EU Tech Policy
Why the EU needs to go hard on quantum computing software
Experts, investors, and policymakers are increasingly paying attention to the code locked inside quantum computers – technology that could one day break cryptographic algorithms rapidly and upend the world’s digital systems as we know them. Though an array of developers across Europe work on hardware, the EU needs to shift focus to software development, says quantum engineer and researcher Olivier Ezratty. “If Europe overlooks the strategic importance of quantum software development, it risks falling behind in the global race,” he said, adding that the European Commission’s current quantum strategy is focusing too heavily on hardware. Access full article >>
UK AI boom at risk due to power and planning gridlock
Britain’s electricity network, originally designed for coal-fired power, is struggling to keep pace with the demands of AI workloads, electric vehicles and modern heating systems. Energy requirements for data centres are forecast to quadruple by 2030, yet operators face years-long waits for grid connections in some regions. This warning comes as the UK government seeks to attract AI investment through initiatives like AI Growth Zones. But without faster approvals and infrastructure reinforcement, hyperscalers and sovereign AI projects could shift to markets with fewer bottlenecks. In the US, states are already fast-tracking data centre permits and aligning energy planning with digital infrastructure needs. Access full article >>
UK’s watchdog receives complain about AI institute governance
Staff at the UK’s leading artificial intelligence institute have raised concerns about the organisation’s governance and internal culture in a whistleblowing complaint to the charity watchdog. The Alan Turing Institute (ATI), a registered charity with substantial state funding, is under government pressure to overhaul its strategic focus and leadership after an intervention last month from the technology secretary, Peter Kyle. In a complaint to the Charity Commission, a group of current ATI staff raise eight points of concern and say the institute is in danger of collapse due to government threats over its funding. The complaint claims there has been no internal or external accountability for how ATI funds have been used. It alleges there is an internal culture of “fear, exclusion, and defensiveness”. Access full article >>
US Tech Policy
Nvidia and AMD agree to pay 15% of China chip sale revenues to US
The chipmakers Nvidia and AMD have agreed to give the US government 15% of their revenue from advanced chips sold to China in return for export licences to the key market, in an unprecedented move amid Donald Trump’s trade war with China. The arrangement will lead to Nvidia giving 15% of its revenue from Chinese sales of its H20 chips, and AMD giving 15% of revenue from Chinese sales of its MI308 chips, according to reports citing US officials. The US government has for several years sought to curb supplies of technology to China that could be used in ways that threaten US national security, especially chips that can power artificial intelligence development and weapons. However, last month Trump rolled back the bans, and last week the commerce department reportedly started issuing export licences for the H20 – a move that analysts linked to China’s easing of rare earth export restrictions, and to the revenue-sharing agreement revealed on Sunday. Access full article >>
US embeds trackers in AI chip shipments to catch diversions to China
U.S. authorities have secretly placed location tracking devices in targeted shipments of advanced chips they see as being at high risk of illegal diversion to China, according to two people with direct knowledge of the previously unreported law enforcement tactic. The measures aim to detect AI chips being diverted to destinations which are under U.S. export restrictions, and apply only to select shipments under investigation, the people said. Five other people actively involved in the AI server supply chain say they are aware of the use of the trackers in shipments of servers from manufacturers such as Dell and Super Micro, which include chips from Nvidia and AMD. Those people said the trackers are typically hidden in the packaging of the server shipments. They did not know which parties were involved in installing them and where along the shipping route they were put in. Access full article >>
Trump calls for Intel boss to resign immediately, alleging China ties
President Donald Trump has called on the head of US chipmaker Intel to resign “immediately”, accusing him of having problematic ties to China. In a social media post, Trump said Lip-Bu Tan was “highly conflicted”, apparently referring to his alleged investments in companies that the US says are tied to the Chinese military. It is unusual for a president to demand the resignation of a corporate executive. In a note to staff, Mr Tan pushed back against the criticism as “misinformation”. “I have always operated within the highest legal and ethical standards,” he said of his more than 40-year career in the US. Access full article >>
Tech Policy Other Regions
China summons Nvidia over ‘backdoor safety risks’ in H20 chips
China’s cyberspace regulators summoned Nvidia over security concerns that its H20 chips can be tracked and turned off remotely, the Cyberspace Administration of China said on its website. In the meeting, Chinese regulators demanded that the U.S. chip company provide explanations on “backdoor safety risks” of its H20 chips to be sold in China and submit relevant materials, the office said. Access full article >>
Indonesia eyes ‘sovereign AI fund’ to drive development
Authorities overseeing the development of artificial intelligence in Indonesia have proposed a “sovereign AI fund” to finance the archipelago’s ambitions to become a regional hub for the fast-growing technology, a government document showed. Last month, Reuters reported that Southeast Asia’s largest economy would release its first national roadmap on AI in a bid to attract foreign investment as it looks to join the global AI and chip-making race. The Indonesia strategy, released in the form of a 179-page white paper seen by Reuters, recommends, among other things, a sovereign AI fund mainly handled by the country’s new sovereign wealth fund Danantara Indonesia, which controls over $900 billion in assets. Access full article >>
Market Trends
Nuclear-powered AI can make Rolls-Royce UK’s biggest firm
Rolls-Royce’s plan to power artificial intelligence (AI) with its nuclear reactors could make it the UK’s most valuable company, its boss has said. The engineering firm has signed deals to provide small modular reactors (SMRs) to the UK and Czech governments to power AI-driven data centres. Rolls-Royce chief executive Tufan Erginbilgic told the BBC it has the “potential” to become the UK’s highest-valued company by overtaking the largest firms on the London Stock Exchange thanks to its SMR deals. He estimates that the world will need 400 SMRs by 2050. At a cost of up to $3bn (£2.2bn) each, that’s another trillion dollar-plus market he wants and expects Rolls-Royce to dominate. Access full article >>
OpenAI will not disclose GPT-5’s energy use
As it rolled out GPT-5, the company highlighted the model’s breakthrough capabilities: its ability to create websites, answer PhD-level science questions, and reason through difficult problems. But experts who have spent the past years working to benchmark the energy and resource usage of AI models say those new powers come at a cost: a response from GPT-5 may take a significantly larger amount of energy than a response from previous versions of ChatGPT. Estimating a model’s power draw was “a lot of work”, said Abdeltawab Hendawi, a professor of data science at the University of Rhode Island. The group struggled to find information on how different models are deployed within data centers. Their final paper contains estimates for which chips are used for a given model, and how different queries are parceled out between different chips in a datacenter. Hendawi, Jegham and others in their group said that their findings underscored the need for more transparency from AI companies as they release ever-larger models. Access full article >>
AI memory market expected to grow 30% a year to 2030
South Korea’s SK Hynix forecasts that the market for a specialized form of memory chip designed for artificial intelligence will grow 30% a year until 2030. The billions of dollars in AI capital spending that cloud computing companies such as Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google are projecting will likely be revised upwards in the future, which would be “positive” for the HBM market. The relationship between AI build-outs and HBM purchases is “very straightforward” and there is a correlation between the two. SK Hynix’s projections are conservative and include constraints such as available energy. Access full article >>
OpenAI takes on Meta and DeepSeek open AI models
The ChatGPT developer has announced two “open weight” large language models, which are free to download and can be customised by developers. OpenAI said the models could underpin an AI agent that operates autonomously, and that they were “designed to be used within agentic workflows”. OpenAI said the two models, called gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b-two, outperformed similarly sized models on reasoning tasks, with the larger, 120b model achieving a near-equal performance to its o4-mini model in terms of core reasoning. Access full article >>
Life-like robots for sale to the public as China opens new store
A new robot shop has opened in Beijing selling everything from mechanical butlers to human-like replicas of Albert Einstein. More than 100 types of products will be on sale at Robot Mall, which launched in the Chinese capital on Friday. The store is one of the first in the country to sell humanoid and consumer-oriented robots. Robot Mall is located next to a themed restaurant, where diners are served by robots and the food is cooked by mechanical chefs. China has increasingly prioritised the robotics industry, with subsidies topping $20bn over the past year. Access full article >>
It shocked the market but has China’s DeepSeek changed AI?
It has now been six months since DeepSeek stunned the world. DeepSeek challenged certain key assumptions about AI that had been championed by American executives like Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI. Perhaps maxing out on data centres, servers, chips, and the electricity to run it all wasn’t the way forward after all. Despite DeepSeek ostensibly not having access to the most powerful tech available at the time, it showed that “with smarter engineering, you actually can build a capable model”. Access full article >>
Open-source AI system launched to protect kids from predators in gaming chats
Roblox, the online gaming platform wildly popular with children and teenagers, is rolling out an open-source version of an artificial intelligence system it says can help preemptively detect predatory language in game chats. The AI system, called Sentinel, helps detect early signs of possible child endangerment, such as sexually exploitative language. Sentinel captures one-minute snapshots of chats across Roblox — about 6 billion messages per day — and analyzes them for potential harms. Humans review risky interactions and flag to law enforcement accordingly. Access full article >>
AI tools used by English councils downplay women’s health issues
Artificial intelligence tools used by more than half of England’s councils are downplaying women’s physical and mental health issues and risk creating gender bias in care decisions, research has found. The study found that when using Google’s AI tool “Gemma” to generate and summarise the same case notes, language such as “disabled”, “unable” and “complex” appeared significantly more often in descriptions of men than women. The study, by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), also found that similar care needs in women were more likely to be omitted or described in less serious terms. Access full article >>
The AI takeover of education is just getting started
Plenty of educators are using AI in their own job, even if they may not love that chatbots give students new ways to cheat. Beyond ChatGPT and other popular chatbots, educators are turning to AI tools that have been specifically designed for them. Using MagicSchool AI, instructors can upload course material and other relevant documents to generate rubrics, worksheets, and report-card comments. This spring, President Donald Trump signed an executive order promoting AI use in the classroom with the goal of training teachers to integrate “AI into all subject areas” so that kids gain an expertise in AI “from an early age.” Schools are stuck in a really confusing place. Everyone seems to agree that education needs an upgrade for the AI era. No matter what teachers’, students’, and parents’ attitudes about AI in the classroom are, though, it’s a reality they have to deal with. The path that schools take from here has direct implications for the future of AI more generally. The more reliant kids are on the technology now, the larger a role AI will play in their lives later. Once schools go all in, there’s no turning back. Access full article >>
The ‘AI slop’ taking over YouTube
Nearly one in 10 of the fastest growing channels globally consist of mass-produced, surreal AI-generated videos. Guardian analysis of data from the analytics firm Playboard shows that out of the top 100 fastest growing channels in July this year, nine were showing purely AI-generated content. AI video generation has surged amid the release of powerful tools such as Google’s Veo 3 and Elon Musk’s Grok Imagine. YouTube has tried to stem the slop deluge by blocking the sharing of advertising revenue with channels that post repetitive and “inauthentic” content – a policy targeted at AI content. Ryan Broderick, the author of the popular Garbage Day newsletter on internet culture, is scathing about the impact of AI video, writing last week that YouTube has become a “dumping ground for disturbing, soulless AI shorts”. Access full article >>
TikTok to replace trust and safety team in Germany with AI and outsourced labor
TikTok workers in Berlin are striking over mass layoffs amid company’s global push to replace moderators with AI. TikTok workers in Germany are holding strikes over mass layoffs of the company’s trust and safety team. The social media behemoth said it is planning to dismantle its entire Berlin moderation team, which removes harmful content from the platform, and outsource the work to artificial intelligence and contract workers. This means the dismissal of 150 employees. In Germany, as with other countries around the world, the trust and safety team is in charge of making sure the short-form videos published on the platform don’t contain harmful content or violate company policy. That means flagging videos for things like violence, pornography, misinformation and hate speech. The people working on this team review up to 1,000 videos per day, according to the union. This human work is often done in conjunction with AI. Over the past year, TikTok has been cutting trust and safety staff worldwide, often substituting those workers completely with automated systems. Access full article >>
Geopolitics
Microsoft investigates Israeli military’s use of Azure cloud storage
Microsoft is investigating how Israel’s military surveillance agency, Unit 8200, is using its Azure cloud storage platform, amid concerns the company’s staff in Israel may have concealed key details about its work on sensitive military projects. Senior executives are scrambling to assess what data Unit 8200 holds in Azure after a Guardian investigation revealed how the spy agency has used the cloud platform to store a vast collection of intercepted Palestinian mobile phone calls. Access full article >>
Social media accounts of Palestinians desperate for funds are being flagged as spam
Like hundreds of other Palestinians struggling to buy or even find food in Gaza, Hanin Al-Batsh uses Bluesky to promote her crowdfunding campaigns, hoping to raise enough money for flour and milk for her children in a given week. Her posts on the text-based social network have grown increasingly desperate as Israel tightens its grip of the Gaza Strip, forcing millions into starvation. But as they seek to get the word about their campaigns out in the world via social media, their accounts are frequently shut down or marked as spam. That’s especially the case on Bluesky, the young Twitter alternative popular in Gaza. Bluesky has deactivated nearly all of Al-Batsh’s accounts after just a few days, she said. The longest she has been able to hold on to one is 12 days. In the meantime, thousands of Bluesky users have signed open letters and made public pleas asking the company to improve its moderation practices. Access full article >>
Finland files charges against tanker crew over alleged subsea cable sabotage
Finland has filed charges against members of the Eagle S oil tanker, which is suspected of damaging five undersea cables by dragging its anchor between Finland and Estonia. The incident happened in December in the Gulf of Finland, when several cables were cut between the two countries. The Eagle S tanker is registered to the Cook Islands and is thought to be part of Russia’s “shadow fleet,” which consists of vessels that sail under foreign flags to evade sanctions, reports The Guardian. It’s alleged that the tanker dragged its anchor along the seabed for about 90km (56 miles) in December. Access full article >>
Europe pushes for Ukraine role in Trump-Putin talks
Talks between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump on the war in Ukraine are set to take place in Alaska next Friday. Europe has insisted that Ukraine and European powers should be part of any deal to end the conflict. The idea of a US-Russia meeting without Zelensky has raised concerns that a deal would require Kyiv to cede swathes of territory, which the EU has rejected. As a prerequisite to any peace settlement, Moscow demanded Kyiv pull its forces out of the regions and commit to being a neutral state, shun Western military support and be excluded from joining NATO. Kyiv said it would never recognize Russian control over its sovereign territory, though it acknowledged that getting land captured by Russia back would have to come through diplomacy, not on the battlefield. Access full article >>
Research
State of European Data Centres 2025
State of Cloud Report 2025
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