WhatsApp wants to be more than a messaging app. CEO Kunal Shah has set three priorities after months of user feedback: better communication, easier everyday tasks and more AI.
Users send over 10 billion voice messages a day, and the company wants voice notes, groups and video to be simpler. Financial and telecom partners would help with tasks like paying bills.
The AI would work quietly in the background, finding information and keeping track of bookings. Shah said personal chats and calls will stay end-to-end encrypted, though no launch dates have been announced.
AI-related financing now makes up about a quarter of bank lending growth to companies in the euro zone, the European Central Bank's chief economist Philip Lane said.
Lane noted that credit has stayed robust despite higher interest rates and an oil price shock. Without AI, company loan growth would be 3% a year instead of 4%, even though AI sectors are a small part of the economy.
He would prefer more investment funded through equity, which could let AI-native firms expand faster. The ECB is expected to raise rates again at its December meeting.
Sachin Tendulkar has taken a non-controlling stake in Recykal, the Indian waste management technology firm.
His investment extends the $23 million round Recykal closed in June. The company will use the money to strengthen its tech platform, expand its Deposit Return System for packaging waste, and grow internationally.
Recykal's goal is to change the habits of a billion people, and Tendulkar said he was drawn in by how technology tackled a daily problem.
SpaceX plans to invest more than $74 billion across two AI supercomputing campuses, one in Texas and one in Arizona.
The Texas facility at Starbase, estimated at over $24 billion, will sit on about 444 acres near Brownsville and generate its own power off the public grid. The project has already created over 3,000 construction jobs.
The roughly $50 billion Arizona campus in Cochise County could scale up to 6 gigawatts, though it still needs county approvals. The Starbase city commission will weigh a property tax break for the Texas project on December 9.
