Microsoft on Monday announced Maia 200, the second generation of its custom AI chip, claiming it’s the most powerful first-party silicon from any major cloud provider. The company says Maia 200 delivers three times the performance of Amazon’s latest Trainium chip on certain benchmarks, and exceeds Google’s most recent tensor processing unit (TPU) on others. The chip is already running workloads at Microsoft’s data center near Des Moines, Iowa. Microsoft says Maia 200 is powering OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 models, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and internal projects from its Superintelligence team. A second deployment at a data center near Phoenix is planned next.

It’s part of the larger trend among cloud giants to build their own custom silicon for AI rather than rely solely on Nvidia. […] The company says Maia 200 offers 30% better performance-per-dollar than its current hardware. Maia 200 also builds on the first-generation chip with a more specific focus on inference, the process of running AI models after they’ve been trained. […] Microsoft is also opening the door to outside developers. The company announced a software development kit that will let AI startups and researchers optimize their models for Maia 200. Developers and academics can sign up for an early preview starting today.

Goodarzi, a California tech executive with ties to BattleBots, is publicly listed as the president and CEO of Magmotor, which describes itself as a "proud" supporter of the combat robot community and claims to support several teams each year. According to his LinkedIn, Goodarzi also previously worked as a research affiliate at UCLA‘s B. John Garrick Institute for the Risk Sciences since 2023.

Originally from Iran, Papoli and Goodarzi settled in Los Angeles County’s verdant Rolling Hills community because of its tranquility and natural beauty, Papoli previously wrote. […] She described her husband, Goodarzi, as a pioneer in the world of renewable energy, developing both electric and hybrid vehicles since the 1980s. According to Papoli, he also worked as the technical director at Hughes Electronics, which developed and manufactured the EV1, an early iteration of the electric car, in the 1990s.

According to a recent post on the Workspace Updates blog, Gemini in Google Calendar can now help you quickly identify optimal meeting times when creating an event, as long as you have access to the attendees’ calendars. The new “Suggested times” feature scans everyone’s calendars and highlights the best time slots based on availability, working hours, and potential conflicts, eliminating the need to manually check schedules. Google has also made rescheduling simpler. The company explains that if multiple attendees decline your invite, you’ll see a banner in the event showing a time when everyone is available, letting you update the invite with a single click.

Google has agreed to pay $68 million to settle a lawsuit claiming it secretly listened to people’s private conversations through their phones. […] the lawsuit claimed Google Assistant would sometimes turn on by mistake — the phone thinking someone had said its activation phrase when they had not — and recorded conversations intended to be private. They alleged the recordings were then sent to advertisers for the purpose of creating targeted advertising. The proposed settlement was filed on Friday in a California federal court, and requires approval by US District Judge Beth Labson Freeman.

The claim has been brought as a class action lawsuit rather than an individual case — meaning if it is approved, the money will be paid out across many different claimants. Those eligible for a payout will have owned Google devices dating back to May 2016. But lawyers for the plaintiffs may ask for up to one-third of the settlement — amounting to about $22 million in legal fees. The tech firm also denied any wrongdoing, as well as claims that it “recorded, disclosed to third parties, or failed to delete, conversations recorded as the result of a Siri activation” without consent.

The plan was presented to DOT staff last month at a demonstration of AI’s “potential to revolutionize the way we draft rulemakings,” agency attorney Daniel Cohen wrote to colleagues. The demonstration, Cohen wrote, would showcase “exciting new AI tools available to DOT rule writers to help us do our job better and faster.”

Discussion of the plan continued among agency leadership last week, according to meeting notes reviewed by ProPublica. Gregory Zerzan, the agency’s general counsel, said at that meeting that President Donald Trump is “very excited about this initiative.” Zerzan seemed to suggest that the DOT was at the vanguard of a broader federal effort, calling the department the “point of the spear” and “the first agency that is fully enabled to use AI to draft rules.” Zerzan appeared interested mainly in the quantity of regulations that AI could produce, not their quality. “We don’t need the perfect rule on XYZ. We don’t even need a very good rule on XYZ,” he said, according to the meeting notes. “We want good enough.” Zerzan added, “We’re flooding the zone.”

These developments have alarmed some at DOT. The agency’s rules touch virtually every facet of transportation safety, including regulations that keep airplanes in the sky, prevent gas pipelines from exploding and stop freight trains carrying toxic chemicals from skidding off the rails. Why, some staffers wondered, would the federal government outsource the writing of such critical standards to a nascent technology notorious for making mistakes? The answer from the plan’s boosters is simple: speed. Writing and revising complex federal regulations can take months, sometimes years. But, with DOT’s version of Google Gemini, employees could generate a proposed rule in a matter of minutes or even seconds, two DOT staffers who attended the December demonstration remembered the presenter saying.

Video game developer and distributor Valve must face a 656 million-pound ($897.7 million) lawsuit in Britain, which alleges it charged publishers excessive commissions for its Steam online store, after a tribunal ruled on Monday the case could continue. Valve was sued in 2024 on behalf of up to 14 million people in the United Kingdom who bought games or additional content through Steam or other platforms since 2018.

Lawyers representing children’s welfare advocate Vicki Shotbolt, who is bringing the case, allege Valve prevents publishers selling products more cheaply or earlier on rival platforms to Steam by imposing conditions on them. They say Valve requires users to buy all additional content through Steam if they’ve bought that game through the platform, effectively “locking in” users to make purchases on its platform. This allows Valve to charge “unfair and excessive” commissions of up to 30%, Shotbolt’s lawyers said at a hearing in October.

An insider who correctly leaked information about Oblivion: Remastered and other titles is warning that GTA 6’s physical release could be pushed back. GTA 6 is set to finally launch on November 19, 2026, but fans hoping to get their hands on a physical copy could be stuck waiting even longer.

According to a report from Polish site PPE, insider Graczdari says Rockstar’s parent company, Take-Two, isn’t planning to release a physical edition of GTA 6 at launch. “We are getting more and more information that the box version will not be released simultaneously with the digital version to prevent leaks,” the report says.

“We always take consumer privacy and data security very seriously,” Nike said in a statement. “We are investigating a potential cyber security incident and are actively assessing the situation.”

The ransomware group World Leaks said on its website that it had published 1.4 terabytes of data from Nike.

From Sandisk shareholders to vibe coders, AI is making — and breaking — fortunes at a rapid pace. One unlikely beneficiary has been the British Overseas Territory of Anguilla, which lucked into a future fortune when ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, gave the island the ".ai” top-level domain in the mid-1990s. Indeed, since ChatGPT’s launch at the end of 2022, the gold rush for websites to associate themselves with the burgeoning AI technology has seen a flood of revenue for the island of just ~15,000 people.

In 2023, Anguilla generated 87 million East Caribbean dollars (~$32 million) from domain name sales, some 22% of its total government revenue that year, with 354,000 ".ai” domains registered. As of January 2, 2026, the number of ".ai” domains surpassed 1 million, per data from Domain Name Stat — suggesting that the nation’s revenue from ".ai” has likely soared, too. This is confirmed in the government’s 2026 budget address, in which Cora Richardson Hodge, the premier of Anguilla, said, “Revenue from domain name registration continues to exceed expectations.”

Demand for cooling will “drastically” increase in giant countries like Brazil, Indonesia and Nigeria, where hundreds of millions of people lack air conditioning or other means of beating the heat. But even a moderate increase in hotter days could have a “severe impact” in nations not used to such conditions like Canada, Russia and Finland, said scientists from the University of Oxford.

In a new study, they looked at different global warming scenarios to project how often people in future might experience temperatures considered uncomfortably hot or cold. They found “that the population experiencing extreme heat conditions is projected to nearly double” by 2050 if global average temperatures rise 2C above preindustrial times.