Tech, in brief

The Trump administration is drafting a second round of taxes on imported chips, eight people told the news site Politico on Thursday. [1][2]

This round would also tax the machines chips go into: laptops, game consoles, and the servers that fill data centres. [1][2][3]

January's tax on imported chips was 25%. Four groups were excused: data centres, research labs, startups and everyday devices. [3]

US Commerce Department officials have said in private talks that those exceptions may not carry over. That is the real change on the table. [3]

Howard Lutnick, the US commerce secretary, wants each company to bring in only so many chips tax-free, matched to what it has promised to build in America. [1][3]

Reuters could not confirm the report. Neither the Trump administration nor the US Commerce Department answered questions. [1]

A separate rule is being drafted to stop Chinese firms renting American AI chips from a distance, through computers sitting in Thailand and Singapore. [4]

The chip factories all this is meant to reward are years away. SK Hynix, a South Korean memory maker, broke ground in Indiana this week and opens fully in 2029. [6][7]

Chips are the one thing still selling hard. South Korea's exports are expected to be up 62.6% in August, a 15th straight monthly gain. [8]

China is pushing back quietly. It is slowing shipments of germanium and quartz, two materials chip factories need, to Taiwan through customs checks rather than a ban. [5]

Why it matters. Watch the list of exceptions, not the rate. If data centres and startups lose their place on it, the same 25% becomes a far bigger tax. [3]

The US Commerce Department is drafting a rule to stop Chinese firms using American AI chips from a distance, through computers in Thailand and Singapore. It may go to trade groups in September. [4]

Why it matters. US export rules cover chips that physically move. Renting the machine from far away has never been covered.

Tencent, China's biggest games and messaging company, released a preview of Hy4, a free-to-download AI model for coding, research and financial work. It holds 770 billion learned numbers and uses about 49 billion on any one request. [13]

Why it matters. A model anyone can download runs wherever chips already are, which is the one place a wall around chips cannot reach.

Z.ai, an AI lab in Beijing, confirmed it built Ox Alpha, a coding and reasoning model, and published the model's weights on Wednesday. It argued China's open approach is safer than Silicon Valley's closed one. [14][15]

Why it matters. Weights are the learned numbers inside a model. Publish them and nobody needs permission to use it.

Nvidia, which makes the chips AI runs on, struck a $6bn deal with Poolside, a builder of free-to-download models. Two weeks ago the payments firm Stripe bought OpenRouter, which resells such models to businesses, for over $7bn. [16]

Why it matters. Nvidia told investors the US government may restrict Chinese-built AI, and is tuning its hardware for Chinese models anyway. [17]

Manchester, London Stansted and East Midlands airports said hackers reached data on about 8.7 million customers, mostly wifi sign-ups and car-park bookings. Emails, phone numbers, car registrations and postcodes were taken. [18]

Why it matters. The airports' owner said the hacked system held no payment details and flights were not affected.

A California district judge ruled that the US defence department's blacklisting of the AI firm Anthropic was unconstitutional. Judge Rita Lin wrote that national security is "not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics". [19]

Why it matters. Anthropic had set limits on military uses of its systems, and the court called the response unlawful retaliation.

SK Hynix held a groundbreaking in West Lafayette, Indiana for a $4bn site that will assemble and test AI memory chips. Full production starts in the second half of 2029, about a year later than first planned. [6][7]

Why it matters. The tax plan rewards promised American building, and the building takes years.

Australian police charged two men, aged 21 and 23, over a group that hid harmful code inside widely used free software tools. Police said it reached more than 1,000 organisations and 500,000 stolen passwords. [22]

Why it matters. Most software is assembled from other people's parts, so one poisoned part travels everywhere at once.

The FBI, the US federal police, seized two platforms it says a China-backed group called QTFY used against NASA, the US energy department and the US Senate. Court papers name a private firm in Nanjing paid by China's Ministry of State Security. [23]

Why it matters. The tools were rented out to other criminals as a hiding service, which makes any single attack hard to trace.

The insurers MSIG, QBE and Beazley are redrafting cyber policies for software that acts without a human telling it to, eight executives said. Separately, Russian-speaking criminals used the coding assistant Cursor to break into seven firms. [24][25]

Why it matters. Nobody has settled whether a machine that decides for itself counts as an attacker in a policy.

From 30 August Google will stop pushing sites down its search results by hand across the 27 EU countries plus Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein. Publishers had complained and the European Commission had opened a case. [20]

Why it matters. Breaking the EU's Digital Markets Act, which limits what the biggest tech firms may do, can cost up to 10% of worldwide sales.

Google agreed to settle a London claim over the cut it takes from Play Store sales for 260 million pounds, about $353m, with no admission of wrongdoing. The claim had been valued at over 1 billion pounds. [21]

Why it matters. It is the fourth such UK case against a big tech company since the start of 2025, after Apple, Qualcomm and Sony.

Spain plans to make new data centres match 80% of their power with renewables hour by hour, rather than averaged across a year. Every new megawatt needs matching generation in place within 18 months. [26][27]

Why it matters. Hourly matching means the clean power has to exist at the moment the servers draw it.

Ofgem, Britain's energy regulator, proposed making data-centre developers pay a large non-refundable deposit and line up customers before joining the queue for a grid connection. Industry feedback closes in September. [28]

Why it matters. The queue has filled with projects that will never be built, delaying the ones that will.

Global Energy Monitor tracks US power plants. It says gas projects tied to data centres have grown from 97 gigawatts at the end of 2025 to over 189 gigawatts by mid-2026. One gigawatt powers roughly a million homes. [45]

Why it matters. The US is now building twice as much gas-fired power as China, after a 76% rise in projects under construction. [46]

California's senate passed AB 1856 by 39 votes to nil, taking freely copyable operating systems out of the state's Digital Age Assurance Act. Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch and SteamOS fall outside it. [29]

Why it matters. The original law would have made volunteer projects collect users' ages the way Apple and Microsoft do.

At Hot Chips, a chip industry conference, OpenAI showed test results for Jalapeno, a chip it designed itself for answering questions rather than for training models. It ships in very small volumes at the end of 2026. [30][31]

Why it matters. Its biggest customers building their own chips is part of why Nvidia is buying into the model layer.

Micron, a US memory maker, told Hot Chips that the stacked memory AI needs uses about three times the silicon area of ordinary computer memory for the same capacity. The gap is widening. [9]

Why it matters. Ordinary memory contract prices rose 90% to 95% in the first quarter, and building more factories adds less supply than the count suggests. [9]

Boston Scientific, a medical device maker, told the US markets regulator that an attack disrupted operations worldwide including order shipping. Its shares fell 3.5% before the open. [38][39]

Why it matters. The ATF, the US agency that polices guns and explosives, declared a major incident, and the $1tn investment firm Apollo confirmed a break-in. [40][41]

The Dutch data regulator fined Uber nearly $1bn over driver accounts switched off by software with too little human review. Its deputy chair said a computer should not make decisions with such consequences. [32]

Why it matters. Uber says it will appeal, and that permanent removals do get human review.

Zillow and Redfin, two US property-listing sites, settled with the US competition regulator and five states on the morning their trial was due to begin. The regulator said Zillow paid Redfin $100m not to compete on rental listings. [36][37]

Why it matters. The arrangement could have kept Redfin out of rental advertising for as long as nine years.

Poland asked the European Commission to fine Meta 250 million euros. Its national cyber team flagged 122 fraudulent adverts; Meta removed 10 and refused to remove 106. [34] Brazil sued the chat app Discord for $97m over child-safety failures. [35]

Why it matters. Both cases are about adverts and chats the platforms are meant to police themselves.

Amazon will close Mechanical Turk on 30 September, 21 years after launch. It matched workers with tiny digital jobs paying a few cents, which Jeff Bezos once called artificial artificial intelligence. [33]

Why it matters. It existed for tasks that are easy for people and hard for computers, and that gap has narrowed.

In 2016, 44.6% of the million most popular web domains ran their own mail server. In 2026 that is 22.4%. Google Workspace now handles 21.8% and Microsoft 365 handles 16.8%. [47]

Why it matters. Two companies now carry 38.6% of the mail for the busiest domains on the internet.

Sandisk and Kioxia agreed a fresh joint investment in their Japanese flash-memory plants. [11] Intel said fault rates on its next chip-making process are falling faster than planned, and Xiaomi's new phone chip is made by TSMC in Taiwan. [10][12]

Why it matters. Everyone is committing to build, which is exactly what the tax plan proposes to reward.

Nvidia is in talks to invest in the AI search firm Perplexity at over $30bn. The AI startup Instinct raised $350m at a $2.5bn valuation, and the robot maker Generalist reached $3bn. [42][43][44]

Why it matters. Perplexity's yearly revenue has gone from under $250m to over $750m since January. [42]