AI Daily: AMD upgraded on AI traction, Meta to launch AI-focused super PAC

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:

AI-FOCUSED SUPER PAC: Meta (META) is preparing to pour tens of millions of dollars into a new California political arm to back candidates with a light-touch approach to tech regulation, especially AI, in Silicon Valley’s home state, Politico’s Tyler Katzenberger and Christine Mui report. The tech giant plans to launch Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across – Meta — California, a super PAC that will support candidates for state offices regardless of party who favor AI innovation over stringent regulation, according to details shared first with Politico.

BUY ON AI TRACTION: Truist upgraded AMD (AMD) to Buy from Hold with a price target of $213, up from $173. Industry contacts have told the firm for the last few years that hyperscale customers deploying AI were experimenting with AMD’s technology as a “price check” to Nvidia (NVDA), “nothing more,” but contacts over the last month have increasingly noted that hyperscalers now are working with AMD in a partnership manner, the firm tells investors. Truist, which notes that contacts indicate that hyperscale datacenter customers are now “expressing true interest in deploying AMD at scale,” sets a calendar year 2027 EPS estimate at $7.89.

COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT: Nikkei and Asahi Shimbun are suing startup Perplexity AI for copyright infringement, joining other news outlets in Japan and the U.S., that are challenging the use of their content in AI tools, Bloomberg’s Mayumi Negishi reports, citing the complaint. The newspapers are demanding an injunction and Y2.2B each in damages from the AI company. “These actions amount to continuous and large-scale freeloading on journalists’ time and effort,” Nikkei and Asahi said in the statement. “If left unchecked, this could undermine all media outlets trying to accurately report the facts and ultimately shake the very foundations of democracy.”

LIVE CONVERSATION: Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) introduced new features to Google Translate. The company said, “Now, thanks to AI, we’re making it even more effortless to overcome language barriers. Using the advanced reasoning and multimodal capabilities of Gemini models, we’re bringing two new features to Translate to help with live conversations and language learning…Building on our existing live conversation experience, our advanced AI models are now making it even easier to have a live conversation in more than 70 languages – including Arabic, French, Hindi, Korean, Spanish, and Tamil…Google Translate’s live capabilities use our advanced voice and speech recognition models, which are trained to help isolate sounds. This means you get a high-quality experience in the real world, like in busy airports or at a noisy cafe in a new country. These new live translate capabilities are available starting today for users in the U.S., India and Mexico.” Shares of Duolingo (DUOL), which offers an online language learning platform, were down following the news.

NVIDIA AI TECH: Broadcom (AVGO) announced that the company is working to bring the latest NVIDIA (NVDA) AI technology to VMware Cloud Foundation. Through this collaboration with NVIDIA, enterprises and cloud service providers will be empowered to build, deploy, and scale next-generation AI models on cutting-edge AI servers within their modern private cloud environments, all while leveraging the trusted operational experience of VCF. Generative, agentic and physical AI applications are fundamentally transforming data center architectures, demanding unprecedented infrastructure capabilities. This expanded integration builds on the longstanding Broadcom and NVIDIA collaboration, adding support for NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs – including NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Server Edition GPUs – and NVIDIA networking. These broad options for NVIDIA accelerated computing address the need for increased choice, flexibility, and operational efficiency for AI infrastructure, enabling VCF customers to harness the full potential of NVIDIA’s AI innovation. These enhancements will expand the capabilities of the companies’ jointly developed VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA.

COLLABORATION: Procore Technologies (PCOR) signed a multi-year strategic collaboration agreement with Amazon Web Services (AMZN). The SCA signifies a joint commitment to co-invest in go-to-market activities and product innovation for the global construction industry and adjacent verticals that drive construction initiatives. Together, the combined power of Procore and AWS will accelerate Procore’s product development in AI, data operability, and analytics, which will help our customers build more efficiently, reduce risk, and make data-driven decisions. Procore’s construction management platform is now available in AWS Marketplace.