SoftBank will partner with South Korea's Cosmos Lab and DeltaX to enable mass production of large-scale battery cells from the fiscal year starting next April. SoftBank Group's mobile unit said it plans to begin large-scale battery cell manufacturing at its plant in Sakai, Osaka Prefecture, to address growing power demand for AI services. SoftBank Corp. will partner with South Korea's Cosmos Lab and DeltaX to enable mass production from the fiscal year starting next April, the company said in a statement Monday. The aim is to output energy storage systems at a scale of one gigawatt-hour per year, SoftBank said, which would make it one of the largest facilities in Japan, according to data from BloombergNEF. SoftBank could scale up to a capacity of several GWh, Bloomberg reported last month.

A member of NOPO, Iran's counter-terrorism special force, stands guard under a billboard of Iran's late supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in Tehran, on April 23. Doha - A drone struck a commercial vessel in Qatari waters on Sunday, the country's defense ministry said, after Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards threatened to target U.S. vessels in the region. Arch-foes the United States and Iran have been clashing in the Gulf and trading accusations in recent days, as Washington waits for Tehran to respond to its latest negotiating position. A commercial cargo vessel in the country's territorial waters -- northeast of Mesaieed Port -- coming from Abu Dhabi, was targeted by a drone on Sunday morning. The incident resulted in a limited fire on board the vessel, with no reported injuries, the Qatari ministry said on X.

A top Google scientist warned EU antitrust regulators that its proposal requiring the company to share search engine data with rivals risked exposing users' private information. BRUSSELS - A top Google scientist sent a warning to EU antitrust regulators on Tuesday that its proposal requiring the company to share search engine data with rivals such as OpenAI risked exposing users' private information, the sternest rebuke yet in a tussle over Google's lucrative business model. The European Commission, which acts as the EU competition enforcer, has in recent years cracked down on Big Tech via a slew of legislation to ensure that users have more choices and that smaller rivals have room to compete. However, that has triggered the ire of the U.S. government. Sergei Vassilvitskii, with the title of distinguished scientist at Google since 2012 and regarded a leader in his field, will meet EU antitrust officials on Wednesday to voice his concerns and propose a broader approach with better guardrails.

AI's hottest private companies have booming crypto shadow market Crypto platforms are offering trades tied to the most valuable private artificial intelligence companies on earth -- such as Anthropic -- that ordinary investors have almost no other way to access. The race to sell retail investors a piece of the artificial intelligence boom has gone mainstream -- closed-end funds, interval funds, special-purpose vehicles (SPVs). Now, crypto platforms are offering trades tied to the most valuable private AI companies on earth -- ones ordinary investors have almost no other way to access. The result is a new frontier in the financialization of private markets: crypto infrastructure, once the domain of digital token speculation, being redeployed to give traders a way to bet on Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX -- in real time, 24 hours a day, with leverage. Ventuals and PreStocks, two crypto venues riding that shift, have seen their trading activity -- measured by open interest and market value combined -- surge more than threefold since the start of the year to last month.

A Maholo humanoid robot carries out a series of tasks at the Institute of Science Tokyo's Robotics Innovation Center, during the center's opening last month. Artificial intelligence is transforming the way we work across industries. Two recent developments in Japan show how technology could help the nation cope with a shortage of talent in the fields of science and medical research. Some researchers have launched an effort to deploy AI-powered robots to carry out complex wet-lab experiments, which could free staff from time-consuming, repetitive work. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.