Mary Ann Azevedo / Crunchbase News:
Autonomous vehicle startups raised a record $21.4B across 34 deals through April 15, up from $5.9B raised across 99 investments globally in all of 2025  —  Funding to autonomous vehicle startups has seen a massive resurgence in 2026, more than tripling so far this year compared to all of 2025 globally, Crunchbase data shows.

Reuters:
Chinese lidar maker Hesai, a primary supplier for Nvidia's ADAS, announces EXT lidar, calling it the industry's first to integrate spatial and color detection  —  Hesai (2525.HK), China's leading maker of lidar, has developed a version of the technology used in autonomous driving that is capable …

Nicole Nguyen / Wall Street Journal:
Some Mac Mini and Mac Studio models are unavailable or facing up to 12-week wait times in the US, with analysts citing strong demand from AI agent power users  —  The scarcity of Apple's littlest Mac comes at a time of high interest from AI power users and a potential product refresh

Leo Marchandon / Reuters:
The EC awards a six-year, €180M sovereign cloud contract to four European providers as part of a push to reduce the EU's dependence on non-European tech  —  The European Commission on Friday awarded a 180 million euro ($212 million) tender for sovereign cloud services to four European providers …

Financial Times:
Sources suggest Anthropic is holding off from a wider Mythos release until it can reliably serve it to customers; Anthropic has suffered outages in recent weeks  —  Dario Amodei met with Susie Wiles despite lawsuits over whether AI lab is a national security threat