POLICY

EU boosts AI efforts, investment

Europe is getting serious about AI.

The European Union on Wednesday outlined plans to boost adoption and research of AI in the region to keep up with the rapidly evolving tech in the U.S. and China. The strategy involves a $1.1 billion investment in boosting AI adoption in key industries. 

The plan includes two main points: an “Apply AI” strategy and an “AI in Science” strategy. 

• The Apply AI strategy aims to accelerate the “ time from concept to availability on the market” and bolster the European workforce to be “AI-ready across sectors.” This will also include the launch of the Apply AI Alliance, which brings together industry, public sector and academic partners.

• Meanwhile, the AI in Science strategy aims to raise the profile of the EU’s AI-powered scientific research, attracting scientific talent and securing access to “AI gigafactories” to meet the computational needs of startups.

“Putting AI first also means putting safety first,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said in the announcement. “We will drive this ‘AI first’ mindset across all our key sectors, from robotics to healthcare, energy and automotive.”

These strategies build on the AI Continent Action Plan, which was unveiled in April, and include more than $220 billion in investment to enhance AI development and support AI infrastructure. 

However, in recent months, the investment and development of AI in the U.S. and China have also sharply ramped up. In the U.S., initiatives like Project Stargate allocate hundreds of billions of dollars in funding to rapidly build out domestic data centers, and the “AI Action Plan” introduced this summer by the Trump Administration is directly aimed at winning the AI race. In China, meanwhile, the Chinese State Council unveiled a ten-year plan to establish a fully AI-powered economy in late August, and companies like Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu and JD.com are ramping up AI spending and infrastructure investments.

One major factor in the speed of innovation is the regulatory environment of these regions. Despite concerns that Europe is lagging behind in the AI race, the region’s regulatory and safety standards are far stricter than those of competitors like China and the U.S., with the EU AI Act in particular seeking to mitigate risks and ban certain practices. While that does stand to slow down development, doing so could ensure that AI coming out of Europe is created in a safe and ethical manner. 

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STARTUPS

SoftBank adds robotics to AI portfolio

Tech investors are eager to bring AI into the physical world. 

On Wednesday, Swiss engineering firm ABB announced an agreement to sell its robotics unit to SoftBank in a deal worth nearly $5.4 billion. The acquisition adds to SoftBank’s existing robotics portfolio and boosts its broader vision for “artificial super intelligence,” or AI that is 10,000 times smarter than humans. The acquisition is expected to be completed by mid-to-late next year. 

“SoftBank’s next frontier is Physical AI,” Masayoshi Son, founder of SoftBank, said in a statement. “Together with ABB Robotics, we will unite world-class technology and talent under our shared vision to fuse Artificial Super Intelligence and robotics.” 

The news signals a growing interest in AI-powered robotics among tech firms: On Tuesday, Qualcomm announced that it’s acquiring Italian electronics firm Arduino as it continues its push into robotics, and Figure is set to unveil its next-generation humanoid robot, Figure 03, on Thursday. 

However, growth for this market is slower than others, held back by costs, safety and technical hurdles in development. According to Info-Tech Research Group’s 2026 Tech Trends report, published this week, robotics and physical AI adoption is still nascent, with relatively low growth rates compared to tech sectors like generative AI, agentic AI, cloud computing and data management solutions. 

It also highlights SoftBank’s aggressive effort to expand its AI footprint. In a press release announcing the acquisition, the firm noted a push into four key areas: AI chips, robotics, data centers and energy, as well as generative AI investments. 

Notably, the company has plunged billions into the Stargate project alongside OpenAI and Oracle, the three firms announcing five new data center sites in late September and $400 billion in investment.

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PRODUCTS

Square launches AI small business upgrades

While tech giants focus on obtaining large enterprise clients, Square is setting its sights on a broader range of businesses. 

On Wednesday, the fintech giant announced enhancements to Square AI, its conversational assistant for businesses. New features include deeper, neighborhood-specific insights that might impact business, AI-generated data visualizations pinned to their dashboards, saved conversation history and mobile access. 

“Small businesses … don’t have great telemetry into how their business is operating,” Willem Avé, Square’s head of product, told The Deep View. “We started Square AI with the assumption that natural language is the best way to find out about your business.” 

Unlike larger enterprises, small and medium-sized businesses are still cautious about adopting AI. Data from Comerica, published in August, found that while AI adoption is accelerating among small companies, challenges such as accuracy, tech vulnerability and learning curves remain roadblocks. The goal is to “bridge that trust gap,” Avé said. “It’s why we tried to build something that could be as reliable as possible.” 

Avé told The Deep View that Square AI’s agent layer delivers both structured and unstructured insights to businesses in a “hallucination-free way” by teaching its models how to query the sellers’ data, rather than interpreting it outright. 

Additionally, making the user interface as easy as possible and providing guidance on how to properly prompt it has helped “build trust over time of the system,” he said. 

“These small and medium businesses are busy,” said Avé. “They just want something turnkey. They can push a button and turn on.”

LINKS

• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang calls AMD, OpenAI deal “imaginative”

• Google launches Opal vibe coding app in 15 more countries

• Elon Musk’s xAI is in talks to raise more financing than initially planned

• AI legal startup Crosby raises $20 million Series A

• Agentic software development firm Relace raised $23 million Series A

• New York City sues social media giants for youth mental health crisis

• Promptius.ai: An AI agent for building AI agents using natural language. 

• Dragonfly: An AI-powered platform for recommending software from a catalog of 250,000 tools. 

• QA.tech: Agentic AI quality assurance testers for user journeys. 

• PagerDuty Agent Suite: A suite of AI agents for meeting transcription, scheduling, and meeting analytics and recommendations 

• The Brief: An AI-powered marketing and advertising agency to create campaigns and discover insights.

• Cisco: AI Researcher

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• Meta: Software Engineer, Infrastructure

• Google: Software Engineer III, Google Cloud

GAMES

POLL RESULTS

When humanoid robots become common in daily life, what will matter most?

• Their empathy (12%)

• Their autonomy (5%)

• Their integration (17%)

• Their purpose (33%)

• I don't want humanoids in my life at all (33%)