AI Daily: Amazon discusses investing $10B in OpenAI

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:
Amazon discusses investing $10B in OpenAI, Reuters reports

INVESTMENT: Amazon (AMZN) is in discussions with OpenAI to potentially invest about $10B in the AI company, but talks between the companies are “very fluid,” Reuters reports, citing a source familiar with the matter.

RISING ELECTRICITY BILLS: Three Democratic senators said they are investigating whether the rapid expansion of AI-driven data centers at major technology companies is contributing to higher residential electricity bills, The New York Times’ Ivan Penn and Karen Weise report. The lawmakers, Senators Elizabeth Warren, Chris Van Hollen, and Richard Blumenthal, warned in letters to Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOGL), Amazon, Meta (META), and others that costly grid upgrades needed to support data centers could be passed on to consumers, especially if the AI boom slows or ends.

AGI TEAM: In a memo to employees from CEO Andy Jassy, Amazon said, “At Amazon, we often start new businesses in parts of the company where there’s an initial customer need, and as they grow and get momentum, we assess where they’re best situated to maximize potential for customers and Amazon over the long term. I believe we are at this inflection point with several of our new technologies that will power a significant amount of our future customer experiences. I’ve asked Peter DeSantis to lead a new organization that drives our most expansive AI models (e.g. Nova-and the team we’ve called “AGI”), silicon development (e.g. Graviton, Trainium, Nitro), and quantum computing… As part of this organizational change, Pieter Abbeel will lead our frontier model research team (the team that builds the base model) in AGI… Finally, I want to recognize Rohit Prasad, who has decided to leave Amazon at the end of this year. Rohit joined Amazon in 2013, during the early days of Alexa, to help us build a conversational AI that could make customers’ lives easier. Rohit helped Alexa grow from an ambitious idea into a service that now touches hundreds of millions of customers’ lives every day. The path ahead is full of opportunity. With the foundation that’s been built, the traction we’re seeing, and Peter’s leadership bringing unified focus to these technologies, we’re well-positioned to lead and deliver meaningful capabilities for our customers. I’m excited about what this team will build and how these foundational technologies will help shape Amazon’s future.”

LICENSING DATA: OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are seeking specialized data to train their artificial intelligence models and have been discussing deals with startups and public companies to license data on topics such as genomics, Valida Pau and Stephanie Palazzolo of The Information report. OpenAI has spoken to Revvity (RVTY) and Xero and biotech about potentially licensing their data or forming a partnership, the website says, citing people who talked to those companies. Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs held discussions with early-stage biotechnology startups about data licensing or partnerships, adds the journalists.
GEMINI 3 FLASH: Google said in a blog post that it is expanding the Gemini 3 model family with the release of Gemini 3 Flash, which offers frontier intelligence built for speed at a fraction of the cost. “With this release, we’re making Gemini 3’s next-generation intelligence accessible to everyone across Google products,” the company said. “Last month, we kicked off Gemini 3 with Gemini 3 Pro and Gemini 3 Deep Think mode, and the response has been incredible. Since launch day, we have been processing over 1T tokens per day on our API. We’ve seen you use Gemini 3 to vibe code simulations to learn about complex topics, build and design interactive games and understand all types of multimodal content. With Gemini 3, we introduced frontier performance across complex reasoning, multimodal and vision understanding and agentic and vibe coding tasks. Gemini 3 Flash retains this foundation, combining Gemini 3’s Pro-grade reasoning with Flash-level latency, efficiency and cost. It not only enables everyday tasks with improved reasoning, but also is our most impressive model for agentic workflows.” Gemini 3 Flash is available now in preview via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio, Google Antigravity, Vertex AI and Gemini Enterprise. Users can also access it through other developer tools like Gemini CLI and Android Studio. It’s also starting to roll out to everyone in the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search, bringing fast access to next-generation intelligence at no cost, the company added.