The PlayStation maker usually holds on to a year or more of exclusivity to its consoles when releasing a single-player title published by it on other platforms. The title was released on PlayStation 5 in June 2025.

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is coming to PC on March 19, 2025. Sony's in-house porting specialist studio, Nixxes Software, will be handling the development of the port. Check out the announcement trailer below:

"Step back into Sam’s boots as he takes on a new adventure to connect Australia to the Chiral network," says Sony, describing the sequel. "Beset on all sides by enemies, Sam will have to shoot, sneak, and sprint his way out of trouble, as well as survive natural disasters such as earthquakes, sandstorms and forest fires, and brave the ruinous Timefall as he strives to save humanity from extinction once again. The Social Strand System returns, connecting players from around the globe allowing you to shape someone else’s world, and have their actions shape yours."

There will be some PC-exclusive features landing with the port, too. This will include ultra-wide monitor support (going up to 32:9) for both gameplay and cutscenes, as well as upscaling tech from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel. Uncapped frame rates and frame generation tech were also confirmed for the PC version today.

Outside of keyboard and mouse controls, full support for the DualSense controller will be available too, including its haptic feedback support. As for sound, "3D Audio via Dolby Access, DTS Sound Unbound, or Windows Sonic for Headphones" has been confirmed.

Sony is also tempting PC players to make a PlayStation account to gain exclusive cosmetics as well as enable the PlayStation overlay and Trophies in the game.

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach pre-orders will be available across Steam and the Epic Games Store later today.

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Posted Friday 13 February 2026 at 12:58 pm AEST (my time).

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Why it matters: Leading AI models, including Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's ChatGPT, are getting a lot better, a lot faster, and even building new products themselves.

• That excites AI optimists — and scares the hell out of several people tasked with policing their safety for society.

Driving the news: On Monday, an Anthropic researcher announced his departure, in part to write poetry about "the place we find ourselves."

• An OpenAI researcher also left this week citing ethical concerns. Another OpenAI employee, Hieu Pham, wrote on X: "I finally feel the existential threat that AI is posing."

• Jason Calacanis, tech investor and co-host of the All-In podcast, wrote on X: "I've never seen so many technologists state their concerns so strongly, frequently and with such concern as I have with AI."

• The biggest talk among the AI crowd Wednesday was entrepreneur Matt Shumer's post comparing this moment to the eve of the pandemic. It went mega-viral, gathering 56 million views in 36 hours, as he laid out the risks of AI fundamentally reshaping our jobs and lives.

Reality check: Most people at these companies remain bullish that they'll be able to steer to technology smartly without societal damage or big job loss. But the companies themselves admit the risk.

• Anthropic published a report showing that, while low risk, AI can be used in heinous crimes, including the creation of chemical weapons. This so-called "sabotage report" looked at the risks of AI without human intervention, purely on its own.

• At the same time, OpenAI dismantled its mission alignment team, which was created to ensure AGI (artificial general intelligence) benefits all of humanity, Platformer author Casey Newton reported Wednesday.

Between the lines: While the business and tech worlds are obsessed with this topic, it hardly registers in the White House and Congress.

Threat level: The latest round of warnings follows evidence that these new models can build complex products themselves and then improve their work without human intervention.

• OpenAI's last model helped train itself. Anthropic's viral Cowork tool built itself, too.

• These revelations — in addition to signs that AI threatens big categories of the economy, including software or legal services — prompted a lot of real-time soul-searching.

The bottom line: The AI disruption is here, and its impact is happening faster and more broadly than many anticipated.

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The aptly named Gravitino Coil is a new module that attaches to the ever-useful multi-tool. It lets players manipulate certain heavy objects to easily carry them or shoot at Sentinels while on foot. Of course, this is not simply a tool to play around with, as Hello Games has added an entire industrial waste collection gameplay loop to accompany it.

"Manipulate gravity itself with the new Gravitino Coil attachment for the Multi-Tool," explains Hello Games. "Magnetise, repel, toss, transport and arrange physical objects - to harvest valuable resources through heavy-duty waste collection, or simply for the joy of it!"

Some planets will now have heaps of industrial waste, which is where players can stumble upon salvageable scrap. Giving this scrap to a Waste Processing Plant will net players brand-new rewards and recycled resources.

Getting large amounts of scrap to these plants is no easy task, which is where the trucking part comes in. Players can now customize their Colossus land vehicles with a new array of attachments to essentially transform them into trucks, capable of carrying massive loads of scrap.

"Aspiring scrap-hunters can install a tippable flatbed on the Colossus Exocraft, for easy transportation of large hauls," adds the developer. "An electromagnetic containment field minimises cargo loss while navigating uneven terrain - but drive carefully up steep slopes!"

No Man's Sky: Remnant update is now available across PC (Steam and Xbox app), Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Game Pass, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and both Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 systems. Find the patch notes here.

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Posted Thursday 12 February 2026 at 12:05 pm AEST (my time).

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Microsoft has ramped up its efforts on the generative AI front over the past few years, integrating the cutting-edge technology across its products and services. However, it's now apparent that AI requires an incredible amount of electricity, computing power, and cooling water to remain operational.

As it turns out, the software giant has seemingly identified a new and effective way to build data centers with new high-temperature superconductors (HTS). The materials foster the flow of electricity with zero resistance and save space, bolstering layout efficiency for data centers (via The Verge).

These data centers currently use copper wires, which do conduct electricity efficiently. However, HTS cables are reportedly better at the job. What's more, their zero-resistance conduction means the energy lost during the process is significantly reduced. HTS cables are also lighter and far more compact.

The rapid construction of data centers worldwide to fuel AI development has sparked backlash from local communities, largely due to the negative impacts they bring.

In 2024, a report suggested that Microsoft and Google's electricity consumption surpassed the power usage of over 100 countries. As a result, people within close proximity to Microsoft data centers are likely to face a wide range of challenges, including high electricity bills, reduced access to water, pollution, and gentrification.

Until now, HTS cables have seen limited adoption across the industry, largely due to their complexity. There's also the cost implication side of things. For instance, while HTS cables promise zero resistance to electrical current flow, the broader system beyond the cables still needs to be cooled.

Part of its components (HTS tape) are also from rare-earth barium copper oxide material, which is still largely concentrated in China. While speaking to The Verge, experts and analysts warned that Microsoft might be forced to increase the manufacturing of the tape to make it more affordable.

Back in August of last year, industry sources reported that Apple was planning to release a budget-friendly MacBook powered by an iPhone-class chip. At the time, the report came as a surprise, given that Apple’s Mac lineup traditionally relies on its powerful M-series processors.

Using an iPhone chip in a MacBook would signal a shift toward a product aimed at emerging markets and first-time Mac buyers who are unwilling or unable to pay premium prices. Apple has already experimented with this strategy in the tablet segment, most notably with the 11th-generation iPad, which features the iPhone-class A16 chip.

A MacBook for those who don’t want to break the bank

Last year’s report suggested that Apple’s low-cost MacBook would feature a 13-inch LCD display (12.9 inches, to be exact) and be powered by the A18 Pro SoC, the same chip used in the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max. The A18 Pro’s performance is reportedly on par with Apple’s M1 processor, which means it should offer more than enough processing power for everyday tasks and entry-level workflows. The chip is also expected to be paired with 8GB of RAM.

The report claimed that the device would enter mass production in Q3 2025 and hit store shelves in late 2025 or early 2026. A more recent report from GF Securities analyst Jeff Pu also echoed these claims.

In the latest edition of the Power On newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman added that the low-cost MacBook is expected to launch in early 2026. While he didn’t specify an exact date, he noted that the device would be unveiled in the first half of the year.

According to Gurman, this new MacBook is designed to serve as an entry point for newcomers to the Mac ecosystem and would help Apple better compete with Windows laptops and Chromebooks.

Moreover, I don’t expect Apple to spend too much time on the design of a budget-friendly MacBook. The device will probably be built based on the same chassis as the 13-inch MacBook Air. Given that students are a targeted customer group, the device is expected to be light and portable.

Since Apple is using an iPhone-class chip inside a 13-inch MacBook, the device could have significant unused internal space that may be repurposed for a larger battery. Apple claims that its 13-inch MacBook with the M4 chip delivers up to 18 hours of video streaming and up to 15 hours of wireless web browsing. In theory, a MacBook powered by an iPhone-class chip could extend these figures by an additional two to three hours.

As for pricing, there are still many conflicting rumors circulating online. Earlier reports suggested that the low-cost MacBook would be priced between $599 and $699, while more recent reports claim the device could cost as much as $750. The cheapest laptop Apple sells now is the 13.6-inch MacBook Air with the M4 chip that costs $999 on the company’s website.

What are your thoughts on a low-cost MacBook powered by an iPhone-class chip? Would you consider buying one if it hit store shelves? Let us know in the comments.

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Posted Tuesday 10 February 2026 at 4:17 am AEST (my time).

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New York’s state legislature is set to consider a pair of bills that would require labels on AI-generated content and would put a three-year pause on new data center construction.

The New York Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Requirements in News Act (NY FAIR News Act, for short) would require that any news “substantially composed, authored, or created through the use of generative artificial intelligence” carry a disclaimer. It would also require that any content created using AI be reviewed and approved by a human with “editorial control” before being published.

Beyond that, the bill requires organizations to disclose to newsroom employees how and when AI is being used. And it would call for safeguards that prevent confidential information, especially about sources, from being accessed by AI.

Meanwhile, S9144 “imposes a moratorium on the issuance of permits for new data centers” for at least three years. The bill cites rising electric and gas rates for residential, commercial, and industrial customers. National Grid New York says that requests for “large load” connections have tripled in just one year, with at least 10 gigawatts of demand expected to be added in the next five years. There are already over 130 data centers in New York, according to Data Center Map.

The state just approved a 9-percent rate increase for Con Edison customers over the next three years, and electric bills are soaring around the country as datacenters put strain on the grid.

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Posted Monday 9 February 2026 at 11:32 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of January) 461

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This year, we started our Apple Rewind series to give you a monthly scoop of everything related to the Cupertino giant. But there's much more happening in the technology world beyond Apple's walled garden. We thought, why not bring back our good old series to give you a weekly dose of tech?

Say hi to "7 Days", which is back on track after years of no show. This week was full of tech drama, a platter of juicy announcements, a dash of controversy, and rumors about the upcoming foldable iPhone. Come on, Apple, it's been ages. Anyway, let's get started.

Long live Adobe Animate

Adobe might have assumed it would get away with it, but creators and animation professionals united against the company after it announced the demise of Adobe Animate. The popular 2D animation software has been around for 30 years and remains an important driver of creative projects.

The company didn't take long to begin damage control and announced that Animate will remain in Maintenance mode.

Loose lips sink ships

The name Jeffrey Epstein is all over the place because the convicted sex offender had ties with numerous high-profile individuals. However, something raised the Windows community's eyebrows. Documents released by the Department of Justice revealed that Microsoft's former Windows chief, Steven Sinofsky, was in extensive contact with Epstein.

Sinofsky, who was a potential CEO before his departure in 2012, shared confidential internal information over email, including real-time sales data, manufacturing projections, and retailer margin structures. He reportedly received advice from the financier to pursue a $20 million retirement package.

We got Spotify selling books before GTA 6

Spotify is doing whatever it can to stay in your good books, literally, this time. From audiobooks, podcasts to direct messages, Spotify is now selling books in partnership with Bookshop.org to go old school. Moreover, its app has got the powers to sync your current page to the audio version.

Upgrading its lyrics game, Spotify rolled out lyrics translation worldwide for all Free and Premium users. However, Premium subscribers also get the lyrics tagged along when they make a song offline in the app.

The streaming giant launched a new "About the song" feature in beta for select users, providing swipeable story cards with behind-the-scenes details. Its fresh rules for developers now require premium accounts for developer mode API access.

Google Meet x MS Teams

Google and Microsoft might be rivals, but they know creating platforms that don't work in harmony isn't a good idea. The search giant announced that Google Meet and Teams are now interoperable, meaning you can join a Meet call from Teams and vice versa. However, the story comes with an asterisk: only a limited number of devices are currently supported.

There is more on the roadmap for Teams users. Soon, Microsoft will give users the option to hide the entire meeting control toolbar to free up extra screen real estate during meetings. The Redmond giant also made Viva Engage communities available directly inside Teams.

You can read about all the new features Microsoft added to Teams in January 2026.

What's your battery?

System76's open-source desktop environment, COSMIC Desktop, now includes a new option to display the battery percentage directly in the panel. COSMIC 1.0.5 also introduced drag-and-drop support to its Files app, and it only shows the "Open" button when you select something that the system can actually open.

Tax-free data centers

Data centers are the backbone of the modern internet. AI products and services are becoming popular, and we are seeing more data centers than ever. The Indian government has announced a sweeping tax holiday for foreign data center operators serving customers outside the country.

This essentially means that demanding workloads such as training AI models, inference, and serving customers outside India would become tax-free. However, the foreign giants must route services for Indian customers through a local reseller entity, which will be taxed as usual.

The biggest data centers in the world

Ivan Jenic took some time out this week to find out the biggest AI data centers in the US owned by Big Tech and curated them into a Top 10 list. The top spot is held by Google's Columbus Cluster in Ohio. Home to Gemini models, it has a total power capacity of 1 gigawatt to support hundreds of thousands of TPUs.

That said, a hard pill to swallow is that AI is slowly replacing conventional web. Ivan's interesting editorial piece discusses how Google's AI Overviews is killing web search, noting that the click-through rates for top ranking websites have dropped by 58%.

TikTok is again in hot water

The short video platform TikTok is already at the center of significant legal drama, with ongoing threats of a ban in the US. Now, lawmakers in Europe are targeting the social media giant in a new legal battle. It's been reported that several of TikTok's core features are intentionally designed to be "addictive."

Everything comes at a price

It's not new for users to make efforts to access premium features for free. And sometimes, companies unintentionally make it easier by leaving loopholes. That's what happened with YouTube Premium: free users used third-party browsers and extensions to trick it into playing videos in the background. But YouTube said it "updated the experience" to make sure freeloaders aren't enjoying premium benefits.

YouTube's AI-powered automatic dubbing feature is now available to everyone with some new upgrades. It's testing a new Lip Sync feature for AI dubbing to make it sound more natural.

The AI kill switch

AI is everywhere, and web browsers aren't spared. While Google Chrome is the unofficial flag bearer for AI features, Mozilla Firefox also offers several. But Mozilla realized AI may not be everyone's cup of tea yet and decided to add a single button (Firefox 148 Beta 11) to disable all of its generative AI features.

Firefox 147.0.3 was also released last week, with fixes for broken UI on Windows, buggy pop-ups, and context menus on Linux. Speaking of others, Vivaldi 7.8 was released for Android and iOS, featuring pinned tabs and private search.

Apple's foldable iPhone might remind you of the iPhone mini

It's been forever since Apple has been working on the foldable iPhone when Samsung has been in the game for over six years. Latest rumors shed more light on the iPhone Fold's physical features, suggesting it could resemble an iPhone mini that unfolds to become an iPad mini.

It will have a Touch ID sensor on the power button, located on the right side of the device alongside the Camera Control button. However, the volume buttons will be on the top rather than the left.

In other news, Apple released Xcode 26.3, which supports coding agents such as OpenAI Codex and Claude for writing and editing in Swift. These agents can understand context, plan multi-step tasks, and execute them.

Our Apple Rewind January edition highlights several additional announcements from Apple, featuring the AirTag 2 and some new competition for Adobe.

It's bezness

Google's parent Alphabet made a lot of money in its previous quarter that ended on December 31, 2025. Its cloud division became the showstopper, with quarterly revenue reaching $17.7 billion. Gemini, Search, and other businesses further helped Alphabet surpass $400 billion in annual revenue. The search giant's consumer services, including Google One and YouTube Premium, have more than 325 million paid subscribers.

OpenAI gets a new frontier

The ChatGPT-maker launched a new enterprise platform this week to build, deploy, and manage AI agents, called Frontier. These AI agents will have shared context, onboarding, hands-on learning with feedback, and clear permissions and boundaries.

Alongside Apple's Xcode support, OpenAI launched a freshly-baked Codex app for macOS, giving a UI-based alternative to people who relied on the command-line interface to use the ChatGPT-powered code editing tool. Also released this week is GPT-5.3-Codex, OpenAI's most capable agentic coding model to date.

JetBrains says goodbye to X11

Speaking of IDE's, JetBrains announced that its IntelliJ-based IDEs will automatically run natively on Wayland in supported desktop environments, starting with the 2026.1 Early Access Program (EAP) releases.

It wasn't a pinky promise

Some drama unfolded earlier this week. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang stated that the company has no obligation to invest in OpenAI. This came after OpenAI announced last year that NVIDIA plans to invest $100 million over time, allowing the AI giant to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of AI data centers powered by millions of NVIDIA chips.

However, Huang told the reporters that OpenAI "invited us to invest up to $100 billion, and of course, we were, we were very happy and honored that they invited us, but we will invest one step at a time.”

Don't blame us

NVIDIA had its share of issues related to recent Windows 11 updates. Users reported performance drops, black screens, graphical artifacts, and other issues during gameplay on NVIDIA's forums. While the company sought solutions, it said the January 2026 Patch Tuesday update (KB5074109) could be the culprit and recommended that users uninstall it.

Elon Musk buys his own company

Both SpaceX and xAI were founded by the world's richest man, Elon Musk, who decided to consolidate his businesses. SpaceX bought xAI in an all-stock transaction that values the combined company at $1.25 trillion.

Musk called it the "most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth." But the tech mogul is also vocal about the belief that money can't happiness.

Here's some more AI news that came out over the week:

• Anthropic commits to no-ads policy for Claude AI

• Amazon takes on ChatGPT as Alexa+ rolls out to all U.S. users

• You can now give AI agents access to your OneDrive

• Google expands Gemini in Chrome to Chromebook Plus devices

   

Social media where only bots are allowed

Evil malicious bots have always been a menace on the web and the rise of AI has only made them more sophisticated. But what if we create a virtual habitat where only bots are allowed to interact with each other

Moltbook is a social media platform that does exactly that, and humans are only allowed the be there as observers. It's like Reddit, but for AI agents, which can post "submolts." However, the Moltbook story took a wrong turn when a security researcher found that Moltbook lacks basic rate limiting, potentially opening doors for someone to create an absurd number of accounts.

Researchers, who managed to hack into the platform, found that Moltbook exposed thousands of emails and over 1.5 million API keys. The platform's creator Octane AI CEO Matt Schlicht, has said on record that he relied on AI for its coding and "did not write one line of code."

Done with yelling "Hey, Google"

Google has been refining its smart home app after facing backlash a while ago. The latest Google Home update brings support for smart programmable buttons. Something that's already available on other smart home platforms such as Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, and Samsung SmartThings.

These are physical buttons that support various functions, including starter only, covering single, multi-press, long press, and long press release.

In other smart home news, Ring has expanded its Search Party feature to help find lost dogs. You can use the service to find your furry friend even if you don't have a Ring camera after filing a lost pet report through the Ring app.

Easy as pie, sky high

Soaring memory prices aren't sparing the Raspberry Pi. That's why the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced another price hike for its single-board computers, including Raspberry Pi 4/5 and Compute Module 4/5. For instance, 16GB models saw a $60 surge, pushing the Raspberry Pi 5 beyond $200.

Whisper-quiet experience

CHUWI announced its new mini PC, the AuBox X1, promising a whisper-quiet experience. It's powered by the Intel Core Ultra 5 226V Lunar Lake processor, 16GB LPDDR5X RAM, and a 512GB PCIe Gen3 SSD.

It qualifies as a Copilot+ PC, giving you access to local AI-powered features such as Recall, Windows Studio Effects, semantic search, and more. CHUWI said that AuBox X1 will cost between $600 and $700 when it arrives in March 2026.

Better late than never

LibreOffice 26.2 arrived this week with several long-awaited features. It brings automatic JSON and XML mapping to spreadsheets, along with full Markdown support, and enhanced multi-user capabilities for Base databases.

Neowin's 2025 Readerboard

We published the results of our year-long fun polls asking Neowin forum members about the types of hardware and software they use. For instance, AMD led the way, with 54.55% of respondents selecting it as their preferred desktop CPU vendor.

What happened at Microsoft this week

Our most trending Microsoft stories this week were about Windows. January 2026 was a disastrous month for the company, and issues with recent updates prevented Windows PCs from shutting down.

You should consider installing the recent non-security update (KB5074105) if you have been experiencing File Explorer issues. The update addresses the issue where Explorer.exe may stop responding when you first sign in to your PC. Additionally, Microsoft released KB5074105 for Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2, providing an additional layer of security for system files.

Read Taras' latest Microsoft Weekly roundup to catch up on the latest news from the Redmond giant.

Your data might have been exposed

Popular publishing platform Substack recently confirmed a data breach occurred in October 2025, exposing user data such as email addresses and phone numbers, but not financial information or passwords.

Substack said it has fixed the specific problem and is investing in measures to prevent future mishaps. However, it was reported that a database containing 697,313 records was leaked online.

Popular image-hosting platform Flickr was also hit by a data breach, exposing emails, location data, and other information. Flickr began notifying users about a security issue affecting one of its third-party email service providers.

Valve doesn't have enough steam

Valve failed to reveal the pricing and launch date for its Steam hardware lineup announced last year. While the company is determined to meet its "first half of the year" launch goal, it blamed industry-wide memory shortage as the reason it can't announce pricing and launch dates yet.

In a separate update, Valve published its Hardware & Software Survey results, noting that over 66% of its users are running Windows 11, and about 28% are still on Windows 10.

Epic Games plans launcher revamp

Epic Games, the force behind Fortnite, said it wants to deliver "long-requested features and deeper platform improvements" this year for its launcher. The company has plans to rebuild its launcher for a summer launch, involving architecture upgrades for the Epic Games Store. It also surprised users by announcing that a new cross-platform library for PC and mobile will arrive later this year.

GeForce NOW turns 6

NVIDIA is celebrating the sixth birthday of its cloud gaming service, GeForce Now, this month. The chipmaker added 24 games to its supported titles list, including the tactical first-person shooter Delta Force and the top-down PUBG spin-off, Blindspot.

You can also check out the latest Weekend PC Game Deals, featuring specials from Doom, Borderlands, STALKER, and others.

Switch is the new king

Nintendo Switch has become the company's best selling console ever, dethroning its older sibling Nintendo DS. Year-end holiday promotions in 2025 helped the original Switch surpass the DS's 154.02 million units sold, pushing the numbers to 155.37 million units.

What's on Xbox?

AMD CEO Lisa Su gave people some tea on the expected launch of the next-gen Xbox console. During the latest earnings call, Su said AMD's work on a semi-custom SoC for Xbox is progressing well and that a launch could occur in 2027.

Microsoft revealed the first wave of titles for Xbox Game Pass in February, including high-profile releases like High on Life 2 and Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii.

Obsidian Entertainment wants to speed up its Xbox game development, reducing it to three- or four-year development cycles. However, the Microsoft-owned developer only has a 280-person team. It's considering some old tricks, such as reusing previous game assets and outsourcing.

Nintendo Switch 2 is getting three major Xbox gaming titles in the coming weeks, and Xbox Free Play Days this weekend onboarded NBA 2K26, Civilization VI, and other 2K hits.

Here are some more gaming stories released throughout the week:

• Epic Games is rebuilding its launcher to make it "feel good to use"

• GTA VI marketing kicking off this summer says Take-Two, holding firm to release date

• Poker Night at the Inventory is getting a remaster, bringing back the delisted Telltale game

• Sony unveils Horizon Hunters Gathering, a multiplayer take on the Horizon universe

• Puzzle game Botany Manor is free to claim on the Epic Games Store this week

• ARC Raiders' second character wipe is incoming, and with even greater rewards

From the review corner

Steven published his review of the REDMAGIC 11 Pro this week, which is the spiritual successor to last year's REDMAGIC 10S Pro. Starting at $749, the gaming-focused smartphone offers a long list of pros, including an under-display camera, a capable chip, and two-way reverse charging, but lacks an eSIM option and falls short in the overall camera experience.

Meanwhile, Pradeep's latest testing toy was the Status Audio Pro X, which sits in the same price bracket as AirPods Pro 3 and Sony WF-1000XM5. This pair of wireless earbuds delivers excellent sound quality with good detail and bass, is comfortable enough for long listening sessions, and supports multipoint Bluetooth. However, the ANC is not as good as Apple's or Sony's, and battery life could be improved.

Steven also reviewed the Creative Pebble X Plus 2.1 speaker set. Creative are perhaps best known for their SoundBlaster audio cards, but they also produce speakers. So we had a chance to try this compact, but powerful set out; you can check out his review of them here.

Signing off

So, these were some of the biggest tech news and other updates from this week. There will be more issues of our 7 Days series in the coming weeks and months, so stay tuned. You can also support Neowin by registering for a free member account or subscribing to extra member benefits, along with an ad-free tier option.

Have a great weekend!

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Posted Monday 9 February 2026 at 3:47 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of January) 461

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Paul's Hardware (1.54m subscribers)

February 8, 2026

Video length: 13m 42s

0:00 Welcome to Paul’s Tech News - February 8, 2026

1:52 RAM and Raw Material Prices Go Up More, Chinese Memory Option In Play

3:37 Valve delays Steam Frame and Steam Machine due to RAM shortage

4:43 Nvidia RTX 50 SUPER pushed back, RTX 60 mass production not til 2028

5:50 Intel Arc B770 May Not Launch At All

6:42 Intel ties AMD for most reliable CPUs in 2025 (per Puget Systems)

8:18 Nvidia's plan to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI has stalled

9:44 Firefox is adding a switch to turn AI features off

10:55 WD's new HDD tech promises 'flash-like' performance

12:07 No generative AI in GTA 6, but AI tools are “speeding up production”

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Posted Sunday 8 February 2026 at 6:24 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of January) 461

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Quick links:

1. Windows 10 and 11
2. Windows Insider Program
3. Updates are available
4. Reviews are in
5. Gaming news

Windows 11 and Windows 10

Here, we talk about everything happening around Microsoft's latest operating system in the Stable channel and preview builds: new features, removed features, controversies, bugs, interesting findings, and more. And, of course, you may find a word or two about older versions.

In case you missed it, the January 2026 non-security update for Windows 11 versions 24H2 and 25H2 introduced various useful changes, some of which were a bit unexpected. For example, Windows now has an extra security layer for system storage settings, so get ready for a UAC prompt when navigating there.

Additionally, Microsoft changed how Smart App Control works. With KB5074105, toggling Smart App Control back no longer requires reinstalling Windows from scratch. Plus, there is an important fix for the bug where the taskbar and other parts of the shell won't load.

Some known bugs remain standing, though. Microsoft confirmed that more computers cannot properly shut down after the recent Patch Tuesday updates. The company is investigating the issue and plans to release a fix soon. Also, NVIDIA is pointing fingers at Microsoft for poor gaming performance on PCs with NVIDIA graphics cards, saying that uninstalling the January 2026 Patch Tuesday update could fix poor performance and graphical glitches.

Moving from bugs, we have some interesting stats. Valve reports that Windows 11 is now installed on over 66% systems that participated in the survey, while Windows 10 is still doing strong.

Finally, Microsoft announced that a certain developer-related Windows component is becoming an optional feature, namely, .NET Framework 3.5. What is not optional anymore is the 3D Viewer app. This relic from the bygone era is now deprecated, and Microsoft will delist the app from the Microsoft Store in July. Now, if you want to preview 3D files on your PC, the company recommends using third-party apps.

We are not done with discontinued things. Recently, Microsoft announced that standalone SharePoint Online and OneDrive plans are going away. Microsoft is now steering users to Microsoft 365, as it can no longer maintain standalone plans due to increasing costs and abuse.

We are finishing this week's Windows section with an odd one: as it turned out, the former Windows chief shared internal secrets with Jeffrey Epstein (of all people), discussing with him the Surface failure, and more.

Windows Insider Program

Here is what Microsoft released for Windows Insiders this week:

Updates are available

This section covers software, firmware, and other notable updates (released and coming soon) delivering new features, security fixes, improvements, patches, and more from Microsoft and third parties.

On the browser side, we have some positive changes coming soon to Firefox. This week, Mozilla announced that Firefox would get a single AI kill switch, allowing you to get rid of AI features in a single click. Right now, this kill switch is available in Firefox Beta, Dev, and Nightly, and it is coming soon to the stable release. Additionally, Firefox 147.0.3 arrived with fixes for broken UI on Windows and other patches.

Here are other updates and releases you may find interesting:

• Microsoft brings Viva Engage communities directly into Teams.
• Microsoft has made a "crucial" accessibility improvement to Word for Windows.

• Microsoft ends Azure Blob Storage support for legacy TLS versions.

• Microsoft is focusing on making AI more reliable in Visual Studio 2026 this month.

• Microsoft Defender XDR now automatically tunes low-severity alerts.

• IT admins can now check the status of Secure Boot in Windows devices across their firm.

Reviews are in

Here is the hardware and software we reviewed this week

Steven Parker reviewed the REDMAGIC 11 Pro, a seriously powerful gaming smartphone with wireless charging, a unique design, hefty specs, and a quite reasonable price tag.

Pradeep Viswanathan reviewed the Status Audio Pro X, a pair of premium earbuds with a big focus on audio quality and unique looks.

On the gaming side

Learn about upcoming game releases, Xbox rumors, new hardware, software updates, freebies, deals, discounts, and more.

Microsoft announced a new wave of games coming to Game Pass. The first batch of games in February consists of High on Life 2, Avatar, Pirate Yakuza, Madden NFL 26, Relooted, Starand Island, and more. Some of Microsoft's games will soon be available on the Nintendo Switch 2 as well, as Microsoft confirmed three major titles coming to the Japanese handheld.

Additionally, Microsoft published its annual Xbox Transparency Report, which detailed how AI helps the company keep the platform safe, combat harmful content, reduce hate speech, and more.

New games are available for GeForce NOW as well. The service recently turned six, and to celebrate, NVIDIA added 24 new titles for owners to play in the cloud.

AMD, Microsoft's long-term hardware partner for making consoles, spilled some beans on the next-gen Xbox release. Lisa Su openly confirmed that the development of the next-generation Xbox is "progressing well to support a launch in 2027."

If you are waiting for the new Steam Machine, Valve has some bad news: the device is delayed, as hardware shortages hit the gaming company. It is still on track for the first half of the year, but the exact release date is not known yet.

The Epic Games Store is giving away the puzzle game Botany Manor; you can add it to your collection for free until next Thursday. As usual, more deals and specials are available in this week's Weekend PC Game Deals.

Other gaming news includes the following:

• Obsidian plans faster game development under Xbox using some old tricks.

• Epic Games is rebuilding its launcher to make it "feel good to use."

• Overwatch 2 overhaul sees 10 new heroes coming in, and even dropping the "2" from its name.

   

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Posted Sunday 8 February 2026 at 6:09 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of January) 461

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Google is putting billions into its new AI Mode for search. The company is currently integrating Gemini into everything from basic research to travel planning. However, not everyone is benefiting from this massive AI push.

Ahrefs conducted research in December 2025 that shows Google's AI Overviews now reduce click-through rates for top-ranking pages by 58%. When an AI Overview appears in search results, the first organic result drops from roughly 7.3% CTR to just 1.6%.

This is a rerun of the original research. Ahrefs conducted the same study in April 2025, when it measured the damage at 34.5%. In roughly eight months, the click-through rate dropped by an additional 24%.

The report further shows that when AI Overviews appear, they’re on top position 91.36% of the time. This pushes organic content to lower positions, and encourages zero-click searches, which is when people come to Google for an answer and leave without visiting any of the search results.

On the surface, AI Mode serves readers well. It provides a convenient way for everyone to get the information they're looking for without digging through multiple search results and reading long articles they don't have time for.

Google claims that AI Overviews actually enhance the search experience for higher-quality, high-intent traffic to listed sources. The company insists that these summaries are just a starting point for users and actually help people discover more useful information than before.

But real-world examples paint a different picture. Both users and publishers are giving up something valuable for these AI Overviews, although on different levels. Users are giving up control, or rather what’s left of it, while publishers are giving everything they’ve got.

The legacy media

If you're in the online publishing industry, these numbers come as no surprise. The introduction of Google AI Mode and constant volatility in search results have caused an absolute bloodbath for publishers of all sizes.

Many established websites lost traffic overnight and were essentially forced to shut down. New websites barely have a chance of breaking through if they rely solely on Google traffic. Even major publications were hit. iMore, a well-known Apple-focused website, ceased to exist last year due to a massive decrease in traffic. Even the Daily Mail saw desktop CTR fall from 25% to 2.79% when AI Overviews appeared, according to the Ahrefs report. No one is going unscathed through this transition.

Google's vision for the future of search engines, with AI summaries as answers to every question, is threatening to turn traditional websites into legacy media. Just writing this feels surreal. I could've sworn it was just yesterday that websites were handing the "legacy media title" to traditional newspapers and TV. Seems like the time for websites to receive the torch from the original legacy media is coming.

But this transition is different in a way that creates a specific, never-before-seen limbo. Major media shifts in the past left room for old players to adapt. Newspapers expanded or transformed into web portals and even increased their numbers by serving fresh news to readers 24/7 instead of relying on paper sales. Moving from physical to digital format changed the way the media business operates but didn't jeopardize its very existence.

What’s different now is that AI search still needs traditional websites as sources. Everything you see in one AI Overview is pulled from multiple real websites and summarized as a quick answer. Without actual websites, there would be no AI. Even its internal knowledge was scraped from somewhere on the internet.

The problem arises when AI Overviews undermine those same sources they rely on. Google does cite the sources inside AI Overviews, but then keeps the user on its own page. Although sources are listed properly, they occupy an insignificant portion of the interface. The majority of users don't bother clicking on them. Click-through rates on cited sources hover below 1% in many cases. Publishers get attribution, but without any compensation or traffic.

For thirty years, the deal was simple. Google indexes your content, and you get traffic. That arrangement is now dead. And this time, the path forward for online publications is unclear.

What this means for users?

You could easily dismiss publishers’ animosity towards Google as a panic response to what feels like a direct attack on their livelihood. If users are getting what they want better and more efficiently than before, why should the change of landscape bother them? There’s no revolution without blood, after all, and publishers are simply paying the price of progress.

That argument sounds reasonable until you follow it to its logical conclusion.

When sites can't monetize content, they stop producing it. Small and medium-sized publishers lose traffic and shut down. Only major publications that built direct audiences independent of Google can survive. This leaves information control concentrated in fewer hands than ever before. When a small number of major players produce the majority of original content, and Google's AI pushes that content for billions of users, the whole thing loses diversity in perspective.

Users could end up with a strictly controlled stream of information. Not controlled through explicit censorship, but through economic pressure that eliminates alternatives. The convenience of AI Overview comes at the cost of losing access to the diverse pool of independent voices that made the web valuable in the first place.

Furthermore, as quality loses value, quantity goes into hyper mode. A recent study from digital marketing firm Graphite shows that over half of new articles on the internet are now AI-written. For the first time in history, AI has overtaken human content production. That number will only climb in the coming years.

As the number of human-written content decreases, AI Overviews will simply be forced to summarize other AI articles. That could potentially lead to us receiving multi-layered AI answers from Google very soon. Picture this: AI that summarizes an article written by an AI that’s probably a rewrite of another AI article.

Displaying AI-generated text wouldn’t be a problem in itself if the presented info were accurate all the time. But let’s not forget that AI doesn’t think as humans do. It encodes input and returns the most logical output based on pattern-matching. For example, even with all the recent advancements, AI still can’t accurately spell words. Trusting it to form our entire opinion on a subject is risky. And verifying AI answers still requires going through sources, which, ironically, creates more work than just going straight to articles.

What does the future hold?

Looking at both parts of the equation, the direction in which web search is going looks bleak. It's a collection of problems and contradictions masked under shiny new tools. And with so much AI infrastructure already in place, going back doesn’t seem like an option.

Both publishers and readers have already started looking for alternatives. But there are no clear alternatives. The entire world is so deeply rooted in Google’s ecosystem that trying to leave it poses its own set of problems.

Social media is already drowning in low-quality AI-generated content, and the sheer volume of bots on every network makes finding a human audience increasingly harder. Many creators are moving to newsletters or Substack to reclaim control, but these private channels lack the massive scale of a search engine.

Migrations leave everyone fragmented. Readers have to juggle dozens of different subscriptions just to find the variety they used to get in one place. Publishers simply can't find the same massive audience on niche platforms that they once had on Google.

The obvious question remains: doesn’t all of this hurt Google, too? It probably does to some extent. But Google, just like the rest of the major tech players, is betting that profits from the AI boom will far exceed potential losses caused by shaking up its legacy operations.

Big Tech is investing billions into AI. They’re building massive data centers, developing new AI models, and push them into virtually every service they provide. If the investments fruit yield, companies will achieve revenues never seen before. But if that bet proves wrong, they’ll have to figure out how to bounce back when the foundations they were built on are already destroyed.

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Posted Sunday 8 February 2026 at 5:06 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of January) 461

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All this innovation requires massive infrastructure, and companies are spending hundreds of billions on it. Or more precisely, companies are spending billions on building AI data centers.

These giant facilities are the hidden backbone of today’s tech. On the consumer side, though, people have grown allergic to even hearing the words “AI data center.” The boom has triggered massive hardware shortages and skyrocketing prices. It forced memory makers to shift almost all their best chips away from gaming/consumer cards to feed the enterprise hunger of the hyperscalers.

Despite being in the headlines nonstop, AI data centers still feel abstract to most people. Everyone knows they exist, many blame them for the current GPU nightmare, but very few truly grasp just how enormous, expensive, and power-hungry these things really are.

To put the scale in perspective, here’s our list of the 10 currently largest AI data centers owned (or heavily controlled) by the major players.

Top 10 biggest AI data centers in the US

AI data centers are giant, super-powered computer warehouses built specifically to run today's advanced artificial intelligence. Companies use these supercomputers to train and run the AI models and support their integration into their services. These “factories” are crunching insane amounts of data at blistering speeds.

Regular data centers handle the “old-school” infrastructure like websites, emails, or cloud storage with standard processors. But these beasts are stuffed with hundreds of thousands of the most powerful GPUs (or custom chips) money can buy. They’re also connected with ultra-fast networking and cooled by liquid systems that prevent meltdown.

Each of the data centers on this list draws 200 MW to over 1 GW of power capacity, which is as much electricity as a small city. If you were shocked by how much electricity the Bitcoin network consumes, you may want to sit down for the rest of this article.

The data centers are ranked based on their estimated power capacity. However, you should look at these scores more as “ballpark” numbers, as companies often don’t disclose the full “specs” of their facilities. The rankings are based on available public data, as well as unique insights from the research firm SemiAnalysis. Matter of fact, the data centers are spawning so rapidly, that Google Earth shows just construction sites where some of the facilities are located today.

So without further ado, these are the biggest AI data centers owned by Big Tech:

10. xAI - Colossus 1 (Memphis, Tennessee)

Elon Musk’s original site that kicked off xAI's existence. This is where Elon's AI assistant, Grok was first trained. The entire facility was built in just 122 days. It remains fully operational, although bigger projects were moved to Colossus 2.

• Power capacity: ~300 MW operational.
• Number of GPUs: ~200,000–230,000 NVIDIA (Hopper + GB200 mix).
• Total investment: Approximately $30–40 billion, including Colossus 2 (recently secured $20B series E funding)
• Operational since: September 2024.

9. OpenAI - Stargate Project (Abilene, Texas flagship + additional sites)

OpenAI's multi-partner mega-project with Oracle, Crusoe, and SoftBank. First buildings operational since late 2025, with five more planned for mid-2026.

• Power capacity: ~200 MW initial operational (scaling toward 1+ GW across sites).
• Number of GPUs: Up to ~150,000 NVIDIA GB200 in phases (first racks already running).

• Total investment: Full reported investment: $100 billion (initial deployment phase), with long-term vision of $500 billion across multiple sites.

• Operational since: Late 2025 (initial training workloads running, full campus expansion expected by mid-2026)

8. Amazon (AWS) - Mississippi data center (Canton, Mississippi)

Still partially under construction. The site is close to existing AWS facilities, which it leverages for logistics and power. Unlike most data centers owned by other companies that use NVIDIA GPUs, it stores Amazon’s own custom-made Trainium 2 chips.

• Power capacity: >300 MW (scaling to 1 GW by mid-2027).
• Number of accelerators: Hundreds of thousands of Trainium 2 ASICs.
• Initial investment: $3 billion.

• Operational since: Partial from 2025, full scale expected by 2027.

7. Microsoft - Fairwater campus (Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin)

The original Fairwater prototype, which Microsoft claims is the world’s most powerful AI data center. The data center pioneered zero-water liquid cooling on 315 acres of land, and is the blueprint for Microsoft’s other AI factories that are now emerging.

• Power capacity: >350 MW (scaling higher across buildings).
• Number of GPUs: Hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GB200/GB300.
• Initial investment: $7+ billion.

• Operational since: Early 2026.

6. xAI - Colossus 2 (Memphis, Tennessee)

The successor to Colossus 1, often listed as the biggest supercomputer in the world. It will serve as the backbone for Macro Hard, Elon Musk’s new project that aims to build a fully AI-run software company.

• Power capacity: 350–400 MW operational (targeting 1 GW mid-2026; satellite estimates cap current cooling near 350 MW).
• Number of GPUs: >110,000 NVIDIA GB200 (part of broader cluster mix).
• Operational since: Partial from mid-2025, full scale expected by mid-2026.

5. Microsoft - Atlanta site (Atlanta, Georgia)

Part of Microsoft's "Fairwater" family, this site connects with Wisconsin to form a distributed "AI superfactory" for OpenAI and Azure AI training. It's doubling its capacity soon by interconnecting with other sites. This is likely where your prompts end up when you’re using Copilot in Notepad or Paint.

• Power capacity: >350 MW.
• Number of GPUs: Hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GB200/GB300 (high-density racks).
• Investment: Precise numbers unknown, likely a multi-billion investment.
• Operational since: October 2025.

4. Amazon (AWS) - Project Rainier (New Carlisle, Indiana)

Fully online since late 2025 on 1,200+ acres, this data center provides major infrastructure for training Anthropic's Claude models. It’s the first major non-NVIDIA AI clusters at hyperscale, built entirely on Amazon's custom silicon.

• Power capacity: ~420–500 MW operational (scaling toward 2+ GW).
• Number of accelerators: Nearly 500,000 Trainium 2 ASICs (doubling plans underway).
• Initial investment: $11 billion.

• Operational since: Late 2025.

3. Meta - Columbus site (Columbus / New Albany, Ohio)

Located literally across the street from Google's Columbus facility, Meta's site (including the Prometheus supercluster) focuses on training the company’s latest Llama. It mixes traditional buildings with temporary high-density "tents" for faster rollout.

• Power capacity: >500 MW.
• Number of GPUs: Dense mix (hundreds of thousands of accelerators).
• Total investment: $1.5+ billion.
• Operational since: New Albany campus operational since ~2019, Prometheus expansion targeted for 2026.

2. Google - Omaha cluster (Omaha, Nebraska / Council Bluffs, Iowa)

Very similar in philosophy to Columbus, this cluster links multiple sites with high-bandwidth fiber, which powers Google’s unified AI training. It’s close in scale to Columbus, and rapidly expanding.

• Power capacity: Over 1 GW total campus (>500 MW AI-dedicated).
• Number of accelerators: Hundreds of thousands of TPUs (multi-generation).
• Total investment: $4-5billion.
• Operational since: Construction started around 2017–2018, heavy AI utilization from 2022–2023 onward.

1. Google - Columbus cluster (New Albany/Columbus Area, Ohio)

Google's Columbus Cluster is currently the world's largest unified AI data center by many metrics. It uses a multi-campus, fiber-interconnected design that allows massive distributed training across buildings and even nearby sites. This is where Gemini models “live,” and Google develops DeepMind research.

• Power capacity: Over 1 GW total campus (>500 MW AI-dedicated).
• Number of accelerators: Hundreds of thousands of TPUs (multi-generation).
• Total investment: $7-8+ billion.
• Operational since: Construction started around 2007–2008, heavy AI utilization from 2022–2023 onward.

With the AI arms race heating up, these numbers will quickly become obsolete. Big Tech is announcing new investments worth billions almost on a weekly basis, and the results are showing. NVIDIA is already the first company in history to reach $5 trillion in value (currently valued at $4.2-4.4T), with the rest of the pack all valued at over $1.6 trillion.

The emergence of these massive data centers also raises environmental concerns. Although companies are making efforts to become more efficient and environmentally friendly, they’re still consuming enough resources to power entire nations.

In Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s own words, these companies need to provide equivalent value to people, or they “will quickly lose even the social permission to actually take something like energy, which is a scarce resource, and use it to generate these tokens.”

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Posted Saturday 7 February 2026 at 5:45 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of January) 461

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Amazon said growth was driven by strong performance across AWS, subscriptions, and advertising. AWS revenue rose to $35.57 billion, up 24% from $28.78 billion year-over-year, and delivered a record operating income of $12.4 billion, compared to $10.6 billion last year. Amazon’s advertising services revenue increased 23% to $21.31 billion, while subscription services revenue grew 14% to $13.12 billion.

Andy Jassy, Amazon’s President and CEO, said the momentum is coming from rapid innovation and a focus on solving customer problems.

However, Amazon shares fell nearly 11% in after-hours trading after the company indicated it expects to spend about $200 billion in capital expenditures in 2026, well above the $146 billion analysts were expecting. Jassy attributed the step-up to demand across core offerings and new bets, including AI:

“With such strong demand for our existing offerings and seminal opportunities like AI, chips, robotics, and low earth orbit satellites, we expect to invest about $200 billion in capital expenditures across Amazon in 2026, and anticipate strong long-term return on invested capital.”

Amazon isn’t the only Big Tech company ramping up capex this year. Alphabet is expected to spend $185 billion, Meta $125 billion, and Microsoft $110 billion.

Apple stands out as the exception, with capex expected to be around $13 billion. That lower spend is largely tied to Apple’s partnership with Google, including plans to use Gemini for next-generation foundation models, which could reduce the near-term need for Apple to build massive AI server infrastructure at the same scale as its rivals.

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Posted Friday 6 February 2026 at 6:26 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of January) 461

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Dubbed Expeditions, these progression-wiping events for the extraction shooter offer players the choice of starting over with a new character in exchange for some useful upgrades. Fans may remember that the first Expedition, after a delay, went forth in December. The second event now has a timeline too.

The next Expedition's sign ups will begin on February 25, and the last day to jump in will be March 1.

The studio says that it has heard the feedback regarding the previous Expedition's high requirements and less than ideal rewards. This time, there are some changes happening.

Here are all the permanent and consecutive rewards ARC Raider players will be receiving for sending their character on the Expedition:

Permanent

Cosmetics:

• The Patchwork outfit (evolved)
• Scrappy cosmetics
• The Expedition Indicator icon (upgraded for each expedition completed)

Bonuses:

• 12→24 Stash spaces
• +0-5 Skill Points (+ catch up on missed Skill Points from the first Expedition, so 85 total is possible for those embarking on their second Expedition)

Consecutive

Buffs:

• 5%→10% XP boost
• 6%→12% Scrappy materials boost
• 60%→70% Repair value increase

"The Trophy Display Project, along with your cosmetics, any Raider Deck progress, unlocked map regions, leaderboard position and Trials, Codex entries, and Raider Tokens will not be affected by the Expedition," explains the studio.

As an added benefit, anyone who missed out on getting all the Skill Points during the last Expedition will still be able to claim them. Any missing Skill Points from last time will be handed to Raiders for having additional 300k Stash Value (per point) when leaving on the second Expedition. This is a pretty good discount considering it required 1 million Stash Value each during the last event.

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Posted Friday 6 February 2026 at 1:22 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of January) 461

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Gamers Nexus (2.59m subscribers)

January 5, 2026

Video length: 23m 34s

In the news this week, we cover the NVIDIA x OpenAI fallout, GPU prices skyrocketing on the back of even more availability issues, allegations from FFmpeg of AMD AI slop coding, and more.

00:00 - Recap for the Week

00:51 - OpenAI x NVIDIA Deal At Risk

04:47 - Norwegian Fund Reduces US AI Exposure

07:03 - FFmpeg Claims AMD AI Vibe Coding

10:45 - NVIDIA Focuses on 8GB and 12GB GPUs

15:29 - GPU Prices Skyrocket

18:38 - NVIDIA to Sell Standalone Server CPUs

21:13 - AMD Zen 6 CPU Leaks

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Posted Thursday 5 February 2026 at 1:01 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of January) 461

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Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has earned more than $400 billion in annual revenue for the first time. The company announced the milestone as part of its Q4 2025 earnings report released on Wednesday, which highlights the 15 percent year-over-year increase as its cloud business and YouTube continue to grow.

As noted in the earnings report, Google’s Cloud business reached a $70 billion run rate in 2025, while YouTube’s annual revenue soared beyond $60 billion across ads and subscriptions. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told investors that YouTube remains the “number one streamer,” citing data from Nielsen. The company also now has more than 325 million paid subscribers, led by Google One and YouTube Premium.

In addition to surging revenue and subscribers, Google reported that its Gemini AI app surpassed 750 million users following the launch of its Gemini 3 model in November, marking a 100 million increase. Gemini 3 continues to dominate the AI industry, with a custom version of the AI model set to power a more personalized version of Apple’s Siri.

Additionally, Pichai noted that Google Search saw more usage over the past few months “than ever before,” adding that daily AI Mode queries have doubled since launch. Google will soon take advantage of the popularity of its Gemini app and AI Mode, as it plans to build an agentic checkout feature into both tools.

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Posted Thursday 5 February 2026 at 1:00 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of January) 461

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With many of Neowin's members being IT professionals during the day, prosumer choices are popular. And with system administrators, network administrators, desktop technicians, system architects, IT analysts, and other professions participating in the forum, these often lead to some pretty technical, and sometimes opinionated, discussions.

Over time, those polls have grown in two directions:

On the hardware side, Neowin has asks its members about their favorite CPU, GPU, motherboard, and storage manufacturers, since those encompass the basic building blocks of computers, as well as routers, since they act as a kind of central nervous system for all of your digital devices.

In the software side, there are not as many polls since a lot of functionality that was previously provided by third-party utilities is now, for better or worse, built in to Windows. However, there are still vibrant ecosystems for antivirus and backup software, so that’s where Neowin has focused its polling.

The results for 2025 are as follows.

Hardware

For processors in 2025, Neowin had a combined poll of CPU and GPU manufacturers.

CPUs

For the desktop side of things, Windows users have a choice of x86 compatible processors from AMD and Intel, and Arm-based processors from Qualcomm. Apple originally started with CPUs from Motorola, switched to Intel, and introduced its own CPUs derived from Arm's designs in its Mac line-up. On the CPU side of things, AMD lead the way with 54.55% of respondents choosing them as their preferred CPU vendor.

Coming in at number two was Intel, with 36.36%. Apple’s M-series CPUs and Qualcomm's Snapdragon tied in third place with 4.55% each. This represents a noticeable change from 2024's results, in which AMD was selected by 45.95% and Apple was selected by 8.11% of the polltakers.

GPUs

For GPU’s, Nvidia received 61.9% of the vote, followed by AMD with 28.57%, and Intel with 9.52%.

While Intel's share in 2025 was not huge, just hovering under 10%, it is important to keep things in perspective: In the 2024 portion of poll, Intel received 5.88% of the vote, meaning an increase of about 38.3% over the course of a single year.

You can view 2025's combined poll for CPU and GPU manufacturers here. If you would like to see and vote in 2026's poll, it is available here in the forum.

Motherboards

For motherboards, Neowin listed twenty manufacturers, including a category for "other" to cover any that might have been missed.

Taking the lead at 53.85% was ASUS, with ASRock and Supermicro tying in second place at 11.54%. Gigabyte took third place with 7.69%. The remaining 15.4% were filled by single votes each. This represents a bit of a change from 2024, where ASUS had 44.64%, followed by Gigabyte with 16.07%, ASRock with 14.29%, and MSI with 12.5%.

You can view 2025's poll for motherboard manufacturers here. If you would like to see and vote in 2026's poll for motherboard manufacturers, it is located here in the forum.

Storage

Neowin's 2025 storage manufacturer poll asked readers for their favorite hard disk drive (HDD) and solid-state drive (SSD) manufacturers.

Hard disk drives

On the rotating media side of things, Western Digital Corporation came in first with 43.33%, followed closely by Seagate Technology at 40%, and less closely by Toshiba at 10%.

Oddly enough, 6.67% of respondents chose "Other" as their preferred HDD brand, but did not leave any replies explaining what these were. This represents a bit of a change over Neowin's 2024 hard disk drive poll, in which Western Digital was in first place and Seagate and Toshiba tied behind it in second place.

Solid-State Drives

Unlike the more mature hard disk drive space, the SSD space has experienced a boom in the number of vendors.

For solid state storage, there were 45 manufacturers listed in the 2025, including "Other" as one of the options. Of these, Samsung Electronics got the lion's share at 46.67%, with Micron Technology (including Crucial it’s consumer-focused subsidiary) coming in second at 11.11%, followed by Western Digital in third place at 8.89% and Seagate in fourth at 6.67%. Dell, Kioxia (formerly Toshiba) and Solidigm (formed by the merger of Intel's and SK Hynix's respective SSD divisions) all tied for fifth place at 4.44% each. The remaining 13.32% were from singleton voters. In the 2024 poll, Samsung came in first with 32.65%, followed by Western Digital at 16.33%, and Micron/Crucial at 14.29%

You can view the Neowin's 2025 storage poll here. If you would like to see and vote in 2026's poll for storage vendors, it is located here in the forum.

Routers

Neowin's 2025 router poll listed twenty five router manufacturers, including two "Other" categories for software (firmware) and hardware, as some readers might have preferred other firmware or devices beyond those listed.

Of these, Ubiquiti came in first place with 29.17%, followed by ASUS in second place at 18.75%, Other (Software) in third place at 12.5%, and Mikrotik and TP-Link tying at fourth place with 11.46%. The remaining 28.12% were between seven other vendors, including the Other (Hardware) category. For Other (Software), Merlin, OPNsense and pfSense were amongst those mentioned, while Fritz!, Sophos, and Synology were mentioned in the Other (Hardware) category. Curiously enough, one respondent mentioned they were still using a Linksys WRT54GS from 2004.

As 2025 was the first year Neowin polled readers about their routers there is no historical data to compare against from 2024. If you would like to see and vote in 2026's poll, it can be found here in the forum.

Software

On the software side of things, operating systems are a matter of continuous discussion in Neowin's forums, and the sheer number of Linux distributions and Windows versions and editions and churn between those makes polling impractical. Also, with the dual trends of operating systems adding so much functionality with included accessory and utility programs, and the trend of using websites rather than software on the desktop, there are less categories to look at. That said, there are several standout categories, and maintaining the security and integrity of those operating systems is something everyone needs to do. Neowin's software polls focus on readers' choices for their antivirus and backup software selections.

Antivirus

Antivirus software (which also includes anti-malware, internet security, security suites, endpoint protection, endpoint detection and recovery, and other nom-de-plumes) is one of those areas where there still is robust competition on the desktop space. As a matter of fact, there is so much competition that we have split antivirus into free and paid categories. Many vendors in this space offer versions in both categories, with the free versions providing basic protection and offering a path to upgrade to paid versions with more features and additional functionality.

Free AV

In the 2025 Free Antivirus poll there were 21 options, including the "Other" category. Redmond-based Microsoft took the lead with 34.78%, followed by Kaspersky Lab in second place with 21.74%, while Bitdefender and Malwarebytes tied in third place with 13.04% each.

The remaining 17.4% was split between three vendors. This lines up closely with 2024's poll, in which Microsoft took first place, followed by Kaspersky Lab and Bitdefender.

You can view 2025's Free AV poll here. If you would like to look at and/or vote in 2026's poll, it can be found here in the forum.

Paid AV

The 2025 Paid Antivirus poll contained 50 options, including the "Other" category. Slovak antivirus firm ESET came in first place with 44%, while Kaspersky Lab and Malwarebytes tied for second place with 16%, and Bitdefender coming in third with 12%.

The remaining 12% was split between two vendors. The 2024's poll had similar results with ESET coming in first, followed by Kaspersky Lab and Bitdefender, although 17 vendors total were chosen from it.

You can view 2025's Paid AV poll here. If you would like to look at and/or vote in 2026's poll, it can be found here in the forum.

Backups

2025's poll for backups had a total of forty-seven choices, including "Other" categories for traditional backup programs, archiving programs, cloud storage providers, and NAS devices, as well as a generic "Other" category.

In Neowin's 2025 poll, Paramount Software's Macrium Reflect came in first with 20%, with Insight Partner's Veeam second at 12.31%, Microsoft's OneDrive in third place at 9.23% and FreeFileSync at 7.69%, the remaining 50.77% were a mix of twenty-one different backup solutions, including two of the Other categories. In 2024's results, Macrium Reflect was in first place with 22.41%, Clonezilla at 10.34%, and Veeam at 8.62%.

You can view the 2025 Backup poll here. If you would like to see and vote in 2026's poll for backups, it is located here in the forum.

Conclusions

With so many choices available, it can sometimes be hard to make a decision about what hardware and software gives you the best bang for your buck. As you can see, though, Neowin’s forums are a place where such questions are not just endlessly debated, but measured as well.

Image by DepositPhotos

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Posted Thursday 5 February 2026 at 4:34 am AEST (my time).

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The news comes from Take-Two's latest earnings results, where the company, as it has done in previous years, said it's committed to the current release date: November 19, 2026.

"Our execution throughout Fiscal 2026 has been extraordinary, and we are highly confident as we approach Fiscal 2027 – which promises to be groundbreaking for Take-Two and the entire entertainment industry – led by the November 19th release of Grand Theft Auto VI with Rockstar’s launch marketing set to begin this Summer,' said the company (via IGN).

Only two trailers have landed for the game so far, showing off the new double protagonists and the returning setting, Vice City. Considering the comments, it doesn't look like fresh trailers and information about the title will be landing any time soon.

The Take-Two CEO, Strauss Zelnick, also addressed a rumor going around that stated Grand Theft Auto VI won't have a physical edition at launch, with it only being a digital release. He directly denied these reports, saying, "That's not the plan."

Meanwhile, the company confirmed that Grand Theft Auto V has now sold over 225 million copies, with it still moving a lot of units thanks to continued GTA Online support.

Grand Theft Auto VI is so far confirmed for Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 consoles, with it slated to launch on November 19, 2026. Unfortunately, there's still no word on a release window for the PC platform or other consoles like the Nintendo Switch 2.

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Posted Thursday 5 February 2026 at 4:33 am AEST (my time).

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The viral virtual assistant OpenClaw—formerly known as Moltbot, and before that Clawdbot—is a symbol of a broader revolution underway that could fundamentally alter how the internet functions. Instead of a place primarily inhabited by humans, the web may very soon be dominated by autonomous AI bots.

A new report measuring bot activity on the web, as well as related data shared with WIRED by the internet infrastructure company Akamai, shows that AI bots already account for a meaningful share of web traffic. The findings also shed light on an increasingly sophisticated arms race unfolding as bots deploy clever tactics to bypass website defenses meant to keep them out.

“The majority of the internet is going to be bot traffic in the future,” says Toshit Pangrahi, cofounder and CEO of TollBit, a company that tracks web-scraping activity and published the new report. “It’s not just a copyright problem, there is a new visitor emerging on the internet.”

Most big websites try to limit what content bots can scrape and feed to AI systems for training purposes. (WIRED’s parent company, Condé Nast, as well as other publishers, are currently suing several AI companies over alleged copyright infringement related to AI training.)

But another kind of AI-related website scraping is now on the rise as well. Many chatbots and other AI tools can now retrieve real-time information from the web and use it to augment and improve their outputs. This might include up-to-the-minute product prices, movie theater schedules, or summaries of the latest news.

According to the data from Akamai, training-related bot traffic has been rising steadily since last July. Meanwhile, global activity from bots fetching web content for AI agents is also on the upswing.

“AI is changing the web as we know it,” Robert Blumofe, Akamai’s chief technology officer, tells WIRED “The ensuing arms race will determine the future look, feel, and functionality of the web, as well as the basics of doing business.”

In the fourth quarter of 2025, TollBit estimates that an average of one out of every 31 visits to its customers’ websites was from an AI scraping bot. In the first quarter, that figure was only one out of every 200. The company says that in the fourth quarter, more than 13 percent of bot requests were bypassing robots.txt, a file that some websites use to indicate which pages bots are supposed to avoid. TollBit says the share of AI bots disregarding robots.txt increased 400 percent from the second quarter to the fourth quarter of last year.

TollBit also reported a 336 percent increase in the number of websites making attempts to block AI bots over the past year. Pangrahi says that scraping techniques are getting more sophisticated as sites try to assert control over how bots access their content. Some bots disguise themselves by making their traffic appear like it’s coming from a normal web browser or send requests designed to mimic how humans normally interact with websites. TollBit's study notes that the behavior of some AI agents is now almost indistinguishable from human web traffic.

TollBit markets tools that website owners can use to charge AI scrapers for accessing their content. Other firms, including Cloudflare, offer similar tools. “Anyone who relies on human web traffic—starting with publishers, but basically everyone—is going to be impacted,” Pangrahi says. “There needs to be a faster way to have that machine-to-machine, programmatic exchange of value.”

WIRED attempted to contact 15 AI scraping companies cited in the TollBit report for comment. The majority did not respond or could not be reached. Several said that their AI systems aim to respect technical boundaries that websites put in place to limit scraping, but they noted such guardrails can often be complex and difficult to follow.

Or Lenchner, the CEO of Bright Data, one of the world’s largest web-scraping firms, says that his company’s bots do not collect nonpublic information. Bright Data was previously sued by Meta and X for allegedly improperly scraping content from their platforms. (Meta later dropped its suit, and a federal judge in California dismissed the case brought by X.)

Karolis Stasiulevičiu, a spokesperson for another cited company, ScrapingBee, told WIRED: “ScrapingBee operates on one of the internet’s core principles: that the open web is meant to be accessible. Public web pages are, by design, readable by both humans and machines.”

Oxylabs, another scraping firm, said in an unsigned statement that its bots don’t “access to content behind logins, paywalls, or authentication. We require customers to use our services only for accessing publicly available information, and we enforce compliance standards throughout our platform.”

Oxylabs added that there are many legitimate reasons for firms to scrape web content, including for cybersecurity purposes and to conduct investigative journalism. The company also says that the countermeasures some websites use do not discriminate between different use cases. “The reality is that many modern anti-bot systems don't distinguish well between malicious traffic and legitimate automated access,” Oxylabs says.

In addition to causing headaches for publishers, the web-scraping wars are creating new business opportunities. TollBit's report found more than 40 companies that are now marketing bots that can collect web content for AI training or other purposes. The rise of AI-powered search engines, as well as tools like OpenClaw, are likely helping drive up demand for these services.

Some firms promise to help companies surface content for AI agents rather than try to block them, a strategy known as generative engine optimization, or GEO. “We're essentially seeing the rise of a new marketing channel,” says Uri Gafni, chief business officer of Brandlight, a company that optimizes content so that it appears prominently in AI tools.

“This will only intensify in 2026, and we're going to see this rollout kind of as a full-on marketing channel, with search, ads, media, and commerce converging,” Gafni says.

Correction: 2/4/25, 12:50 pm EST: The share of internet traffic TollBit attributed to AI bots in the fourth quarter of 2025 has been corrected.

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Posted Thursday 5 February 2026 at 4:31 am AEST (my time).

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Microsoft says it is working on the Publisher Content Marketplace (PCM), an AI licensing hub that shows usage terms set by publishers. That way, AI companies can easily shop the terms and set up deals to use online content for “grounding” their AI models, while the content owners get usage-based reporting to help set prices.

Microsoft says it’s been codesigning PCM with companies including Verge parent Vox Media, The Associated Press, Condé Nast, People, and others. The AI boom has been largely fueled by content ingested without payment, and many of the previously mentioned publishers have filed lawsuits and/or arranged content licensing deals as traffic from traditional sources drops. Some, like The New York Times and The Intercept, have filed copyright lawsuits against both Microsoft and OpenAI.

There’s also a publisher-backed open standard called Really Simple Licensing (RSL) that lays out a framework aimed at keeping the digital media business sustainable in the age of AI. It builds licensing terms into a publisher’s website, dictating how bots should pay to scrape their sites.

When asked about how, or if, that could interact with the PCM, Microsoft spokesperson Courtney Ramirez says the company plans “to work closely with publishing partners as we build this pilot experience,” but doesn’t have “anything specific to share today.”

According to Microsoft, with this setup, “publishers will be paid on delivered value, and AI builders gain scalable access to licensed premium content that improves their products.” The company adds that PCM will “support publishers of all sizes,” including large organizations and independent publications.

“The open web was built on an implicit value exchange where publishers made content accessible, and distribution channels — like search — helped people find it,” Microsoft writes. “That model does not translate cleanly to an AI-first world, where answers are increasingly delivered in a conversation.”

Microsoft says it has started to onboard partners, including Yahoo, as it continues piloting the marketplace and is looking to expand further.

Update, February 3rd: Added a response from Microsoft.

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Posted Wednesday 4 February 2026 at 12:20 pm AEST (my time).

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This update introduces several new starters and conditions, including:

• Humidity reaches a specific level
• Robot vacuum docking
• Battery status on a device
• Switch or button is pressed (available as a starter only, covering single, multi-press, long press, and long press release)
• Binary state for supported devices (like closed or opened windows, contact or no contact, freeze or no freeze, leak or no leak)

Starters, conditions, and actions have been around for several years now, allowing you to create customized automations for your smart home devices. These elements together form the "if this, then that" logic that controls your smart gadgets.

Starters are the triggers that begin an automation, such as a specific time or a device changing its state. Conditions are optional criteria that must be met for an automation to proceed after being triggered. Actions are the tasks the automation performs once the starter fires and any conditions are satisfied, perhaps turning on lights or adjusting a thermostat.

Only one action, setting a smart light to a specific color or temperature, was added to this update.

Apart from the new automation capabilities, this update brings a "foundational" fix for camera close-to-live playback, reducing "Video not available" errors when you launch the Google Home app from a notification or click on a recent event.

Speaking of Google Home, Google has a new smart speaker on the way, seemingly reviving the "Google Home" branding that it largely abandoned in 2019 in favor of Nest.

The new Google Home Speaker features an oval design with 360-degree audio and allows grouping with other Nest and Home speakers and introduces a new capability to pair two speakers with a Google TV Streamer for spatial surround-sound audio.

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Posted Wednesday 4 February 2026 at 12:11 pm AEST (my time).

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Just in case you thought the ARC Raiders hype train might be slowing down, allow me to pass along the news that it's still cruising along. It may now be over three full months since Embark Studios' PvPvE extraction shooter launched at the end of October, but the game still remains the hottest title in the industry.

That news comes from the latest monthly report from the gaming industry research firm Alinea Analytics, which estimates that ARC Raiders sold 3.2 million copies in January — 1.5 million on Steam, and 1.7 million across Xbox Series X|S and PS5 — making it the best-selling game for the third consecutive month.

Those numbers have also pushed the game's lifetime performance past two gigantic milestones: the sale of over 15 million copies in total across all platforms, and a whopping gross revenue of $500 million and counting. Those are huge numbers, and quantify just how remarkably successful ARC Raiders has been thus far.

Its dominant performance is also reflected in player engagement metrics; at the time of writing, the multiplayer shooter maintains an average concurrent player count of anywhere between roughly 250K and 400K depending on time-of-day according to SteamDB data. That's nearly on par with its launch numbers, and makes it the third most-played Steam game currently, above PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS and below only Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2.

Notably, Alinea Analytics reports that ARC Raiders reached 10 million monthly active users (MAUs) in January across its platforms, too, which is an 8% increase over December's results and the holidays. Granted, these are estimates, but overall, it's clear that the game's popularity hasn't waned whatsoever.

In September 2025, Nvidia and OpenAI announced a letter of intent for Nvidia to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI’s AI infrastructure. At the time, the companies said they expected to finalize details “in the coming weeks.” Five months later, no deal has closed, Nvidia’s CEO now says the $100 billion figure was “never a commitment,” and Reuters reports that OpenAI has been quietly seeking alternatives to Nvidia chips since last year.

Reuters also wrote that OpenAI is unsatisfied with the speed of some Nvidia chips for inference tasks, citing eight sources familiar with the matter. Inference is the process by which a trained AI model generates responses to user queries. According to the report, the issue became apparent in OpenAI’s Codex, an AI code-generation tool. OpenAI staff reportedly attributed some of Codex’s performance limitations to Nvidia’s GPU-based hardware.

After the Reuters story published and Nvidia’s stock price took a dive, Nvidia and OpenAI have tried to smooth things over publicly. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X: “We love working with NVIDIA and they make the best AI chips in the world. We hope to be a gigantic customer for a very long time. I don’t get where all this insanity is coming from.”

What happened to the $100 billion?

The September announcement described a wildly ambitious plan: 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems for OpenAI, requiring power output equal to roughly 10 nuclear reactors. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC at the time that the project would match Nvidia’s total GPU shipments for the year. “This is a giant project,” Huang said.

But the deal was always a letter of intent, not a binding contract. And in recent weeks, Huang has been walking back the number. On Saturday, he told reporters in Taiwan that the $100 billion was “never a commitment.” He said OpenAI had invited Nvidia to invest “up to” that amount and that Nvidia would “invest one step at a time.”

“We are going to make a huge investment in OpenAI,” Huang said. “Sam is closing the round, and we will absolutely be involved. We will invest a great deal of money, probably the largest investment we’ve ever made.” But when asked if it would be $100 billion, Huang replied, “No, no, nothing like that.”

A Wall Street Journal report on Friday said Nvidia insiders had expressed doubts about the transaction and that Huang had privately criticized what he described as a lack of discipline in OpenAI’s business approach. The Journal also reported that Huang had expressed concern about the competition OpenAI faces from Google and Anthropic. Huang called those claims “nonsense.”

Nvidia shares fell about 1.1 percent on Monday following the reports. Sarah Kunst, managing director at Cleo Capital, told CNBC that the back-and-forth was unusual. “One of the things I did notice about Jensen Huang is that there wasn’t a strong ‘It will be $100 billion.’ It was, ‘It will be big. It will be our biggest investment ever.’ And so I do think there are some question marks there.”

In September, Bryn Talkington, managing partner at Requisite Capital Management, noted the circular nature of such investments to CNBC. “Nvidia invests $100 billion in OpenAI, which then OpenAI turns back and gives it back to Nvidia,” Talkington said. “I feel like this is going to be very virtuous for Jensen.”

Tech critic Ed Zitron has been critical of Nvidia’s circular investments for some time, which touch dozens of tech companies, including major players and startups. They are also all Nvidia customers.

“NVIDIA seeds companies and gives them the guaranteed contracts necessary to raise debt to buy GPUs from NVIDIA,” Zitron wrote on Bluesky last September, “Even though these companies are horribly unprofitable and will eventually die from a lack of any real demand.”

Chips from other places

Outside of sourcing GPUs from Nvidia, OpenAI has reportedly discussed working with startups Cerebras and Groq, both of which build chips designed to reduce inference latency. But in December, Nvidia struck a $20 billion licensing deal with Groq, which Reuters sources say ended OpenAI’s talks with Groq. Nvidia hired Groq’s founder and CEO Jonathan Ross along with other senior leaders as part of the arrangement.

In January, OpenAI announced a $10 billion deal with Cerebras instead, adding 750 megawatts of computing capacity for faster inference through 2028. Sachin Katti, who joined OpenAI from Intel in November to lead compute infrastructure, said the partnership adds “a dedicated low-latency inference solution” to OpenAI’s platform.

But OpenAI has clearly been hedging its bets. Beyond the Cerebras deal, the company struck an agreement with AMD in October for six gigawatts of GPUs and announced plans with Broadcom to develop a custom AI chip to wean itself off of Nvidia dependence. When those chips will be ready, however, is currently unknown.

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Posted Wednesday 4 February 2026 at 12:08 pm AEST (my time).

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On Monday, Elon Musk announced that he was merging two of his companies, SpaceX and xAI, in a deal said to be worth $1.25 trillion. The reason, Musk said in an announcement, was that in order for AI to grow, it needed to go to space.

AI relies on “large terrestrial data centers” that run on “immense amounts of power and cooling,” he said, which comes at great expense to the environment and community opposition. The solution: data centers in space. “In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale,” Musk said.

Musk isn’t the only one looking to launch data centers into orbit. Google has Project Suncatcher to build solar-powered AI data centers in space. China is looking into space-based data centers, as is Europe. As we reported last year, space-based data centers — in the form of satellites with solar panels — are Big Tech’s latest fad and Silicon Valley’s newest investable venture.

On the surface, it sounds like a logical solution to the unique problem presented by power-hungry data centers. Local communities are rising up against data center projects over concerns about electricity demand, water usage, and rising utility rates. Launching those data centers into space means they are not taking up any space on Earth, and in a sun-synchronous orbit there is the availability of solar energy.

But there’s another, simpler way of looking at Musk’s merger: SpaceX is profitable, and xAI is not. Not only is xAI not profitable, it’s in the midst of a serious cash burn as it races to compete with well-financed rivals like Google and OpenAI. As Bloomberg recently reported, the AI company is burning about $1 billion a month as it spends heavily to build data centers, recruit talent, and run the social media platform X.

Meanwhile, SpaceX generated about $8 billion in profit on an estimated $16 billion of revenue last year, Reuters reported. The main revenue driver is Starlink, which accounts for up to 80 percent of the company’s revenue. Since 2019, SpaceX has launched over 9,500 satellites and boasts up to 9 million broadband internet users. The company is also a major government contractor, having secured over $20 billion in NASA and Defense Department deals since 2008. When it goes public later this year, SpaceX is expected to raise up to $50 billion in investment.

Meanwhile, xAI has it own government tie-ups. The Department of Defense is using Grok, in addition to other chatbots, to analyze information that flows through its military intelligence networks.

It’s not clear how investors will feel about merging the cash-burning xAI with the profitable SpaceX. But it’s important to note that Musk has done this before, when he merged the debt-ridden SolarCity with Tesla in 2016. Since Musk was the largest shareholder and chairman of both Tesla and SolarCity, shareholders sued to block the merger, alleging it was a $2.6 billion “bailout” of a cash-strapped, struggling company. Musk eventually won the lawsuit, with a judge ruling that he did not force Tesla to overpay for SolarCity.

Musk now faces a new lawsuit from Tesla shareholders over his creation of xAI. The lawsuit alleges that Musk breached his fiduciary duty to Tesla by forming xAI, which competes with the automaker for AI talent, resources, and Musk’s attention. The news that SpaceX is acquiring xAI certainly won’t settle those concerns; if anything, it makes it more chaotic and complex.

So where does this all leave Tesla? In the most recent earnings report, Tesla said it was investing $2 billion into xAI “to enhance Tesla’s ability to develop and deploy AI products and services into the physical world at scale.” Grok, xAI’s chatbot that’s currently under investigation in multiple countries for generating nonconsensual sexualized images of people, including children, was recently integrated into certain Tesla vehicles as a voice assistant. Grok also lags behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and other large language models in several key metrics.

Data centers in space is pure Musk futurism that has no guarantee of success. It’s not as simple as just strapping a GPU to a rocket and hitting “launch.” First off, GPUs are total power hogs. Unless you’ve got a nuclear reactor floating up there, you’re going to need a massive solar arrays to power it. Then there’s the communication situation; even if you’re hitching a ride on Starlink, you still have to figure out the budget for sending info back and forth to Earth. Eventually, the numbers start to look pretty scary.

Musk says merging SpaceX and xAI is the way to make it happen. And perhaps one day he’ll take the suggestion of bullish investors to combine all his companies, including Tesla, Neuralink, and the Boring Company, into one massive, Musk-run mega-corporation: Musk Inc., if you will. How will Tesla shareholders react?

“Tesla is Musk’s liquid piggy bank, since it’s publicly traded; his other companies are not,” Tesla investor James McRitchie said during a prevote presentation before the company’s 2024 shareholder meeting, according to The Wall Street Journal. “Either he sticks around long enough to use our shareholder capital to fund his other ventures, or he shifts his attention sooner if we reject his pay package and turn off the money tap.”

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Posted Wednesday 4 February 2026 at 12:02 pm AEST (my time).

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David Michaud-Cromp, who has worked at Ubisoft for more than 13 years, took to social media last week to announce that his suspension was related to “public comments” that he “expressed regarding the company’s return-to-office policy, and based on an alleged breach of the duty of loyalty.”

Insider Gaming gave Ubisoft the opportunity to comment on our coverage of Michaud-Cromp’s suspension, but did not, only acknowledging that the opportunity was given.

However, following our coverage, screenshots of Michaud-Cromp’s comments in Ubisoft’s internal communication channel, Agora, were sent to Insider Gaming, providing greater clarity on why the suspension and, now, the termination may have occurred.

Michaud-Cromp criticised Ubisoft’s RTO policies, the closing down of studios, and investing in GaaS that “keeps running away to bite us in the bollocks,” he said. Michaud-Cromp also hit back at the decision to have Vantage Studios run by now co-CEO Charlie Guillemot, who is the son of Ubisoft’s CEO Yves Guillemot, citing that he’s pretty much only got Unagi games on his resume.

In his message, he continued to say that it’s the employees who pay the price for successive bad decisions taken by executives, who “keep swimming in millions of dollars”. He concluded that he agrees costs should be trimmed, but that it needs to start at the top, because nothing will change otherwise.

Frankly, I think everyone at Ubisoft, both internally and externally, is on board with this message, but perhaps it was a little too transparent.

According to Michaud-Cromp, Ubisoft has concluded that Michaud-Cromp can no longer work at the company and has subsequently decided to terminate his position.

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Posted Tuesday 3 February 2026 at 10:00 am AEST (my time).

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This means that cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud will be able to serve global customers and earn revenue without paying a cent in Indian taxes. There are, of course, guardrails.

To protect the domestic tax base, these foreign giants must route services for Indian customers through a local reseller entity, which will be taxed as usual. But most power-hungry tasks, such as training AI models, inference, and serving customers outside India, would essentially become tax-free.

Historically, multinational companies have been hesitant to put too many assets in India because of tax disputes. The government would often disagree with companies on how much tax they owed, leading to years of court battles. This new policy addresses that head-on with something called a "Safe Harbour", where the government has set a fixed operating margin of 15% for these transfer pricing calculations between a company's Indian and foreign entity. This acts as a pre-signed peace treaty, where, as long as companies declare this 15% margin, the government promises to accept it without scrutiny.

There has been an increasing shortage in the global data center market for compute, as AI models are increasingly becoming popular and more and more workloads are now dependent on them. Traditional hubs like Virginia, Singapore, and Ireland are facing severe constraints on power and land.

However, the move is unlikely to create a massive employment boom in the country. Unlike the smartphone assembly lines by Apple and Foxconn that employ tens of thousands of workers, data centers are notoriously capital-intensive but labor-light.

This isn't the first time India has lured big tech data centers. Microsoft and Amazon, both, have set up multibillion-dollar data center operations in the country. Google is also playing catch-up in terms of physical footprint and announced a data center that will be built in the Indian coastal city of Visakhapatnam.

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Posted Tuesday 3 February 2026 at 5:08 am AEST (my time).

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