Texas has 474GW of data centre requests and no idea how many are real
Texas has 474GW of data centre requests and no idea how many are real

Texas has 474 gigawatts of requests from data centre developers waiting to connect to its power grid, more than five times the state’s record peak demand. In 2023, the figure was just 48 gigawatts, and the difference clearly does not represent hundreds…

London surgeons remove brain tumour in first AI-assisted operation of its kind
London surgeons remove brain tumour in first AI-assisted operation of its kind

Surgeons at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London have removed a brain tumour in what University College London Hospitals says is the world’s first successful AI-assisted operation of its kind. The system analysed live camera f…

Bill Gates proposes ‘Human Reserved’ jobs and a tax on AI tokens
Bill Gates proposes ‘Human Reserved’ jobs and a tax on AI tokens

Bill Gates has proposed what he calls Human Reserved jobs, occupations society would deliberately keep for people even where AI could do them, and the analogy he reaches for is a nature reserve, a place where development is restricted because something…

Microsoft employees built their own pay spreadsheet, and it shows two companies
Microsoft employees built their own pay spreadsheet, and it shows two companies

Around 600 Microsoft employees have entered their pay into a crowdsourced spreadsheet circulating internally, and the resulting picture is of a company that now compensates two quite different populations. Base salaries run from $111,000 at level 59 to…

Apple gave Tim Cook a farewell party a week before Ternus takes over
Apple gave Tim Cook a farewell party a week before Ternus takes over

Apple gave Tim Cook a leaving party on Sunday, a week before he stops being its chief executive. About 200 people attended, almost all of them Apple employees, at the Caffè Macs cafeteria on the company’s Cupertino campus. OneRepublic played. Aaron Til…

A robot that takes blood could be the best AI health story of 2026
A robot that takes blood could be the best AI health story of 2026

One minute and 49 seconds, that was the median time a machine needed to read a patient’s arm, choose a vein, insert a needle, fill the tubes, and withdraw, across the Dutch clinical trial that carried it towards regulators. A phlebotomist working caref…

A Berkeley professor wrote about students cutting corners, but a detector flagged her op-ed
A Berkeley professor wrote about students cutting corners, but a detector flagged her op-ed

Zvezdelina Stankova published an op-ed on 15 August arguing that Berkeley admits students who cannot do middle school mathematics. Within days, the argument had been overtaken by a question about how the op-ed itself was written. Zvezdelina Stankova, a…

A Turing Award winner says the industry’s fix for running out of data is ‘a big mistake’
A Turing Award winner says the industry’s fix for running out of data is ‘a big mistake’

Richard Sutton thinks the AI industry’s answer to running out of training data is a mistake, and he has picked a blunt word for it. “ That’s just a big mistake,” he said of the turn to synthetic data on Sequoia Capital’s Training Data podcast, publishe…

Deutsche Telekom buys Macquarie’s Polish fibre and TV assets in a €1bn bet on convergence
Deutsche Telekom buys Macquarie’s Polish fibre and TV assets in a €1bn bet on convergence

Deutsche Telekom has agreed to buy two of Poland’s best-known fibre businesses, Fiberhost and INEA, from the Australian investment group Macquarie, in a deal worth roughly €1bn and aimed squarely at the country’s scramble to bundle mobile, broadband, a…

A Beijing bar swapped free Wi-Fi for free DeepSeek tokens
A Beijing bar swapped free Wi-Fi for free DeepSeek tokens

In Beijing’s Zhongguancun district, the dense grid of universities and start-ups that likes to bill itself as China’s Silicon Valley, a small bar has found a neat way to distil the country’s artificial-intelligence boom into something you can actually …