Category: South Africa

Canada’s fastest-growing AI event sells out a month in advance, cementing Edmonton as a global anchor for AI innovation and literacy

EDMONTON, Alberta, May 19, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Amii (Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute) today officially opens the fifth annual Upper Bound, the premier AI conference that has surpassed all projections to become a cornerstone of the global AI calendar. Welcoming 11,000 researchers, business leaders, and policymakers representing 22 countries, the event has seen a staggering 53% year-over-year surge in scale.

This momentum is fueled by sold-out event passes, a growing roster of community-led sessions, and K-9 school takeovers. This growing demand solidifies Amii’s role as a central pillar in Canada’s AI ecosystem. By connecting world-leading AI research with business leaders, policy-makers, founders, students and educators, Amii is moving beyond theory to transform an optimistic vision for AI into a tangible economic and social reality.

A Convergence of Global Leadership

Upper Bound 2026 features a high-level intersection of government and industry, including:

• Federal & Provincial Leadership:
  • The Hon. Evan Solomon, Minister of Artificial Intelligence & Digital Innovation and Minister for the Federal Economic Development Agency of Southern Ontario, Government of Canada
  • The Hon. Eleanor Olszeweski, Minister of Emergency Management and Community Resilience and Minister responsible for Prairies Economic Development Canada, Government of Canada
  • The Hon. Nate Glubish, Minister of Technology and Innovation, Government of Alberta
  • The Hon. Myles McDougall, Minister of Advanced Education, Government of Alberta
• Industry Titans: On-stage insights and representation from global leaders at Google, Anthropic, Meta, Sony AI, Electronic Arts and Mozilla.

Scaling Canada’s AI Talent Pipeline

The event also serves as a unique immersive training experience for Amii’s massive national training initiatives. This year, Upper Bound welcomes participants from:

• AI Workforce Readiness (AIWR) initiative: A $5M initiative supported by Google.org equipping 125,000 post-secondary students across 57 post-secondary institutions with AI skills.
• AI Pathways: A $10.4M Government of Canada investment empowering 6,000 energy workers with tailored AI training for the low-carbon economy.

Quotes:

“Upper Bound has grown in tandem with the unprecedented acceleration of AI, from advancing world-class research to driving global business adoption and literacy. We are immensely proud to have built a premier platform where a unique cross-section of attendees can connect, ensuring that diverse perspectives shape the next five years of AI innovation. This is where an optimistic AI future is both imagined and realized.” – Cam Linke, Amii CEO

“Canada’s leadership in artificial intelligence is grounded in world-class research and a commitment to translating innovation into real economic impact. The overwhelming demand for Upper Bound reflects the appetite to engage with Canada’s AI ecosystem and the momentum we are building to position our country at the forefront of AI.” – The Hon. Evan Solomon, Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, Government of Canada.

Event attendees will dive deep into themes critical to the field’s future, including AI for Health, Generative AI for Business Productivity, Ethical Governance, AI Literacy & Education, Energy & the Environment, Blue Sky Research, and more. The program also features an exclusive CEO Circle curated by Cam Linke, designed to spotlight pivotal AI trends and strategic opportunities for today’s executive leaders.

Upper Bound takes place May 19-22 in Edmonton. Full schedule and early access for Upper Bound 2027 available at: www.upperbound.a

About Amii:
Amii (Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute) is one of Canada’s three National AI Institutes. Based in Alberta, Amii supports world-leading research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) and translates scientific advancement into industry adoption. Amii is dedicated to advancing leading-edge research, delivering exceptional educational offerings, and providing business advice—all to bring AI out of the lab and into the world. www.amii.ca

Media Contact:
Lynda Vang, Media & Communications Manager, Amii
[email protected]

GlobeNewswire Distribution ID 9721573

Bitget Introduces Delta Neutral Mode for Hedged Trading Strategies

VICTORIA, Seychelles, May 18, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Bitget, the world’s largest Universal Exchange (UEX), has introduced Delta Neutral Mode within its Unified Trading Account, adding a new risk management feature designed for traders using hedging and arbitrage strategies across spot, margin, and futures markets. The feature applies differentiated auto-deleveraging (ADL) ranking treatment to eligible hedged positions when accounts meet predefined delta neutrality criteria.

Delta Neutral Mode allows users to combine spot, cross margin, and cross futures trading under a single unified account structure while the system evaluates directional exposure at both the account and asset levels. Eligible positions that satisfy the neutrality thresholds receive lower ADL priority during extreme market conditions, helping reduce the likelihood of auto-deleveraging for properly hedged strategies.

The feature is designed for traders running funding rate arbitrage, basis trading, market-neutral strategies, and quantitative hedging models. It supports USDT-M, USDC-M, and Coin-M futures across live trading and demo trading environments, with ongoing rollout across web, app, and API access channels.

“Trading infrastructure continues evolving toward more sophisticated multi-strategy environments where users actively manage exposure across spot, derivatives, and onchain markets simultaneously. Delta Neutral Mode adds more flexibility for traders using hedging and arbitrage strategies while improving how risk treatment is handled within a unified account structure,” said Gracy Chen, CEO at Bitget.

The launch expands Bitget’s broader Unified Trading Account framework, which was developed to improve capital efficiency and simplify cross-market trading execution. The system evaluates account neutrality using delta exposure calculations relative to total account equity, while also verifying whether futures positions are effectively hedged by spot holdings in the same underlying asset.

The introduction of Delta Neutral Mode follows Bitget’s continued expansion of institutional-style trading infrastructure across its Universal Exchange ecosystem, including multi-asset trading access, tokenized financial products, and cross-market collateral functionality. Bitget has continued developing tools that support more advanced trading strategies while maintaining unified account management across multiple market types.

For more information, visit here.

About Bitget

Bitget is the world’s largest Universal Exchange (UEX), serving over 125 million users and offering access to over 2M crypto tokens, 100+ tokenized stocks, ETFs, commodities, FX, and precious metals such as gold. The ecosystem is committed to helping users trade smarter with its AI agent, which co-pilots trade execution. Bitget is driving crypto adoption through strategic partnerships with LALIGA and MotoGP. Aligned with its global impact strategy, Bitget has joined hands with UNICEF to support blockchain education for 1.1 million people by 2027. Bitget currently leads in the tokenized TradFi market, providing the industry’s lowest fees and highest liquidity across 150 regions worldwide.

For more information, visit: Website | Twitter | Telegram | LinkedIn | Discord

For media inquiries, please contact: [email protected]

Risk Warning: Digital asset prices are subject to fluctuation and may experience significant volatility. Investors are advised to only allocate funds they can afford to lose. The value of any investment may be impacted, and there is a possibility that financial objectives may not be met, nor the principal investment recovered. Independent financial advice should always be sought, and personal financial experience and standing carefully considered. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. Bitget accepts no liability for any potential losses incurred. Nothing contained herein should be construed as financial advice. For further information, please refer to our Terms of Use.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at:
https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/aa9baad4-a7b9-4668-a674-7960ad9c5611

GlobeNewswire Distribution ID 1001182407

Bitget Enters Mexico Market With SAT and UIF Registration

VICTORIA, Seychelles, May 18, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Bitget, the world’s largest Universal Exchange (UEX) has successfully completed key registrations in Mexico to operate within the country’s current virtual asset framework. With the completion of these registrations, Bitget now looks to expand across Central and Latin America, where Mexico stands as one of the company’s most important markets.

Bitget has obtained vulnerable activity registration with Mexico’s Tax Administration Service (otherwise known as SAT), and has also completed registration with the Financial Intelligence Unit (or UIF) of Mexico – together, these registrations place Bitget among the first global platforms to complete this process in Mexico, providing a strong footing in one of the region’s most active crypto markets.

Mexico has become a major focus for digital asset platforms as interest in crypto continues to grow across the country. For Bitget, Mexico remains one of its largest markets across Central and Latin America and one of the key regional priorities. The market’s size, rising user interest, and its wider role in regional financial significance make it an important part of Bitget’s long-term expansion in the region.

“Regulatory progress in crypto constantly changes with the landscape, and each one requires a clear understanding of local rules and how local financial systems operate,” said Gracy Chen, CEO at Bitget. “By following that path in Mexico, Bitget is building on a model that supports responsible growth and gives the business more opportunities to operate alongside banks and financial institutions whose relationships have become increasingly important in penetrating diverse markets.”

The registrations place Bitget in a stronger position to serve the local market within Mexico’s current regulatory regime, which has become more clearly defined following recent reforms that expanded and implied strong AML obligations for virtual-asset activities.

The expansion comes as Bitget continues to grow in markets where user demand and regulatory progress are moving in the same direction. In Latin America, that trend is becoming more visible as more users look for access to digital assets through platforms that are taking a serious and practical approach to operating within local rules. Mexico is expected to play an important role in that shift, both because of its domestic market and its broader influence across the region.

For more information on Bitget’s licenses, please visit here.

About Bitget

Bitget is the world’s largest Universal Exchange (UEX), serving over 125 million users and offering access to over 2M crypto tokens, 100+ tokenized stocks, ETFs, commodities, FX, and precious metals such as gold. The ecosystem is committed to helping users trade smarter with its AI agent, which co-pilots trade execution. Bitget is driving crypto adoption through strategic partnerships with LALIGA and MotoGP. Aligned with its global impact strategy, Bitget has joined hands with UNICEF to support blockchain education for 1.1 million people by 2027. Bitget currently leads in the tokenized TradFi market, providing the industry’s lowest fees and highest liquidity across 150 regions worldwide.

For more information, visit: Website | Twitter | Telegram | LinkedIn | Discord
For media inquiries, please contact: [email protected]

Risk Warning: Digital asset prices are subject to fluctuation and may experience significant volatility. Investors are advised to only allocate funds they can afford to lose. The value of any investment may be impacted, and there is a possibility that financial objectives may not be met, nor the principal investment recovered. Independent financial advice should always be sought, and personal financial experience and standing carefully considered. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. Bitget accepts no liability for any potential losses incurred. Nothing contained herein should be construed as financial advice. For further information, please refer to our Terms of Use.

Editor’s Note
Bitget’s registration in Mexico places the company in a strong regulatory position in the market. Based on current public information, only a few of the major global exchanges are known to have obtained the same registrations, making Bitget one of the very few global platforms to complete this process in Mexico.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/6efd1df6-e5e0-4871-ad03-1c12dcc1c57d

GlobeNewswire Distribution ID 1001182540

New product integrations unify semantics, extend governed data access, and accelerate enterprise AI agent adoption across hybrid and multi-cloud environments

PALO ALTO, Calif., May 18, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Denodo, a leader in data management, announced new product integrations to support the building and scaling of agentic AI across hybrid and multi-cloud environments supporting customers across financial services, healthcare and life sciences, manufacturing, retail, public sector and others.

As enterprises move beyond AI experimentation to production with a focus on business outcomes, many face common challenges: AI agents fail to deliver reliable outcomes when they lack real-time awareness, operate on incomplete or incorrect data, or act outside governance and compliance boundaries. These are not model limitations, but data challenges.

Denodo addresses this gap by integrating with Amazon Web Services (AWS) data and AI services — including Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, and Amazon Quick — to extend access into operational and analytical data residing in on-premises, SaaS, and multi-cloud environments. This provides a logical data foundation that delivers live, business-contextual, and governed data across the enterprise, enabling AI agents to operate with confidence, accuracy, and control.

New Integrations:

• Providing AI Agents with Secure, Enterprise-Scale Data Access
  Denodo extends agentic AI capabilities by combining live, governed data access with centralized control through Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. Denodo provides a trusted data foundation by defining what data is available across the enterprise, enriching it with business context in Denodo’s semantic layer, and ensuring it can be easily accessed, via Denodo’s support for Model Context Protocol (MCP) in accordance with established governance policies. Amazon Bedrock AgentCore also manages how AI agents interact with that data by handling authentication, routing requests, and enforcing access controls. This integration enables organizations to provide AI agents with secure, consistent, and real-time access to the right data across distributed environments, so they operate within business rules while delivering reliable, high-quality business outcomes at scale.

• Unifying Semantics, Governance, and AI-Ready Data across Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Systems
  Denodo powerfully complements Amazon SageMaker by providing organizations with live, zero-copy access, with consistent semantics, across all their data. This capability spans on-premises, multi-cloud, and sovereign environments via 200+ native connections to enterprise systems such as SAP, Oracle, and Salesforce. Denodo now integrates with Amazon SageMaker Catalog to directly add business metadata and context to the data consumed by AI agents. By leveraging the definitions, classifications, and governance context established within Amazon SageMaker, Denodo ensures that data accessed across both AWS services and non-AWS environments is consistently understood and aligned with business meaning. This gives AI agents the semantic context they need to interpret data correctly, resulting in more accurate, trustworthy outcomes, with integration patterns validated and documented by Denodo. Denodo also provides fine-grained governance controls over non-AWS data sources, with capabilities such as attribute-based access controls, dynamic data masking, and end-to-end lineage capture, which operate alongside native Amazon SageMaker controls for AWS data.

• Accelerating Insight-to-Action
  Denodo enhances analytics and AI experiences with Quick by enabling organizations to move seamlessly from insight to action. By combining Quick with Denodo’s live, zero-copy access to enterprise data, business users can work with the most current, complete information across distributed environments. The integration with Quick empowers users to create AI-driven workflows, conversational experiences, and automated processes that operate on trusted data without the delays of data movement. As a result, organizations can rapidly develop and validate new AI-driven use cases, significantly reducing time-to-market for autonomous workflows while improving decision speed and business responsiveness.

Driving the Next Phase of Enterprise AI

With these new integrations and capabilities, Denodo delivers a scalable data foundation that powers agentic workflows and automation, helping organizations achieve measurable business outcomes across industries, from financial services and healthcare to manufacturing and retail.

“Agentic AI requires more than powerful models. It requires trusted, real-time, and well-governed data,” said Suresh Chandrasekaran, Executive Vice President at Denodo. “Our collaboration with AWS focuses on delivering a unified data foundation that enables organizations to scale AI agents with confidence across the entire data landscape.”

By combining Denodo’s logical data management platform with AWS AI and data services, organizations can accelerate the adoption of agentic AI while maintaining trust, governance, and control. This enables enterprises to move beyond experimentation to operationalize AI at scale, driving faster decisions, more intelligent automation, and measurable business impact.

With Denodo available in the AWS Marketplace, organizations can get started quickly with free trials, private offers, and other options. Customers can choose the options that best fit their business needs, while streamlining procurement and leveraging the ability to apply Denodo purchases toward AWS Private Pricing Agreements (PPAs).

About Denodo
Denodo is a global leader in data management, powering trustworthy AI agents and applications. The Denodo Platform, an award-winning logical data management solution, transforms enterprise data into reliable insights for AI, analytics, and self-service initiatives. Organizations worldwide use Denodo to deliver AI-ready, business-ready data in a fraction of the time compared to traditional data lakehouses, achieving up to 4x faster time-to-insight, 345% ROI, and 10x better performance. For more information, visit denodo.com.

Media Contact
[email protected]

GlobeNewswire Distribution ID 9721772

Bitget IPO Prime Taps Into $4T AI Opportunity With OpenAI

VICTORIA, Seychelles, May 18, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Bitget, the world’s largest Universal Exchange (UEX), has added OpenAI (preOPAI) as the second listing on its IPO Prime platform, extending pre-IPO access to one of the most closely watched companies in artificial intelligence.

Issued on Solana by regulated partner Republic, preOPAI is designed to track the economic performance of OpenAI following a future public listing. The offering introduces a low entry threshold starting from $100, significantly reducing the capital requirements traditionally associated with pre-IPO participation.

The commitment window for preOPAI will open on May 12, 2026, 8:00 till May 15, 2026, 8:00 (UTC). Allocations will then be distributed between 8:00 till 12:00 (UTC), followed by the start of spot trading at 14:00 (UTC) the same day.

The launch comes amid surging global interest in artificial intelligence, with capital flowing into AI companies and valuations at historic levels. This $4 trillion opportunity, however, has largely remained limited to institutional investors and private networks.

Unlike conventional pre-IPO participation, which often involves long lock-ups and limited liquidity, preOPAI introduces a model where access and flexibility exist together. Once distributed, users are able to actively trade their positions, rather than waiting for a listing event to realize value. In addition, approximately six months post-IPO, holders will have the option to redeem their tokens into stock-linked assets or USDT based on market pricing, providing a defined settlement pathway.

The introduction of preOPAI follows the earlier launch of preSPAX, linked to SpaceX, marking a phased approach to expanding IPO Prime. Each listing is introduced with a focus on structure, liquidity and regulatory alignment, rather than speed of rollout. At the point of publication, preSPAX saw over 13,000 users subscribed, with a commitment value of $171 million.

“The way people access markets is changing,” said Gracy Chen, CEO of Bitget. “We’re moving toward a system where different asset classes and opportunities come together on one platform, and where access is no longer limited by structure. That’s the direction we see for the future of finance, and what we are building toward here at Bitget, the Universal Exchange.”

The introduction of preOPAI builds on IPO Prime’s broader framework, where digital assets are structured to reflect economic outcomes rather than direct equity ownership. This approach, combined with issuance through a regulated partner, Republic, Bitget establishes a more structured foundation for tokenized pre-IPO exposure compared to typical token launch models.

Within Bitget’s Universal Exchange model, IPO Prime continues to extend the platform’s reach across the investment lifecycle. With crypto, tokenized traditional assets, and now pre-IPO exposure integrated into a single system, UEX is evolving to support how users allocate capital across different stages of opportunity, rather than across fragmented platforms.

For more details on preOPAI, please visit here.

About Bitget

Bitget is the world’s largest Universal Exchange (UEX), serving over 125 million users and offering access to over 2M crypto tokens, 100+ tokenized stocks, ETFs, commodities, FX, and precious metals such as gold. The ecosystem is committed to helping users trade smarter with its AI agent, which co-pilots trade execution. Bitget is driving crypto adoption through strategic partnerships with LALIGA and MotoGP. Aligned with its global impact strategy, Bitget has joined hands with UNICEF to support blockchain education for 1.1 million people by 2027. Bitget currently leads in the tokenized TradFi market, providing the industry’s lowest fees and highest liquidity across 150 regions worldwide.

For more information, visit: Website | Twitter | Telegram | LinkedIn | Discord

For media inquiries, please contact: [email protected]

Risk Warning: Digital asset prices are subject to fluctuation and may experience significant volatility. Investors are advised to only allocate funds they can afford to lose. The value of any investment may be impacted, and there is a possibility that financial objectives may not be met, nor the principal investment recovered. Independent financial advice should always be sought, and personal financial experience and standing carefully considered. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. Bitget accepts no liability for any potential losses incurred. Nothing contained herein should be construed as financial advice. For further information, please refer to our Terms of Use.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/4c4d6ab7-3943-496f-becb-b01616717899

GlobeNewswire Distribution ID 1001182530