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WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. government officials said on Wednesday that federal networks are being targeted by an unidentified "nation-state cyber threat actor" that's trying to exploit vulnerabilities in products made by the cybersecurity company F5. In a statement, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said exploitation of the devices "could allow the threat actor to move laterally within an organization’s network, exfiltrate sensitive data, and establish persistent system access, potentially leading to a full compromise of targeted information systems." Earlier, F5 said it had detected unauthorized access to certain company systems by a threat actor, but the breach had no impact on its operations. The company discovered the intrusion on August 9 and took "extensive actions" to contain the threat, engaging external experts, including CrowdStrike, Mandiant, NCC Group and IOActive, to assist with the investigation, it said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. F5, a provider of cybersecurity and multi-cloud application services, said the attacker had long-term access to its internal systems used to develop BIG-IP software and stole files containing parts of the program's code and details about security flaws that had not yet been made public. The company, however, said it found no signs that key security flaws were used in attacks or that its software development process had been tampered with. F5 said information from a few customers was involved in the breach, and it was reaching out to those affected directly. The company continues to strengthen its security controls and infrastructure following the incident, it said, adding that the U.S. Department of Justice had approved a delay in publicly disclosing the breach until September 12, citing national security considerations. (Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru and Raphael Satter in Washington; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar and David Gregorio)

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By Munsif Vengattil and Aditya Kalra BENGALURU (Reuters) -At a startup office in this Indian city, developers are fine-tuning artificial-intelligence chatbots that talk and message like humans.  The company, LimeChat, has an audacious goal: to make customer-service jobs almost obsolete. It says its generative AI agents enable clients to slash by 80% the number of workers needed to handle 10,000 monthly queries.  "Once you hire a LimeChat agent, you never have to hire again," Nikhil Gupta, its 28-year-old co-founder, told Reuters. Cheap labor and English proficiency helped make India the world's back office — sometimes at the expense of workers elsewhere. Now, AI-powered systems are subsuming jobs done by headset-wearing graduates in technical support, customer care and data management, sparking a scramble to adapt, a Reuters examination found.  That's driving business for AI startups that help companies slash staffing costs and scale operations — even though many consumers still prefer to deal with a person. This account of the disruptive changes transforming India's $283 billion IT sector is based on interviews with 30 people, including industry executives, recruiters, workers and current and former government officials. Reuters also visited two AI startups and tested voice and text chatbots that handle increasingly sophisticated customer interactions in human-like ways. Rather than pump the brakes as the technology threatens jobs built on routine tasks, the country is accelerating, wagering that a let-it-rip approach will create enough new opportunities to absorb those displaced, Reuters found. The outcome of India's gamble carries weight far beyond its borders — a test case for whether embracing AI-driven disruption can elevate a developing economy or render it a cautionary tale. The global conversational AI market is growing 24% a year and should reach $41 billion by 2030, consultancy Grand View Research estimates. India — which relies on IT for 7.5% of its GDP — is leaning in. In a February speech, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said "work does not disappear due to technology. Its nature changes and new types of jobs are created." Not everyone shares Modi's confidence in India's preparedness. Santosh Mehrotra, a former Indian official and visiting professor at the University of Bath's Centre for Development Studies, criticized the government for a lack of urgency in assessing AI's effects on India's young workforce. "There's no gameplan," he said. Business process management employs 1.65 million workers in call centers, payroll, and data handling in India. Hiring has plummeted due to increased automation and digitalization, despite rising demand for AI coordinators and process analysts, said Neeti Sharma, CEO of staffing firm TeamLease Digital. Net headcount in the segment, which represents one-fifth of IT output, grew by fewer than 17,000 workers in each of the past two years, down from 130,000 in 2022-2023 and 177,000 in 2021-2022, TeamLease Digital figures show. Reuters spoke to three current and five former customer-service workers, who described increasing job insecurity and integration of AI, including tools that suggest responses and bots that handle nearly all routine queries autonomously. Megha S., 32, was earning $10,000 a year at a Bengaluru-based software solutions provider. She said she was laid off last month, just before India's festive season, as the company moved to implement AI tools to review the quality of sales calls. "I was told I am the first one who has been replaced by AI," said Megha, who spoke on the condition that her full name and former employer not be identified. "I've not told my parents."  Sumita Dawra, a former labor ministry secretary who oversaw an Indian government taskforce on AI's impact on the workforce before retiring in March, said while the technology offered productivity gains that would lead to new jobs, India could consider stronger social security measures, such as unemployment benefits, to help those displaced during the transition.  However, a senior Indian official told Reuters the government believed AI would ultimately have little impact on overall employment. India's IT and labor ministries, and Modi's office, didn't respond to requests for comment. AUTOMATION GOLD RUSH Besides AI, factors clouding the outlook for India's IT sector include U.S. tariffs; a proposal by a U.S. lawmaker for a 25% tax on firms using foreign outsourcing services; and President Trump's $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas, which are widely used by tech firms to sponsor Indian workers. Investment bank Jefferies predicted in September that India's call centers would face a revenue hit of 50% — and around 35% for other back-office functions — from AI adoption over the next five years.  That would spell near-term job losses in India, which accounts for 52% of the global outsourcing market. "The biggest impact is going to be on young students coming out of college," said Pramod Bhasin, who in the 1990s established India's first call center with 18 employees for GE Capital, where workstations were partitioned by saris strung from the ceiling. In the longer run, India could transition from "back office" to the world's "AI factory" by capitalizing on demand for AI engineers and automation deployment, said Bhasin, who went on to found IT services firm Genpact. One beneficiary of that demand is LimeChat, which Reuters visited in August. Gupta, the co-founder, said his developers and engineers have helped automate 5,000 jobs across India. The company's bots handle 70% of customer complaints for its clients, and it plans to achieve 90-95% within a year, he said. "If you're giving us 100,000 rupees per month, you are automating the job of at least 15 agents," said Gupta. At that price — about $1,130 — the service costs roughly the same as three customer-care staff, he said. LimeChat's sales soared to $1.5 million in 2024 from $79,000 two years earlier, regulatory disclosures show. Last year, the firm began integrating Microsoft's Azure language models and algorithms in a partnership to launch a new e-commerce chatbot. Among Gupta's clients is Indian ayurvedic products firm Kapiva, which has deployed a LimeChat bot for customer interactions over WhatsApp.  Keying in a prompt — "What kind of diet should I have to reduce weight?" — yielded an AI meal-plan creator. A follow-up query in English and Hindi about how a slimming juice differs from another item was also answered, with the chatbot eventually sharing links to Kapiva products with a smiling emoji. Kapiva didn't respond to Reuters questions. LimeChat's rivals include Reliance, the conglomerate chaired by Mukesh Ambani, which acquired Indian startup Haptik in 2019.  Haptik says it offers "AI agents that deliver human-like customer experiences" that cost $120 and can cut support costs by 30%. Revenue skyrocketed to almost $18 million last year from less than $1 million in 2020, disclosures show.  Haptik promoted a webinar in September by posing the question: "What if you had a full-time employee who never sleeps and costs just 10,000 rupees?"  "We are seeing a huge shift," Haptik product manager Suji Ravi said in the webinar, which Reuters reporters attended. "Brands are not investing in human agents and they want to deploy AI agents." For LimeChat client Mamaearth, an Indian personal-care brand, the main attraction of AI chatbots is scalability, said Vipul Maheshwari, head of product and analytics at parent firm Honasa Consumer. "Providing good customer support is make or break for us," he said. "But can we infinitely scale my customer support team? Absolutely not." The chatbot used by Mamaearth could go beyond simple assistance like order tracking, and help users with queries such as recommending the right products during pregnancy or, in some cases, handle an agitated customer, Maheshwari said.  COFFEE WITH NEHA The promise and perils of AI are evid…

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By Arsheeya Bajwa and Aditya Soni (Reuters) -An investor group including BlackRock, Microsoft and Nvidia is buying one of the world's biggest data center operators with nearly 80 facilities in a deal worth $40 billion to secure coveted computing capacity for artificial intelligence. The purchase of U.S.-based Aligned Data Centers from Australian Macquarie Asset Management on Wednesday is the first deal for the AI Infrastructure Partnership formed last year which includes Abu Dhabi-based fund MGX and Elon Musk's startup xAI among its backers. "With this investment in Aligned Data Centers, we further our goal of delivering the infrastructure necessary to power the future of AI," said BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, who also serves as the chairman of the AI Infrastructure Partnership. DEALS TO SNAP UP CHIPS AND INFRASTRUCTURE The acquisition is the latest in a series of big-ticket deals involving Big Tech and Silicon Valley startups that has been fueled by the boom in AI.  Major tech companies including Alphabet, Amazon.com, Meta, Microsoft and CoreWeave, are on track to spend $400 billion on AI infrastructure this year, Morgan Stanley estimates. OpenAI, the startup at the heart of the AI boom, struck deals in recent weeks with chipmakers Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and Broadcom that may cost over $1 trillion to secure about 26 gigawatts of computing capacity, enough to power roughly 20 million U.S. homes. Meta Platforms is building several multi-gigawatt AI data centers, including one called Prometheus due to come online in 2026 and another, Hyperion, that can scale up to 5 gigawatts. Privately-held Aligned Data Centers currently has over 5 gigawatts of operational and planned capacity located across 50 campuses in the U.S. and Latin America. Joe Tigay, portfolio manager at Nvidia shareholder Equity Armor Investments, said the acquisition highlights the growing value of data center assets for investors. "They’re looking at rapid expansion to meet AI demand and optimize for it." SPENDING SURGE AS INTEREST BOOMS Founded in 2013, Aligned has been a big winner of the AI infrastructure spending boom, raising $12 billion in equity and debt earlier this year in one of the largest private capital injections into a data center company. Its customers include cloud-computing platform Nutanix and IT services provider Datto, according to its website. The company also has a land portfolio with access to significant near-term power capacity in key markets, said Macquarie, which first invested in the company in 2018. Shares of its publicly listed rivals, such as Applied Digital, have soared more than four-fold this year. Applied Digital shares jumped 5% on Wednesday. The investment group buying Aligned, which also includes Kuwait Investment Authority and Singapore state-owned investor Temasek as backers, has an initial target of deploying $30 billion of equity capital, with the potential of reaching $100 billion including debt. It has not disclosed how much each partner has contributed to the group nor the equity value of Wednesday's deal. Nvidia and Aligned declined to comment, while the investors did not immediately respond to requests seeking more details on the deal. "All the major parties in that consortium, they are showing the strength of the AI ecosystem," said Hendi Susanto, portfolio manager at Nvidia investor Gabelli Funds. Aligned will remain headquartered in Dallas, Texas, under CEO Andrew Schaap when the deal closes in the first half of 2026, the investor group said in its statement. (Reporting by Arsheeya Bajwa in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D'Silva and Elaine Hardcastle)

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(Reuters) -Meta Platforms said it is partnering with chip tech provider Arm Holdings to power the systems that drive personalization across its apps, including Facebook and Instagram, as companies rush to upgrade the chip technology underpinning their services. The social media giant will use Arm-based data center platforms to power its AI ranking and recommendation systems, which are key to discovery and personalization across its apps. A deal with Meta would mark another major validation of Arm's technology as the SoftBank‑backed company competes with the entrenched x86 architecture used by Intel and AMD. Arm provides chip architecture that serves as a blueprint for what a central processing unit can do and which applications it can run. The companies said the Arm‑based approach promises higher performance and lower power use than x86 systems. While Arm-based chips already power a large portion of the world's smartphones, they are quickly gaining traction in Intel and AMD's core markets – personal computers and server CPUs. Separately, Meta said it will invest $1.5 billion in a Texas data center, breaking ground on its 29th facility globally as it expands infrastructure for artificial intelligence workloads. The companies said they have worked together to adapt Meta’s AI infrastructure software for Arm architectures, making the software improvements open source and freely available for anyone to use. The open-source effort could boost adoption of Arm-based architecture by improving software compatibility, a key hurdle to wider use. Meta and Arm said they plan to keep adding improvements to these open-source projects. (Reporting by Arsheeya Bajwa in Bengaluru; Editing by Tasim Zahid)

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By Echo Wang NEW YORK (Reuters) -Meta Platforms said on Wednesday it would invest $1.5 billion in a data center in Texas, breaking ground at its 29th such facility globally, as the social media giant expands infrastructure to support artificial intelligence workloads. The data center in El Paso, Meta's third in Texas, is expected to come online in 2028, and can scale to a 1-gigawatt site – enough energy to power a city the size of San Francisco for a day – making it one of the largest planned data center campuses in the U.S. Large-scale cloud service providers, called hyperscalers, have been racing to build AI infrastructure, with Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft projected to spend over $360 billion in 2025, according to company filings. Most of the investment is expected to go toward powering data centers. The new facility is projected to create about 100 jobs once operational, with over 1,800 construction workers expected onsite at peak construction, Meta said in a statement. The company cited El Paso's robust electrical grid and skilled workforce as factors in the site selection. Meta has invested over $10 billion in Texas and employs more than 2,500 people across the state, the company said. These figures include the latest investment.  The company is putting up $1.5 billion of its own money to fund the current phase of the El Paso site. Wednesday's announcement follows Meta's recent $29 billion off-balance-sheet deal with Pimco and Blue Owl to fund a data center campus in Louisiana. "The fastest gazelle finds their place, others follow, and Meta is the fastest gazelle in the industry, as far as I'm concerned," Jon Barela, CEO of the Borderplex Alliance, a local economic development and policy advocacy group involved in facilitating the project, told Reuters. "We've had others look at the region, other data centers, and we expect there probably to be others that will want to follow."  Barela said the Meta project first came from a referral from Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s office about four years ago, and El Paso offered a package of tax incentives and other measures to attract the company. Meta said the data center will be matched with 100% renewable energy. The facility will use a closed-loop, liquid-cooled system that continuously recycles water. Meta pledged to restore twice the water consumed by the data center to local watersheds, exceeding its 2030 goal to be "water-positive" by restoring more water than it consumes. (Reporting by Echo Wang in New York; Editing by Matthew Lewis)

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(Reuters) -An investor group, which includes BlackRock, Nvidia, xAI and Microsoft, will buy Aligned Data Centers from Macquarie Asset Management and co‑investors in a deal worth $40 billion. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2026, the companies said on Wednesday. Aligned will remain based in Dallas, Texas, and will be led by CEO Andrew Schaap. The group aims to deploy $30 billion of equity capital initially, with the potential of reaching $100 billion, including debt. Here are key facts about Aligned Data Centers: SIZE AND SCALE ** Founded in 2013 and based in Texas, the company builds and operates data centers for hyperscalers and cloud computing companies.  ** The company has 50 data center campuses and touts roughly 5-gigawatts of contracted and available capacity. ** Aligned completed a capital raise of more than $12 billion in January this year, which includes $5 billion of new primary equity, comprising funds managed by Macquarie Asset Management, and more than $7 billion of new debt commitments. ** It acquired Latin American data center provider ODATA in 2023, in a major push to boost its portfolio, with ODATA now operating in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and the U.S. ** Aligned is also building a new data center in Texas with Nvidia-backed cloud company Lambda. EXECUTIVE TEAM ** Andrew Schaap is the CEO of Aligned Data Centers since 2017. Prior to joining Aligned, he held many leadership roles in his 11 years with data center operator Digital Realty Trust. ** Schaap is the founder and board member of DC Delta, an advisory council of global data center end users and innovators, among others, who are focused on data center efficiency and sustainability. ** Meghan Baivier is the finance chief of Aligned Data Centers since 2024. ** Prior to joining Aligned, Baivier was chief operating officer of Easterly Government Properties, a fully integrated real estate investment trust focused properties leased to the U.S. government. CUSTOMERS ** The company targets hyperscalers, cloud providers, neocloud operators and large enterprise customers. ** Cloud computing platform Nutanix and IT services provider Datto are among the customers of Aligned Data Centers. COMPETITORS ** Companies such as Equinix, Digital Realty Trust, CyrusOne, Microsoft and Vantage Data Centers are rivals of Aligned. (Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru)

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(Refiles to remove extraneous word in paragraph 6) By Gianluca Lo Nostro (Reuters) -British consumer credit firm Lendable launched a monthly 20-pound mobile plan on Wednesday, the latest financial technology firm to expand into telecommunications to unlock new revenue streams. London-based Lendable, founded in 2014, is the first fintech in Britain to launch such a service. It joins a string of firms in other countries tapping into the telecoms market and seeking to build "super-app" ecosystems that combine banking, shopping and communications. Revolut recently announced plans for its own mobile virtual network operator in Europe, while Klarna will launch a $40 per month plan in the United States. Unlike mainstream providers, these operators do not own the wireless infrastructure they depend on, which allows them to avoid heavy fixed costs while competing on the pricing front. Celebrities have also jumped on the trend. Ryan Reynolds-backed budget brand Mint Mobile was sold to T-Mobile US for $1.35 billion in 2023, while U.S. President Donald Trump's family business has licensed its name to launch a mobile service. Lendable's plan will be powered by U.S.-based tech company Gigs, which provides the operating system, and will be available on the Lendable-owned Zable app, which has 2 million customers. The plan includes unlimited 5G data, calls and texts on Vodafone's network, plus 10GB of roaming across 38 nations. "Expanding into telecoms is a natural next step for us," Lendable co-founder and CEO, Martin Kissinger, said in an interview. Kissinger said that, unlike other fintechs focused on current accounts, international payments and trading, Zable offers cost-saving options with the aim of lowering bills. When asked about fundraising, Kissinger said Lendable was a profitable and well-funded business. "At the moment, we are not thinking about any kind of listing, as there is still a lot of building to do." He declined to comment on a potential initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange. (Reporting by Gianluca Lo Nostro in Gdansk; Editing by Milla Nissi-Prussak)

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(Reuters) -Cybersecurity firm F5 said on Wednesday it had detected unauthorized access to certain company systems by a highly sophisticated nation-state threat actor, but the breach had no impact on its operations. The company discovered the intrusion on August 9 and took "extensive actions" to contain the threat, engaging external experts, including CrowdStrike, Mandiant, NCC Group and IOActive, to assist with the investigation, it said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. F5, a provider of cybersecurity and multi-cloud application services, said the attacker had long-term access to its internal systems used to develop BIG-IP software and stole files containing parts of the program's code and details about security flaws that had not yet been made public. The company, however, said it found no signs that key security flaws were used in attacks or that its software development process had been tampered with. F5 said information from a few customers was involved in the breach, and it was reaching out to those affected directly. The company continues to strengthen its security controls and infrastructure following the incident, it said, adding that the U.S. Department of Justice had approved a delay in publicly disclosing the breach until September 12, citing national security considerations. (Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)

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(Reuters) -An investor group, which includes BlackRock, Nvidia, xAI and Microsoft, will buy Aligned Data Centers from Macquarie Asset Management and co‑investors in a deal worth $40 billion. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2026, the companies said on Wednesday. Aligned will remain based in Dallas, Texas, and will be led by CEO Andrew Schaap. The group aims to deploy $30 billion of equity capital initially, with the potential of reaching $100 billion, including debt. Here are key facts about Aligned Data Centers: SIZE AND SCALE ** Founded in 2013 and based in Texas, the company builds and operates data centers for hyperscalers and cloud computing companies.  ** The company has 50 data center campuses and touts roughly 5-gigawatts of contracted and available capacity. ** Aligned completed a capital raise of more than $12 billion in January this year, which includes $5 billion of new primary equity, comprising funds managed by Macquarie Asset Management, and more than $7 billion of new debt commitments. ** It acquired Latin American data center provider ODATA in 2023, in a major push to boost its portfolio, with ODATA now operating in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and the U.S. ** Aligned is also building a new data center in Texas with Nvidia-backed cloud company Lambda. EXECUTIVE TEAM ** Andrew Schaap is the CEO of Aligned Data Centers since 2017. Prior to joining Aligned, he held many leadership roles in his 11 years with data center operator Digital Realty Trust. ** Schaap is the founder and board member of DC Delta, an advisory council of global data center end users and innovators, among others, who are focused on data center efficiency and sustainability. ** Meghan Baivier is the finance chief of Aligned Data Centers since 2024. ** Prior to joining Aligned, Baivier was chief operating officer of Easterly Government Properties, a fully integrated real estate investment trust focused properties leased to the U.S. government. CUSTOMERS ** The company targets hyperscalers, cloud providers, neocloud operators and large enterprise customers. ** Cloud computing platform Nutanix and IT services provider Datto are among the customers of Aligned Data Centers. COMPETITORS ** Companies such as Equinix, Digital Realty Trust, CyrusOne, Microsoft and Vantage Data Centers are rivals of Aligned. (Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru)

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(Reuters) -Cybersecurity firm F5 said on Wednesday it had detected unauthorized access to certain company systems by a highly sophisticated nation-state threat actor, but the breach had no impact on its operations. The company discovered the intrusion on August 9 and took "extensive actions" to contain the threat, engaging external experts, including CrowdStrike, Mandiant, NCC Group and IOActive, to assist with the investigation, it said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. F5, a provider of cybersecurity and multi-cloud application services, said the attacker had long-term access to its internal systems used to develop BIG-IP software and stole files containing parts of the program's code and details about security flaws that had not yet been made public. The company, however, said it found no signs that key security flaws were used in attacks or that its software development process had been tampered with. F5 said information from a few customers was involved in the breach, and it was reaching out to those affected directly. The company continues to strengthen its security controls and infrastructure following the incident, it said, adding that the U.S. Department of Justice had approved a delay in publicly disclosing the breach until September 12, citing national security considerations. (Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)

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