ROME, April 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — XPPen, a leading global brand in digital art innovation, made a significant appearance at Romics April 2026 — the International Festival of Comics, Animation, Cinema, and Games — held in Italy from April 9 to 12. Drawing more than 150,000 visitors, the event offered XPPen a premier platform to engage Italy’s creative community and reinforce its growing presence across the European market.

At its exhibition booth, XPPen showcased a comprehensive lineup of professional-grade pen displays and drawing tablets for artists. Visitors were invited to experience the devices firsthand, exploring the precision, pressure sensitivity, and responsiveness that have made XPPen a trusted name among digital creators worldwide.

The Magic Drawing Pad is the industry’s first professional mobile standalone drawing tablet, built for creators who need a full drawing experience anywhere. The Magic Note Pad, the world’s first 3-in-1 color note pad, redefines digital note-taking for professionals, students, and creatives alike. The compact Artist 12 3rd proved a crowd favorite, turning heads with its innovative industrial design while delivering a lightweight 719g body paired with the X4 Smart Chip Stylus for a portable punch well above its size. Rounding out the showcase was the acclaimed Artist Pro series, offering tools for creators at every stage.

A highlight of XPPen’s presence was its partnership with Silly Studios, an Italian independent comic publishing house best known for The Little Trashmaid and Simply Silly. XPPen sat down with CEO Davide Valente to discuss the studio’s creative vision and the role of digital tools in their work.

Davide emphasized that while strong foundational drawing skills remain critical, digital tools have become indispensable to how artists develop and work today. “XPPen has given us a huge hand in this fundamental aspect, and our artists are starting to use it much more frequently and expand their skills thanks to XPPen,” he said. “I definitely see a bright future in this respect and it will only get better.”

XPPen’s participation at Romics April 2026 reflects its ongoing commitment to engaging artists and creators around the world. True to its mission of delivering cutting-edge, accessible tools — for everyone from independent illustrators to studio professionals — XPPen looks forward to connecting with creative communities at leading events worldwide.

For more information about XPPen and its products, visit www.xp-pen.com.

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Combining over 1GW of power capacity secured through grid connection agreements and reserved sites across distributed micro-power sites in the US, Europe and GCC, Antimatter will deploy a global network of 1,000 distributed micro data centers to serve the growing AI inference market — 5 times faster and 50% cheaper than hyperscalers.

CANNES, France, April 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Antimatter, a new category of neocloud purpose-built for the distributed AI economy, today announced its launch through the strategic combination of three companies: Datafactory (US-based energy and power infrastructure), Policloud (modular micro data center network), and Hivenet (distributed cloud provider).

The combined entity creates the industry’s first fully integrated AI infrastructure platform spanning energy sourcing, physical hardware, and cloud software — designed to serve the explosive global demand for AI inference at a fraction of hyperscale cost and dramatically faster time to market.

Antimatter is deploying capital at an unprecedented pace to build out the first global neocloud network optimized for AI inference. The company is securing €300 million to fund the deployment of its first 100 Policloud units by 2027, representing 40,000 GPUs and over 3.6 exaFLOPS of active compute capacity.

By the end of 2030, the planned network of 1,000 Policlouds will provide more than 400,000 GPUs and over 36 exaFLOPS of distributed AI inference capacity — the equivalent of five traditional hyperscale data centers, deployed across dozens of countries with 50% lower capital spending and significantly faster time to market.

Antimatter is led by David Gurlé, the serial high-tech entrepreneur who founded Microsoft’s Real-Time Communications business (today’s Microsoft Teams), led Skype’s enterprise division and its sale to Microsoft, and founded Symphony Communication Services.

“In the age of AI, intelligence is not the bottleneck — energy is,” said David Gurlé, Cofounder, Executive Chairman, and CEO of Antimatter. “The infrastructure built for the first era of cloud and AI was designed around centralized scale. But the inference era requires a different model: more distributed, faster to deploy, and sovereign by design. That is the infrastructure Antimatter is building.”

Why AI Inference is Breaking the Cloud Model

The first wave of AI was about training massive models in centralized data centers. But the next phase — inference — is about running those models billions of times per day, across applications like copilots, agents, and real-time decision systems.

That shift changes everything. Inference requires infrastructure that is closer to users, faster to deploy, more energy-efficient, and geographically distributed. Traditional hyperscalers were not built for this. Their model relies on massive, centralized campuses that can take years to build and require enormous upfront capital.

Antimatter’s answer: bring the data center to the energy, not the energy to the data center.

The global data center capacity market is projected to grow from 55GW in 2023 to 220GW by 2030 — a 22% CAGR — yet grid connection queues and infrastructure delays are emerging as the primary bottleneck. In Europe alone, more than 12 TWh of renewable electricity were curtailed in 2023, representing over €4.2 billion in lost value. At the same time, more than 1,000GW of additional renewable capacity remains stuck in permitting and grid-connection queues across Europe and the GCC.

A Full-Stack Neocloud Built for the AI Inference Era

Antimatter is uniquely positioned as the only neocloud that controls the complete value chain:

Energy-first model

More than 1GW of power capacity secured through formal grid connection agreements and site reservations, including over 160MW already operational across Texas and Oregon, USA. Antimatter deploys Policloud units directly at or near existing power assets — including wind, solar, hydro, or biogas sites — converting stranded generation into productive AI infrastructure in a matter of months, rather than waiting years for new transmission capacity.

Decentralized infrastructure layer

A fleet of modular, containerized micro data centers, each housing up to 400 GPUs and deployable in as little as five months, compared with 24+ months for traditional hyperscale builds. Antimatter currently operates 10 units across 8 sites and has a commercial pipeline of more than 500 additional units.

Distributed software layer

A proprietary distributed computing and storage platform providing the orchestration intelligence that connects distributed hardware into a single, sovereign cloud fabric with global default Tier 3 capability — supporting billions of inference requests each day, with sub-10ms latency for edge workloads and full data sovereignty for regulated industries.

Key Competitive Advantages

Strong Commercial Traction

Antimatter enters the market with demonstrated commercial momentum:

$20m forward looking revenue3,344 GPUs deployed with demand for 10,000+100 Policlouds being deployed in 2027, representing 40,000+ GPUs1,000 Policlouds planned by end of 2030, representing 400,000+ GPUsDiversified customer base: Energy sector (35%), Public sector (30%), Agriculture (15%), Corporates (20%)

The company is targeting $250M+ in revenue within the next 18 months and $3.0B+ by the end of 2030.

Investor Perspectives

“AI infrastructure is now a strategic asset class, and the winners will be those who can combine hard assets with software at scale. Antimatter’s vertically integrated model — from megawatts to APIs — is exactly the kind of infrastructure we believe can define the next decade of digital growth.” — Alex Manson, CEO of SC Ventures, Standard Chartered Bank

“France and Europe need sovereign, energy-efficient infrastructure to compete in AI. What convinced us about Antimatter is not just the technology, but the ability to deploy micro data centers in months, on existing power assets, while meeting the most demanding regulatory constraints.” — Stéphanie Hospital, Founder and CEO of OneRagtime

“We are witnessing first-hand how emerging markets are leapfrogging legacy infrastructure and going straight to AI-native architectures. Antimatter’s model — distributed, capital-efficient and deeply integrated with energy — is built for these environments and for an economy increasingly shaped by AI.” — Noor Sweid, Founder and Managing Partner, Global Ventures

“At Inria, we work every day at the frontier of AI and high-performance computing. Antimatter’s approach is compelling because it reconciles cutting-edge AI workloads with more frugal, sustainable infrastructure — distributed, software-defined, and close to available energy. It is a strong illustration of the deeptech industrial story we want to see emerge in Europe.” — Bruno Sportisse, Chairman and CEO of Inria

About the Founder

David Gurlé is a French entrepreneur, engineer, and Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur. He has founded seven companies, including Symphony Communication Services ($1.4B valuation), and held senior leadership roles at Microsoft (where he founded the Real-Time Communications business), Thomson Reuters, and Skype (VP & General Manager, Enterprise). He holds an MSc in Computer Science and Telecommunications from EFREI Paris.

About Antimatter

Antimatter is the distributed neocloud for AI inference. By vertically integrating energy, modular infrastructure, and orchestration software, Antimatter deploys enterprise-grade AI compute infrastructure faster, cheaper, and more sustainably than traditional hyperscale providers. Headquartered in Cannes, France, with major operations in the United States, Antimatter serves enterprises, governments, and AI companies worldwide.

www.antimatter.com

Note on exaFLOPS calculation: RTX 5090 = ~90 TFLOPS FP32. 40,000 GPUs x 90 TFLOPS = 3,600 petaFLOPS = 3.6 exaFLOPS. For 400,000 GPUs = 36 exaFLOPS.

CONTACT: Ariane Forgues, aforgues@mantu.com 

SOURCE Antimatter

HONG KONG, April 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — On April 20, Ant Digital Technologies introduced its architectural vision for the agent economy at Hong Kong Web3 Festival — the “4R Full-Stack Architecture,” comprising four layers: Agentic Runtime, Payment Rails, Agent Registry, and Root Infrastructure — aimed at providing AI agents with foundational technical infrastructure covering identity, payments, risk control, and regulatory compliance.

In her keynote, Dr. Yan Ying, CTO of Ant Digital Technologies identified four fundamental fault lines in the current foundations of the agent economy: execution failures arising from prompt logic vulnerabilities, an accountability vacuum caused by AI’s lack of verifiable identity, transactional barriers stemming from payment gateways designed around human principals, and collaboration risks that emerge when unfamiliar agents cannot establish mutual trust. “This cannot be resolved by patching software,” she stated. “It requires a ground-up redesign at the infrastructure layer.”

The core product of the Agentic Runtime layer is DT Claw, which embeds the CARLI safety model to enforce behavioral constraints on agents at the execution level, supports multi-model compatibility and financial-grade compliance standards, and is designed to ensure that every AI operation is controllable, auditable, and recoverable.

The Payment Rails layer establishes a native on-chain payment channel that integrates agent-driven intelligent decision-making with verifiable credential chain technology, enabling precise identification of payment intent and end-to-end security while delivering full transaction transparency and immutability. For high-frequency micropayment scenarios, the platform builds a native instant settlement network supporting cross-chain, multi-asset seamless transfer and intelligent routing, significantly improving capital turnover efficiency. Additionally, by providing a standardized developer toolchain and a frictionless wallet integration experience, the solution substantially lowers both development barriers and end-user adoption costs — forming a payment closed-loop that balances financial-grade security with best-in-class usability.

The Agent Registry layer issues on-chain identities to each agent based on the DID (Decentralized Identifier) standard and ERC-8004, ensuring every instance of inter-agent collaboration is traceable and verifiable. The Root Infrastructure layer serves as the architectural foundation, leveraging Jovay Layer2 to achieve sub-120-millisecond transaction confirmation in support of AI micropayments, and combining ZKVM technology to enable off-chain computation with on-chain verification — resolving the computational trust problem inherent in the AI economy. As Yan Ying put it, “Root Infrastructure uses blockchain and privacy-preserving computation to provide agents with a tamper-proof contract execution environment. Even two agents with no prior relationship can establish trust through code and transact with confidence.”

AI is currently progressing from the Chat phase through the Action phase and into the era of the agent economy. Yan Ying argued that the defining transformation of this third phase lies not in AI becoming more intelligent, but in AI beginning to hold assets and exercise transactional authority. She noted that over the past decade-plus, Ant Digital Technologies has accumulated deep engineering expertise across financial-grade security, privacy computing, blockchain, and compliance systems — and that the 4R Architecture represents a ground-up research and development effort built upon that foundation.

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SOURCE Ant Digital Technologies