The company has already invested over $1 billion in digital infrastructure, including subsea cable projects such as Equiano and Umoja, enabling 100 million people to come online for the first time. Four new regional cable hubs are being established to boost connectivity and resilience further.
Alongside infrastructure, Google will provide college students in eight African countries with a free one-year subscription to Google AI Pro. The tools, including Gemini 2.5 Pro and Guided Learning, are designed to support research, coding, and problem-solving.
By 2030, Google says it intends to reach 500 million Africans with AI-powered innovations tackling issues such as crop resilience, flood forecasting and access to education.
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Japan is adopting a softer approach to regulating generative AI, emphasising innovation while managing risks. Its 2025 AI Bill promotes development and safety, supported by international norms and guidelines.
The Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) is running a market study on competition concerns in AI, alongside enforcing the new Mobile Software Competition Act (MSCA), aimed at curbing anti-competitive practices in mobile software.
The AI Bill focuses on transparency, international cooperation, and sector-specific guidance rather than heavy penalties. Policymakers hope this flexible framework will avoid stifling innovation while encouraging responsible adoption.
The MSCA, set to be fully enforced in December 2025, obliges mobile platform operators to ensure interoperability and fair treatment of developers, including potential applications to AI tools and assistants.
With rapid AI advances, regulators in Japan remain cautious but proactive. The JFTC aims to monitor markets closely, issue guidelines as needed, and preserve a balance between competition, innovation, and consumer protection.
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Notion has officially entered the agent era with the launch of Notion Agent, the centrepiece of its Notion 3.0 rollout. Described as a ‘teammate and Notion super user,’ the AI agent is designed to automate work inside and beyond Notion.
The new tool can automatically build pages and databases, search across connected tools like Slack, and perform up to 20 minutes of autonomous work at a time. Notion says this enables faster, more efficient workflows across hundreds of pages simultaneously.
A key feature is memory, which allows the agent to ‘remember’ a user’s preferences and working style. These memories can be edited and stored under multiple profiles, allowing users to customise their agent for different projects or contexts.
Notion highlights use cases such as generating email campaigns, consolidating feedback into reports, and transforming meeting notes into emails or proposals. The company says the agent acts as a partner who plans tasks and carries them out end-to-end.
Future updates will expand personalisation and automation, including fully customised agents capable of even more complex tasks. Notion positions the launch as a step toward a new era of intelligent, self-directed productivity.
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The UK and US have signed a landmark Tech Prosperity Deal, securing a £250 billion investment package across technology and energy sectors. The agreement includes major commitments from leading AI companies to expand data centres, supercomputing capacity, and create 15,000 jobs in Britain.
Energy security forms a core part of the deal, with plans for 12 advanced nuclear reactors in northeast England. These facilities are expected to generate power for millions of homes and businesses, lower bills, and strengthen bilateral energy resilience.
The package includes $30 billion from Microsoft and $6.8 billion from Google, alongside other AI investments aimed at boosting UK research. It also funds the country’s largest supercomputer project with Nscale, establishing a foundation for AI leadership in Europe.
American firms have pledged £150 billion for UK projects, while British companies will invest heavily in the US. Pharmaceutical giant GSK has committed nearly $30 billion to American operations, underlining the cross-Atlantic nature of the partnership.
The Tech Prosperity Deal follows a recent UK-US trade agreement that removes tariffs on steel and aluminium and opens markets for key exports. The new accord builds on that momentum, tying economic growth to innovation, deregulation, and frontier technologies.
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The social media ban, the backlash, the reversal, and the political break sequence have narrated an unexpected digital governance tale. The on-the-ground reality: a clash between a fast-evolving regulatory push and a hyper-networked youth cohort that treats connectivity as livelihood, classroom, and public square.
The trigger: A registration ultimatum meets a hyper-online society
The ban didn’t arrive from nowhere. Nepal has been building toward platform licensing since late 2023, when the government issued the Social Media Management Directive 2080 requiring platforms to register with the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (MoCIT), designate a local contact, and comply with expedited takedown and cooperation rules. In early 2025, the government tabled a draft Social Media Bill 2081 in the National Assembly to convert that directive into an effective statute. International legal reviews, including UNESCO-supported March 2025 assessment and an analysis, praised the goal of accountability but warned that vague definitions, sweeping content-removal powers and weak independence could chill lawful speech.
Why did the order provoke such a strong reaction? Considering the baseline, Nepal had about 14.3 million social-media user identities at the start of 2025, roughly 48% of the population, and internet use around 56%. A society in which half the country’s people (and a significantly larger share of its urban youth) rely on social apps for news, school, side-hustles, remittances and family ties is a society in which platform switches are not merely lifestyle choices; they’re digital infrastructure, and it is important to stress the ‘generation gap’ to understand this.
The movement: Gen Z logistics in a blackout world
What made Nepal’s youth mobilisation unusual wasn’t only its size and adaptability, but also the speed and digital literacy with which organisers navigated today’s digital infrastructure; skills that may be less familiar to people who don’t use these platforms daily. However, once the ban hit, the digitally literate rapidly diversified their strategies:
Alt-messaging and community hubs: With legacy apps dark, Discord emerged as a ‘virtual control room,’ a natural fit for a generation raised in multiplayer servers. Despite the ban, the movement’s core group (Hami Nepal) organised on Discord and Instagram. Several Indian outlets and the Times of India claimed that more than 100,000 users converged in sprawling voice and text channels to debate leadership choices during the transition.
Peer-to-peer and ‘mesh’ apps: Encrypted, Bluetooth-based tools, prominently Bitchat, covered by mainstream and crypto-trade press, saw a burst of downloads as protest organisers prepared for intermittent internet access and cellular throttling. The appeal was simple: it works offline, hops device-to-device, and is harder to block.
Locally registered holdouts: Because TikTok and Viber had registered with MoCIT, they remained online and quickly became funnels for updates, citizen journalism and short-form explainers about where to assemble and how to avoid police cordons. Nepal Police’s Cyber Bureau, alarmed by the VPN stampede, publicly warned users about indiscriminate VPN use and data-theft risks; advice that landed with little force once crowds were already in the streets.
The logistics looked like distributed operations: a core group tasked with sourcing legal and medical aid; volunteer cartographers maintaining live maps of barricades; diaspora Nepalis mirroring clips to international audiences; and moderators trying (often failing) to keep chatrooms free of calls to violence.
The law: What Nepal is trying to regulate and why it backfired?
Mandatory registration with MoCIT and local point-of-contact;
Expedited removal of content deemed ‘unlawful’ or ‘harmful’;
Data cooperation requirements with domestic authorities;
Penalties for non-compliance and user-level offences include phishing, impersonation and deepfake distribution.
Critics and the youth movement found that friction was not caused by the idea of regulation itself, but by how it was drafted and applied. UNESCO-supported March 2025 assessment and an analysis of the Social Media Bill 2081 flagged vague, catch-all definitions (e.g. ‘disrupts social harmony’), weak due process around takedown orders, and a lack of independent oversight, urging a tiered, risk-based approach that distinguishes between a global platform and a small local forum, and builds in judicial review and appeals. The Centre for Law and Democracy (CLD) analysis warned that focusing policy ‘almost exclusively on individual pieces of content’ instead of systemic risk management would produce overbroad censorship tools without solving the harms regulators worry about.
Labelling the event a ‘Gen Z uprising’ is broadly accurate, and numbers help frame it. People aged 15–24 make up about one-fifth of Nepal’s population (page 56), and adding 25–29 pushes the 15–29 bracket to roughly a third, close to the share commonly captured by ‘Gen Z’ definitions used in this case (born 1997–2012, so 13–28 in 2025). Those will most likely be online daily, trading on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook Marketplace, freelancing across borders, preparing for exams with YouTube and Telegram notes, and maintaining relationships across labour migration splits via WhatsApp and Viber. When those rails go down, they feel it first and hardest.
There’s also the matter of expectations. A decade of smartphone diffusion trained Nepali youth to assume the availability of news, payments, learning, work, and diaspora connections, but the ban punctured that assumption. In interviews and livestreams, student voices toggled between free-speech language and bread-and-butter complaints (lost orders, cancelled tutoring, a frozen online store, a blocked interview with an overseas client).
The platforms: two weeks of reputational whiplash
Meta: after months of criticism for ignoring registration notices, it still has not registered in Nepal and remains out of compliance with the government’s requirements from the Social Media Bill 2081.
TikTok, banned in 2023 for ‘social harmony’ concerns and later restored after agreeing to compliance, found itself on the legal side of the ledger this time; it stayed up and became a publishing artery for youth explainers and police-abuse documentation.
VPN providers, especially Proton, earned folk-hero status. The optics of an ‘8,000% surge’ became shorthand for resilience.
Discord shifted from gamer space to civic nerve centre, a recurring pattern from Hong Kong to Myanmar that Nepal echoed in miniature. Nepalis turned to Discord to debate the country’s political future, fact-check rumours and collect nominations for the country’s future leaders. On 12 September, the Discord community organised a digital poll for an interim prime minister, with former Supreme Court Chief Justice Sushila Karki emerging as the winner. The same features that facilitate raids and speed-runs, voice, low-latency presence, and channel hierarchies, make for a capable ad-hoc command room. The Hami Nepal group’s role in the event’s transitional politics underscores that shift.
The economy and institutions: Damage, then restraint
The five-day blackout blew holes in ordinary commerce: sellers lost a festival week of orders, creators watched brand deals collapse, and freelancers missed interviews. The violence that followed destroyed far more: Gen Z uprising leaves roughly USD 280 million / EUR 240 million in damages, estimates circulating in the aftermath.
On 9 September, the government lifted the platform restrictions; on 13 September, the news chronicled a re-opening capital under interim PM Karki, who spent her first days visiting hospitals and signalling commitments to elections and legal review. What followed mattered: the ban acknowledged, and the task to ensure accountability was left. Here, the event gave legislators the chance to go back to the bill’s text with international guidance on the table and for leaders to translate street momentum into institutional questions.
Bottom line
Overall, Nepal’s last two weeks were not a referendum on whether social platforms should face rules. They were a referendum on how those rules are made and enforced in a society where connectivity is a lifeline and the connected are young. A government sought accountability by unplugging the public square and the public, Gen Z, mostly, responded by building new squares in hours and then spilling into the real one. The costs are plain and human, from the hospital wards to the charred chambers of parliament. The opportunity is also plain: to rebuild digital law so that rights and accountability reinforce rather than erase each other.
If that happens, the ‘Gen Z revolution’ of early September will not be a story about apps. It will be about institutions catching up to the internet, digital policies and a generation insisting they be invited to write the new social contract for digital times, which ensures accountability, transparency, judicial oversight and due process.
The two US tech firms, NVIDIA and Intel, have announced a major partnership to develop multiple generations of AI infrastructure and personal computing products.
They say that the collaboration will merge NVIDIA’s leadership in accelerated computing with Intel’s expertise in CPUs and advanced manufacturing.
For data centres, Intel will design custom x86 CPUs for NVIDIA, which will be integrated into the company’s AI platforms to power hyperscale and enterprise workloads.
In personal computing, Intel will create x86 system-on-chips that incorporate NVIDIA RTX GPU chiplets, aimed at delivering high-performance PCs for a wide range of consumers.
As part of the deal, NVIDIA will invest $5 billion in Intel common stock at $23.28 per share, pending regulatory approvals.
NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang described the collaboration as a ‘fusion of two world-class platforms’ that will accelerate computing innovation, while Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said the partnership builds on decades of x86 innovation and will unlock breakthroughs across industries.
The move underscores how AI is reshaping both infrastructure and personal computing. By combining architectures and ecosystems instead of pursuing separate paths, Intel and NVIDIA are positioning themselves to shape the next era of computing at a global scale.
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Three lawsuits have been filed in US federal courts alleging that Character.AI and its founders, with Google’s backing, deployed predatory chatbots that harmed children. The cases involve the family of 13-year-old Juliana Peralta, who died by suicide in 2023, and two other minors.
The complaints say the chatbots were designed to mimic humans, build dependency, and expose children to sexual content. Using emojis, typos, and pop-culture personas, the bots allegedly gained trust and encouraged isolation from family and friends.
Juliana’s parents say she engaged in explicit chats, disclosed suicidal thoughts, and received no intervention before her death. Nina, 15, from New York, attempted suicide after her mother blocked the app, while a Colorado, US girl known as T.S. was also affected.
Character.AI and Google are accused of misrepresenting the app as child-safe and failing to act on warning signs. The cases follow earlier lawsuits from the Social Media Victims Law Center over similar claims that the platform encouraged harm.
SMVLC founder Matthew Bergman stated that the cases underscore the urgent need for accountability in AI design and stronger safeguards to protect children. The legal team is seeking damages and stricter safety standards for chatbot platforms marketed to minors.
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OpenAI and Apollo Research developed evaluations to reveal hidden misalignment in advanced AI systems, often labelled scheming, and observed scheming-like behaviour in several frontier models, including OpenAI o3, o4-mini, Gemini 2.5 pro and Claude Opus-4.
Researchers treated covert actions, such as deliberately withholding or distorting task-relevant information, as a measurable proxy and stress-tested models across dozens of scenarios.
Scheming occurs when a model outwardly appears aligned while pursuing an alternate goal. The teams used a trader analogy to explain the risk: a rule-breaking broker who covers tracks can seem more compliant than an honest operator who accepts lower gains.
They trained models with deliberative alignment to counter the behaviour, asking them to read and reason about an anti-scheming specification before acting. Hence, models follow safety principles instead of merely avoiding detection.
That training produced about a thirtyfold reduction in covert actions on out-of-distribution tests, with o3 falling from 13 percent to 0.4 percent and o4-mini dropping from 8.7 percent to 0.3 percent.
Nevertheless, rare but serious failures remained, and measurement proved complex. Models often became more aware of being evaluated, and situational awareness can suppress observable scheming without altering underlying aims.
The study relied heavily on access to the models’ chain of thought to probe motivations, so preserving reasoning transparency is crucial for reliable oversight. The teams warned that training practices eroding transparency could make monitoring far harder and let misalignment hide rather than vanish.
OpenAI and Apollo called for broader cross-lab safety evaluations, stronger monitoring tools and continued research into anti-scheming techniques. They renewed their partnership, launched a $500,000 red-teaming challenge focused on scheming and proposed shared testing protocols.
The researchers emphasised there is no evidence that today’s deployed AI models would abruptly begin harmful scheming. Still, the risk will grow as systems take on more ambiguous, long-term, real-world responsibilities instead of short, narrow tasks.
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Alphabet’s Google has announced new AI-powered features for its Chrome browser that aim to make web browsing more proactive instead of reactive. The update centres on integrating Gemini, Google’s AI assistant, into Chrome to provide contextual support across tabs and tasks.
The AI assistant will help students and professionals manage large numbers of open tabs by summarising articles, answering questions, and recalling previously visited pages. It will also connect with Google services such as Docs and Calendar, offering smoother workflows on desktop and mobile devices.
Chrome’s address bar, the omnibox, is being upgraded with AI Mode. Users can ask multi-part questions and receive context-aware suggestions relevant to the page they are viewing. Initially available in the US, the feature will roll out to other regions and languages soon.
Beyond productivity, Google is also applying AI to security and convenience. Chrome now blocks billions of spam notifications daily, fills in login details, and warns users about malicious apps.
Future updates are expected to bring agentic capabilities, enabling Chrome to carry out complex tasks such as ordering groceries with minimal user input.
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US tech giant, Microsoft, is completing the construction of Fairwater in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, which it says will be the world’s most powerful AI data centre. The facility is expected to be operational in early 2026 after a $3.3 billion investment, with an additional $4 billion now committed for a second site.
The company says the project will help shape the next generation of AI by training frontier models with hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs, offering ten times the performance of today’s fastest supercomputers.
Beyond technology, Microsoft is highlighting the impact on local jobs and skills. Thousands of construction workers have been employed during the build, while the site is expected to support around 500 full-time roles when the first phase opens, rising to 800 once the second is complete.
The US giant has also launched Wisconsin’s first Datacentre Academy with Gateway Technical College to prepare students for careers in the digital economy.
Microsoft is also stressing its sustainability measures. The data centre will rely on a closed-loop liquid cooling system and outside air to minimise water use, while all fossil-fuel power consumed will be matched with carbon-free energy.
A new 250 MW solar farm is under construction in Portage County to support the commitment. The company has partnered with local organisations to restore prairie and wetland habitats, further embedding the project into the surrounding community.
Executives say the development represents more than just an investment in AI. It signals a long-term commitment to Wisconsin’s economy, education, and environment.
From broadband expansion to innovation labs, the company aims to ensure the benefits of AI extend to local businesses, students, and residents instead of remaining concentrated in global hubs.
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