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Facility to be built with $1 billion investment from Nscale and Aker

OpenAI's Stargate initiative has teleported to Europe, where the AI flag bearer has enlisted datacenter builder Nscale and Norwegian energy magnate Aker ASA to deploy a 100,000-GPU compute cluster in the Arctic by 2026.…

The world's "oldest baby" has been born in the US from an embryo that was frozen in 1994, it has been reported. The Guardian: Thaddeus Daniel Pierce was born on 26 July in Ohio to Lindsey and Tim Pierce, using an "adopted" embryo from Linda Archerd, 62, from more than 30 years ago. In the early 1990s, Archerd and her then husband decided to try in vitro fertilisation (IVF) after struggling to become pregnant. In 1994 four embryos resulted: one was transferred to Archerd and resulted in the birth of a daughter, who is now 30 and mother to a 10-year-old. The other embryos were cryopreserved and stored. "We didn't go into it thinking we would break any records," Lindsey told the MIT Technology Review, which first reported the story. "We just wanted to have a baby."

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What's next - gonna tell us it's time to migrate to Windows 8?

Watch out, world: The US government has finally found out about DevSecOps, and it has become a late evangelist for the security-by-default software development practice.…

No way this will be abused

Microsoft has upgraded Azure AI Speech so that users can rapidly generate a voice replica with just a few seconds of sampled speech.…

Microsoft has abandoned a decades-long tradition of calling out the names of its rivals in regulatory documents. From a report: When the 50-year-old technology company released its annual report Wednesday, the 101-page document contained zero references to longtime foes Apple and IBM. Nor did it mention privately held challengers such as Anthropic or Databricks. Last year's Microsoft annual report officially designated over 25 companies as competitors. The names of Microsoft's enemies have appeared in its annual reports at least since 1994.

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Microsoft's internal pay guidelines show exactly how much the company will pay new engineering hires, according to documents obtained by Business Insider. The guidelines, updated in May, break down salary ranges, stock awards, and bonuses for every level from entry-level engineers to the company's most senior technical talent. The documents come with an important caveat: recruiters can get approval to pay more when competing for exceptional candidates. At Microsoft's highest tier, Level 70 "distinguished engineers" can earn up to $408,000 in annual salary. But the real money comes from stock: these hires get up to $1.9 million in stock when they join, plus annual stock awards reaching $1.476 million. The company uses different pay scales depending on location. Engineers in expensive markets like San Francisco get higher ranges than those at Microsoft's Redmond headquarters, where most hiring happens. For entry-level engineers at Level 57, Microsoft offers salaries between $83,000 and $108,000 in its main markets, with higher ranges of $95,800 to $124,600 in expensive areas like San Francisco. These new hires get modest stock awards of $5,000 to $13,000 and signing bonuses up to $9,000. The company considers levels 57 through 59 as entry-level positions. The compensation jumps significantly as engineers advance. By Level 63, when engineers reach senior status, salaries range from $145,000 to $237,600 depending on location, with stock awards reaching $220,000.

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H20 silicon under the microscope after slipping through US export bans

China's internet watchdog has hauled Nvidia in for a grilling over alleged backdoors in its H20 chips, the latest twist in the increasingly paranoid semiconductor spat between Washington and Beijing.…

Sony has filed a lawsuit in California court against Tencent, alleging the Chinese company's upcoming game Light of Motiram constitutes a "slavish clone" of Sony's Horizon series. The complaint details extensive similarities between the games, from post-apocalyptic robot dinosaur settings to red-haired female protagonists. Tencent had approached Sony for licensing deals in 2024, which Sony rejected twice.

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Trauma-inducing startup sound finally axed

Great news! Microsoft has finally squashed a Windows 11 Insider bug. No, it still hasn't "Made the Start Menu Great Again." No, you still can't drag the taskbar wherever you like. But yes, it simply kills the bug that played the Windows Vista boot chime on startup.…

Brit chip biz sees demand surge for turnkey compute subsystems, chiplets, and complete SoC designs

Chip designer Arm says it is looking to bring more compute subsystems, chiplets, and even end-to-end solutions to market as customers increasingly expect a more complete starting point for their custom silicon.…

Russia spying on foreign embassies? Say it ain't so

Russian cyberspies are abusing local internet service providers' networks to target foreign embassies in Moscow and collect intel from diplomats' devices, according to a Microsoft Threat Intelligence warning.…

Britain's Competition and Markets Authority concluded that Microsoft and Amazon hold "significant unilateral market power" in cloud services and recommended investigating both companies under new competition rules. The regulator said it had concerns about practices creating customer "lock-in" effects through egress fees and unfavorable licensing terms that trap businesses in difficult-to-exit contracts. Microsoft and Amazon each control roughly 30-40% of the infrastructure-as-a-service market, while Google holds 5-10%. Microsoft disputed the findings, calling the cloud market "dynamic and competitive." Amazon said the probe recommendations were "unwarranted."

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Beijing has summoned Nvidia over alleged security issues with its chips, in a blow to the US company's push to revive sales in the country after Washington granted approval for the export of a made-for-China chip. From a report: China's cyber regulator on Thursday said it had held a meeting with Nvidia over what it called "serious security issues" with the company's artificial intelligence chips. It said US AI experts had "revealed that Nvidia's computing chips have location tracking and can remotely shut down the technology." The Cyberspace Administration of China requested that Nvidia explain the security problems associated with the H20 chip, which was designed for the Chinese market to comply with US export restrictions, and submit documentation to support their case.

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US court docs reveal that infamous Chinese snoops filed IP papers like tax returns

Security researchers have uncovered more than a dozen patents for offensive cybersecurity tools filed by Chinese companies allegedly tied to Beijing's Silk Typhoon espionage crew.…

Microsoft has reached a $4 trillion market cap, becoming only the second company to achieve this milestone. Investors drove the stock up 4.62% following the company's fourth-quarter earnings report, which showed strong growth in cloud-computing services fueled by artificial intelligence demand. Microsoft's Azure cloud business generated $75 billion in annual revenue, representing a 34% increase from the previous fiscal year. Nvidia became the first company to reach the $4 trillion market cap earlier this month.

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Passwordless disk locking is coming, a couple of years later than hoped

Canonical's Director of Engineering for Ubuntu Desktop has published a roadmap for the 25.10 release, which includes a feature that was originally planned for 23.10.…

A Nature survey of more than 1,100 physicists reveals fundamental disagreements about quantum mechanics' relationship to reality, despite the theory's century-long track record as one of science's most successful frameworks. The survey, conducted to mark quantum mechanics' 100th anniversary, found 36% of researchers favor the Copenhagen interpretation while 17% prefer epistemic approaches that treat quantum states as information rather than physical reality. Another 15% support the many-worlds interpretation. Researchers split evenly on whether a boundary exists between quantum and classical worlds -- 45% said yes, 45% said no. When asked about the wavefunction's nature, 47% called it a mathematical tool while 36% considered it a representation of physical reality. Only 24% of respondents expressed confidence their chosen interpretation was correct, with others viewing their preference as merely adequate or useful in certain circumstances. The survey contacted over 15,000 researchers whose recent papers involved quantum mechanics, plus attendees of a centenary meeting on Heligoland island. Despite quantum mechanics enabling technologies from computer chips to medical imaging, physicists remain divided on the physical reality underlying the mathematics.

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Regulators around the globe pay attention as results of 21-month cloud probe published

Britain's competition regulator says Microsoft and AWS are using their dominance to harm UK cloud customers and proposes to designate both with strategic market status (SMS) to take action against them.…

Developers are growing increasingly frustrated with AI coding tools that produce deceptively flawed solutions, according to Stack Overflow's latest survey of over 49,000 programmers worldwide. The 2025 survey exposes a widening gap between AI adoption and satisfaction: while 84% of developers now use or plan to use AI tools, their trust has cratered. Only 33% trust AI accuracy today, down from 43% last year. The core problem isn't broken code that developers can easily spot and discard. Instead, two-thirds report wrestling with AI solutions that appear correct but contain subtle errors requiring significant debugging time. Nearly half say fixing AI-generated code takes longer than expected, undermining the productivity gains these tools promise to deliver.

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Investors cash in as design firm goes public after takeover dreams dashed

Figma is offering 36,937,080 shares of Class A common stock at $33 apiece, in an initial public offering that values the web design tool developer at $19.3 billion.…