Amazon

Data-labeling startup Scale AI raises $1B as valuation doubles to $13.8B

Scale AI, which provides data-labeling services to companies that want to train machine learning models, has raised a $1 billion Series F round from a slew of big-name institutional and corporate investors that include Amazon and Meta. The fundraise is a mix of primary and secondary funding, and is the latest in a slew of […]

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AWS confirms will launch European ‘sovereign cloud’ in Germany by 2025, plans €7.8B investment over 15 years

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing business, has confirmed further details of its European “sovereign cloud,” which is designed to enable greater data residency across the region. The company said that the first AWS sovereign cloud region will be set up in the German state of Brandenburg, and will go live by the end

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Meesho, an Indian social commerce platform with 150M transacting users, raises $275M

Meesho, a leading e-commerce startup in India with about 150 million transacting users, has secured $275 million in a new funding round, the company disclosed in a securities filing. The new funding is part of a larger financing round that is likely to include secondary transactions and balloon to over $500 million, people familiar with

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Amazon’s CTO built a meeting-summarizing app for some reason

How does Amazon CTO Werner Vogels — a man worth untold millions, who during the COVID-19 pandemic outright bought the small Central Amsterdam Airbnb he’d been living in — spend his days? From the looks of it: building AI-powered meeting-summarizing apps. Go figure. In a post this week on Vogels’ personal blog, he details Distill,

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Bedrock Studio is Amazon’s attempt to simplify generative AI app development

Amazon is launching a new tool, Bedrock Studio, designed to let organizations experiment with generative AI models, collaborate on those models, and ultimately build generative AI-powered apps. Available in public preview starting today, the web-based Bedrock Studio — a part of Bedrock, Amazon’s generative AI tooling and hosting platform — provides what Amazon describes in

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TechCrunch Minute: Audible deploys AI-narrated audiobooks. Can it replace the human touch?

AI is coming for audiobooks, and that is not an entirely bad thing. But it is a cause of concern in the realm of audio titles and the folks who make them today. Audible is making it easy for authors to generate AI-narrated audiobooks, and as in many cases of AI showing up in an

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Amazon launches a Prime-free marketplace in South Africa, its first in sub-Saharan Africa

Two years after announcing plans, Amazon’s highly awaited e-commerce entry into sub-Saharan Africa has finally come to pass. On Tuesday, the tech giant launched its marketplace in South Africa. South Africa is the e-commerce giant’s first marketplace in the sub-Saharan region (it already has an operation out of Egypt following the acquisition of Souq in

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Audible to test using Prime Video data for audiobook recommendations as Spotify competition heats up

Amazon has historically operated audiobook marketplace Audible as a separate entity, unconnected to the retailer’s broader goals and ambitions. Today, that’s changing a bit with the launch of a test that will allow Audible users to receive recommendations about what to listen to next based on their Prime Video viewing behavior. The company says this

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