A joint venture between India’s Reliance Industries and Canadian and US companies will invest $11 billion to develop an artificial intelligence data centre in southeastern India, the state government said on Wednesday.

The five-year investment is for a one-gigawatt AI data centre in Visakhapatnam in the state of Andhra Pradesh.

Google said last month it will spend $15 billion over the same period on a giant data centre and AI base in the same city, its biggest outside the United States.

The Digital Connexion joint venture is between retail-to-refining giant Reliance, Canadian multinational Brookefield and U.S. real estate investment firm Digital Realty.

The investment will drive “jobs, innovation and global tech investment”, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu said in a post on social media platform X.

“This landmark project underscores Andhra Pradesh’s emergence as a leading destination for advanced digital infrastructure and next-generation computing capabilities,” the state government said in a statement.

Demand for AI tools and solutions is surging in India, which is projected to have more than 900 million internet users by year’s end.

Data centres are also an area of phenomenal global growth, fuelled by the need to store massive amounts of digital data and to train and run energy-intensive AI tools.

Leading U.S. AI firms seeking to court users in the world’s fifth-largest economy have made a flurry of announcements recently about expanding into India.

U.S. startup Anthropic said in October it plans to open an office in India next year, with its chief executive Dario Amodei meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

OpenAI has said it will open an Indian office this year, with its chief Sam Altman noting that ChatGPT usage in the country had grown fourfold over the past year.

AI firm Perplexity also announced a major partnership in July with Indian telecom giant Airtel, offering the company’s 360 million customers a free one-year Perplexity Pro subscription.

Three websites allowing users to create child sexual exploitation material with artificial intelligence have gone offline in Australia, the country’s internet regulator said Thursday.

Canberra’s eSafety said the sites had received over 100,000 visits from Australia and had been linked to a number of high-profile cases of AI-generated child sexual exploitation material of students at local schools.

AFP understands the websites were run by the UK-based Itai Tech, which was fined last week by UK regulator Ofcom for failing to include age verification measures.

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said the website had “failed to put in safeguards to prevent its services being used to create child sexual exploitation material”, and was marketing features allowing users to undress “any girl”.

“With this major provider blocking their use by Australians we believe it will have a tangible impact on the number of Australian school children falling victim to AI-generated child sexual exploitation,” Inman Grant said.

The firm was sent a formal warning by eSafety in September and threatened with a fine of up to AUD$49.5 million ($32.3 million US) over “alarming” features clearly targeted at children.

The proliferation of AI tools has led to new forms of abuse impacting children, including pornography scandals at universities and schools worldwide, where teenagers create sexualized images of their classmates.

A Save the Children survey this year found that one in five young people in Spain have been victims of deepfake nudes, with those images shared online without their consent.

Australia has been at the forefront of global efforts to curb internet harm, especially that targeted at children.

Landmark laws come into effect next month restricting under-16s from social media, one of the world’s toughest crackdowns on popular sites like Tiktok, Snapchat and Youtube.

Nothing on Thursday (November 27, 2025) officially launched the Phone 3a Lite in India catering to mid segment buyers. The new Nothing Phone 3a Lite fits at the starting of Phone 3 series which already has Phone 3, Phone 3a Pro and Phone 3a in the line up.

The Nothing Phone 3a Lite has features like Essential Key/Essential Space, Glyph light and a transparent design.

Phone 3a Lite has a 6.77 inch flexible AMOLED display with a 120 Hz refresh rate and 3,000 nits peak brightness. It is being protected by Panda glass, both front and back. The phone bears an IP54 rating to make it dust and splash proof.

Nothing has used a 5,000 mAh battery in the Phone 3a Lite. It supports up to 33W charging and 5W reverse charging. However, charger is not included in the box.

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Phone 3a Lite runs on MediaTek Dimensity 7300 Pro with 8 GB RAM and up to 256 GB storage, which can be expanded till 2 TB via microSD card. It will operate on Nothing OS 3.5 based on Android 15 out of the box. Nothing will provide 3 OS and 6 years of security updates to it.

Nothing Phone 3a Lite sports a 50 MP main Samsung sensor, with an 8 MP ultrawide lens and a 2 MP macro camera. It has a 16 MP front lens for selfies.

Phone 3a Lite will be sold in Black, White and Blue colours starting at ₹20,999 for the 8 GB/128 GB variant. The 8 GB/256 unit costs ₹22,999. It will go on sale starting December 5 on Flipkart, Vijay Sales, Croma and all leading retail stores across India.

The Pentagon has concluded that Alibaba Group Holding, Baidu Inc and BYD Co should be added to a list of companies that aid the Chinese military, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday.

Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg informed lawmakers of the conclusion in a letter on October 7, three weeks before Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping agreed to a broad trade truce, according to the report.

It is not immediately clear if the companies have been added to the Pentagon’s 1260H list of Chinese companies deemed military-linked but operating in the U.S., Bloomberg reported.

While the designation does not involve immediate bans, it can be a blow to the reputations of affected companies and represents a stark warning to U.S. entities and firms about the risks of conducting business with them.

Feinberg said the three companies and five others, Eoptolink Technology Inc, Hua Hong Semiconductor Ltd , RoboSense Technology Co, WuXi AppTec Co and Zhongji Innolight Co, merit inclusion on the 1260H list, according to the report.

An Alibaba spokesperson told Reuters in an emailed statement that “there’s no basis to conclude that Alibaba should be placed on the Section 1260H List”, clarifying that “Alibaba is not a Chinese military company nor part of any military-civil fusion strategy.”

The company also added that “being on the Section 1260H List would not affect our ability to conduct business as usual in the United States or anywhere in the world” as it doesn’t do any business related to U.S. military procurement.

The Pentagon, Baidu and BYD did not immediately respond to Reuters request for comments.

The annually updated list of Chinese military companies, formally mandated under U.S. law as the “Section 1260H list”, designated 134 companies in its last update in January, including Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings and battery maker CATL.

A U.S.-based advocacy group has filed a lawsuit in Washington accusing Apple of using minerals linked to conflict and human rights abuses in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda despite the iPhone maker’s denials.

International Rights Advocates (IRAdvocates) has previously sued Tesla, Apple and other tech firms over cobalt sourcing, but U.S. courts dismissed that case last year.

French prosecutors also dropped Congo’s case against Apple subsidiaries in December over conflict minerals, citing lack of evidence. A related criminal complaint in Belgium is still under investigation.

Apple denied any wrongdoing in response to Congo’s lawsuits, saying it had instructed its suppliers to halt the sourcing of material from Congo and neighbouring Rwanda. It did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the latest complaint.

IRAdvocates, a Washington-based nonprofit that tries to use litigation to curtail rights abuses, said in the complaint filed on Tuesday in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia that Apple’s supply chain still includes cobalt, tin, tantalum and tungsten linked to child and forced labour as well as armed groups in Congo and Rwanda.

The lawsuit seeks a determination by the court that Apple’s conduct violates consumer protection law, an injunction to halt alleged deceptive marketing, and reimbursement of legal costs, but does not seek monetary damages or class certification.

The lawsuit alleges that three Chinese smelters — Ningxia Orient, JiuJiang JinXin and Jiujiang Tanbre — processed coltan that U.N. and Global Witness investigators allege was smuggled through Rwanda after armed groups seized mines in eastern Congo, linking the material to Apple’s supply chain.

A University of Nottingham study published in 2025 found forced and child labour at Congolese sites linked to Apple suppliers, the lawsuit said.

Ningxia Orient, JiuJiang JinXin and Jiujiang Tanbre did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Congo, which supplies about 70% of the world’s cobalt and significant volumes of tin, tantalum and tungsten – used in phones, batteries and computers – did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Rwanda also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Apple has repeatedly denied sourcing minerals from conflict zones or using forced labour, citing audits and its supplier code of conduct. It said in December that there was “no reasonable basis” to conclude any smelters or refiners in its supply chain financed armed groups in Congo or neighbouring countries.

Congolese authorities say armed groups in eastern Congo use mineral profits to fund the conflict that has killed thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands. They have tightened controls on minerals to choke off funding, squeezing global supplies.

Apple says 76% of cobalt in its devices was recycled in 2024, but the IRAdvocates lawsuit alleges its accounting method allows mixing with ore from conflict zones.

Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, has gone on the defensive against skeptics of its $4.5 trillion valuation, down from a historic $5 trillion, by waging an information campaign on Wall Street and social media.

Last week, the company issued a detailed memo to sell-side stock analysts with a point-by-point rebuttal of claims made by Michael Burry, who was featured in the book and movie “The Big Short,” and others writing on Substack. Burry, who shot to fame for betting against the U.S. housing market ahead of the 2008 financial crisis, is widely watched by investors for his comments on markets and the economy; he has stepped up criticism of Nvidia in recent weeks in a new newsletter.

The memo, seen by Reuters, was published in full by research firm Bernstein on Wednesday. In it, Nvidia responded to a Substack essay by a different author that purported to use an AI analysis of Nvidia’s public financial disclosures to show that inventories were piling up and customers were unable to pay.

Nvidia also provided a detailed rebuttal, pointing to its publicly available disclosures, to say why it should not be compared to historical accounting frauds such as WorldCom, Lucent or Enron. But Nvidia did concede that its most recent Blackwell chips had lower gross margins and higher warranty costs than previous models due to the Blackwell’s complexity.

Nvidia did not respond to a request for comment on the memo.

The memo was published by Bernstein a day after Nvidia’s shares declined following the release of a report from technology publication The Information saying Meta Platforms was in discussions with Alphabet’s Google to use Google AI chips that compete with Nvidia’s semiconductors.

Nvidia publicly responded to the story on X, saying it is “delighted by Google’s success” but that its chips remain “a generation ahead” of its rivals. The post itself drew questions and criticism from users on X who wondered why Nvidia was taking to social media to defend itself against Google, which is one of Nvidia’s major customers.

“Surely someone at Nvidia sees how bad this looks … right?” wrote Susan Zhang, a researcher at Google’s DeepMind, with more than 38,000 followers.

Tesla’s low running costs, including maintenance and fuel, can help Indian buyers to recoup about one-third of the Model Y’s $67,000 price tag over four to five years, the company’s India head said on Wednesday.

Tesla entered India in July with its imported Model Y, priced at a significant markup to its other major markets because of India’s 100% import tariff.

Tesla is targeting a niche electric vehicle market in India that accounts for about 5% of overall sales in the world’s third-largest car market. Analysts estimate that the majority of cars sold in India are priced below $22,000.

Since starting deliveries in September, Tesla has sold just over 100 Model Y’s in India, based on Indian government registration data.

Tesla’s India General Manager Sharad Agarwal said if Indian customers considered the low cost of maintaining a Tesla and electricity versus petrol prices, they could save around $22,000 over four to five years.

“Tesla does not provide a maintenance schedule because most of the service is done remotely through software updates which reduces the cost of ownership. And the cost of home charging is one tenth of petrol prices,” he told reporters in Gurugram, where the company on Wednesday opened its biggest sales and service centre in the country.

Agarwal, who joined Tesla earlier in November, was previously the head of luxury carmaker Lamborghini in India.

In India, Tesla competes with homegrown rivals like Mahindra & Mahindra and Tata Motors and global players like SAIC Motor’s India unit and Vietnamese EV maker VinFast Auto.

The company is also gradually rolling out its supercharger network in India starting with Mumbai, Delhi and Gurugram.