Tech, in brief

A US federal judge, Leonie Brinkema, refused to make Google sell AdX, the auction at the centre of its advertising business. [1][2]

The same judge ruled in April 2025 that Google holds illegal monopolies in two advertising markets, and that it unlawfully locked publishers into AdX. [1]

AdX runs the instant auction that fills the ad slots on a web page. Publishers pay Google a 20% fee on every sale. [1][4]

The US justice department and a group of states sued in 2023 and asked for the sale. They argued Google cannot be trusted to run AdX. [1][4]

Google argued a forced sale would be technically difficult and cause a long, painful transition that would hurt its customers. [1]

The judge instead adopted most of the behaviour changes the two sides had proposed, with her own modifications. [3]

Nobody outside the case knows what those changes are. Her order is sealed for 14 days so both sides can ask for redactions. [2][3][4][6]

Reported possibilities include stopping Google favouring itself in its own auctions, and giving rival tools the live data Google sees. [3]

This is the third time in a row a US judge has refused to break up a large technology company. [1]

In the other two, one judge let Meta keep Instagram and WhatsApp, and another let Google keep Chrome, pointing to new competition from AI firms. [1][2]

The newest public figure for the size of the business is old. Google's Ad Manager was 4.1% of revenue and 1.5% of operating profit in 2020. [1]

Google's vice-president for regulatory affairs, Lee-Anne Mulholland, said the company was pleased the court rejected breaking apart its tools. [4][5]

Once the final opinion is published, Google can appeal the underlying finding that it is a monopoly at all. [3]

Why it matters. The next real test is what the unsealed order actually requires - watch whether it forces Google to hand rival tools the same live auction data it can see itself.

Anthropic released Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 on Tuesday, the same model in two forms. Reading from cached context costs 75% less, and customers can now keep monitoring data on their own machines. [7][8]

Why it matters. Cheap cached context is what makes an assistant that runs all day affordable to leave running.

Google released Gemini 3.8 Flash on Wednesday. It costs $0.75 per million tokens of text put in - a token is about three-quarters of a word - until the end of the year, against a list price of $1.50. [9]

Why it matters. Google has not shipped a top-tier Pro model since early 2026, and the introductory price outlives most models.

Meta released Muse Spark 1.3 and has not decided whether to publish its weights, the numbers that let anyone run a model themselves. Its chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, called it competitive with Anthropic's and OpenAI's best. [10][11]

Why it matters. In Europe the weights decision is also a legal one: the AI Act excuses genuinely open models from part of its rules.

OpenAI said Astra is the first of its models to reach what the company calls a critical level of cyber ability - it can find and exploit unknown software flaws without a person guiding it. Those abilities go only to a private group of testers at launch. [12][13]

Why it matters. OpenAI graded itself against its own framework, and did not name the testers or say how they were chosen.

Microsoft said on Wednesday it will report quarterly sales for Azure, its cloud computing business, for the first time, and will cut its reporting segments from three to two. [14]

Why it matters. Amazon has published its cloud revenue since 2015; Microsoft chose this quarter to start.

Email, search, file sync and Teams calendars failed across Microsoft 365 from 31 August into 1 September. Microsoft traced it to a misconfiguration in a shared sign-in system used by several services. [15][16]

Why it matters. One shared sign-in component took down services that look entirely separate to the people using them.

Australia's largest telecoms company said an outside investigation found a fault in its network timing system caused the mobile outage in early July. [17]

Why it matters. Timing is the invisible layer a phone network runs on; when the clocks disagree, calls fail.

A court in Dongguan froze Nexperia's shareholdings in four of its Chinese subsidiaries, worth about $300 million, until August 2029. Wingtech, the Chinese group stripped of control of the Dutch chipmaker last year, brought the case and wants 8 billion yuan. [18][19]

Why it matters. Nexperia makes the basic chips inside cars, and it cannot sell or restructure those units while the freeze holds.

The EU's General Court rejected Opera's challenge to the European Commission's decision not to treat Microsoft's Edge browser as a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act. [20]

Why it matters. Edge passed the user-number threshold and was excused anyway, on Microsoft's argument that it is not an important gateway.

The European Commission designated ChatGPT a very large online search engine, and Reddit and Roblox very large online platforms, under the Digital Services Act. Each passed 45 million monthly users in the EU, and ChatGPT has four months to comply. [21][22]

Why it matters. It is the first AI chatbot brought inside the EU's toughest tier of online-harms rules.

The group Protect Democracy sued to force the US government to publish how it reviews frontier AI models before release. It says the framework's text, its participants and its legal basis are all unpublished. [23]

Why it matters. A safety review nobody can read tells you only that somebody with the power to approve did.

The US is preparing an export rule to stop Chinese firms renting advanced AI computers remotely through Thailand and Singapore, which are not covered by the current controls. It could be shown to industry as soon as September. [24]

Why it matters. Rules about shipping chips do not cover logging in to them from somewhere else.

Rest of World traced Taiwan's investigations into Chinese chip firms operating behind locally registered front companies. A 2021 raid hit one whose Taiwanese and Nanjing arms shared an English name; an engineer there was paid double the industry average. [25]

Why it matters. What is being recruited is the know-how inside people, which no export control reaches.

South Korean semiconductor exports rose 209% from a year earlier to a record $46.65 billion in August, 47.5% of the country's goods exports that month. One analyst put chips at nearly 80% of August's export growth. [26]

Why it matters. An economy that grows on one product has to keep hoping that product does not stall abruptly.

A preliminary survey found 80% of Micron's Taiwan union members backing a strike over pay. They want a profit-sharing scheme like the bonuses paid at Samsung and SK hynix. [27]

Why it matters. The memory shortage made the companies rich, and the people running the plants want a share of it.

A UBS analyst wrote that China's lithography tools - the machines that print circuit patterns onto silicon - are at roughly where the Dutch maker ASML stood in 2004. [28]

Why it matters. It is one analyst's estimate, and it is the clearest public figure anyone has offered on the size of the gap.

Texas holds 474 gigawatts of grid connection requests and no way to know how many are genuine. Where utilities started charging, demand vanished: Exelon's pipeline of likely projects fell 40% after it began asking developers to put money down, and an Ohio utility's fell by more than half after study fees of up to $100,000. [29]

Why it matters. Grid operators plan power plants years ahead against numbers that include projects nobody intends to build.

Governor Josh Shapiro said too many data centre developers do not care about the communities they build in. He signed an order on 18 August requiring stricter permits above 25 megawatts and details of who will actually use each site. [30][29]

Why it matters. Pennsylvania has more than 100 proposed data centres and 20 permit applications.

PwC estimates AI data centre spending could reach $31.6 trillion by 2050, more than railways, electrification or the internet each needed. Unlike those, the hardware is replaced every four to six years. [31]

Why it matters. A railway built once carries trains for a century. This is a bill that arrives again and again.

Equinix, which has rented data-centre space since 1998 and now houses equipment for more than 10,500 customers, struck a deal with Nvidia on Wednesday. [32]

Why it matters. The oldest layer of the industry is the one nearly everyone building AI has to come through.

SpaceX began making turbine blades and vanes at a foundry in Bastrop, Texas, to speed up the gas generators powering its AI data centres. Elon Musk said the move cuts generator delays by about 18 months. [33][34]

Why it matters. Waiting for a grid connection is now slower than building your own power station.

NextDC said it used 2.40 litres of water per kilowatt-hour in the year to June, up from 2.25, while profit beat forecasts. [35]

Why it matters. Cooling is where a data centre's demand stops being electricity and becomes water.

Reuters found a shortage of transformers is now limiting how fast data centres can be delivered, lifting makers of power and cooling equipment alongside the chip firms. [36]

Why it matters. A transformer steps grid voltage down to what machines can use, and very few companies make them.

OpenAI will cut Cursor's customers off from its coding models in November. It cited concerns about whether SpaceX, which now owns Cursor's maker, will keep to its terms of service. [37]

Why it matters. A tool you rely on can lose its engine because of a fight between its owner and its supplier.

AfterQuery, which pays skilled professionals to produce training data for AI labs, raised at a $3.2 billion valuation five months after a round at $300 million. Its founders are 22 and 23. [38]

Why it matters. A Y Combinator partner called it the fastest any of its startups has reached a billion-dollar valuation.

Wonderful, which sells software that coordinates AI agents inside companies, more than doubled its valuation to $5 billion. Insight Partners led again, and Salesforce invested for the first time. [39][40]

Why it matters. It began as a customer-service tool for non-English-speaking markets and now works in more than 35 countries.

The betting-market company Polymarket raised $1 billion in a round led by 1789 Capital, valuing it at $21 billion. [41]

Why it matters. Bloomberg had reported it in early talks earlier in August at a valuation above $20 billion.

AIR raised $50 million to find the AI agents running inside a company, vet the tools and add-ons they use, and block the ones that fail its checks. [42]

Why it matters. Agents install software the way an operating system does, without the oversight an operating system gets.

Empirik launched with $21 million, incubated at Sequoia by two people who previously ran infrastructure at Rubrik and VMware, to forecast system failures before they happen. [43]

Why it matters. It launched in the same week as a two-day Microsoft 365 failure.

Thyme Care, which guides cancer patients through treatment remotely, raised $125 million led by Morgan Health, with Humana and CVS Health Ventures, at a valuation above $2 billion. [44]

Why it matters. That roughly doubles what it was worth less than a year ago.

Reliance Jio opened JioPC to anyone with an internet connection, not just its own broadband subscribers. It streams a virtual computer with up to eight processors and 16GB of memory, from about $11 for two months. [45]

Why it matters. India had more than 65 million PCs in use last year, many of them too old for current software.

Magna, a car-parts maker, put another $35 million into Yuma Energy, which swaps batteries for electric two- and three-wheelers in India. Yuma has done more than 60 million swaps with about 100,000 batteries. [46]

Why it matters. Swapping sidesteps charging time, which is the thing that keeps a delivery rider off the road.

Reform UK pledged to abolish the UK's version of GDPR, the data-protection law, and replace it with a lighter one modelled on New Zealand's, where the maximum fine is NZ$50,000. [47]

Why it matters. The party is currently being sued under the law it wants to remove.

Sandhya Devanathan, Meta's vice-president for India and Southeast Asia, is leaving after more than a decade. She will run OpenAI's consumer growth, enterprise sales and regulatory work across Southeast Asia and Australia. [48]

Why it matters. She was inside Meta's decision-making in India while the company faced growing scrutiny there.

Google Research and Technion found frontier models hold 95-98% of tested facts internally but fail to retrieve them while answering. Up to 65% of the missed facts came back when the model was given longer to think. [49]

Why it matters. If recall rather than knowledge is the limit, then a bigger model is the wrong fix.

The OpenClaw agent project shipped version 2.0, rewriting installation, memory, plugins and permissions at once, and adding sandboxing, approval controls and auditing. It said the pace of work had outgrown its foundation. [50][51]

Why it matters. A Gartner analyst said agent security cannot be handled layer by layer, because those layers share one identity and one authority.

Reuters found China's humanoid robots are too slow and error-prone for most factory work, with manufacturing capacity far ahead of real demand. One researcher put the hard part at the last centimetre, sometimes the last millimetre. [52]

Why it matters. Capacity built for a market that does not exist yet usually ends in a painful consolidation.

The US imposed tariffs on imported drones and their parts, taking effect in September with more on components in 2027, and tightened rules on foreign-made advanced robots. Both cite national security. [53]

Why it matters. China still holds the manufacturing scale that the tariffs are trying to price out.

Vietnam's prime minister, Le Minh Hung, asked Chinese firms investing in the country to move toward AI, 5G and semiconductors rather than low-value assembly. [54]

Why it matters. Vietnam has absorbed a lot of relocated manufacturing and wants the part of it that pays more.

Hugging Face's robotics arm began selling Microduck, a $399 robot with a camera, a lidar sensor and motion sensors. Its behaviours can be trained in simulation and loaded onto the machine, and the training code is public. [55]

Why it matters. Robotics research has mostly needed hardware costing more than a car.