NYC seller seeks $6M in cash — or Anthropic stock — for luxury home
A Brooklyn seller is putting their $5.99 million property on the block, and they’ll sign the deed if you pay them in cash — or Anthropic stock.
IT/기술 · "PROPERTY" · 총 17건
필터 보기현재 지수
50.3
0 = 부정 우세
50 = 중립
100 = 긍정 우세
최근 7일 기준 88,406건을 분석한 결과, 뉴스 심리지수는 50.2(균형)입니다. 긍정 4,398건(5.0%)·중립 81,841건(92.6%)·부정 2,167건(2.5%)이며, 중립 비중이 뚜렷하게 높습니다. 성향 지수는 종합 14.7(중도 균형)입니다.
A Brooklyn seller is putting their $5.99 million property on the block, and they’ll sign the deed if you pay them in cash — or Anthropic stock.
Midnight Labs, an AI company focused on intellectual property protection in the entertainment industry, has secured an investment from Sony’s Innovation Fund to help bolster its efforts to combat piracy and deepfakes plaguing entertainment companies and content creators in the U.S. and Japan. A Midnight Labs spokesperson did not disclose how much the company had […]
Grimes County commissioners voted 4-1 to approve a 100% property tax abatement and reinvestment zone for SpaceX's proposed semiconductor facility
The startup’s automated underwriting engine ingests hundreds of data points per property to price its policies.
A Brooklyn home seller is seeking Anthropic shares or bitcoin for a $5.99M property, reflecting AI equity's rise in real estate transactions.
The head of The New York Times newspaper launched a scathing attack on artificial intelligence companies, accusing them of "shameless theft of intellectual property" and of threatening journalism. He was speaking at a global media congress on Monday in the southern French city of Marseille.
A.G. Sulzberger says AI companies are 'failing to embrace a core responsibility... to ensure the public has access to trustworthy news and information.'
Shares of Coforge rose more than 2% to their day’s high of Rs 1,495 on the BSE on Tuesday after the company announced the launch of its "Nexa Agentic AI Platform", a business platform that aims to cater to the global insurance industry.According to the company, the platform is designed to help insurers derive greater value from their existing insurance platforms and speed up time-to-market without replacing core systems. Instead, it layers AI orchestration capabilities over incumbent platforms while operating within the guardrails of leading platform providers.Built on the Coforge One AI platform, Nexa Agentic AI Platform offers a marketplace of more than 30 insurance AI assets covering underwriting, claims, product development, customer service and platform modernisation. The company said the platform is modular and composable, allowing insurers to deploy specific capabilities or adopt the full suite through an Insurance-in-a-Box model.Coforge said the platform is purpose-built for the global insurance market across Property & Casualty, Life & Annuities, Specialty insurance, as well as managing general agents (MGAs) and intermediaries. It incorporates human-in-the-loop oversight, full auditability and measurable outcomes.The platform includes six flagship orchestrators spanning the insurance value chain. These include an AI-enabled Submission Centre, which the company said can increase underwriting capacity by more than 30% through automated data extraction, validation and prioritisation.Another offering, the Agentic State Rollout Factory, is designed to automate rates, forms and filings across jurisdictions, enabling more than 25% faster realisation of new revenue. The AI-enabled Product Rollout Factory aims to accelerate product launches by 30% while improving quality and responsiveness to regulatory changes.Coforge also introduced an Agentic AI Global Expansion capability to support market entry across geographies, a Core Platform Modernisation capability that it said can reduce total cost of ownership by more than 30%, and an Agentic Claims Triaging Centre that can enable more than 35% faster claims triaging and higher straight-through processing.Rajeev Batra, Executive Vice President and Global Practice Head of Insurance at Coforge, said the platform combines the company's AI engineering capabilities with its insurance domain expertise to help clients scale AI adoption and business outcomes.Also read: Morgan Stanley says Indian stock market poised for strong year ahead. Here’s whyThe company said the platform is designed around key insurance stakeholders, including brokers, underwriters, claims adjudicators and customer service agents. Looking ahead, Coforge plans to progressively integrate insurance knowledge graphs into the platform to enhance insurance-specific reasoning across submissions, policies, claims and customer interactions.Coforge said Nexa Agentic AI Platform will form a key part of its insurance go-to-market strategy, helping clients accelerate AI adoption while preserving existing technology investments and complying with platform guardrails.(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of The Economic Times)
The B.C. Property Assessment Appeal Board issued a decision dated May 28 ordering BC Assessment to lower the 2025 assessed value of Wilson's home to $64.4 million.
Beijing views AI as a sensitive sector critical to national security and has sought to curb the outbound flow of technology, intellectual property and talent.
Campaigners had hoped to buy the property from Nottingham Trent University to maintain public access Bramley apples are a staple in supermarkets across the UK and it all started in a house in Nottinghamshire. But now the future of the original fruit-bearing tree is in question after the garden where it stands has been sold by Nottingham Trent University (NTU). The news has left campaigners aiming to turn it into a heritage site “gobsmacked”. Continue reading...
I have been an application-specific IC (ASIC) designer for almost three decades. Over that time, I’ve moved through the full academic trajectory, from graduate student to full professor; later, I transitioned to industry after an unsuccessful stint at entrepreneurship. When I made the switch to the private sector in 2019, I began focusing on a critically important aspect of the electronic industry: silicon intellectual property. As much as 80 percent of the physical area in today’s most advanced chips is occupied by blocks that aren’t made for specific products or even designed by the consumer-facing companies that built them. Instead, chipmakers draw heavily on established silicon IP from companies like Arm, Cadence, Rambus, Synopsys, and the company I work for, Silicon Creations. Throughout my career, I’ve designed chips for very different purposes, including enabling the research program in my academic lab and expanding the IP portfolio of my company. When I joined Silicon Creations, I had no idea how differently the industry approaches IC design and encountered a steep learning curve. Initially, it seemed that much of my two decades of academic research and training did not directly translate to the role. I had to learn new skills and adopt a new mindset. Today, demand for ASICs is rapidly growing, driven by the need for specialized chips in the automotive sector, AI applications, and more. By one market estimate, the ASIC market is expected to grow from US $23.4 billion to $38.8 billion by 2033, and the semiconductor industry as a whole is projected to hit $1 trillion by 2030. The industry needs more chip designers—but if you’re coming from an academic background as I did, there are a few things you’ll need to know. Different goals lead to different strategies The differences between industry and academe begin with a divergence in purpose. In academia, my primary objective was to generate new knowledge: to propose a novel circuit technique, validate an unconventional architecture, or explore the limits of performance in a given domain. A successful chip is one that demonstrates a concept. In industry, it is not nearly enough to prove that something can work. The goal is to ensure that it works reliably, repeatedly, and at scale. Success is measured not by novelty but by whether the silicon meets specifications, yields as expected in production, and supports a competitive product delivered on schedule. This leads to a stark contrast in risk tolerance. Academic designs often deliberately push into unproven territory, where even partial success can yield valuable insight. In industry, however, we systematically minimize risk. The cost of failure makes first-time silicon success a central requirement—especially at advanced technology nodes, where the lithography masks used to transfer circuit designs onto silicon wafers alone can cost tens of millions of dollars. As a result, industry design flows are built around eliminating uncertainty through conservative margins, extensive validation, and careful reuse of proven solutions. “Academia explores the design space, asking what is possible, while industry exploits it, determining what is viable at scale.” This paradigm has existed since the 1970s, when application-specific chip design was established. However, the gulf between academia and industry has expanded since the mid-2010s, when FinFET technology, a 3D architecture using vertical “fins” of silicon, was widely adopted in industry. System designs are also becoming increasingly modular with the advent of chiplets. This fundamentally altered the economics and complexity of ASIC development, with design costs rising by almost an order of magnitude. Initiatives like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s University FinFET Program and new government-funded chip-design hubs now let some well-resourced universities design for more advanced architectures, but the technology is still out of reach for many academics. What the industry-academia split means in practice Consider a startup developing an ASIC. Its engineering team may have deep expertise in a particular algorithm, sensor interface, or system architecture, the features that define its competitive advantage. But it is unlikely to possess world-class expertise in every supporting function. Developing each of these blocks internally would require significant time, capital, and specialized talent. Doing so could delay market entry beyond the startup’s viability. Even large semiconductor companies face similar constraints. Advanced-node development demands intense focus. Allocating a team to redesign a standard interface block that has already been implemented elsewhere may be difficult to justify when differentiation lies at the system level, such as an inference chip’s ability to speed up neural network computations. The time it takes to move a new chip from conception to market and risk mitigation, not self-sufficiency, govern most decisions about in-house development versus outsourcing. The economics of advanced IC manufacturing reinforce this reality. When the development cost of a leading-edge chip reaches hundreds of millions of dollars, minimizing risk becomes a central design imperative. In this context, silicon IP emerged as a practical solution. Similar to how software developers rely on preexisting libraries rather than writing every function from scratch, ASIC designers license predesigned, preverified silicon blocks—such as processor cores, memory interfaces, and security engines—from highly specialized IP vendors. These blocks can then be integrated into larger, increasingly complex systems. Design scope, verification, and time horizons With the use of silicon IP, industry is able to widen the scope of its designs. Academic efforts tend to focus on block-level innovation: a new analog-to-digital converter architecture or an ultralow-noise amplifier, for instance. These designs typically abstract away many of the complexities of bringing a chip to market, such as packaging constraints, long-term reliability, and manufacturing yield. In industry, the focus shifts to system-level integration. Modern systems on chips, or SoCs, incorporate dozens or even hundreds of functional blocks. Managing signal integrity, timing, firmware interaction, and system-level validation becomes as critical as the design of any individual block. Verification philosophy also diverges sharply. In academia, the goal of verification is to demonstrate that the concept works under nominal conditions, which may not always reflect how it would perform in real applications. Even if only a fraction of fabricated chips from a multiproject wafer operates correctly, the design may still be considered a success if it validates the underlying idea. At my academic lab for instance, we used to receive 40 chips from a TSMC prototyping service and started testing them in batches of five. If the first five or 10 chips proved functional, we had already collected more than enough data for a publication. If some of them failed, we weren’t required to mention this when publishing the results. In industry, verification is exhaustive, critical, and often dominates the development schedule. Failures are measured in parts per million, and even rare anomalies are carefully analyzed and documented to identify root causes and prevent recurrence. When I started at Silicon Creations, I was surprised by the level of detail and scrutiny designs face. Differences in time horizons and economic constraints reinforce each of these contrasts. Academic projects operate on flexible timelines aligned with research and funding cycles. If I missed a deadline, I just had to wait for the next cycle. Industry projects are driven by fixed product schedules and market windows, frequently targeting costly leading-edge nodes to achieve competitive performance, power, and area efficiency. Missing a deadline can negate the value of an entire design and may have major financial consequences along the entire supply chain. In essence, academia explores the design space, asking what is possible, while industry exploits it, determining what is viable at scale. Both are indispensable, but they operate under fundamentally different definitions of success. As ASIC complexity continues to grow, understanding both perspectives will be essential for the next generation of engineers navigating the evolving semiconductor landscape. This article appears in the June 2026 print issue.
These weatherproof outdoor security cams keep a watchful eye on your property while you get on with life. Our list includes battery-powered cameras that need no subscription.
Embattled Chinese developers have turned to a new strategy to resuscitate their ailing businesses: diversifying into semiconductor production. Certain listed property companies have seen their shares skyrocket – some by hundreds of per cent – after announcing investments in “chipmaking”. Such strategic diversification efforts have sparked a buying frenzy among retail investors in the mainland’s A-share market. “Chip-themed stocks are the new darlings of individual investors since [such stocks]...
This sponsored article is brought to you by Wetour Robotics. A field technician on a wind turbine, harness clipped, both hands on a wrench, needs to send a command to the diagnostic device hanging at her belt. A logistics worker on a loading dock, gloves on, eyes on the pallet, needs to redirect a connected lift. A person using an assistive mobility device on a crowded street wants to nudge it forward without taking out a phone or speaking aloud. None of these moments call for a smarter robot. They call for a smarter way to be heard by the machines that already exist. The industry has been building from one side The past three years of Physical AI have been a story of remarkable progress on the robot side of the loop. Companies like Boston Dynamics, Figure, and Unitree have advanced actuators, locomotion, and dexterity to a level that would have seemed implausible a decade ago. Google DeepMind’s Gemini Robotics has redefined what vision-language-action models can do in unstructured settings. The trajectory of the hardware and the foundation models is real, and it is accelerating. But there is another side to this loop, and it has been treated as a solved problem for too long. The interface between humans and machines has defaulted, for 40 years, to three input modalities: screens, buttons, and voice. Each of those assumes the user can stop, look down, and translate intent into structured commands. That assumption breaks the moment the work moves into a real environment. On a turbine. On a dock. On a sidewalk. In any setting where hands are occupied, eyes are committed, or speaking is impractical, the conventional interface stack quietly fails. Spatial Intent Fusion is the simultaneous processing of three streams of human-centered information, namely spatial position, visual context, and gestural intent: Your body is the interface. The bottleneck on the human side of the loop is becoming as important as the one on the machine side. And solving it requires a different question. Not how do we make the robot more capable, but how do we let the human participate in the computing system as naturally as the robot already does. Wetour Robotics’ bet: put the human back into the computing loop Wetour Robotics is betting that the next architectural leap in Physical AI is not about making the robot more capable. It is about making the human a first-class node in the computing network, with the same kind of low-latency, high-fidelity participation that connected devices already enjoy. Wetour Robotics’ engineers frame the problem this way: a wristband that recognizes a gesture is not enough. A camera that recognizes a scene is not enough. The information a human carries about what they are about to do is distributed across multiple channels, including where their body is in space, what their eyes are attending to, and what their muscles are preparing to do, and any single channel observed in isolation is ambiguous. Reconstructing intent reliably means fusing those channels at the operating system level, with latency low enough that the loop feels closed rather than mediated. This approach has a name. Wetour Robotics calls it Spatial Intent Fusion: the simultaneous processing of three streams of human-centered information, namely spatial position, visual context, and gestural intent, fused into a single real-time command for any connected physical device. It is the technical implementation behind a simpler positioning statement the company uses externally: your body is the interface. Orchestra is a portable intelligent hub running the operating system that handles sensor fusion, intent inference, command translation, and safety arbitration. The reference compute platform is NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super, which provides enough on-device inference capacity to keep the entire control loop at the edge, with no cloud dependency on the critical path. Wetour Robotics The architecture: three layers, four engines, one loop Orchestra is not a single device but a layered platform, designed from the start to be sensor-flexible and actuator-agnostic. The architecture decomposes into three perception layers and four coordination engines. Orchestra itself is the local compute and orchestration core: a portable intelligent hub running the operating system that handles sensor fusion, intent inference, command translation, and safety arbitration. The reference compute platform is NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super, which provides enough on-device inference capacity to keep the entire control loop at the edge, with no cloud dependency on the critical path. Edge inference is non-negotiable for this application. Full-chain latency from biosignal acquisition to actuator command is held under 100 milliseconds, the envelope inside which closed-loop control feels natural rather than laggy. VisionLink handles visual and spatial perception. Cameras feed into vision models that identify objects, estimate distances, and track environmental context. VisionLink is designed not as a passive recognition layer but as a real-time command generator: its outputs feed directly into Orchestra OS to be fused with biosignal data. Conductor is the biosignal pipeline. It ingests raw surface electromyographic (sEMG) data from a wrist-worn device, classifies temporal patterns into discrete gestures or continuous control signals, and outputs actuator commands. The technically interesting property of sEMG for this use case is that the signal precedes visible motion. Motor unit action potentials appear at the skin surface roughly 50 to 80 milliseconds before a finger completes the corresponding gesture. Wetour Robotics calls this property pre-motion intent sensing, and it is what allows Orchestra to anticipate user intent rather than react to it. On top of the three perception layers, Orchestra OS runs four coordination engines. The Perception Engine ingests and normalizes raw sensor streams. The Intent Engine performs Spatial Intent Fusion across modalities, resolving what the user is trying to do given where they are, what they are looking at, and what their hand is signaling. The Orchestration Engine translates intent into device-specific command sequences for any connected actuator. The Safety Engine arbitrates conflicting commands, enforces operational envelopes, and gates execution against runtime safety conditions. Wetour Robotics The trade-offs we’re honest about No system that bridges the human body and the digital world is finished. Three engineering challenges remain open, and the company addresses each with a deliberate trade-off rather than a claim of having fully solved it. Baseline stability of sEMG under motion. In a stationary user, continuous gesture recognition from sEMG is reliable. Once the user is walking, climbing, or otherwise moving, motion artifacts and electrode drift degrade the signal in ways that are difficult to fully compensate for. Rather than overpromise on continuous control in dynamic settings, Orchestra defaults to a smaller set of robust discrete gestures in complex operating environments, and reserves continuous control modes for contexts where the signal-to-noise ratio supports them. Miniaturization of edge AI compute. Running the Orchestra control loop entirely at the edge requires real on-device inference, which has historically meant trading off between compute capacity, battery life, and form factor. Wetour Robotics’ approach has been a compact carrier board paired with a thermal design and a battery module sized for all-day wearability. The result is a hub that travels with the user rather than tethering them to a desk, and that performs the full perception-to-actuation loop without offloading to the cloud. Heterogeneity of third-party device protocols. The actuator side of the loop is a fragmented landscape. Different manufacturers expose different command interfaces, different communication stacks, and different safety conventions, and a Physical AI operating system has to integrate with all of them. Wetour Robotics uses an AI-agent layer to negotiate connection and protocol translation adaptively, so that Orchestra OS can ingest data from a wide range of devices, run them through neural network models that infer human intent, and emit the right command on the right protocol for the device on the other end. Why this matters, and why it helps the rest of the field The history of computing is a history of interface revolutions. Command lines gave way to graphical user interfaces, which gave way to touch, which gave way to voice. Each transition expanded who could participate in the system and what they could do with it. The next transition is not about a new screen or a new microphone. It is about treating the human body itself as a participant in the computing network, capable of contributing intent at the same speed and fidelity that any other connected node can. The history of computing is a history of interface revolutions. The next transition is not about a new screen or a new microphone — it is about treating the human body itself as a participant in the computing network. This path is not a competitor to the work being done on humanoid robots, foundation models for embodied AI, and dexterous manipulation. It is the missing complement to that work. The hardest open problem for humanoid systems is the data: every natural interaction between a human and the physical world is a potential training signal, and most of those interactions are currently invisible to any computing system. As more humans become first-class nodes in the loop, those interactions become observable, structured, and ultimately useful for training the next generation of embodied AI, including the humanoid robots being developed today. In other words: putting the human back into the computing loop is not just about better interfaces for individual users. It is about generating the kind of grounded, in-the-wild human-machine interaction data that the broader Physical AI ecosystem will need to keep advancing. The robot side and the human side of the loop are not two competing futures. They are two halves of the same one. That is what Wetour Robotics means when it says: Your body is the interface. Learn more at wetourrobotics.com.
In the late 1940s—when computer engineers were grappling with unreliable hardware and noisy transmission environments—a team of engineers inside a modest lab at the University of Manchester, England, confronted a problem so fundamental that it threatened the viability of digital computing itself. Machines could generate bits, but they could not reliably read them back. The inconsistent reading back of memory data did not initially present itself as a grand theoretical challenge. It showed up as something more mundane: inconsistent computing results. Engineers including Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn, and G. E. (Tommy) Thomas traced the failures not to logic errors but to the physical behavior of the machines themselves. The team devised a technique for keeping a transmitter and a receiver synchronized without relying on a separate clock signal. Their innovation, known as Manchester code or phase encoding, encoded each bit with a transition in the middle of the bit period, effectively embedding timing information directly into the data stream to be a self-clocking signal. So, even if the signal degraded or the timing drifted slightly, the receiver could continually keep time based on those regular transitions. By eliminating the need for separate clocks and reducing synchronization errors, Manchester code made data transfer more robust across cables and circuits. Those qualities later made it a natural fit for technologies such as Ethernet and early data storage systems. Its self-clocking nature helped standardize how machines communicate, and it laid the groundwork for modern networking and digital communication protocols. On 13 April 2026, this breakthrough was honored with an IEEE Milestone plaque during a ceremony at the University of Manchester. Dignitaries from IEEE and the university attended the ceremony. Embedding timing in signals Those 1940s Manchester University engineers were working on systems that fed into the Manchester Mark I, one of the first practical stored-program machines. When troubles arose, they used oscilloscopes to probe signals. They found that electrical pulses did not arrive with consistent timing. Memory signals also blurred over time, making them harder to read, and when long runs of identical bits occurred, the waveform flattened into stretches with no transitions. That led to a crucial insight: The problem was not just detecting whether a signal was high or low; the system also lost track of when to sample the signal. Without reliable timing markers, even correctly formed signals were misread. Bits could effectively be lost or miscounted because the system fell out of sync. At first, the engineers tried to tame the hardware. They experimented with stabilizing circuits and more consistent pulse generation, attempting to impose a regular rhythm on an inherently unstable system. But the fixes proved fragile, and the electronics of the day could not maintain the required precision. So the Manchester group took a different approach. If the hardware could not provide a dependable clock, the signal itself would have to carry one. Instead of representing data as static levels, each bit changed state, with a guaranteed transition in the middle. Embedding timing in the signal reduced erratic behavior. Machines were suddenly able to reliably transmit, store, and read back data—an essential step toward practical stored-program computing. Making signals unmistakable The Manchester code addressed several issues at once. Regular transitions allowed continuous timing recovery. Transitions proved easier to detect than static levels, and long runs of identical bits no longer produced flat, ambiguous waveforms. Rather than fighting the imperfections of early electronics, the design worked with them. From lab curiosity to a global standard What began as a local solution in Manchester shaped digital communication systems for decades, including early Ethernet technology, for which timing and shared-medium communication were central challenges. According to Robert Metcalfe, a member of the team that built the first Ethernet system at Xerox PARC in 1973, he and his colleagues relied on Manchester code. “Manchester code solved a fundamental problem for us: timing,” Metcalfe says, explaining that each bit carried its own clock and removed the need for a global synchronized signal. That self-clocking property wasn’t the only benefit provided by the encoding scheme. On a shared coaxial cable, Manchester encoding did more than provide timing. Each transceiver left the medium undriven—effectively “off”—most of the time, allowing packets from other machines to pass without interference. Even during transmission, a station drove the signal only about half the time, leaving the line undriven during the other half of each bit cycle. This distinction—between a driven signal and an undriven line, rather than simple 1s and 0s—allowed receivers to recover both data and clock timing while also monitoring the cable for other activity. If a transceiver detected a signal when it expected the line to be undriven, the signal indicated that another station was transmitting at the same time. In other words, the system could detect collisions in real time and respond accordingly. The idea has proven durable far beyond local networks. Manchester code is being used aboard the Voyager spacecraft, which are now cruising through interstellar space—underscoring its reliability in extreme environments. The code also has found its way into everyday consumer electronics. Infrared remote controls for televisions and audio equipment commonly rely on Manchester code through protocols such as RC-5, developed by Philips in the early 1980s. The protocol encodes commands as timed infrared signals transmitted by a handset’s integrated circuit and LED, allowing devices to reliably interpret button presses even through noise and signal distortion. Manufacturers across Europe—and many in the United States—adopted the approach, extending Manchester code into the home. Why the Milestone matters An IEEE Milestone designation recognizes technologies with enduring impact. Manchester code qualifies because it solved a foundational timing problem at a critical moment in computing history. Without a way to embed timing in the data itself, early digital systems would have remained fragile and unreliable. Manchester code helped transform them into dependable machines, and it enabled much of today’s digital communication. “Manchester code solved a fundamental problem for us: timing,” —Robert Metcalfe, an Ethernet inventor Key participants at the plaque dedication ceremony included Tom Coughlin, 2024 IEEE president; Duncan Ivison, University of Manchester president and vice chancellor, and Nagham Saeed, chair of the IEEE U.K. and Ireland Section. Talks by Kees Schouhamer Immink (the 2017 IEEE Medal of Honor laureate probably best known for his work that made compact discs and other high-density digital media practical) and Peter Green (Manchester’s deputy dean for the engineering faculty) highlighted the code’s lasting impact on digital data storage and communications. The IEEE Milestone plaque for the Manchester code reads: “At this site in 1948–1949, Manchester code was invented for reliably encoding digital data stored on the Manchester Mark I computer’s magnetic drum. It became a standard for computer magnetic tapes and floppy disks and was used in digital communications, including the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft and early Ethernet networks. It found wide use in domestic remote controllers, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, and many control network standards.” Administered by the IEEE History Center and supported by donors, the Milestone program recognizes outstanding technical developments worldwide. The IEEE U.K. and Ireland Section sponsored the nomination.
This sponsored article is brought to you by Melbourne Convention Bureau (MCB) supported by Business Events Australia. Melbourne’s reputation as a global events city, from the Australian Open tennis and Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix to hosting NFL regular season games, now intersects with a different form of scale: large-scale compute, data-intensive research, and advanced engineering. Long recognized for delivering complex international events, the city is applying the same organisational capability to the infrastructure that underpins modern AI research, positioning Melbourne at the convergence of global convening and high-performance digital systems. Consistently ranked among the world’s most livable cities, Melbourne was named Time Out’s Best City in the World in 2026, the first Australian city to hold the title. Melbourne, Australia’s premier conference destination. Tourism Australia More materially for research and innovation, Melbourne is also the nation’s fastest‑growing capital, attracting increasing concentrations of engineering and technology talent, investment and international engagement. Australia’s artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem is entering a new phase, defined less by isolated initiatives and more by the convergence of compute infrastructure, research intensity and international collaboration. Melbourne sits at this intersection. Melbourne’s trajectory highlights what enables research at scale: access to frontier-grade compute, proximity to industry-ready infrastructure, and repeated opportunities for global research communities to convene. Sovereign AI compute, expanding hyperscale data center campuses and a growing pipeline of international research-led conferences are reshaping the city’s research landscape. Together, these elements position Melbourne as a focal point for applied AI research, advanced engineering and data-intensive science. The growing global influence of AI engineering, underscored by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang receiving the 2026 IEEE Medal of Honor, reflects the scale of this shift. In Melbourne, these factors form a reinforcing research flywheel linking infrastructure, discovery and collaboration. Rather than focusing on startup density or short-term commercial output, Melbourne’s trajectory highlights what enables research at scale: access to frontier-grade compute, proximity to industry-ready infrastructure, and repeated opportunities for global research communities to convene. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang received the 2026 IEEE Medal of Honor.IEEE Sovereign AI foundations The most recent cornerstone of Melbourne’s AI capability is MAVERIC (Monash AdVanced Environment for Research and Intelligent Computing), Australia’s largest university-based AI supercomputer. Built and deployed by Monash University in partnership with NVIDIA, Dell Technologies, and CDC Data Centres, MAVERIC has been engineered specifically for large scale AI and data intensive science, with medical research representing a key priority. Indeed, in these regards MAVERIC has been designed to function as a Next Generation Trusted Research Environment thus ensuring that it is state-of-the-art and provides a safe and secure framework for the analysis of large sensitive datasets. Designed to support research projects including cancer and neurodegenerative disease detection, clinical trial analysis and drug discovery through to materials science and engineering, MAVERIC enables Australian researchers to train and evaluate large models domestically while keeping highly sensitive datasets secure and under national jurisdiction. This sovereign design is particularly relevant in fields such as medical research where privacy, regulation or intellectual property constraints limit the use of offshore cloud resources. Monash University Vice-Chancellor and President Professor Sharon Pickering with researchers [left to right] Professor Anton Peleg, Professor Victoria Mar, Professor James Whisstock, Vice-President (Strategy and Major Projects) Teresa Finlayson, and Professor Patrick Kwan.Eamon Gallagher (Australian Financial Review) Technically, the system reflects the latest shifts in high performance AI architecture. Built on NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 platforms and integrated using Dell’s rack scale infrastructure, MAVERIC employs closed loop liquid cooling to reduce water consumption compared with conventional air-cooled systems, aligning large scale compute growth with sustainability objectives while supporting high density, high throughput workloads. Professor James Whisstock, Deputy Dean Research of Monash’s Faculty of Medicine, Nursing, and Health Sciences commented, “MAVERIC provides a huge leap forward in our compute capability that will revolutionize our researchers’ ability to address the most challenging and important research questions across the fields of medical research, information technology, and STEM disciplines. It will seed wonderful new cross-disciplinary collaborations, underpin the work of our best and brightest young researchers and will allow our scientists to continue to make major discoveries that positively impact the Australian and global population more broadly.” “MAVERIC provides a huge leap forward in our compute capability that will revolutionize our researchers’ ability to address the most challenging and important research questions across the fields of medical research, information technology, and STEM disciplines.” —Professor James Whisstock, Deputy Dean Research of Monash’s Faculty of Medicine, Nursing, and Health Sciences Monash University frames MAVERIC not as a standalone asset, but as part of the national research infrastructure, intended to strengthen collaboration across academia, healthcare, government and industry. This approach positions Melbourne at the forefront of sovereign AI enabled research in the region. Data center scale as research infrastructure The infrastructure demands of modern AI research extend well beyond individual systems. Melbourne’s expanding data center footprint now supports hyperscale compute, applied AI deployment and large-scale research workloads simultaneously. Total data center investment, US$ billions.Source: Data Centres Global Report 2025 In February 2026, CDC Data Centres opened its first Melbourne campus in Brooklyn, with two live facilities and a third in planning. Combined with CDC’s Laverton campus, Melbourne is projected to host more than 800 megawatts of sovereign digital capacity, critical for AI workloads requiring sustained access to high-density power, cooling and secure environments. Parallel investment is underway in Fishermans Bend, where NEXTDC is developing a AUD $2 billion AI and digital infrastructure hub adjacent to the Innovation Precinct. Planned facilities include an AI Factory, a Mission Critical Operations Center and a Technology Center of Excellence, enabling sovereign AI, high-performance computing and cross-sector collaboration across health, defence and finance. Melbourne hosts Australia’s largest cluster of AI firms, with 188 companies, and more than 40 data centers currently operate across Victoria. The Victorian Government has complemented this growth with an initial AUD $5.5 million investment in the Sustainable Data Center Action Plan. Together, these developments reinforce Melbourne’s role as a national and increasingly global hub for high-performance AI infrastructure as model complexity and infrastructure dependency continue to accelerate. Applied AI research at scale Monash University is home to MAVERIC, Australia’s largest university-based AI supercomputer, built and deployed by Monash in partnership with NVIDIA, Dell Technologies, and CDC Data Centres.Monash University Melbourne’s research strength is underpinned by a dense university network with deep capability across AI, data science and engineering. Institutions including Monash University, the University of Melbourne, Deakin University, La Trobe University, RMIT University and Swinburne University of Technology collectively support research across machine learning, robotics, human-computer interaction, extended reality and advanced manufacturing. This concentration fosters applied collaboration where AI intersects with medicine, sustainability, cognitive systems and immersive technologies. For visiting researchers, it provides access not only to academic expertise but also to live infrastructure environments where research can be tested and validated, reinforcing Melbourne’s position as one of the Asia-Pacific’s most integrated AI research ecosystems. Conferences as research accelerators Plenary session at Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Center.Melbourne Convention Bureau Melbourne’s selection as host city for a growing number of international technology conferences reflects the convergence of research capability and infrastructure maturity. In September 2026, Data Center World Australia and The AI Summit Australia will be co-located at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Center, bringing together global leaders across AI, digital infrastructure and enterprise technology. The pairing highlights a broader reality: advances in AI are inseparable from the infrastructure that enables them. Melbourne’s expanding data center footprint now supports hyperscale compute, applied AI deployment and large-scale research workloads simultaneously. Research-led conferences are also expanding Melbourne’s global footprint. ICONIP 2026, hosted by Deakin University, will bring up to 700 researchers in neural networks and machine learning, followed in 2027 by IEEE VR, the leading conference on virtual reality and 3D user interfaces, attracting up to 1,000 delegates. In this context, conferences function not simply as events, but as infrastructure for knowledge transfer, supporting standards exchange, collaboration and system-level learning at global scale. A global platform for advancing research Sovereign compute, data center scale and a strong conference pipeline create a reinforcing cycle, enabling researchers to engage directly with infrastructure and industry well beyond the event itself. By closing the gap between theory and deployment, Melbourne supports deeper technical exchange and more enduring global research networks. This role was recognized in 2025 when the IEEE awarded Melbourne Convention Bureau the 2025 Organisational Supporting Friend of IEEE Member and Geographic Activities (MGA) — the first convention bureau in the Asia Pacific region to receive the acknowledgement as a result of the longstanding partnership with the IEEE Victorian Section. Melbourne Convention Bureau (MCB) representative Fatima Aboudrar, Senior Business Development Manager, with Vijay S. Paul, Immediate Past Chair, IEEE Victorian Section, receiving Supporting Friend Member recognition in 2025. As AI research becomes increasingly dependent on infrastructure scale, sovereign capability, and global collaboration, Melbourne is moving beyond hosting conversations to actively enabling the systems that advance AI and data‑driven research at global scale. Conference support in Melbourne Your browser does not support the video tag. Why host a conference in Melbourne, Australia.Melbourne Convention Bureau This ecosystem is underpinned by Melbourne’s highly accessible city center, where world-class venues, research institutions and industry hubs are located in close proximity. Free public transport and a compact city footprint enable seamless movement from conference floor to real-world application. Melbourne Convention Bureau (MCB) is a not-for-profit state government agency with over 60 years’ experience, that provides IEEE and its members with free support to bring international conferences to Melbourne, Australia. MCB’s support spans early-stage exploration and international bidding through to securing government funding, connecting organizers with venues, accommodation and event suppliers, and providing destination support for conference planning and delivery. Organizations considering a conference in Australia are encouraged to connect with MCB’s dedicated team, which supports IEEE conferences in Melbourne. Enquiries can be directed to info@melbournecb.com.au.