A GOP-linked group is urging Congress to slash red tape on the Pentagon’s defense acquisition process, a restructuring aimed at prioritizing shorter timelines for delivery, expanding the industrial base and boosting capacity. The new report from Polaris National Security, which was first shared with The Hill, argues that the acquisition process should be predicated on… Source link
Canva announced on Wednesday the dual acquisition of Simtheory, an AI collaboration and agent management platform, and Ortto, a customer data and marketing automation company. The financial terms of the deals were not disclosed. Canva says the acquisitions are part of its continued investment in AI and marketing infrastructure. Both companies were founded by Chris and Mike Sharkey, previously founders of vacation rental service Stayz, which was acquired by Fairfax Media. The pair will join Canva in leadership roles across the company’s AI and marketing technology teams. Canva says the acquisitions add strengths in agentic AI, data infrastructure, marketing automation, and customer engagement, helping Canva evolve from a design tool into a system where teams do all of their work from start to finish. The additions extend Canva’s capabilities across the full workflow, from early ideas to campaign scaling and measurement. Image Credits:Simtheory Simtheory’s platform helps teams use AI to build assistants that understand their business, work across tools, and handle real tasks. Simtheory lets teams apply the latest models across diverse use cases and …
The Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. is starting to show its hand ahead of October’s long-awaited reopening of its rethought and improved sculpture garden. The museum has announced the first round of acquisitions for its overhauled garden, redesigned by Hiroshi Sugimoto, with a lineup that leans heavily on contemporary names now entering the institution’s orbit. The group includes works by Mark Grotjahn, Raven Halfmoon, Lauren Halsey, Izumi Kato, Liz Larner, Woody De Othello, Chatchai Puipia, and Pedro Reyes. Together they sketch out the institution’s pitch: a garden that still nods to its modernist roots while making a more forceful case for the present. A few of the works give a sense of how that balance will play out. De Othello’s crumpled box fan turns a domestic object into something closer to a monument, folding in questions about air, heat, and memory. Grotjahn, best known for his paintings, contributes a bronze “mask” that began life as a discarded box. Halsey’s column, wrapped in signage from South Central Los Angeles and topped with a portrait of her grandmother, pushes directly against the idea of who gets commemorated …
The Denver Art Museum in Colorado announced this week that it acquired more than 750 works across all 11 of its curatorial departments in roughly the last year, with an emphasis on further diversifying its collection. Made between October 1, 2024, and September 30, 2025, the acquisitions included Tishan Hsu’s mammal-screen-green-1 (2024) and Jackie Amézquita’s el SUDOR de mi GENTE (2023), as well as works artists who had solo exhibitions at the museum in 2025 such as Dawoud Bey and Kent Monkman. The museum also acquired two important historical pieces by women: Berthe Morisot’s painting La Leçon au jardin (The Lesson in the Garden), from 1886, which was already on view but was only formally accessioned in 2025, and a rare version of Camille Claudel’s sculpture Rêve au coin du feu (Fireside Dream), which was conceived 1899 between 1905. Meanwhile, the museum expanded its photography collection by 133 works, among them seven 20-by-24-inch Polaroid photographs by modernist photographer and theoretician György Kepes, and its architecture and design department added 35 new objects, including two contemporary …
Amid overwhelming redemptions in other funds, Blackstone is preparing a publicly traded acquisition company dedicated to data centers, opening the door for “mom and pop” to jump into the AI boom, just as the market is panicking over who will find the trillions in data center spending over the next several years Bloomberg reported that the vehicle’s focus is on already-built and leased facilities, allowing rapid deployment amid surging hyperscaler demand. The new entity will initially raise capital from sovereign wealth funds and institutional investors before broadening access, with plans to gather tens of billions overall. This structure positions the vehicle as a direct player alongside REITs such as Digital Realty and Equinix, while leveraging Blackstone’s established scale in the sector. Blackstone has emerged as the world’s largest data center owner following its 2021 privatization of QTS Realty Trust in a deal valued at roughly $10 billion. Since then, QTS’s leased capacity has expanded 14-fold. Blackstone Chief Executive Officer Steve Schwarzman said the “historic pace of investment” to develop AI is the “key driver of economic …
An acclaimed Kara Walker sculpture, abstractions by beloved painters of the past and present, and a video about two lizards in Covid-era New York are among the 158 artworks acquired last year by the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, which revealed the newest pieces to enter its holdings on Tuesday. Fifty of the artists behind those works have never before seen their art acquired by MOCA, one of LA’s top museums. The Walker sculpture, Unmanned Drone (2023), is perhaps the most high-profile work of the bunch. It is currently on view in the exhibition “Monuments,” a co-production between MOCA and the Brick, and was created as a commission for the show. Formed from Confederate monuments whose pieces Walker reassembled, Unmanned Drone was named the most defining artwork of 2025 by ARTnews. While Unmanned Drone rises 13 feet into the air, it is not the biggest artwork acquired by MOCA in 2025. That would be Olafur Eliasson’s 40-foot-tall 2024 installation Observatory for seeing the atmosphere’s futures, which was created for a MOCA show and acts …
Reddit is gearing up for more M&A, the company told analysts on its fourth-quarter earnings call on Thursday. Reddit CFO Andrew Vollero said the online forum site is looking for businesses that can either leverage Reddit’s scale — meaning their products become more impactful when deployed across Reddit’s massive user base — or help grow the company’s user base. “[We’re] looking to buy capabilities, technologies, and companies,” he said during the introductory remarks. Investors, obviously, wanted to know more — particularly about what the company had in mind when it came to scaled opportunities. In the Q&A portion of the call, Vollero clarified, “I probably wouldn’t overthink the scaled opportunities. I would just look at it as sort of a spectrum of opportunities.” He reiterated that the company was looking for capabilities and technologies that could add to its business, noting that it’s been successful doing this in the past. “It’s really been one of the secrets of our success,” he pointed out. Vollero explained that Reddit’s adtech team in particular had been adept at …
The Toledo Museum of Art has a somewhat atypical history, in terms of encyclopedic museums of its ilk. “The museum,” director Adam M. Levine explains, “was founded in 1901 with money and not a collection. The most interesting feature of our acquisitions is that they are almost all funded from the endowment rather than as gifts.” This, Levine feels, enables curators to drive the acquisitions process. “Because the resources are owned by the museum, there is greater stakeholder alignment. The only question is, does it serve our acquisition strategy? There isn’t really a donor relations component to the calculus. Donors can be hugely advantageous, of course, but it does introduce another variable. We’re able to be a little more focused on our collecting strategy.” That strategy involves “collecting superlative things from around the world and across time” and will be on full view when the museum completes a large-scale chronological reinstallation in 2027, a process which began last year. In 2025, the Toledo Museum acquired more than 200 artworks, many of which are already, or …
Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company SpaceX is acquiring his AI startup xAI, the centibillionaire announced on Monday. In a blog post, Musk said the acquisition was warranted because global electricity demand for AI cannot be met with “terrestrial solutions,” and Silicon Valley will soon need to build data centers in space to power its AI ambitions. “In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale,” Musk wrote. “The only logical solution therefore is to transport these resource-intensive efforts to a location with vast power and space. I mean, space is called ‘space’ for a reason.” The deal, which pulls together two of Musk’s largest private ventures, values the combined entity at $1.25 trillion, making it the most valuable private company in the world, according to a report from Bloomberg. SpaceX was in the process of preparing to go public later this year before the xAI acquisition was announced. The space firm’s plans for an initial public offering are still on, according to Bloomberg. In December, SpaceX told employees that it …
The Baltimore Museum of Art has added 250 artworks in the past year to its encyclopedic collection. The wide-ranging acquisitions—from all over the world and spanning centuries—“reflect the museum’s focus on expanding the range of global voices represented within its collection,” according to a statement released by the museum. More than half of the new works—180 in total—are part of an anonymous gift of contemporary art by 63 different artists, among Gina Beavers, Lucas Blalock, Alex Da Corte, Juliana Huxtable, and Martine Syms. In late 2020, the BMA faced widespread scrutiny when it announced that it would deaccession three blue-chip paintings in order to raise $65 million, which would be used, in large part, to acquire artworks by women and artists of color who were underrepresented in the collection. The museum ultimately called off the sale hours before it was to take place at Sotheby’s. Despite this sudden pivot, the BMA has continued to diversity its collection in the intervening years. “We believe artistic innovation and compelling stories of the human spirit transcend historical and …
