Category: Biz Tech

 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

Commercial artificial intelligence models are advancing quickly in vulnerability research and exploit development, sharpening concern across the cybersecurity industry that tools built for productivity and defence could also lower the barrier for offensive misuse. A study by Forescout’s Vedere Labs found that commercial systems now outperform open-source and underground alternatives in identifying software flaws, while more than half of the models tested were able to generate exploits with varying degrees of autonomy or user guidance.That marks a notable shift

Netflix is set to roll out a redesigned mobile app by the end of April, adding a vertical video discovery feed that mirrors the swipe-driven format popularised by short-form platforms as the streaming group pushes to make browsing faster and more intuitive on phones. The company disclosed the change in its April 16 shareholder letter, saying the updated mobile experience follows a period of testing and is meant to reflect a broader entertainment offering while making it easier for members

Google has extended its Personal Intelligence system to the Gemini app’s built-in image generation tools, allowing users to create tailored visuals shaped by data from their own Google services, including Google Photos, rather than relying only on long text prompts or manual uploads. The update ties a more personal layer of context to Nano Banana 2, Google’s latest image model, as the company pushes harder to make AI assistants more useful in everyday consumer tasks.The move builds on Personal

Anthropic has rolled out Claude Opus 4.7, an upgraded version of its top broadly available artificial intelligence model, pitching it as a stronger tool for advanced software engineering just days after keeping its more powerful Mythos Preview behind tight access controls because of cyber-risk concerns. The move gives developers a more capable coding model while signalling that Anthropic is trying to balance commercial momentum with a more cautious approach to frontier releases.The company said Opus 4.7 improves on Opus

Alibaba Group Holding has unveiled a new artificial intelligence model aimed at building 3D environments and interactive video, widening its challenge to Tencent in one of the most commercially sensitive corners of China’s technology market: games, cloud services and creator tools. The model, called Happy Oyster, was introduced on Thursday as a “world model”, a system designed to generate explorable digital scenes rather than only short clips, according to Bloomberg’s report on the launch.The move matters because it shifts

Comcast customers notified about the company’s 2023 Xfinity data breach are being offered cash payments, reimbursement for documented losses and identity-protection services under a proposed $117.5 million class-action settlement, opening what could become one of the largest consumer redress exercises tied to a telecom cyber incident in the United States. The settlement applies to people in the United States and its territories who were sent individual notice of the breach around December 18, 2023, with claims due by August 14,

YouTube is changing how advertising appears during livestreams, pulling back commercial interruptions at moments when audience activity is surging or when viewers are paying to support creators. The move marks a notable adjustment in how the platform balances revenue with viewer experience, and it signals a wider push towards automated ad placement shaped by what is happening on screen and in chat in real time.Under the update, YouTube says viewers who buy Super Chats, Super Stickers or gifts will

OpenAI has launched GPT-5.4-Cyber, a new version of its frontier model tailored for defensive cybersecurity work, moving quickly to answer growing concern that ever more capable AI systems could help both defenders and attackers in a widening digital arms race. The release came a week after Anthropic disclosed Claude Mythos Preview under its tightly controlled Project Glasswing programme, setting up a new contest over who can best position advanced AI as a shield rather than a threat.OpenAI said the

Amazon has struck an $11.57 billion deal to buy Globalstar, a move that would give the technology group a sharper edge in satellite communications, deepen its rivalry with SpaceX’s Starlink and place it at the centre of the next phase of smartphone connectivity, including services tied to future iPhone and Apple Watch models. The proposed acquisition, announced on April 14, would fold Globalstar’s satellites, spectrum assets and operational capabilities into Amazon’s low-Earth-orbit network, now branded Amazon Leo.The transaction matters

SoftBank Group’s push to raise broader backing for a $40 billion loan tied to its investment in OpenAI is drawing fresh attention to how far global lenders are willing to support Masayoshi Son’s debt-heavy bet on artificial intelligence. More banks are being approached to join the financing, extending a syndication effort that began after SoftBank secured the bridge facility in March, in what has become a major test of confidence in both the Japanese group’s balance sheet and the commercial

A new study by Pearson and Amazon Web Services has sharpened concerns over whether universities are keeping pace with the demands of an AI-driven labour market, finding that 53% of employers say their main difficulty is hiring graduates with the right AI skills. The report, released on April 13, surveyed 2,711 learners, higher-education leaders and employers across the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and Vietnam, pointing to a widening gap between academic confidence and workplace expectations.

OpenAI has told users of its Mac software to update their applications after a third-party supply-chain incident touched the company’s app-signing workflow, prompting a wider effort to replace security certificates and tighten the process that proves its desktop software is authentic. The company said there is no evidence that user data was accessed, that passwords or API keys were exposed, or that its systems, intellectual property or software were altered.The issue centres on Axios, a widely used JavaScript library

Booking.com has confirmed that hackers accessed customer booking information, exposing names, email addresses, phone numbers and reservation details in a security incident that has triggered fresh concern over how much personal travel data is concentrated on large online platforms. The company said it moved to contain the issue, reset reservation PINs for affected bookings and contacted impacted guests directly. It has not disclosed how many customers were affected or when the intrusion began, leaving regulators, travellers and accommodation partners with

Microsoft has lifted prices across its Surface hardware range, making its premium laptops and tablets significantly more expensive as a global memory shortage ripples through the personal-computer market and forces manufacturers to pass higher component costs on to buyers. The move places Microsoft alongside other device makers that have warned of steeper bills for DRAM and NAND components, with the pressure tied largely to booming demand from artificial-intelligence infrastructure and tighter supply for consumer electronics.Several of the increases are