Welcome back. This was a landmark week in AI hardware: Arm broke with 35 years of tradition and shipped its own silicon, while Stripe’s payments blockchain went live with a protocol purpose-built for AI agents paying each other. In robotics, the partnership wave between hardware and AI companies continues to accelerate. On the cleantech front, geopolitics is making the case for clean energy louder than any policy paper ever could. And in quantum, a Japanese collaboration just cut one of the biggest barriers to practical quantum chemistry by a factor of 80. Here’s what you need to know.

In an historic shift after 35 years as a pure IP licensing company, Arm Holdings unveiled the AGI CPU - its first production silicon, a 136-core data center processor built on TSMC’s 3nm process. Co-developed with Meta as its lead customer, the chip is designed for the CPU-side orchestration work required by agentic AI workloads. Arm claims more than 2x the performance per rack versus x86 processors at 300 watts, and has signed on OpenAI, Cloudflare, Cerebras, and SAP as launch partners. Arm’s stock surged 16% on the news, with the company projecting $15 billion in revenue from the chip alone by 2031.

Source: CNBC  →  Read full article

Tempo, the payments-focused blockchain incubated by Stripe and crypto VC firm Paradigm, launched its mainnet on March 18 alongside the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) - an open standard that lets AI agents pay for services autonomously without human sign-off at each step. The protocol introduces “sessions,” essentially OAuth for money, allowing agents to authorize a spending cap once and then stream micropayments continuously. Visa, Mastercard, and Lightspark have already extended the standard to support cards, wallets, and Bitcoin Lightning. Design partners include Anthropic, OpenAI, DoorDash, Revolut, Nubank, and Shopify. Tempo raised $500M at a $5B valuation last year.

Source: CoinDesk  →  Read full article

Munich-based Agile Robots has entered a strategic research partnership with Google DeepMind, the latest in a growing wave of robotics-AI alliances reshaping manufacturing. The deal involves implementing DeepMind’s Gemini Robotics foundation models into Agile’s hardware, while the data collected by the robots will be fed back to improve the underlying AI. The companies will focus on sectors including electronics manufacturing, automotive, data centers, and logistics. With over 20,000 robotic solutions already deployed worldwide, Agile Robots brings significant real-world operational data to the partnership.

Source: TechCrunch  →  Read full article

A new report from the International Energy Agency projects the global market for clean technologies - including solar PV, wind, EVs, batteries, electrolyzers, and heat pumps - could more than double over the coming decade, approaching a value comparable to the entire global crude oil market. The report arrives as the Iran conflict has exposed fossil fuel supply chain fragility, with the UK introducing new rules this week requiring solar panels and heat pumps in all new homes, citing clean power as an energy security imperative.

Source: BusinessGreen  →  Read full article

Fujitsu and The University of Osaka have unveiled a framework that enables early fault-tolerant quantum computers to perform complex molecular energy calculations that were previously out of reach. The breakthrough, announced March 25, combines the STAR architecture v3 with a novel molecular model optimization technique, reducing the required qubit count by up to 80x and cutting computation time from several millennia to just 35 days. The target application: simulating industrial catalysts like Cytochrome P450, a critical enzyme in drug metabolism - bringing practical quantum chemistry from a distant dream closer to near-term industrial reality.

Source: Quantum Computing Report  →  Read full article

Bitcoin’s slide below $68K amid Middle East tensions has pushed the Fear & Greed Index to its lowest since October 2025 - watch for whether the 200-day moving average holds as support. Arm’s AGI CPU volume shipments are expected later this year, and the first independent benchmarks will be critical. Meanwhile, the UK’s new mandate for solar panels and heat pumps in all new homes could accelerate cleantech adoption across Europe.

Stay tuned.

/emrgng team