Tech, in brief

A cyberattack on Boston Scientific, which makes pacemakers and defibrillators, began on 25 August and is still going on. [1][3]

Pacemakers and other heart devices implanted since that date cannot send readings to doctors, because the home monitoring units cannot be switched on. [1]

The devices still work and still record. A patient has to bring the reading in and have it read on a clinic app instead. [1]

The attack also stopped the company making, shipping and taking orders. Boston Scientific says it treats about 48 million patients a year. [1][2]

There is no date for full repair. The company hired the security firm CrowdStrike and says only its own on-site computers were hit, not its cloud services. [1][2]

Its shares fell more than 4% on the day it told US regulators about the attack. No group had claimed responsibility, and the company has declined to say whether it was ransomware. [1][3]

In the same week McKesson, one of the biggest US distributors of medicines and medical supplies, confirmed intruders took data from its cloud accounts. [4]

The group ShinyHunters says it took 284 million patient records and asked for $55.2m not to publish them. McKesson has given no number of its own. [1][4]

It got in by telephoning several McKesson employees and talking them into granting access to the company's Snowflake and Salesforce accounts. [1][4]

The stolen data is said to include names, addresses, Social Security numbers, diagnoses, medications and where in the body a cancer is. [1][4]

The same group hit the pacemaker maker Medtronic in April and the cancer-test firm Exact Sciences in July. [1]

Criminals' counts are often wrong. When that group leaked Carhartt's data, a checker cut the claim from 24.8 million people to 12,933,413. [5]

Much of the difference was the retailer's own machine-made test data in the same store, with customers in Benin and birthdays in the early 1900s. [5]

Why it matters. Watch whether Boston Scientific gives a restoration date this week. Until it does, every heart device it fits adds one more patient whose readings have to be carried into a clinic by hand. [1]

The US Federal Trade Commission and 22 states sued Amazon on Monday, saying it secretly raised what millions of brands and sellers paid for the Sponsored Product adverts in its search results. Amazon said the claim misunderstands how advertisers work and cites no evidence that shoppers paid more. [6]

Why it matters. The company selling the goods also runs the auction for the space above them.

Microsoft's Exchange Online, the system behind Outlook email, broke for hours on Monday; Microsoft blamed a component that checks who you are. OpenAI's ChatGPT Work had about three hours of errors the same afternoon, and no link between the two was reported. [7][8]

Why it matters. Two office tools that most large employers now depend on failed together, on a Monday.

GitHub Actions, which runs software builds and tests for millions of projects, degraded for about three hours on 26 August after switching to a backup database did not fix the problem. GitHub logged 26 separate incidents in April alone. [9]

Why it matters. The tools that ship everybody else's software are infrastructure now, and they break like it.

A court in Dongguan froze the Dutch chipmaker Nexperia's holdings in four of its Chinese subsidiaries under an asset-preservation order, its Chinese owner Wingtech said on Monday. Reuters put the value at about $300m. [10]

Why it matters. The fight over who controls Nexperia has moved from export rules into courts.

Investigators raided Unimicron, one of the world's largest makers of the boards chips sit on, over claims it shipped China-made boards back to Taiwan and relabelled them as Taiwanese. Fourteen employees were questioned as suspects, and the head of its board business was bailed for about $473,000. [11]

Why it matters. US customs adds a 40% tariff to goods it decides were routed through a third country, and that penalty falls on the American buyer.

CXMT, which makes DRAM, the working memory in phones and servers, filed suit to overturn its listing as a company tied to China's military. It says it spent over a year handing over information, and that a notice removing it was published in February and withdrawn the same day. [12]

Why it matters. The blacklists that shape the chip trade are being tested in court rather than negotiated.

CXMT said in a social-media post that it has started mass-producing LPDDR6, the next phone memory standard, for a Xiaomi handset. On earlier generations Chinese memory lagged Samsung, SK hynix and Micron by years. [13]

Why it matters. It is a company claim, not a measured result, but the gap it says it closed is the one export controls were meant to hold open.

The US president posted on Monday that the only reason communities should not want data centres is if they want to end up backwards and poor, and told them to let data reign. [14]

Why it matters. Where the computers go has become an argument in the US midterm elections.

A Heatmap Pro and Embold Research poll found 83% of Democrats, 80% of independents and two-thirds of Republicans against a data centre in their own area. Net approval has swung 62 percentage points in a year, and more than half backed a national pause. [15]

Why it matters. Opposition that holds across every party and region is the kind politicians act on.

Reviewing several polls, the researcher Andy Masley found the pushback tracks local harms - electricity costs and noise - rather than views about AI, big tech or China. The cost of grid upgrades has typically been spread across all users. [16]

Why it matters. A complaint about a bill can be settled with money; a complaint about AI could not.

The US Environmental Protection Agency proposes scrapping the federal requirement that states publicise and take comments on air-pollution permits for data centres and the power plants that feed them. Nearly 200 advocacy groups and more than a dozen states object. [17]

Why it matters. That notice is how most residents first learn a data centre is coming.

The DataOne site in Vineland, New Jersey, is part of a $19.4bn arrangement to supply Microsoft. Campaigners say it has run 62 gas turbines without permits and built an unpermitted 1.5-million-gallon liquefied gas tank. They also report night noise breaches within half a mile. [18]

Why it matters. Residents say they only learned the site was a data centre after the deal was announced.

Analysis by the group Foxglove says the planned Wapseys Wood and Quest Park data centres would draw 1.3GW and emit more than 4.5m tonnes of carbon a year. ExxonMobil's UK emissions were 3.9m tonnes in 2023. [19]

Why it matters. Britain's climate targets are set in law, and nobody has said which other emissions come down instead.

A draft Spanish decree would require data-centre operators to be established in the European Union, and to keep data and metadata inside it. At least 80% of every hour's electricity would have to be renewable. Each new megawatt used must be matched by a new megawatt built within 18 months. [20]

Why it matters. Spain has more offers than it can take, which is the opposite of most countries' position.

Together AI, valued at $8.3bn in July, will take 250 megawatts of power and 120,000 chips from the Saudi company Humain. [21]

Why it matters. The scarce thing is no longer power or chips but local consent, and consent is easier to get abroad.

The region has 306 data centres running and 173 more in the pipeline. The research firm Arizton expects investment to rise from $15.72bn in 2025 to $35.08bn by 2031, with Malaysia leading on more than 6GW planned, most of it in Johor. [22]

Why it matters. Singapore stopped expanding outward and its neighbours took the work.

Australia's prime minister, Anthony Albanese, wanted new data centres to bring their own 100% renewable electricity. Queensland and the Northern Territory want to use their state-owned gas and coal stations, so the national agreement was worded loosely enough for everyone to claim a win. [23]

Why it matters. Whether bring-your-own-power means clean power decides if the build helps or strains the grid.

Elon Musk said SpaceX will cast turbine blades and vanes in-house, to speed up the portable gas generators xAI uses instead of waiting for a grid connection. He says it could cut deliveries by 18 months, against a queue running towards 2030. [24]

Why it matters. When the queue for the grid is the constraint, firms start manufacturing their way around it.

Emerald AI, whose software makes data centres cut their power draw when the grid is short, was valued at $1.05bn after a Series A round led by Energize Capital and DCVC, taking its total raised past $220m. [25]

Why it matters. It is a bet that flexibility, not more generation, is what gets a project connected.

Instinct, an assistant you connect to your apps and then text or call, raised $250m in a Series B co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark. That takes total funding to $350m at a $2.5bn valuation. [26]

Why it matters. The money is moving from the models to the thing that runs errands with them.

Generalist, founded by two former Google DeepMind researchers and a former Boston Dynamics engineer, added nearly $200m to a $400m Series B, bringing the round to $600m. [27]

Why it matters. It is training one model to drive many different robots rather than one robot well.

Lambda took $1bn in private debt to buy chips, days after closing a $926m loan for Nvidia GB300 processors it is contracted to supply back to Nvidia. Banks and tech firms have raised more than $400bn of AI-related debt worldwide this year, on Bloomberg's count. [28]

Why it matters. The build-out has shifted from shares to borrowing, and borrowing has a repayment date.

Socure, which verifies that people online are who they say, took a growth investment led by Summit Partners and bought Fravity, a platform for running agent-driven operations. [29]

Why it matters. As fraud gets automated, so does the checking.

Stability AI raised $76m, taking its total to $232m, with money from Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group, Warner Music Group, the games company Electronic Arts, and AMD Ventures. [30]

Why it matters. The round reads less like a venture raise than a list of the partners Stability needs content licences from.

Wrtn secured about 100 billion won in a Series C, with new backers Coreline Ventures and Eugene Asset Management joining Goodwater Capital, Woori Venture Partners and the Korea Development Bank. [31]

Why it matters. South Korea's AI money is coming partly from state-linked institutions, not only venture funds.

Its product connects the fragmented legacy software big Latin American companies still run on, and captures processes that currently live in employees' heads. Chief executive Jose Murillo said buyers can now measure a return: "Before, selling software was more of a leap of faith." [32]

Why it matters. The value is in the undocumented knowledge, not in the model.

The 15-person start-up, valued at $65m after the round, is aiming at what comes after building a website: finding customers for small businesses. Susquehanna Venture Capital and Nexus Venture Partners co-led. [33]

Why it matters. It is taking on Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor and Replit with fifteen people.

Clipto, three years old and split between San Francisco, Singapore and Hong Kong, raised $15m to make terabytes of video and recordings searchable. Adobe, Apple and Google are building the same thing into products people already own. [34]

Why it matters. Whether this is a product or a feature is the open question of the round.

The car-parts maker raised its stake in Yuma Energy, a Bengaluru firm that swaps batteries for electric two- and three-wheelers. Yuma has completed more than 60 million swaps and has about 100,000 batteries out on its network. [35]

Why it matters. Swapping avoids charging time, which is the real constraint on small delivery vehicles.

ITC Infotech will buy 22.1% of Happiest Minds for about $140m and then merge with it, aiming for $1bn of revenue by 2028; the deal takes three to eight months. Coforge bought Encora for $2.3bn last year, and Persistent Systems plans to buy Germany's Nagarro for $1.1bn. [36][37]

Why it matters. AI is lowering the barrier that kept mid-sized Indian firms out of the largest contracts, so they are buying scale.

The company said it will produce checked, signed builds of the open-source Java framework Spring and the message system RabbitMQ, both of which matter to its own Tanzu products. [38]

Why it matters. Free software that thousands of companies depend on now needs somebody paid to stand behind it.

The Document Foundation led the announcement of version 26.8 of the free office suite with "professional typography, deeper support for the world's writing systems, and no artificial intelligence". [39]

Why it matters. The absence of a feature is being used as the selling point.

Version 1.135 of Microsoft's code editor adds Rubber Duck, a built-in critic that reviews the main agent's plans, code and tests using a different model. It can also pick up Copilot or Claude sessions started in other apps. [40]

Why it matters. The proposed fix for an agent's blind spots is another agent.

Compose Multiplatform 1.12.0 adds an experimental server using MCP, the standard that lets AI tools drive other software. A coding agent can now reload the app, take screenshots, click, type and read the logs. [41]

Why it matters. The agent stops guessing whether its own change worked and looks.

Unsloth Desktop, an open-source app from the brothers Daniel and Michael Han, runs models on your own machine and also trains them, with image generation and multi-step workflows, on Windows, macOS and Linux. [42]

Why it matters. Training, not just running, is now something you can do without a cloud bill.

The tool that runs AI agents added a rebuilt browser interface, shared cloud sessions, tighter walls around what an agent can touch, permissions by job role, and a record of what it did. The Register called it glitter on a slow-burning security fire, because most of the protection is still left for the user to switch on. [43][44]

Why it matters. The gap is not what the software can do but what it does if nobody configures it.

Parse 5, a 2.3-billion-parameter model that turns PDFs and slides into structured text, scores below GPT-5.5, Opus 4.8 and Gemini 3.5 Flash on Cohere's own published benchmark. It is priced at $1.50 per 1,000 pages. [45]

Why it matters. A vendor publishing a benchmark it loses is rare, and it moves the argument to cost per page.

Portable Computer keeps the model, the files and the work on the machine, charges no usage credits for local work, and asks permission before sending any step to a cloud model. [46]

Why it matters. Nvidia spent two years selling data centres and is now selling the machine that avoids one.

At the Hot Chips conference Nvidia presented the Groq 3 LPX rack, which came from its $20bn purchase of Groq in December 2025. It published a first outside benchmark: 3,431 output tokens a second on a reasoning task, against 870 for the next-fastest public service. [47]

Why it matters. It is an independently measured number, which most chip and model claims are not.

Wildcat Lake uses UCIe, the shared industry standard for wiring together the separate pieces of silicon inside one chip, to cut cost. Intel says the part could not have existed without it. [48]

Why it matters. The open standard turns up first at the budget end, where there is no money for a private one.

The Mac Mini and Mac Studio return with the M6, Apple's first 2-nanometre chip, and the M5 Ultra. The M6 Mac Mini costs $200 more than the model it replaces. [49]

Why it matters. Both machines were hard to buy for most of the year, and the price went up rather than down.

Apple confirmed the date of its annual launch in Cupertino, with a foldable iPhone rumoured alongside new watches and AirPods. [50]

Why it matters. A foldable would be Apple's first answer to a shape Samsung and Google have sold for years.

The Galaxy S26 FE keeps last year's 6.7-inch screen, 4,900mAh battery and triple rear camera. The processor is a year newer and the selfie camera is slightly wider. [51]

Why it matters. The upgrades are software features already shipped on this year's dearer Samsungs.

Rising memory and storage prices have thinned the budget laptop market, and older cheap models are being discontinued faster than new ones arrive. [52]

Why it matters. The AI build-out's appetite for memory has reached the cheapest shelf in the shop.

The US Justice Department took down two tools, QTRouter and QScan, which it says a contractor called Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology sold to state hackers, giving them access to networks of hacked internet-connected devices. [53]

Why it matters. The tools hid where attacks came from, so naming them matters more than seizing the domains.

CISA, the US cyber-defence agency, said attacks largely targeted programmable logic controllers - the small computers that open valves and run pumps - made by Rockwell, Schneider Electric and others, at water providers in Michigan, Minnesota and at least five other states. [54]

Why it matters. Those controllers were built to be reachable over a network, not to be defended on one.

Researchers at VulnCheck found three implants in firmware from Shenzhen Zhibotong, known as ZBT, whose routers are sold worldwide under many names. One starts at boot, disguises itself as a normal Linux process and runs commands from a fixed server with full control. [55]

Why it matters. Buyers usually cannot tell they own a ZBT router, so they cannot check.

Police in Perth charged two men with more than a dozen hacking and money-laundering offences over TeamPCP. The FBI's cyber chief said the group broke into more than a thousand organisations by tampering with popular open-source projects. [56]

Why it matters. Poisoning a shared code package reaches every organisation that installs it.

The US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said a ransomware group - criminals who steal or lock up data and demand payment - reached a standalone system holding information about the targets of its investigations. It says the system was shut down when the breach was found. [57]

Why it matters. The people at risk are the subjects of investigations, not the agency's staff.

Nvidia registered an employee political action committee with the US Federal Election Commission, taking voluntary contributions of up to $5,000 a year to fund politicians whose positions favour it. It told staff that decisions by the US Congress could have substantial consequences for AI. [58]

Why it matters. It is the standard step after lobbying, taken by the company most exposed to export rules.

Hy4 preview uses a mixture-of-experts design - many specialist sub-models, of which only about 49 billion parameters' worth run on any one request - aimed at software engineering, research and financial analysis. [59]

Why it matters. It is free to download, which is the part American labs cannot answer on price.

Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Flash handles text and images, can hold 262,144 tokens of text at once, and cost less to train [60]. IBM's Granite 4.2 comes in 3-, 8- and 30-billion-parameter versions built to be self-hosted, with the two larger ones trained to use a terminal and search the web [61].

Why it matters. This week's releases are all aimed at hardware you own rather than an API you rent.

Nvidia published optimisations for DeepSeek's V4 Flash and Alibaba's Qwen 3.8, and in the same week told US regulators in a filing that restrictions on Chinese-developed AI could hurt its business. [62]

Why it matters. The chips are American, the popular free models increasingly are not, and Nvidia sells to whoever runs them.