Category: Biz Tech

Anthropic has struck a major compute agreement with SpaceX that will give its Claude artificial intelligence platform access to more than 300 megawatts of capacity and over 220,000 Nvidia graphics processors, marking one of the largest infrastructure moves yet in the race to support commercial AI demand.The deal, announced on May 6, gives Anthropic use of all compute capacity at SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data centre within the month. The company said the additional infrastructure has enabled immediate increases in usage

Adnoc Distribution will roll out an artificial intelligence-powered self-checkout system across 50 Oasis by Adnoc convenience stores from the second quarter of 2026, marking a new phase in the company’s push to turn its fuel-station retail network into a digitally enabled mobility and convenience platform.The agreement with UAE-based DTEK. ai will introduce SWIFT, a computer-vision and machine-learning checkout system designed to recognise products instantly and allow customers to place, pay and leave in under 30 seconds from the start of

Cisco has patched a high-severity denial-of-service flaw that could allow unauthenticated attackers to knock key network management systems offline by flooding them with connection requests, raising operational risks for service providers and large enterprises that rely on automated orchestration platforms.The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20188, affects Cisco Crosswork Network Controller and Cisco Network Services Orchestrator, two products used to manage complex, multi-vendor networks and automate service provisioning. The flaw carries a CVSS 3.1 score of 7.5, placing it in the high-severity

Snap has confirmed the quiet end of its $400 million artificial intelligence partnership with Perplexity, removing a high-profile growth lever from its 2026 outlook just as the Snapchat parent faces pressure from uneven advertising demand, geopolitical disruption and a deeper push for cost discipline.The agreement, announced in November 2025, was designed to bring Perplexity’s conversational answer engine into Snapchat’s Chat interface, allowing users to ask questions and receive AI-generated responses inside one of the app’s most used communication surfaces. Perplexity

Anthropic has struck a major compute agreement with SpaceX that will give the maker of Claude access to all capacity at the Colossus 1 data centre, adding more than 300 megawatts of power and over 220,000 Nvidia GPUs within a month.The deal is aimed at easing capacity pressure on Claude as demand rises for AI assistants, developer tools and enterprise services. Anthropic said the extra resources will directly improve access for Claude Pro and Claude Max users, while allowing higher

OpenAI is reportedly accelerating work on a ChatGPT-centred smartphone, raising the prospect that the artificial intelligence company could move from software into mass-market consumer hardware as early as 2027.Supply-chain checks point to a device designed around AI agents rather than the familiar app-led smartphone model. The project is being described as OpenAI’s first AI agent phone, with mass production targeted for the first half of 2027 if development remains on track. The shift would place OpenAI in direct competition with

Google Home is being reshaped into a more conversational smart home platform as Google rolls out Gemini 3.1 for its connected-home assistant, alongside camera, automation and notification upgrades aimed at making household devices faster and easier to manage.The update marks another step in Google’s attempt to replace the older Google Assistant experience on compatible speakers and displays with Gemini for Home, an AI-driven system designed to interpret longer commands, handle follow-up questions and manage several household tasks in one request.

Panthalassa has secured $140 million in Series B financing to push artificial intelligence computing into open waters, backing a plan to run inference workloads on floating platforms powered by ocean waves rather than land-based grids.Peter Thiel led the round, joined by John Doerr, Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures, Max Levchin’s SciFi Ventures, Susquehanna Sustainable Investments, Hanwha Asset Management’s venture fund, Fortescue Ventures, Future Positive, Super Micro Computer and other investors. Existing backers Founders Fund, Gigascale Capital, Lowercarbon Capital, Unless and WovenEarth

OpenAI plans to open its Trusted Access for Cyber programme to government cyber defenders across federal, state and local levels, marking a broader push to place advanced artificial intelligence tools in the hands of public agencies responsible for protecting critical systems.The expansion is aimed at agencies handling national security, emergency response, public health systems, benefits delivery, municipal infrastructure and other services that face rising digital threats. OpenAI said the programme will create pathways for government users with varying levels of

Croatia has been thrust into Europe’s artificial intelligence infrastructure race after Pantheon Atlas LLC outlined plans for a €50 billion data centre and innovation campus in Topusko, a small town in Sisak-Moslavina County that could become one of the continent’s most ambitious compute hubs.The proposed Pantheon AI campus is designed around 1 gigawatt of total power capacity, including about 800 megawatts of usable information technology load for AI computing and cloud services. Construction is targeted for early 2027, with full

Ooredoo has launched Smart Wi-Fi Analytics in Qatar, giving large venues and enterprises a tool to convert everyday wireless connectivity into real-time operational intelligence for business, customer experience and network management.The service has been introduced as an add-on to Ooredoo’s existing Smart Wi-Fi portfolio and is designed for high-density environments such as shopping malls, universities, large office buildings, hospitality venues and other sites where thousands of users rely on stable connectivity throughout the day. It brings network health, user behaviour

Palo Alto Networks has agreed to acquire Portkey, a Bengaluru-founded AI infrastructure startup, as the cybersecurity group pushes further into securing autonomous software agents now moving from pilot projects into business-critical systems.The Santa Clara-based company said the deal is expected to close in its fourth quarter of fiscal 2026, subject to customary conditions. Financial terms were not disclosed, though market estimates place Portkey’s potential valuation at about $140 million, roughly twice the level implied by its latest funding round. The

A new botnet campaign is turning poorly secured Jenkins servers into attack nodes aimed at online game infrastructure, including Valve Source Engine servers used for titles such as Counter-Strike and Team Fortress 2. The activity shows how a single exposed continuous integration system can be repurposed to generate UDP, TCP and application-layer floods against multiplayer platforms.Cybersecurity researchers observed the activity on March 18, 2026, after a threat actor gained access to a Jenkins honeypot configured with weak credentials. The attacker

Attackers are shifting credential theft campaigns towards QR codes, fake CAPTCHA pages and ClickFix-style prompts, turning familiar security checks into tools for large-scale account compromise.Fresh threat telemetry for the first quarter of 2026 shows email-based phishing remains vast in scale, with about 8.3 billion threats detected between January and March. Although monthly volumes eased from 2.9 billion in January to 2.6 billion in March, the composition of attacks changed sharply. Link-based threats accounted for 78% of email attacks, underlining a

 America’s four largest AI spenders are pushing capital outlays towards a record level this year, betting that demand for computing power will justify one of the most expensive investment cycles in corporate history.Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Meta are preparing to spend roughly $680 billion to more than $700 billion on data centres, chips, servers, networking equipment and related infrastructure in 2026, after quarterly earnings showed that artificial intelligence is now central to growth plans across cloud computing, advertising, software and

Global internet reliability came under sharper pressure in the first quarter of 2026 as shutdowns, war damage, power failures and cable incidents disrupted connectivity across several regions, exposing a widening risk for enterprises that depend on cloud platforms, cross-border data flows and always-on digital services.Cloudflare’s review of disruptions from January to March showed that the most damaging incidents were not dominated by software faults alone. Political orders, military strikes, fragile electricity grids, storms and physical cable damage repeatedly interrupted internet

MCP’s rapid rise as the preferred bridge between AI assistants and external tools is running into a harder test inside production software teams: whether convenience justifies the security, reliability and governance risks now surfacing around the protocol.Model Context Protocol, introduced by Anthropic in November 2024 and later moved into broader open governance under the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation, was designed to solve a real engineering problem. Instead of building separate connectors for every database, issue tracker, repository, design tool

Samsung’s next free Android upgrade is set to sharpen security controls on Galaxy phones, even as some owners of flagship models complain of battery drain, overheating and shorter screen-on time after April software patches.One UI 8.5, Samsung’s Android 16-based interface, is expected to expand a package of privacy and anti-theft protections across supported Galaxy devices after debuting on the Galaxy S26 series. The update is expected to reach more handsets in stages, with availability varying by market, model and carrier

Blockchain investigator ZachXBT has sharpened scrutiny of Sam Altman-linked World, accusing the biometric identity and crypto project of using a low-float token structure and incentives that placed poorer users at the centre of a controversial data-gathering model.The criticism, posted on X and amplified across crypto markets, focused on Worldcoin’s WLD token distribution, its iris-scanning sign-up system and the risk that verified accounts could be traded through informal channels. ZachXBT alleged that the project’s structure mirrored some of the low-circulation, high-valuation

Business-to-business marketing teams are entering 2026 with a sharper problem than ranking on search results pages: how to make their brands visible inside AI-generated answers that buyers increasingly use before visiting a supplier’s website.Mark Lydon, senior content marketing manager, has framed the shift as a move from search engine optimisation to answer engine optimisation, reflecting a wider change in how procurement teams, technology buyers and enterprise decision-makers gather information. Traditional SEO remains important, but the battleground is widening to ChatGPT,

Google has withdrawn from a $100 million US Department of Defense contest to build voice-controlled technology for autonomous drone swarms, stepping away after its proposal had advanced in the competition and reopening questions over how far major AI companies are willing to go in military work.The company notified the government on 11 February 2026 that it would not continue in the challenge, only weeks after submitting its proposal. Internal records tied the decision to an ethics review, while the formal

Brussels has moved to compel Google to share key search data with rival search engines and AI-powered services, raising the stakes in Europe’s effort to curb the dominance of large digital platforms under the Digital Markets Act.The European Commission’s preliminary measures would require Alphabet’s Google to provide eligible third-party search providers with access to anonymised ranking, query, click and view data on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. The data is central to how search engines refine results, detect user intent

 CNTXT AI has launched Munsit Emirati TTS, a native Arabic text-to-speech model designed to produce real-time, human-like speech in the UAE dialect for enterprise and consumer applications.The Abu Dhabi-based artificial intelligence company is positioning the system as a response to a long-running weakness in global voice technology: the inability of many speech engines to capture Arabic dialects with natural rhythm, pronunciation and cultural nuance. The company says Munsit Emirati TTS is its most accurate native voice model and is intended

Dubai’s advertising market has become the launchpad for a new AI-powered creative intelligence system from Omnicom Advertising and Google, marking the first customised deployment of Google’s ABCD AI detector in the Africa, Middle East and Turkey region and setting up a wider rollout across client markets this year.The system combines Google’s framework for evaluating effective YouTube video creatives with Omnicom’s proprietary creative AI, giving advertisers a tool to test campaign work before it goes live. Its first pilot is already

Google has moved to tackle one of enterprise AI’s hardest problems by giving each autonomous software agent its own cryptographic identity, part of a broader Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform unveiled at Cloud Next on 22 April. The idea is straightforward but consequential: every agent action can be tied to a unique, verifiable ID and checked against a defined set of permissions, creating an audit trail designed for corporate compliance, security reviews and risk control.The platform marks a wider push by

Google appears to be edging towards a new chapter in wearables, with leaks pointing to a screen-free fitness band branded as Fitbit Air and a broader push to fold Fitbit more tightly into a wider Google health ecosystem. The device, if launched in the coming weeks as tipped, would mark one of the clearest signals yet that the company sees room for simpler, lower-distraction health hardware alongside full-featured smartwatches.Rather than chasing the crowded smartwatch market head-on, the rumoured product

OmniOps has joined Grafana Labs’ partner programme, a move that gives the Riyadh-based infrastructure company a stronger route into Saudi Arabia’s fast-growing market for cloud monitoring, telemetry and data-sovereign digital operations. The step positions OmniOps to sell and implement Grafana-backed observability services for enterprises that want tighter control over metrics, logs, traces and performance data inside the Kingdom’s regulatory and strategic framework.The partnership matters because observability has shifted from a niche engineering function into a board-level concern as organisations

Parody outlet The Onion has unveiled a fresh attempt to take control of Infowars, recasting a long-running legal and commercial fight over Alex Jones’s media platform into a new phase driven by state-court liquidation rather than the failed bankruptcy auction that stalled the deal in late 2024. The latest proposal, filed in Texas, would give The Onion an exclusive temporary licence over key Infowars intellectual property while court-supervised asset sales continue, with proceeds intended to benefit families owed more than

Nvidia has delivered another blockbuster quarter, posting revenue of $68.1 billion and giving a next-quarter forecast of $78 billion, a result that underlined how aggressively the world’s largest technology groups are still spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure. Data centre sales reached $62.3 billion, up 75 per cent from a year earlier, showing that demand for high-end chips, networking gear and full AI systems remains strong despite growing questions over costs, competition and power use.The scale of the quarter matters

OVHcloud has added Quandela’s Belenos quantum computer to its cloud platform, giving customers on-demand access to a second physical quantum machine as Europe pushes to turn research strength into commercial computing capacity.The announcement, made on April 17 at the Quantum Defence Summit, expands OVHcloud’s Quantum Platform less than six months after the French cloud group launched it as a European Quantum-as-a-Service offering. Belenos is a 12-qubit photonic system from Quandela, another French technology company, and joins Pasqal’s Orion Beta as

Quantum computing has taken a meaningful step from theory towards application after researchers showed that a hybrid system combining quantum hardware with artificial intelligence can improve predictions of chaotic physical systems, a class of problems that has long frustrated scientists because small errors grow quickly over time. The work, led by University College London and published in Science Advances on April 17, found that the method delivered stronger long-range forecasts while using a fraction of the memory required by standard

StarLink opened its 2026 roadshow in Riyadh on 19 April, pitching a vision of cyber defence in which autonomous systems are used not only to detect threats but to counter AI-enabled attacks at machine speed, as companies across the Middle East weigh how far they can trust software agents with critical security decisions.The event series, branded “The Silent War of AI vs AI”, is scheduled to run from 19 April to 17 June across Riyadh, Jeddah, Muscat, Amman, Cairo,

 eToro has relaunched its AI investing companion Tori with a stronger claim to immediacy, adding real-time market sentiment drawn from X through Grok 4.2, persistent memory across sessions and a new conversational tool for creating and managing AI-driven “Agent Portfolios”. The move, announced on 16 April, places artificial intelligence more squarely at the centre of the platform’s retail investing strategy as brokers compete to turn chat interfaces into portfolio and discovery tools.The company said the overhaul is meant to shift

OpenAI has moved deeper into the scientific market with the launch of GPT-Rosalind, a specialist artificial intelligence model designed for biology, drug discovery and translational medicine, marking the company’s first dedicated push into life sciences as pharmaceutical groups and research institutes race to test whether advanced reasoning systems can shorten the slow and costly path from laboratory insight to new treatments.Announced on April 16, GPT-Rosalind is being presented by OpenAI as a frontier reasoning model tuned for scientific workflows