If you were expecting the PlayStation 6 to arrive on the usual console timeline, it may be time to reset expectations. A new report from Bloomberg suggests Sony is considering pushing back the next PlayStation launch to 2028 or even 2029, a significant shift from the typical seven-year console cycle. Interestingly, this is something that was rumored late last year, too.

The reason is not a lack of ambition or demand. It is a global memory chip shortage driven by the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure. According to the Bloomberg report, the surge in AI data centers is consuming massive amounts of DRAM and high-bandwidth memory, leaving consumer electronics companies competing for a shrinking supply.

The AI boom is reshaping console timelines

The Bloomberg report explains that companies such as Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into AI data centers, buying huge numbers of AI accelerators that require enormous amounts of memory. Each new generation of AI hardware uses far more RAM than traditional PCs, and that demand is expected to keep rising through the rest of the decade.

As a result, memory manufacturers are shifting production toward high-bandwidth memory for AI workloads, leaving less capacity for consumer electronics like smartphones, laptops, and game consoles. In fact, analysts warn that this supply imbalance is not temporary and could last for years, forcing companies to rethink long-term product roadmaps.

In such a scenario, delaying the PS6 may be a strategic move from Sony. Launching a new console during a period of high component costs would likely push prices higher and risk repeating the supply shortages seen during the PS5 launch. By waiting, Sony could avoid another hardware rollout plagued by limited stock and inflated prices.

That said, if the PS6 arrives later than expected, the PS5 generation will likely enjoy a longer lifespan, giving developers more time to support existing hardware and continue releasing major titles without rushing the next transition. For now, though, Sony has not officially confirmed the delay. But if these reports hold true, the next PlayStation era may take a little longer to arrive.

Gabriel Vasquez, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, recently revealed he took nine flights from NYC to Stockholm in one year. That wasn’t just to visit Lovable, a portfolio company, but also to look for other future Swedish unicorns before they cross the Atlantic.

This all came to light when news emerged that a16z had led a $2.3 million pre-seed round into Dentio, a Swedish startup that uses AI to help dentists’ practices with admin work. While this is a small check for a firm that just announced new funds totaling $15 billion, it confirms that U.S. VCs are actively seeking deal flow outside of the U.S., even without local offices.

Stockholm is a natural stop for a16z, which previously achieved significant returns from backing Skype, cofounded by Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennström. Since then, a significant number of fast-growing startups have been created in the Swedish capital, and the VC heavyweight tracked down where many of them were coming from. 

“We spend a lot of time developing a deep understanding of specific markets and knowing where innovation is emerging. In Sweden, that has meant closely tracking ecosystems like SSE Labs — the startup incubator of the Stockholm School of Economics — and the companies coming out of it,” Vasquez told TechCrunch.

Like fintech giant Klarna, legal AI startup Legora, and e-scooter company Voi, Dentio is an alum of SSE Labs — a startup incubator that has produced several successful Swedish companies. The three former high school classmates Elias Afrasiabi, Anton Li and Lukas Sjögren joined the incubator after reconnecting as students at both the SSE (Stockholm School of Economics) and KTH (Royal Institute of Technology), then joined the incubator with additional backing from KTH’s Innovation Launch program. They tackled a problem close to home: Li’s mom, a dentist, had told them how admin work detracted from clinical care.

The trio intuited that they could leverage LLMs to help people like her — an idea that they also validated with her and her colleagues. This led them to Dentio’s initial product, a recording tool that uses AI to generate clinical notes. But it’s only a matter of time before AI scribes become a commodity product, and Dentio needs to prove its value to dentists so they aren’t tempted to switch providers when that happens, Afrasiabi said.

Potential competitors include fellow Swedish startup Tandem Health, which raised a $50 million Series A round last year to support clinicians with AI across multiple medical specialties. Dentio, by contrast, focuses exclusively on dentists, but it believes it can still reach the scale VCs expect through international expansion

“Now we’re a team of seven people, and we think that it’s possible to build a unified way of handling administration all over Europe, and maybe even all over the world,” Afrasiabi said. While Europe’s healthcare systems are fragmented, they share similarities, and Dentio’s assumption is that what works in Sweden could work elsewhere in the EU.

Dentio prominently features its “Made in Sweden” branding and emphasizes that “all relevant data is processed in Sweden and Finland in compliance with Swedish and EU law.” It signals data protection to privacy-conscious European customers. But it also signals potential to VCs — a callback to Sweden’s history of producing breakout companies.

“We went to zero meetups. I reached out to zero investors,” Afrasiabi said. While the team was heads down building, the word spread out. “I think it was mostly through referrals and people talking to each other that the news got all the way over to the U.S.,” he said.

This wasn’t happenstance: a16z has eyes around the world in order to spot these companies as early as local funds might, Vasquez said. “In Sweden for example, we partnered with top founders abroad like Fredrik Hjelm, founder of Voi, and Johannes Schildt, founder of Kry, by turning them into scouts and mapping the best local talent.”

For Vasquez, who focuses on AI application investments for a16z, this isn’t just about Sweden, but about “a pattern of great global companies being born abroad and scaling quickly,” from Black Forest Labs in Germany to Manus, the Singapore-based AI startup recently acquired by Meta.

Born and raised in El Salvador, he has also been spending time in São Paulo. “I’m really excited about what’s brewing in Brazil and across Latin America in AI,” he wrote on LinkedIn at the time. “I believe AI is the great equalizer,” he added. “Most people now have access to PhD-level intelligence on a phone, and ultimately, Silicon Valley is a state of mind.”

• The Pentagon and Anthropic are in a standoff over usage of Claude
• The AI model was reportedly used to capture Nicolás Maduro
• Anthropic refuses to let its models be used in “fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance”

A rift between the Pentagon and several AI companies has emerged over how their models can be used as part of operations.

The Pentagon has requested AI providers Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and xAI to allow the use of their models for “all lawful purposes”.

The co-founders of startup Ricursive Intelligence seemed destined to be co-founders.

Anna Goldie, CEO, and Azalia Mirhoseini, CTO, are so well-known in the AI community that they were among those AI engineers who “got those weird emails from Zuckerberg making crazy offers to us,” Goldie told TechCrunch, chuckling. (They didn’t take the offers.) The pair worked at Google Brain together and were early employees at Anthropic.

They earned acclaim at Google by creating the Alpha Chip — an AI tool that could generate solid chip layouts in hours — a process that normally takes human designers a year or more. The tool helped design three generations of Google’s Tensor Processing Units.

That pedigree explains why, just four months after launching Ricursive, they last month announced a $300 million Series A round at a $4 billion valuation led by Lightspeed, just a couple of months after raising a $35 million seed round led by Sequoia.

Ricursive is building AI tools that design chips, not the chips themselves. That makes them fundamentally different from nearly every other AI chip startup: they’re not a wannabe Nvidia competitor. In fact, Nvidia is an investor. The GPU giant, along with AMD, Intel, and every other chip maker, are the startup’s target customers.

“We want to enable any chip, like a custom chip or a more traditional chip, any kind of chip, to be built in an automated and very accelerated way. We’re using AI to do that,” Mirhoseini told TechCrunch. 

Their paths first crossed at Stanford, where Goldie earned her PhD as Mirhoseini taught computer science classes. Since then, their careers have been in lockstep. “We started at Google Brain on the same day. We left Google Brain on the same day. We joined Anthropic on the same day. We left Anthropic on the same day. We rejoined Google on the same day, and then we left Google again on the same day. Then we started this company together on the same day,” Goldie recounted.

During their time at Google, the colleagues were so close they even worked out together, both enjoying circuit training. The pun wasn’t lost on Jeff Dean, the famed Google engineer who was their collaborator. He nicknamed their Alpha Chip project “chip circuit training” — a play on their shared workout routine. Internally, the pair also got a nickname: A&A. 

The Alpha Chip earned them industry notice, but it also attracted controversy. In 2022, one of their colleagues at Google was fired, Wired reported, after he spent years trying to discredit A&A and their chip work, even though that work was used to help produce some of Google’s most important, bet-the-business AI chips.

Their Alpha Chip project at Google Brain proved the concept that would become Ricursive — using AI to dramatically accelerate chip design.

Designing chips is hard

The issue is, computer chips have millions to billions of logic gate components integrated on their silicon wafer. Human designers can spend a year or more placing those components on the chip to ensure performance, good power utilization and any other design needs. Digitally determining the placement of such infinitesimally small components with precision is, as you might expect, hard. 

Alpha Chip “could generate a very high-quality layout in, like, six hours. And the cool thing about this approach was that it actually learns from experience,” Goldie said. 

The premise of their AI chip design work is to use “a reward signal” that rates how good the design is. The agent then takes that rating to “update the parameters of its deep neural network to get better,” Goldie said. After completing thousands of designs, the agent got really good. It also got faster as it learned, the founders say.

Ricursive’s platform will take the concept further. The AI chip designer they are building will “learn across different chips,” Goldie said. So each chip it designs should help it become a better designer for every next chip.

Ricursive’s platform also makes use of LLMs and will handle everything from component placement through design verification. Any company that makes electronics and needs chips is their target customer.

If their platform proves itself, as it seems likely to do, Ricursive could play a role in the moonshot goal of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI). Indeed, their ultimate vision is designing AI chips, meaning the AI will essentially design its own computer brains. 

“Chips are the fuel for AI,” Goldie said. “I think by building more powerful chips, that’s the best way to advance that frontier.” 

Mirhoseini adds that the lengthy chip-design process is constraining how quickly AI can advance. “We think we can also enable this fast co-evolution of the models and the chips that basically power them,” she said. So AI can grow smarter faster. 

If the thought of AI designing its own brains at ever increasing speeds brings visions of Skynet and the Terminator to mind, the founders point out that there’s a more positive, immediate and, they think, more likely benefit: hardware efficiency.  

When AI Labs can design far more efficient chips (and, eventually all the underlying hardware), their growth won’t have to consume so much of the world’s resources. 

“We could design a computer architecture that’s uniquely suited to that model, and we could achieve almost a 10x improvement in performance per total cost of ownership,” Goldie said. 

While the young startup won’t name its early customers, the founders say that they’ve heard from every big chip making name you can imagine. Unsurprisingly, they have their pick of their first development partners, too. 

The Vatican is leaning into AI. AI-assisted live translations are being introduced for Holy Mass attendees — the holy masses if you will. The Papal Basilica of Saint Peter in the Vatican has teamed up with Translated, a language service provider, to create live translations in 60 languages.

“Saint Peter’s Basilica has, for centuries, welcomed the faithful from every nation and tongue. In making available a tool that helps many to understand the words of the liturgy, we wish to serve the mission that defines the centre of the Catholic Church, universal by its very vocation,” Cardinal Mauro Gambetti, O.F.M. Conv., Archpriest of the Papal Basilica of Saint Peter in the Vatican, said in a statement. “I am very happy with the collaboration with Translated. In this centenary year, we look to the future with prudence and discernment, confident that human ingenuity, when guided by faith, may become an instrument of communion.”

Visitors to the Vatican will have the option to scan a QR code. They will then have access to live audio and text translations of the liturgy. It doesn’t require an app and should work right on a web page.

The technology stems from Lara, a translation AI tool Translated launched in 2024. Translated claims that Lara works with the “sensitivity of over 500,000 native-speaking professional translators.”