Chips, Drones and New Laws

By the Orchestra editors · 4 min read

TL;DR

Anthropic in talks with Samsung to build a custom AI chip, chasing OpenAI's Broadcom deal
Brisbane robotics startup Emesent lands $25m with NRFC making its first venture debt investment
Australia bans subscription traps and drip pricing in landmark consumer law reform
Cloudflare gives AI scrapers a September deadline to separate training crawlers or face blocks

AI · Worldwide

Anthropic explores custom chip deal with Samsung

Anthropic is in discussions with Samsung to develop a custom AI chip, following OpenAI's recent Broadcom partnership. The move signals another major lab looking to reduce its dependence on Nvidia.

Cloudflare draws a line on AI crawlers

Cloudflare is requiring AI companies to separate search crawlers from training and agent crawlers by September 15, or face default blocking on publisher sites. A meaningful policy shift for anyone building or deploying AI agents that touch the open web.

Google's AI push drove 37% jump in electricity use

Google's 2025 environmental report shows its AI data centre buildout pushed electricity consumption up 37% year on year. The company says it's offsetting with clean energy purchases but the trajectory is steep.

Australian Tech

Emesent raises $25m with NRFC's first venture debt deal

Brisbane-based drone mapping and robotics scaleup Emesent has raised $25m through a $15m equity round and $10m in venture debt from the National Reconstruction Fund Corporation, the government fund's first venture debt investment.

Subscription traps and drip pricing now banned

Parliament has passed amendments to consumer law creating a general prohibition on unfair trading practices including subscription traps and drip pricing, effective within a year. Tech industry lobbying to soften the wording was unsuccessful.