Browsing: Technology

WASHINGTON: OpenAI has reached an agreement with the U.S. Defense Department to deploy its artificial intelligence models on the military’s classified cloud networks, the company said late Feb. 27, as President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using technology from rival AI firm Anthropic. OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said the department, which the Trump administration refers to as the “Department of War” as a secondary title, agreed to include safeguards in the arrangement. Altman said the agreement reflects prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and requires human responsibility for the use of force, including in autonomous weapon systems, and he said OpenAI will…

CALIFORNIA: Meta Platforms and Advanced Micro Devices have signed a multi-year partnership to deploy up to 6 gigawatts of AMD Instinct graphics processing units across Meta’s artificial intelligence infrastructure. The companies said shipments supporting the initial deployment are scheduled to begin in the second half of 2026, using a custom AMD Instinct GPU based on the MI450 architecture. Meta said the hardware will be used in its data centers to support AI training and inference workloads at scale. The companies said the deployment will use AMD’s Helios rack-scale architecture and the ROCm software stack, and will pair the new GPUs with sixth-generation…

CAPE CANAVERAL: NASA has completed a key fueling and countdown rehearsal for Artemis II, running the Space Launch System moon rocket through a full wet dress rehearsal at Kennedy Space Center and ending the simulated launch sequence at T-minus 29 seconds. The test, completed late Feb. 19, marked a major step in preparations for the first crewed flight of the SLS rocket and the Orion spacecraft. NASA is targeting a launch no earlier than March 6, pending final pad work, data reviews and readiness checks. During the rehearsal, teams loaded about 730,000 gallons of super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen into the…

LOS ANGELES: Meta Platforms Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg took the witness stand on Feb. 18 in a Los Angeles Superior Court trial accusing Instagram and YouTube of harming a young user through features that plaintiffs say encouraged compulsive use. Zuckerberg denied that Instagram targets children and disputed claims that the service was designed to be addictive, while describing steps Meta says it has taken to protect younger users. The case centers on a young woman identified in court filings as K.G.M., who alleges she suffered severe mental health harms linked to extensive use of Instagram and YouTube beginning in adolescence. The lawsuit is being…

SAN FRANCISCO: Google has launched an official YouTube app for Apple Vision Pro, making “YouTube for visionOS” available as a free download in the visionOS App Store. The release brings a native YouTube viewing experience to Apple’s mixed reality headset, with the app described as a spatial watch experience designed for viewing YouTube content in an immersive environment. The App Store listing says the app lets users explore content across YouTube, including standard rectangular videos and YouTube Shorts, alongside immersive formats. It also offers a signed-in experience, allowing access to subscriptions, playlists and watch history, aligning the headset experience with core features…

MENA Newswire, SAN FRANCISCO: Global drugmakers are increasingly using artificial intelligence to compress the most time-consuming parts of clinical development, applying the technology to tasks such as selecting trial sites, screening participants, monitoring data flows and assembling regulatory documents. Executives and investors described the shift in recent industry briefings, as companies look for practical ways to shorten timelines and reduce manual work in late-stage programs. The tools being deployed range from machine-learning systems that analyze performance and patient data to generative AI software that drafts and checks technical text. Companies have focused first on the operational steps that routinely slow trials, including identifying sites likely…

MENA Newswire, SAN FRANCISCO: Microsoft on Jan. 26 introduced Maia 200, the second generation of its in-house artificial intelligence accelerator, built to run AI models in production across Azure data centres. The company said Maia 200 is designed for inference, the stage where trained models generate responses to live requests, and will be used to support a range of Microsoft AI services. Maia 200 is manufactured on TSMC’s 3-nanometer process and includes more than 140 billion transistors, Microsoft said. The chip pairs compute with a new memory system that includes 216 gigabytes of HBM3e high-bandwidth memory and about 272 megabytes of on-chip SRAM, aimed at…

EuroWire, SAN FRANCISCO: Apple has introduced faster wireless connectivity for select Mac and iPad models through recent software updates, improving Wi-Fi performance without a formal announcement in consumer-facing release notes. The enhancement is delivered as part of iPadOS 26.2 and macOS Tahoe 26.2 and affects devices equipped with Wi-Fi 6E hardware. The update increases the maximum supported channel bandwidth on 5 GHz Wi-Fi networks, enabling higher data throughput when paired with compatible wireless routers and network configurations. The performance gain comes from enabling support for 160 MHz channel widths on the 5 GHz band, doubling the previous 80 MHz limit available on supported Apple devices.…

Cupertino, California, November 28, 2025: Apple Inc. is finalizing development of its first foldable iPhone, which will reportedly feature a crease-free display when it enters production, according to information emerging from the company’s supply chain partners. The device, informally referred to as the iPhone Fold, marks Apple’s entry into the foldable smartphone segment and is expected to introduce a new display engineering standard that eliminates the visible crease typically found on foldable screens. Sources within the production network indicate that Apple has completed engineering validation for the foldable model, advancing it closer to the mass-production phase. The company has reportedly refined the internal structure of the…

LONDON, NOVEMBER 18, 2025: A significant technical failure at Cloudflare, one of the internet’s largest infrastructure providers, has caused widespread disruption across the global web, taking down numerous high-traffic websites including the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. The outage, which was first observed shortly before noon in the UK, rapidly highlighted the critical concentration risk inherent in centralized web services. Cloudflare’s technical problems led to error messages being displayed to users attempting to access platforms that rely on its extensive global network for crucial performance and security functions. The incident marks another instance of a single point of failure…