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Mahindra & Mahindra to hive off EV car business, ropes in BII as equity partner

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India’s automobile major Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd (M&M) will hive off its assets relating to the four-wheeler passenger electric vehicles to a new company in which the British International Investment (BII) will invest upto Rs 1,925 crore for 2.75 per cent to 4.76 per cent stake.

The four-wheeler electric vehicle business is valued at Rs 70,070 crore and will roll out electric sport utility vehicle (SUV) first.

The M&M said it would also invest Rs 1,925 crore in the to be incorporated electric vehicle company (EVCo) and the investment by both the parties will happen in two tranches based on milestones.

The first tranche will be Rs 1,200 crore each to be brought in not later than 30.6.2023 and the second tranche will be of Rs.725 crore each in FY24.

The company’s Board on Thursday approved the hiving off and the investment by BII and M&M.

The sale/hiving off of the EV business is expected to be completed not later than 30.6.2023, the company said.

According to M&M, the BII will invest in Compulsorily Convertible Preference Shares of EVCo which would result in the latter having a stake in the range of 2.75 per cent to 4.76 per cent.

According to M&M, the company has invested about Rs 400 crore in the four-wheeler passenger EV business and its net worth is not tracked separately.

Last year, M&M did not generate any revenue from this business.

The consideration for sale/transfer/hiving off of the identified assets of the four wheel EV business will be settled by the EVCo on arms’ length basis, M&M said.

The EVCo will be a wholly owned subsidiary of M&MA it does not belong to the promoter/ promoter group of the company.

However, the proposed EVCo will significantly leverage the manufacturing capabilities and product development of M&M as also the ecosystem of suppliers, dealers and its financiers.

The M&M also said the total capital infusion for the EVCo. is envisaged to be approximately Rs 8,000 crore/USD 1 billion between FY 24 and FY 27 for the planned product portfolio.

M&M and BII will work jointly to bring other like-minded investors in the EV Co. to match the funding requirement in a phased manner.

“The Mahindra Group aims to be Planet Positive by 2040. Mahindra has been a pioneer in the electric vehicles space, and we are confident we will be the leaders in the electric SUV market in the future,” Dr Anish Shah, MD & CEO, M&M said.

“BII’s anchor investment will be key to attracting additional sources of private capital into this exciting venture with the Mahindra Group,” Nick O’Donohoe, CEO, BII said.

According to Rajesh Jejurikar, Executive Director – Auto & Farm Sectors, M&M, the group will share its vision on the electric sport utility vehicle (SUV) space, product, technology and platform strategy on August 15, 2022 in UK followed by a reveal of the electric XUV 400 in September 2022.

“We would expect between 20 per cent to 30 per cent of Mahindra SUVs being electric by 2027,” he said.

Business

Why Nvidia chief Jensen Huang is not ready to retire?

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Chapel Hill (North Carolina), Sep 3: Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang says he does not need to keep working.

He simply cannot bear the thought of missing what artificial intelligence (AI) could deliver over the next decade.

“I’ve been working a long time and Surely I don’t have to work, but I don’t want to miss, I’m definitely not going to miss the next 10, 15 years,” Huang said during a fireside chat with US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

For Huang, the appeal lies not only in the technology but also in the scale of the ambitions it has unleashed.

“The ambition of the industry, the ambition of my colleagues, my own ambition has really been supercharged,” he said.

Huang offered a buoyant vision of an AI-powered future in which work that once took a decade could be completed in a year, while year-long projects could be finished within a month.

“What do I expect in the next five, ten years? Things that take ten years are going to take one. Things that take one will take a month,” he added.

The Nvidia Chief said that artificial intelligence was giving ordinary people, companies and countries the ability to tackle problems on a scale previously considered unimaginable.

“It is now possible for average humans like ourselves to think that we can make an impact on a hundred trillion dollar industry,” Huang added.

He said that innovators were talking about adding between $20 trillion and $50 trillion in economic benefits worldwide.

Such ideas, he added, reflected a new level of ambition made possible by access to AI.

“No time in history have we been able to say things like that,” he said.

Huang encouraged countries to approach the technology with optimism and raise their ambitions rather than allow uncertainty to dominate the public conversation.

“This is the time when you have to feel enlightened, inspired, supercharged, lifted, because you now have this incredible technology behind you,” he said.

He compared the development of AI with earlier technological advances that initially appeared almost magical.

“Electricity once made it possible to turn on a light from far away, while modern cars and aircraft became safer as their technology improved.”

AI, Huang said, would similarly advance through engineering, mathematics, software and responsible development.

He rejected predictions that the technology would simply remove human workers.

AI would automate certain skills and tasks, he said, but people would retain the purpose, context and meaning that define their jobs.

Huang also described AI as a great equaliser because people could now communicate with computers through ordinary human language.

Lutnick picked up that theme, suggesting that the technology could place advanced knowledge within everyone’s reach.

“You now can have… A PhD in everything. That’s right. At your fingertips,” Lutnick said.

“You are that person now. Right? Everybody is that person now,” Huang responded.

Lutnick praised Huang’s optimistic assessment and called him “an American treasure”, saying Nvidia was leading the United States towards a future once confined largely to science fiction.

“Your company is leading us in a path that none of us, when we were young, ever dreamed possible,” the US Commerce Secretary said.

Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and has served as its President and Chief Executive since its inception.

The company began as a specialist in graphics technology before its processors became vital to the development and operation of modern artificial intelligence systems.

Born in Taiwan, Huang moved to the United States as a child and studied electrical engineering at Oregon State University and Stanford University.

Under his leadership, Nvidia has grown into one of the world’s most valuable technology companies.

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Business

Indian markets open higher amid positive global cues, easing US yields

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Mumbai, Sep 3: Indian equity benchmarks opened higher on Thursday tracking positive global cues and gains in Asian markets.

Sensex opened 154.60 points or 0.20 per cent higher at 76,724.95, while Nifty gained 83.50 points or 0.35 per cent to 23,997.95.

In early trade, banking and realty stocks led sectoral gains as Nifty PSU Bank and Nifty Realty gained up to 1 per cent.

Meanwhile, Nifty Private Bank climbed 0.83 per cent and Nifty MidSmall Financial Services index advanced 0.82 per cent.

On the other hand, Nifty IT fell 0.8 per cent, while Nifty FMCG dropped 0.44 per cent and Nifty Healthcare, Nifty Pharma and Nifty500 Healthcare were also marginally lower.

According to market experts, sentiment was likely to improve following a slight easing in US bond yields.

They said the mobilisation of $136 billion under a concessional swap facility, including $127 billion through the FCNR(B) scheme could support the rupee and improve foreign investor confidence.

The large FCNR(B) mobilisation by banks could also help improve net interest margins, providing support to banking stocks, they said.

They noted that Wednesday’s 141-point decline in Nifty came despite institutional buying of about Rs 9,500 crore comprising Rs 6,688 crore from foreign institutional investors and Rs 2,812 crore from domestic institutional investors.

“This suggested that selling pressure had largely come from retail investors, proprietary traders and bears,” according to the experts.

Technical analysts said the rebound from around 23,800 had strengthened expectations of a move higher, although they remained cautious about chasing prices. A break above the 24,150-24,215 zone would signal further strength, while 23,860 was seen as an important downside marker.

Additionally, Asian equities broadly mirrored gains on Wall Street. In addition, crude oil prices edged lower after US President Donald Trump downplayed the likelihood of an extended conflict with Iran.

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Business

Meta launches ‘Muse Voice Transcribe’ with native support for five Indian languages

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New Delhi, Sep 2: US-based technology giant Meta has introduced its first real‑time audio‑perception model — Muse Voice Transcribe — which offers native support for five major Indian languages and advanced streaming features.

Muse Voice Transcribe — developed by Meta Superintelligence Labs — delivers streaming transcription, speaker separation across over 20 voices in hour‑plus recordings, native code‑switching and diarisation from a single model with no post‑processing step, the company said in a statement.

Muse Voice Transcribe is trained across over 70 languages spoken in multiple countries with 25 validated at launch.

“It ranks first on the Artificial Analysis streaming speech-to-text leaderboard as of September 1, 2026,” the statement added.

Available via the Meta Model API and already running dictation in Meta AI for Mac and Muse Code, Muse Voice Transcribe delivers real‑time automatic speech recognition, diarisation with over 20 speakers and endpointing.

It is multilingual with seamless code-switching and improves accuracy with language, keyword, and context biasing.

“The longer the model waits to predict, the more accurate the transcript, but the higher the latency. Muse Voice Transcribe has “adaptive delay,” dynamically changing delay for each word based on difficulty,” the statement noted.

This is enabled with reinforcement learning (RL), where word error rate (WER) reward and a delay reward are combined multiplicatively.

“Muse Voice Transcribe is an autoregressive multimodal model from the Muse Spark family,” Meta said.

It explained that the audio is processed in 80 ms chunks (12.5 Hz), each of which is transformed into a single soft token. At each audio chunk, the model decides to either continue listening to the next audio chunk or emit a text token.

With adaptive delay, Muse Voice Transcribe achieves the Pareto front on speed-accuracy trade-off measured by time to final transcription, the company said.

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