As the Gulf region gains growing strategic importance for the tech war between the U.S. and China, Microsoft makes a big move into one of its richest oil countries.
The minority stake will give Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice chair and president, a seat on G42’s board of directors.
The funding comes amid U.S. politicians’ escalating concerns over G42’s ties with China.
Given the two countries’ increasing economic ties, it’s no surprise that G42, the AI poster child of the UAE, has also forged ties with Chinese firms.
Under the agreement, the Emirati company’s data platform and other key technology infrastructure will migrate to Microsoft Azure, which will power G42’s AI product development.
AI is a data problem.
Now Cyera is raising up to $300M on a $1.5B valuation to secure itA cybersecurity startup called Cyera is betting that the next big challenge in enterprise data protection will be AI, and it’s raising a big round of funding as demand picks up for it.
Previous to this, Cyera — pronounced “Sierra” and headquartered in San Mateo and with roots in Israel — had raised a total of $160 million with its current $500 million valuation dating from last year.
Cyera, Coatue and Sequoia declined comment.
A source said that AI right now is a “huge driver” for business at Cyera.
India has approved allocating up to $15.2 billion (1.26 trillion Indian rupees) to build three new semiconductor plants, including its first semiconductor fab facility — part of the country’s big bid to take on China, Taiwan and other countries in the chip race.
On Thursday, the Indian cabinet approved the country’s first semiconductor fab facility set up by the salt-to-software conglomerate Tata Group and Taiwan’s Power Chip, which will be established in the Dholera region of Gujarat.
The Indian IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw told reporters at a media briefing in New Delhi that the construction work for the semiconductor fab will start within 100 days.
“A typical semiconductor fab, construction is a three-four-year time frame.
This will be the country’s third semiconductor unit and will be able to produce 48 million chips per day.
