The Government of Canada is investing over $19 million to help 20 AI and tech businesses in southern Ontario bring new solutions to market. The funding aims to boost Canada’s global competitiveness in AI.
The Ontario Brain Institute receives $2 million to expand its Centre for Analytics, providing secure and bias-free AI tools. This initiative supports safe and responsible AI adoption across industries.
Investments are expected to create jobs and accelerate AI adoption nationwide. The Regional Artificial Intelligence Initiative builds on over $450 million in FedDev Ontario funding since 2015.
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UAE telecom operator ‘du’ has deployed the country’s first tri-band Radio Remote Unit on the 600MHz spectrum in partnership with Huawei. The rollout marks progress in the UAE’s 5G-Advanced network development.
Improved indoor coverage and faster speeds are delivered through dynamic power sharing and multi-band functionality. The upgrade supports services such as 5G Fixed Wireless Access and Voice over New Radio.
Lower energy consumption and a compact design reduce the environmental footprint of network infrastructure. The deployment aligns with national sustainability goals while improving long-term network efficiency.
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Reports suggest Solana was targeted by a sustained DDoS campaign in mid-December, with peak traffic estimates close to 6 Tbps. Public dashboards showed full uptime and no visible disruption for users.
Recent upgrades appear central to the outcome, as they move spam filtering and prioritisation closer to the network edge. QUIC traffic handling, stake-weighted routing and local fee markets helped limit congestion.
Focus is shifting from outage risks to resilience under pressure. The episode suggests major blockchains are now engineered and attacked like Tier 1 internet infrastructure.
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The US tech giant, Google, has unveiled Gemini 3 Flash, a new frontier AI model designed for developers who need high reasoning performance combined with speed and low cost.
Built on the multimodal and agentic foundations of Gemini 3 Pro, Gemini 3 Flash delivers faster responses at less than a quarter of the price, while surpassing Gemini 2.5 Pro across several major benchmarks.
The model is rolling out through the Gemini API, Google AI Studio, Vertex AI, Android Studio and other developer platforms, offering higher rate limits, batch processing and context caching that significantly reduce operational costs.
Gemini 3 Flash achieves frontier-level results on advanced reasoning benchmarks while remaining optimised for large-scale production workloads, reinforcing Google’s focus on efficiency alongside intelligence.
Early adopters are already deploying Gemini 3 Flash across coding, gaming, deepfake detection and legal document analysis, benefiting from improved agentic capabilities and near real-time multimodal reasoning.
By lowering cost barriers while expanding performance, Gemini 3 Flash enhances Google’s competitive position in the rapidly evolving AI model market. It broadens access to advanced AI systems for developers and enterprises.
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AI is entering a new phase, with 2026 expected to mark a shift from experimentation to real-world collaboration. Microsoft executives describe AI as an emerging partner that amplifies human expertise rather than replacing it.
Microsoft says the impact is becoming visible across healthcare, software development, and scientific research. AI tools embedded in Microsoft products are supporting diagnosis, coding, and research workflows.
With the expansion of AI agents across all platforms, organisations are strengthening safeguards to manage new risks. Security leaders argue agents will require clear identities, restricted access, and continuous monitoring.
Microsoft also points to changes in the infrastructure powering AI. The company says future systems will prioritise efficiency and intelligence output, supported by distributed and hybrid cloud architectures.
Looking further ahead, the convergence of AI, supercomputing, and quantum technologies stands out as the main highlight. Hybrid approaches, the company says, are bringing practical quantum advantage closer for applications in materials science, medicine, and research.
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The US tech company, Oracle, has expanded Oracle Database@Google Cloud to India, making the service available through Google Cloud’s Mumbai region.
Enterprises can access Oracle Exadata, Autonomous AI Database and AI Lakehouse services while keeping data in the region to meet sovereignty and regulatory requirements.
The multicloud offering allows organisations to combine Oracle enterprise data with Google Cloud analytics and AI tools, including BigQuery, Vertex AI and Gemini models.
Customers can modernise applications and migrate mission-critical workloads without sacrificing performance, security or low-latency access.
Oracle Database@Google Cloud is available through the Google Cloud Marketplace, enabling customers to procure services via trusted partners instead of navigating complex contracting models.
Oracle and Google Cloud partners can also integrate the service into broader multicloud solutions.
The launch reflects growing demand for flexible multicloud architectures in India, supporting AI-driven innovation, advanced analytics and accelerated IT modernisation across regulated and data-intensive industries.
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Local councillors have approved Google’s plans to build a large data centre campus at North Weald Airfield near Harlow, marking a major expansion of the company’s UK digital infrastructure.
The development is expected to create up to 780 local jobs, including approximately 200 direct roles, and contribute an estimated £79 million annually to the local economy and £319 million nationally.
The project involves demolishing existing buildings at the former RAF airfield and constructing two data centre facilities alongside offices, roads and parking.
While UK councillors largely welcomed the investment, the council acknowledged potential downsides, including a reduction in stalls at the long-running North Weald Market and pending Section 106 contributions to mitigate infrastructure impacts, such as upgrades to nearby transport links.
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Telefónica has called for a shift in Europe’s telecommunications policy, arguing that market fragmentation is undermining investment, digital competitiveness, and the continent’s technological sovereignty, according to a new blog post from the company.
In the post, Telefónica says Europe’s emphasis on maximising retail competition has produced a highly fragmented operator landscape. It cites industry data showing the average European operator serves around five million customers, far fewer than peers in the United States or China.
The company argues that this lack of scale explains Europe’s lower per-capita investment in telecoms infrastructure and is slowing the rollout of technologies such as standalone 5G, fibre networks, and sovereign cloud and AI platforms.
Telefónica points to recent reports by Mario Draghi and Enrico Letta as signs of a policy shift, with EU institutions placing greater weight on investment capacity, resilience, and dynamic efficiency alongside traditional competition objectives.
The blog post concludes that Europe faces a strategic choice between preserving fragmented markets or enabling responsible consolidation. Telefónica says carefully regulated mergers could support sustainability, reduce regional digital divides, and strengthen Europe’s digital infrastructure.
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AWS has released a new case study showing how Pinterest scaled into an AI-powered discovery platform, emphasising the cloud provider’s role in supporting rapid growth and responsible use of generative tools across the service.
AWS says Pinterest now serves around 600 million users and relies on cloud infrastructure to process large visual datasets. Its systems analyse terabytes of content each day and generate high volumes of personalised suggestions across search, shopping, and inspiration features.
The case study details Pinterest’s move from early machine-learning models to multimodal and generative systems built on AWS. It highlights Canvas for image enhancement, improved visual search, and the conversational Pinterest Assistant.
AWS also points to Pinterest’s use of Amazon EKS, EC2 GPU instances, and Bedrock-powered moderation tools as a full-stack approach to responsible AI. Pinterest states that these systems help maintain a safe and positive environment while supporting new commercial and creative features.
AWS cites recent performance metrics as evidence of effective scaling, noting gains in revenue, user activity, and search quality. The company presents the case study as evidence that cloud-based AI infrastructure can support innovation on a global scale.
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Google’s new research on the impact of Gemini AI in Workspace reveals that the technology is reshaping how teams collaborate, with surveyed workers reporting weekly time savings and increasing confidence in AI-supported tasks.
The findings, based on input from more than 1,200 leaders and employees across six countries, suggest generative AI is becoming integral to routine workflows.
Many users report that Gemini helps them accomplish more in less time, generate ideas faster, and redirect their attention from repetitive tasks to higher-value work.
The report highlights wider organisational benefits. Leaders see AI as a driver of innovation, but a gap remains between executive ambitions and employee readiness. Google says structured training and phased rollouts are key to building trust and improving adoption accuracy.
New and updated Workspace features aim to address these needs. Recent Gemini releases offer improved task automation, enhanced email drafting, and advanced storytelling tools, while no-code agent builders support more complex workflow design without specialist skills.
The research points to a broader transformation in digital productivity. Companies using Gemini report fewer hours spent on administrative work, higher engagement, and stronger collaboration as AI becomes a functional layer that supports rather than replaces human judgement.
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