring up to ~1 petaflop of AI performance and 128GB of unified memory to Windows-on-Arm laptops.
- Dell, Lenovo, and Microsoft are named launch partners, with systems expected to ship in fall 2026.
- The Commerce Department took steps to extend export controls to cover advanced AI chips routed to overseas subsidiaries and affiliates of Chinese companies, closing a workaround that let restricted firms procure Nvidia and AMD silicon through entities outside mainland China.
- The action widens the enforcement perimeter from named entities to their global footprint and signals tighter scrutiny of third-country transshipment.
- curated executive briefing on the most significant developments in artificial intelligence — covering frontier models, industry moves, research breakthroughs, and policy shifts.
- Today's edition features major financial milestones from Anthropic and OpenAI, Nvidia's bold push into agentic CPUs, last-minute drama around U.S.
- AMD CEO Lisa Su revised the company's server CPU market growth projection from 18-20% annually to over 35% through 2031 — nearly doubling the prior estimate — driven by the memory bandwidth and orchestration demands of agentic AI workloads that extend well beyond GPU-only compute.
- The revision implies the server CPU total addressable market could exceed $120B by 2030.
- AMD announced more than $10 billion in capital commitments across Taiwan's semiconductor and AI ecosystem, including expanded packaging partnerships with ASE and SPIL and qualification of the industry's first 2.5D panel-based EFB interconnect with PTI.
- The investments support deployment of the AMD Helios rack-scale platform — powered by Instinct MI450X GPUs and 6th Gen "Venice" EPYC CPUs — in the second half of 2026.
- MLCommons announced its fourth annual Rising Stars cohort: 39 early-career researchers selected from 175+ applicants across 26 institutions, including UC Berkeley/BAIR, Cornell Tech, and Carnegie Mellon.
- The cohort spans LLM systems efficiency, hardware-software co-design, trustworthy AI, and multimodal learning, with 28% women and gender-diverse participants.
Early investors disclosed in Cerebras's blockbuster IPO include Foundation Capital, Benchmark, and — notably — OpenAI itself. The IPO reshapes the AI hardware competitive map, providing Cerebras fresh capital to challenge Nvidia and AMD in inference-optimized accelerators just as Trainium momentum builds.
- The AI hardware spotlight has shifted from GPU-heavy training to CPU-driven inference as agentic AI workloads transform data center architecture.
- AMD CEO Lisa Su projects the server CPU market will exceed $120B annually by 2030 (35%+ CAGR), a forecast she says has doubled in six months.
- AMD's Q1 revenue rose 38% year-over-year;
- Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab released a closed research preview of TML-Interaction-Small, a 276B-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 12B active parameters that processes audio, video, and text in 200-millisecond simultaneous micro-turns—achieving 0.40-second turn-taking latency versus 1.18 seconds for GPT-Realtime-2.0 minimal (per the lab's own FD-bench V1 benchmarks).
- Nvidia has already deployed $40 billion in equity investments across AI companies in 2026 — with more than half the year still to go.
- The figure marks a dramatic expansion of Nvidia's strategy from pure chip manufacturer to portfolio investor and ecosystem anchor.
- Deals span AI infrastructure, foundation model labs, and application-layer companies, effectively giving Nvidia financial exposure to the entire AI stack.
- Researchers released ZAYA1-8B, a strong open reasoning model whose defining characteristic is its training hardware: an exclusively AMD Instinct MI300 GPU stack — zero Nvidia silicon.
- The model performs competitively in its size class and arrives as independent validation that high-quality AI training is no longer exclusively Nvidia's domain.
- OpenAI has partnered with Microsoft, AMD, Broadcom, Nvidia, and Intel researchers to publish the Multipath Reliable Connection (MRC) protocol—a new networking standard designed to help AI infrastructure scale compute more efficiently across large distributed training clusters.
- The cross-industry collaboration on a low-level networking protocol is notable for its breadth, reflecting growing recognition that the bottleneck for next-generation AI training is not just raw compute but interconnect efficiency.
Meta raised its 2026 capex guidance to $125–145B, up from a prior $115B. The increase reflects sustained infrastructure commitment from the hyperscaler tier — and continues to validate the structural Nvidia thesis even as AMD gains share (data-center revenue up 39% YoY to $5.4B last quarter).