Microsoft unveiled its Community-First AI Infrastructure initiative, pledging to cover full electricity costs, reject local property tax breaks, and replenish more water than its data centres consume. The company has been developing the initiative since September 2025, responding to shifting public sentiment observed in Wisconsin, where concerns shifted to electricity
President Donald Trump signed a proclamation imposing a 25% tariff on advanced AI semiconductors produced outside the United States that pass through the country before being exported to other nations, formalising a key component of the U.S. Department of Commerce's December decision to permit Nvidia to ship
More than 200,000 European banking jobs could vanish by 2030 as lenders lean into AI and shutter physical branches, according to a Morgan Stanley analysis reported by the Financial Times. This represents approximately 10 per cent of the workforce across 35 major European banks. The banks in the analysis
Dassault Aviation, the French maker of military aircrafts and business jets, led a €200 million Series B funding round in autonomous drone maker Harmattan AI on 12 January 2026, valuing the Paris-based startup at €1.4 billion and establishing France's first defence unicorn. The strategic partnership aims to
Nvidia has agreed to license assets from AI chip startup Groq for approximately $20 billion through a non-exclusive technology licence whilst simultaneously hiring the company's founders and executives, marking the chipmaker's largest transaction to date and dwarfing its previous record of $7 billion for Mellanox in
The UK and Germany are emerging as key hubs for a new wave of AI defence startups, as Europe scrambles to rearm amid rising geopolitical tensions. Investors have funnelled a record $4.3 billion into the sector since the start of 2022, nearly four times the funds deployed in the
Oracle shares closed down nearly 11% on 11th December 2025, after the company announced revenue that fell short of Wall Street estimates, wiping nearly 70 billion dollars off the company's market value in a matter of hours. Its revenue came in at 16.06 billion dollars, compared with
Italian defence company Leonardo unveiled on 27 November 2025 an AI-powered integrated defence system called Michelangelo Dome, designed to protect critical infrastructure and urban areas amid rising geopolitical tensions. The company targets full operational capability by the end of the decade. Leonardo's shares rose approximately 77% since January
On 24 November 2025, President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order launching the Genesis Mission, a national effort to use AI to transform scientific research and accelerate discovery, comparing the initiative in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project. The Department of Energy will lead the effort by leveraging
DuckDuckGo’s $9.99-per-month subscription now provides access to the most advanced AI models via its Duck.ai chatbot, including GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4 and Llama Maverick. The free plan remains available, but only with older models such as GPT-4o mini or Claude 3.5 Haiku. The company stressed that
The OECD's August 2025 analysis of AI openness reveals that traditional "open source" terminology does not fully capture the complexities specific to AI systems. The study published in August 2025 demonstrates that AI openness exists on a spectrum from fully closed systems with restricted access to
Character.AI, once a billion-dollar startup promising to bring personalized superintelligence to everyone, has implemented a significant strategic shift. Karandeep Anand, appointed as the company's CEO in June 2025, announced that the firm has abandoned its founders' Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas' aspirations to develop
