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Min-Liang Tan speaks during a conference at SXSW Sydney on October 16, 2024 in Sydney, Australia.

Nina Franova | Getty Images

Artificial intelligence is set to have a huge impact on the gaming industry and its billions of players, according to Min-Liang Tan, the billionaire CEO and co-founder of gaming firm Razer.

From the ways in which games are developed to hacks for completing levels, Tan said the technology’s ramifications across the sector can’t be overstated.

“For us at Razer, the way we see it is that AI is going to completely disrupt everything, or change everything in gaming,” Tan told CNBC’s “Beyond the Valley” podcast.

Gaming plays a significant role in the creative sector, with 3.6 billion players around the world and annual revenue of nearly $189 billion, according to research company Newzoo, which tracks data across mobile, console and PC games.

Razer changed gaming with its hardware. Now it’s hoping to do the same with AI

“Game developers will now be able to use AI tools, and then you’ve got game publishers that will now distribute, market new games with AI tools … For gamers, the AI tools will be able to change things, in terms of the way they play,” Tan told CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal at Singapore’s SWITCH conference.

Razer, known for its gaming gear like mice, headsets and keyboards, has developed Game Co-AI, a tool that uses computer vision to “watch” how a gamer plays and provides tips on solving quests or defeating enemies. The tool will also use data such as public APIs, and a beta version of Game Co-AI will be available “later in 2025,” according to Razer’s website.

The potential use of AI in esports — or competitive gaming — has sparked debate, however.

“We will not have AI running, I think, during a game itself, but what about at the point of time of training?” Tan said. There is an appetite among some esports players to use AI to help coach future stars, Tan said. “There’s a lot of excitement in respect of this. The opportunities are limitless.”

Along with helping players, AI will also be able to detect and fix bugs when games are developed, according to Tan.

Traditionally, game testing involved “a whole bunch of people sitting in a room,” playing games and identifying bugs one by one, Tan said, in a process known as quality assurance or QA. Razer is developing an AI QA Companion, which can find and log bugs — and will soon also be able to suggest bug fixes, he added.

“[QA] is about 20% to 30% of the [development] costs, it takes up about 30% of the time,” Tan said, adding that the new tool will automate the QA process, making human testers more effective and productive.

AI-created games?

The effects of AI are being felt across industries, but there is still some disagreement on how far AI can go in gaming.

Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of video game publisher Take-Two Interactive, which makes Grand Theft Auto, said on Tuesday that AI can’t rival human game developers.

When asked for his gaming predictions for a year’s time, however, Tan said: “I think we will be talking about some of the new, exciting games that have been built with AI, and how we see the future from that. Maybe we might see one or two major hit games.”

Developing a game usually involves large teams and significant investment, but AI will allow smaller groups of people to do so, according to Tan. Rather than being a threat to jobs, AI can remove “tedious” tasks, he added. “The human creativity still needs to be there.”

The way in which the gaming industry uses AI may have a wider impact beyond the sector, Tan said, suggesting that it could “spawn multiple other new industries.”

“A lot of what’s happening in the tech industry was born from gaming, and I believe that a lot of what will happen for AI will also be born from AI gaming,” he said.

Razer was founded by Tan and Robert Krakoff in 2005, and the company became known for the Boomslang, a mouse — named after a deadly snake — designed specifically for gaming. “For a gamer, the mouse is everything. It’s an extension of your arm,” Tan said. “The more precise your mouse is, the more likely you are going to be able to get frags,” he said, referring to the “kills” made in first-person shooter games.

Headquartered in Singapore and Irvine, California, Tan said the company went global “very quickly” after it launched. Razer went public in 2017, listing on the Hong Kong stock exchange, before going private again in 2022.

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OpenAI to acquire Neptune, a startup that helps with AI model training

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OpenAI to acquire Neptune, a startup that helps with AI model training

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attends an event to pitch AI for businesses in Tokyo, Japan February 3, 2025.

Kim Kyung-hoon | Reuters

OpenAI has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Neptune, a startup that builds monitoring and de-bugging tools that artificial intelligence companies use as they train models.

Neptune and OpenAI have collaborated on a metrics dashboard to help teams that are building foundation models. The companies will work “even more closely together” because of the acquisition, Neptune CEO Piotr Niedźwiedź said in a blog.

The startup will wind down its external services in the coming months, Niedźwiedź said. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

“Neptune has built a fast, precise system that allows researchers to analyze complex training workflows,” OpenAI’s Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki said in a statement. “We plan to iterate with them to integrate their tools deep into our training stack to expand our visibility into how models learn.”

OpenAI has acquired several companies this year.

It purchased a small interface startup called Software Applications Incorporated for an undisclosed sum in October, product development startup Statsig for $1.1 billion in September and Jony Ive’s AI devices startup io for more than $6 billion in May.

Neptune had raised more than $18 million in funding from investors including Almaz Capital and TDJ Pitango Ventures, according to its website. Neptune’s deal with OpenAI is still subject to customary closing conditions.

“I am truly grateful to our customers, investors, co-founders, and colleagues who have made this journey possible,” Niedźwiedź said. “It was the ride of a lifetime already, yet still I believe this is only the beginning.”

WATCH: Sam Altman hits reset at OpenAI, pausing side bets to defend ChatGPT’s AI lead

Sam Altman hits reset at OpenAI, pausing side bets to defend ChatGPT’s AI lead

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Micron stops selling memory to consumers as demand spikes from AI chips

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Micron stops selling memory to consumers as demand spikes from AI chips

A person walks by a sign for Micron Technology headquarters in San Jose, California, on June 25, 2025.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Micron said on Wednesday that it plans to stop selling memory to consumers to focus on meeting demand for high-powered artificial intelligence chips.

“The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage,” Sumit Sadana, Micron business chief, said in a statement. “Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments.”

Micron’s announcement is the latest sign that the AI infrastructure boom is creating shortages for inputs like memory as a handful of companies commit to spend hundreds of billions in the next few years to build massive data centers. Memory, which is used by computers to store data for short periods of time, is facing a global shortage.

Micron shares are up about 175% this year, though they slipped 3% on Wednesday to $232.25.

AI chips, like the GPUs made by Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, use large amounts of the most advanced memory. For example, the current-generation Nvidia GB200 chip has 192GB of memory per graphics processor. Google’s latest AI chip, the Ironwood TPU, needs 192GB of high-bandwidth memory.

Memory is also used in phones and computers, but with lower specs, and much lower quantities — many laptops only come with 16GB of memory. Micron’s Crucial brand sold memory on sticks that tinkerers could use to build their own PCs or upgrade their laptops. Crucial also sold solid-state hard drives.

Micron competes against SK Hynix and Samsung in the market for high-bandwidth memory, but it’s the only U.S.-based memory supplier. Analysts have said that SK Hynix is Nvidia’s primary memory supplier.

Micron supplies AMD, which says its AI chips use more memory than others, providing them a performance advantage for running AI. AMD’s current AI chip, the MI350, comes with 288GB of high-bandwidth memory.

Micron’s Crucial business was not broken out in company earnings. However, its cloud memory business unit showed 213% year-over-year growth in the most recent quarter.

Analysts at Goldman on Tuesday raised their price target on Micron’s stock to $205 from $180, though they maintained their hold recommendation. The analysts wrote in a note to clients that due to “continued pricing momentum” in memory, they “expect healthy upside to Street estimates” when Micron reports quarterly results in two weeks.

A Micron spokesperson declined to comment on whether the move would result in layoffs.

“Micron intends to reduce impact on team members due to this business decision through redeployment opportunities into existing open positions within the company,” the company said in its release.

WATCH: Winners and losers from surge in prices for memory chips

The winners and losers from the surge in memory chip prices

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Microsoft stock sinks on report AI product sales are missing growth goals

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Microsoft stock sinks on report AI product sales are missing growth goals

Microsoft: Have not lowered sales quotas or targets for salespeople

Microsoft pushed back on a report Wednesday that the company lowered growth targets for artificial intelligence software sales after many of its salespeople missed those goals in the last fiscal year.

The company’s stock sank more than 2% on The Information report.

A Microsoft spokesperson said the company has not lowered sales quotas or targets for its salespeople.

The sales lag occurred for Microsoft’s Foundry product, an Azure enterprise platform where companies can build and manage AI agents, according to The Information, which cited two salespeople in Azure’s cloud unit.

AI agents can carry out a series of actions for a user or organization autonomously.

Less than a fifth of salespeople in one U.S. Azure unit met the Foundry sales growth target of 50%, according to The Information.

In another unit, the quota was set to double Foundry sales, The Information reported. The quota was dropped to 50% after most salespeople didn’t meet it.

In a statement, the company said the news outlet inaccurately combined the concepts of growth and quotas.

Read more CNBC tech news

“Aggregate sales quotas for AI products have not been lowered, as we informed them prior to publication,” a Microsoft Spokesperson said.

The AI boom has presented opportunities for businesses to add efficiencies and streamline tasks, with the companies that build these agents touting the power of the tools to take on work and allow workers to do more.

OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Salesforce, Amazon and others all have their own tools to create and manage these AI assistants.

But the adoption of these tools by traditional businesses hasn’t seen the same surge as other parts of the AI ecosystem.

The Information noted AI adoption struggles at private equity firm Carlyle last year, in which the tools wouldn’t reliably connect data from other places. The company later reduced how much it spent on the tools.

Read the full story from The Information here.

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