Microsoft laid off about 9,000 employees, roughly 4% of its global workforce, in July 2025, with the Xbox division heavily affected. Microsoft’s AI push includes an $80 billion investment in AI infrastructure for fiscal 2025, plus a $30 billion annual cloud deal with Oracle to support Project Stargate via Azure. Microsoft’s gaming division seismic changes…
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Microsoft laid off about 4% of its workforce in July 2025, citing AI as a direct replacement for roles, notably in Xbox. More than 110 major European companies, including ASML, Airbus, Siemens, SAP, and Mistral AI, signed open letters urging a two-year delay to the EU AI Act due to its complexity and costs. Meta…
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Astronomers confirmed 3I/ATLAS (C/2025 N1) as the third confirmed interstellar object to visit our solar system, about 20 km wide, detected by NASA’s ATLAS survey, and it will pass inside Mars’ orbit in October 2025 at a minimum distance of 1.6 AU. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope directly imaged exoplanet TWA 7 b, a Saturn-mass…
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Gemini Ultra scored 90.0% on the MMLU academic exam and 59.4% on the MMMU multimodal benchmark, becoming the first AI to surpass human experts on MMLU and achieving top results on 30 of 32 benchmarks. Gemini Ultra is Google’s largest and most capable model for highly complex tasks, with final testing including external red-teaming and…
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By early 2025, fiber is available to over 7–8 million of about 9.3 million Dutch households, roughly 75–85% coverage. Fiber take-up reached about 3.2 million lines by end-2024. DSL is rapidly being phased out as KPN replaces copper with fiber and piloted copper network shutdowns in areas where fiber is live. Cable networks cover roughly…
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Paris is governed by the permanent LF-P 23 no-fly zone, which covers the city from ground level up to 6,500 feet (about 1,981 meters) within the périphérique. To fly a drone in Paris, operators must obtain written authorization from the Paris Police Prefecture, with applications now due at least 10 working days before the flight…
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Oracle signs a $30 billion annual cloud deal to lease 4.5GW of computing power to OpenAI for the Stargate data center, aiming to double Oracle’s cloud sales by 2028. OpenAI’s Stargate expansion, in partnership with Oracle and SoftBank, will build massive AI infrastructure in Texas, reinforcing a sovereign AI push and multi-cloud strategies. Distributed cloud…
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In 2025, Chinese AI models like DeepSeek and Alibaba’s language models gained global traction, with DeepSeek reportedly priced at 1/17th the cost of leading US models and adopted by HSBC, Standard Chartered, and Saudi Aramco. US tech giants increased AI infrastructure spending in 2025, with Microsoft committing $80 billion and Meta $68 billion to data…
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Global telecom equipment revenues declined about 11% in 2024 and are forecast to be essentially flat in 2025. Huawei remains the leading telecom equipment supplier with about 31% global market share, ahead of Nokia at 14% and Ericsson at 13%. Ericsson’s Mobility Report (June 2025) projects 5G subscriptions reaching about 2.9 billion by the end…
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Meta launched its Superintelligence Labs, led by Alexandr Wang (ex-Scale AI CEO) and Nat Friedman (ex-GitHub CEO), with reports of offers up to $300 million over four years to recruit talent from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and DeepMind. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman criticized Meta’s talent tactics as distasteful and OpenAI countered by offering staff a one-week…
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