DevSparks2025 Hyderabad charts AI roadmap; Diamonds for next-gen buyers

Hello,

Did Intel just save its business or its face?

US President Donald Trump announced that the US government has secured a 10% stake in the struggling Silicon Valley pioneer. The company’s market value currently stands at about $108 billion—a fraction of the current chip kingpin, NVIDIA, which is valued at $4.3 trillion.

However, many analysts say that the money will not be enough to revive Intel’s contract-chipmaking business. What the company needs is external customers.

Meanwhile, back home, Indian chip-makers are receiving a promising boost.

The government has committed around Rs 62,900 crore, or 97%, of the Rs 65,000 crore fund earmarked as incentives for semiconductor production in the country. It has also cleared 23 chip-design projects under the Design Linked Incentive Scheme to boost the country’s semiconductor design capabilities.

Moving on, have you noticed how the monsoon this year is way too wet? You may want to blame climate change for putting the rainfall on steroids. 

And now, travellers are factoring in global warming when it comes to vacationing. 

While tourist hotspots like Tokyo, Athens, and Paris are seeing a fall in the number of tourists this summer, places like Antarctica, Norway, and Iceland have seen their popularity boom.

Cooler climates, hotter demand!

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about 

• All that happened at DevSparks2025 Hyderabad
• Diamonds for next-gen buyers
• The unequal story of citizen environmentalism

Here’s your trivia for today: Which country has the largest population and coverage of mangrove trees?

DevSparks

All that happened at DevSparks2025 Hyderabad

At DevSparks 2025 Hyderabad, the conversations were all about artificial intelligence (AI), with distinguished speakers from companies like NVIDIA, Google, and AWS talking about how the technology is disrupting the developer community.

AI roadmap:

• Mohan Rao Goli, CVP and MD, Samsung R&D Institute India, Bengaluru, highlighted how Samsung is opening its ecosystem to developers by empowering them to create next-gen AI experiences on Galaxy devices.
• Kanika Gupta, Solutions Architect at Redis, emphasised that companies need to move beyond the hype and make it faster, more reliable, accurate, and cost-effective. “AI is not a buzzword anymore. It’s about organisations implementing it at scale,” she remarked.
• Sri Lakshmi Tadepalli, VP IT, FedEx, highlighted that the focus should be on applying AI to solve real problems. “Customer expectations are growing and that means we must run our business more efficiently while keeping costs lower,” she remarked.

Startup

Diamonds for next-gen buyers

True Diamond, a Mumbai-based lab-grown diamond startup founded in 2024 by Darayus Mehta and Parin Shah, is cashing in on the lab-grown diamond phenomenon.

The startup began as a bootstrapped venture with the founders investing Rs 1 crore at its inception. In June 2025, the brand raised Rs 26 crore in a pre-Series A funding round led by India Quotient.

Shining bright:

• True Diamond functions with an exclusive focus on rings, catering to a niche segment within the broader jewellery market. Within its first year, the Mumbai-based brand launched over 5,000 designs.
• True Diamond’s pieces have also been donned by celebrities including Tara Sutaria, Pooja Hegde, Ahsaas Channa, and Trinetra Haldar, among other notable personalities.
• The company moved from an online-only presence to opening its three experience stores within its first year. Its sales are now evenly split between online and offline channels.

Environment

The unequal story of citizen environmentalism

Citizen environmentalism in India is often hailed as an embodiment of civic responsibility. It also exposes the uneven currency of participation, where in some places, privilege enables people to plant and protect; in others, precarity forces families to fight for homes and survival.

In 2010, Usha Rajagopalan gathered a few neighbours and formed the Puttenahalli Neighbourhood Lake Improvement Trust to maintain the 10-acre Puttenahalli lake in Bengaluru. 

While ordinary residents had beaten apathy and turned a stagnant pool into a living ecosystem, at the lake’s edges, another story was unfolding. For decades, slum families living in makeshift homes on the lake boundary faced evacuation.

News & updates

• Tit for tat: The Department of Posts on Saturday announced a temporary suspension of all postal services to the United States from August 25, citing changes in US customs rules that will come into effect later this month.
• AI deal: Meta is partnering with Midjourney to licence the startup’s AI image and video generation technology, Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang announced Friday in a post on Threads. Wang says Meta’s research teams will collaborate with Midjourney to bring its technology into future AI models and products.
• New tech: Apple is in early discussions for using Google Gemini to power a revamped version of the Siri voice assistant, marking a key potential step toward outsourcing more of its AI technology. The iPhone maker recently approached Google to explore building a custom AI model that would serve as the foundation of the new Siri next year.

Which country has the largest population and coverage of mangrove trees?

Answer: Indonesia. It accounts for roughly 20-23% of the world’s mangrove coverage.

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