Tech industry

Tech industry

Google sidestepped the toughest penalties in a landmark antitrust clash, retaining control of Chrome and Android. In a court ruling, Judge Amit P. Mehta barred the search giant from exclusive search deals, ordered limited data sharing with rivals, and restricted its app store tie-ins. The decision comes after the Justice Department's landmark monopoly case against Google. Judge Mehta rejected the Justice Department's call for drastic remedies, declining to force a divestiture or unwind Google's multibillion-dollar default search arrangement with Apple's Safari browser.

didn't know what innovation was.

"I continue to believe that humans plus AI together actually create more meaningful work, more challenging work, more interesting work, high-productivity jobs," Amodei added. "And then I think it will also open the aperture to a lot of access and opportunity for many people." That doesn't mean the future employment landscape will require a technical background. Indeed, the release of Anthropic's latest AI-coding tools sparked a massive selloff among tech stocks this past week as the technical expertise needed to write and maintain code is expected to fall sharply.

This week: Anthropic released an update that seems to have tipped the scales against Software as a Service companies, erasing billions in market value. Felix Salmon, Elizabeth Spiers, and Emily Peck, unpack why there was such a massive market response to such a small AI plugin, and what it says about the future of tech investment. Then, Disney has finally named a new CEO in Josh D'Amaro.

A few months ago, I decided to breathe new life into a 2019 Dell XPS 15 that had been collecting dust for a couple of years. Despite its (at the time) high-end Core i7 CPU and 32GB of RAM, Windows was frustratingly slow on it. The fan was constantly at full throttle even when the machine was idle, and it regularly failed to install updates.

The tech world was taken aback this week by the unexpected departure of HP CEO Enrique Lores, who left the device giant to head PayPal. But, according to industry experts, the company will fare well against this kind of shakeup as long as it is able to execute on AI PCs, show definitive ROI, differentiate with emerging edge use cases, and strike a balance between pricing and technology advances.

CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes used the company's Thursday earnings call to reveal Atlassian now has five million users of its Rovo agentic AI offering and suggested that investors in the company might worry that costs would blow out as a result. "We're able to deliver those five million Rovo seats and continue to improve gross margin," he reassured. "That's a huge achievement on behalf of our engineering teams, but it shows that we can manage those AI costs inside for the vast majority of customers."

It's for real this time: After nearly 20 years, there will soon be no more Exchange Web Services (EWS) in Microsoft Exchange Online. The API will be disabled by default on October 1, 2026, and will be completely shut down on April 1, 2027, with "no exceptions." Organizations must have switched to Microsoft Graph by then. However, admins can give themselves a little more wiggle room if they change a configure setting

But he quickly turned pessimistic by warning "In the coming quarters, the handset industry will be constrained by the availability and pricing of memory, particularly DRAM." Those constraints, he said, stem entirely from memory-makers prioritizing memory for AI datacenters and reducing the amount of other memory they make. The laws of supply and demand have kicked in, sending the price of DRAM soaring.

The markets are under pressure today after Big Tech stocks spooked investors with their hefty capex agendas for 2026. Google parent Alphabet ( Nasdaq: GOOGL) Google shocked the markets by basically doubling its capital expenditures roadmap to $185 billion in 2026 compared with expectations of $120 billion in a bid to drive growth. GOOGL stock, which is a member of the Nasdaq Composite, is currently down about 3% while its market cap is hovering at $3.9 trillion.

Modern gaming platforms no longer win purely on content libraries, bonuses, or marketing spend. Competitive advantage is increasingly determined by the quality of the underlying technology stack, particularly payment infrastructure. This article examines how payment systems have evolved into a decisive moat for gaming operators, driven by massive investment, API-led architecture, advanced security engineering, cloud scalability, and the measurable financial cost of legacy platforms. Each section below explores a distinct technical pillar shaping competitive outcomes across the modern gaming ecosystem.

The numbers released Wednesday marked Google's third consecutive quarter of digital ad growth of more than 10% from the previous year, while also posting more than 30% sales growth in its division that powers data centers for AI services. Those increases during the October-December period propelled Google's corporate parent Alphabet Inc. well past the earnings forecasts of stock market analysts.

In December, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened an investigation into Waymo after Austin's largest school district reported at least 19 incidents where the company's robotaxis failed to fully stop for school buses during loading and unloading - an illegal violation in all 50 states. Waymo quickly responded by issuing a voluntary software recall and rolling out updates intended to fix the problem.

Microsoft has made OneDrive agents generally available, allowing users to query multiple documents simultaneously through Copilot instead of just one at a time. Users can select up to 20 files and create an agent, saved as a .agent file in OneDrive. Rather than teasing information out of individual documents, Microsoft says users can make cross-document queries, including "What decisions have we made so far?" and "What risks keep coming up?" The agent then generates a response based on the documents' content.

Total revenue -- $1.72 billion, up 10%, with advertising contributing $1.48 billion, a 5% increase driven by direct response advertising and SMB client segment growth. Other revenue -- $232 million, increasing 62%, supported by 71% subscriber growth to 24 million, with memory storage plans cited as a primary driver for higher retention. Adjusted gross margin -- 59%, rising from 57%, achieving the near-term goal articulated in recent strategic communications.

Founded in 2013 to archive the "aesthetic awesomeness" of GeoCities websites, Neocities keeps the spirit of the 1990s Internet alive. It lets users design free websites without relying on standardized templates devoid of personality. For hundreds of thousands of people building websites around art, niche fandoms, and special expertise-or simply seeking a place to get a little weird online-Neocities provides a blank canvas that can be endlessly personalized when compared to a Facebook page.

The Boring Company signed a partnership agreement with Dubai Roads and Transport Authority on the sidelines of the World Governments Summit 2026 to start the implementation of the Dubai Loop, as per the tunneling startup in a blog post. The agreement was signed on behalf of Dubai RTA by Mattar Al Tayer, director general and chairman of the Board of Executive Directors, and on behalf of The Boring Company by James Fitzgerald, the startup's global vice president of business development.

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Wednesday marks exactly 22 years since Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook. The platform has evolved from its original goal of connecting college students in 2004 when it launched, to a dominant platform for AI-driven discovery and commerce in 2026. Feeds that used to prioritize chronological updates from friends now use AI to pick up on interests and behavioral signals in deciding what to serve up its users.

Amazon has announced that its generative AI-powered digital assistant Alexa Plus is now available to all Prime members in the US via any Alexa-enabled device, Alexa.com, and the Alexa mobile app. If you don't have Prime, you can access the assistant on a new free tier on the web and app, or pay $20 a month for unlimited access to Alexa Plus, without Prime.

It's a goal that Musk suggested in his announcement of the deal could become easier to reach with a combined company. "In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale," Musk wrote on SpaceX's website Monday, then added in reference to solar power, "It's always sunny in space!" Musk said in his announcement he estimates "that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space."

PayPal Holdings (NASDAQ:PYPL) just did something nearly unheard of in Silicon Valley: it poached a sitting CEO from another public company. Enrique Lores, who led HP Inc () through six consecutive quarters of revenue growth, is now PayPal's new chief executive as of February 3, 2026. This wasn't a quiet retirement transition or a graceful succession plan. This was a raid.

The documents suggest that Google will wash its hands of ChromeOS once the current support window closes. Google promises 10 years of Chromebook support, but that's not counted from the date of purchase-Chromebooks are based on a handful of hardware platforms dictated by Google, with the most recent launching in 2023. That means Google has to support the newest devices through 2033. The "timeline to phase out ChromeOS is 2034," says the filing.