Critical infrastructure

Netherlands and China in talks to resolve Nexperia dispute

The Dutch Economy Minister has spoken with his Chinese counterpart to ease tensions following the Netherlands’ recent seizure of Nexperia, a major Dutch semiconductor firm.

China, where most of Nexperia’s chips are produced and sold, reacted by blocking exports, creating concern among European carmakers reliant on its components.

Vincent Karremans said he had discussed ‘further steps towards reaching a solution’ with Chinese Minister of Commerce Wang Wentao.

Both sides emphasised the importance of finding an outcome that benefits Nexperia, as well as the Chinese and European economies.

Meanwhile, Nexperia’s China division has begun asserting its independence, telling employees they may reject ‘external instructions’.

The firm remains a subsidiary of Shanghai-listed Wingtech, which has faced growing scrutiny from European regulators over national security and strategic technology supply chains.

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Nexos.ai raises €30 m to ease enterprise AI adoption

The European startup Nexos.ai, headquartered in Vilnius, Lithuania, has closed a €30 million Series A funding round, co-led by Index Ventures and Evantic Capital, valuing the company at about €300 million (~US $350 million).

Founded by the duo behind cybersecurity unicorn Nord Security (Tomas Okmanas and Eimantas Sabaliauskas), Nexos.ai aims to solve what they describe as the ‘enterprise AI adoption crisis’. In their view, many organisations struggle with governance, cost control, fragmentation and security risks when using large-language models (LLMs).

Nexos.ai’s platform comprises two main components: an AI Workspace for employees and an AI Gateway for developers.

The Gateway offers orchestration across 200+ models, unified access, guardrails, cost monitoring and compliance oversight. The Workspace enables staff to work across formats, compare models and collaborate in a secure interface.

The company’s positioning as a neutral intermediary, likened to ‘Switzerland for LLMs’, underscores its mission to allow enterprises to gain productivity with AI without giving up data control or security.

The new funds will be used to extend support for private model deployment, expand into regulated sectors (finance, public institutions), grow across Europe and North America, and deepen product capabilities in routing, model fallback, and observability.

It’s an illustration of how investors are backing infrastructure plays in the enterprise-AI space: not just building new models, but creating the scaffolding for how organisations adopt, govern and deploy them safely.

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Medical group hit with £100,000 penalty after cyberattack exposes patient data

Emails containing sensitive health data were stolen from the Medical Specialist Group (MSG) in a 2021 cyberattack. The data has been later used in phishing campaigns, prompting the Office of the Data Protection Authority (ODPA) to fine MSG £100,000 for insufficiently safeguarding personal data and breaching data protection legislation.

Investigators found the clinic’s email server was compromised in August 2021 and went undetected for more than three months. Health data is sensitive information that requires stringent protection. However, the ODPA found MSG neglected to install routine security updates for thirteen months, and weaknesses in its threat-detection system led to multiple missed chances to identify unauthorised access to its email server.

The ODPA has ordered MSG to pay £75,000 within 60 days and a further £25,000 after 14 months, with the final amount being waived if it completes an agreed security action plan. MSG stated it has invested in new technology, system monitoring and staff training. The exact number of stolen emails remains unclear, though thousands were left exposed to unauthorised access.

The breach adds to a growing list of cyberattacks targeting the healthcare sector over the past year, including incidents like the Anne Arundel Dermatology cyberattack affecting nearly two million patients and the McLaren Health Care ransomware attack, affecting over 700,000 individuals.

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AWS outage turned a mundane DNS slip into global chaos

Cloudflare’s boss summed up the mood after Monday’s chaos, relieved his firm wasn’t to blame as outages rippled across more than 1,000 companies. Snapchat, Reddit, Roblox, Fortnite, banks, and government portals faltered together, exposing how much of the web leans on Amazon Web Services.

AWS is the backbone for a vast slice of the internet, renting compute, storage, and databases so firms avoid running their own stacks. However, a mundane Domain Name System error in its Northern Virginia region scrambled routing, leaving services online yet unreachable as traffic lost its map.

Engineers call it a classic failure mode: ‘It’s always DNS.’ Misconfigurations, maintenance slips, or server faults can cascade quickly across shared platforms. AWS says teams moved to mitigate, but the episode showed how a small mistake at scale becomes a global headache in minutes.

Experts warned of concentration risk: when one hyperscaler stumbles, many fall. Yet few true alternatives exist at AWS’s scale beyond Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, with smaller rivals from IBM to Alibaba, and fledgling European plays, far behind.

Calls for UK–EU cloud sovereignty are growing, but timelines and costs are steep. Monday’s outage is a reminder that resilience needs multi-region and multi-cloud designs, tested failovers, and clear incident comms, not just faith in a single provider.

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IAEA launches initiative to protect AI in nuclear facilities

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has launched a new research project to strengthen computer security for AI in the nuclear sector. The initiative aims to support safe adoption of AI technologies in nuclear facilities, including small modular reactors and other applications.

AI and machine learning systems are increasingly used in the nuclear industry to improve operational efficiency and enhance security measures, such as threat detection. These technologies bring risks like data manipulation or misuse, requiring strong cybersecurity and careful oversight.

The Coordinated Research Project (CRP) on Enhancing Computer Security of Artificial Intelligence Applications for Nuclear Technologies will develop methodologies to identify vulnerabilities, implement protection mechanisms, and create AI-enabled security assessment tools.

Training frameworks will also be established to develop human resources capable of managing AI securely in nuclear environments.

Research organisations from all IAEA member states are invited to join the CRP. Proposals must be submitted by 30 November 2025, with participation encouraged for women and young researchers. The IAEA offers further details through its CRP contact page.

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China leads the global generative AI adoption with 515 million users

In China, the use of generative AI has expanded unprecedentedly, reaching 515 million users in the first half of 2025.

The figure, released by the China Internet Network Information Centre, shows more than double the number recorded in December and represents an adoption rate of 36.5 per cent.

Such growth is driven by strong digital infrastructure and the state’s determination to make AI a central tool of national development.

The country’s ‘AI Plus’ strategy aims to integrate AI across all sectors of society and the economy. The majority of users rely on domestic platforms such as DeepSeek, Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen and ByteDance’s Doubao, as access to leading Western models remains restricted.

Young and well-educated citizens dominate the user base, underlining the government’s success in promoting AI literacy among key demographics.

Microsoft’s recent research confirms that China has the world’s largest AI market, surpassing the US in total users. While the US adoption has remained steady, China’s domestic ecosystem continues to accelerate, fuelled by policy support and public enthusiasm for generative tools.

China also leads the world in AI-related intellectual property, with over 1.5 million patent applications accounting for nearly 39 per cent of the global total.

The rapid adoption of home-grown AI technologies reflects a strategic drive for technological self-reliance and positions China at the forefront of global digital transformation.

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Google Cloud and NVIDIA join forces to accelerate enterprise AI and industrial digitalisation

NVIDIA and Google Cloud are expanding their collaboration to bring advanced AI computing to a wider range of enterprise workloads.

The new Google Cloud G4 virtual machines, powered by NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs, are now generally available, combining high-performance computing with scalability for AI, design, and industrial applications.

An announcement that also makes NVIDIA Omniverse and Isaac Sim available on the Google Cloud Marketplace, offering enterprises new tools for digital twin development, robotics simulation, and AI-driven industrial operations.

These integrations enable customers to build realistic virtual environments, train intelligent systems, and streamline design processes.

Powered by the Blackwell architecture, the RTX PRO 6000 GPUs support next-generation AI inference and advanced graphics capabilities. Enterprises can use them to accelerate complex workloads ranging from generative and agentic AI to high-fidelity simulations.

The partnership strengthens Google Cloud’s AI infrastructure and cements NVIDIA’s role as the leading provider of end-to-end computing for enterprise transformation.

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China’s Unitree reveals next-generation humanoid ahead of major IPO

Unitree Robotics has unveiled its most lifelike humanoid robot to date, marking a bold step forward in the country’s rapidly advancing robotics industry.

The new H2 humanoid model, showcased in a short social media video, demonstrated remarkable agility and expressiveness, performing intricate dance moves with striking humanlike grace.

The 180cm-tall, 70kg robot features a silver face with defined eyes, lips and nose, alongside the tagline ‘Destiny Awakening – born to serve everyone safely and friendly’.

A model that represents the company’s growing ambition as it prepares for a mainland listing valued at around US$7 billion.

Unitree’s progress underscores the growing strength of China in humanoid robotics, a field increasingly dominated by domestic innovation and manufacturing capabilities.

As global competition intensifies, the company aims to position itself at the forefront of human-robot interaction and industrial automation.

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Startup raises $9m to orchestrate Gulf digital infrastructure

Bilal Abu-Ghazaleh has launched 1001 AI, a London–Dubai startup building an AI-native operating system for critical MENA industries. The two-month-old firm raised $9m seed from CIV, General Catalyst and Lux Capital, with angels including Chris Ré, Amjad Masad and Amira Sajwani.

Target sectors include airports, ports, construction, and oil and gas, where 1001 AI sees billions in avoidable inefficiencies. Its engine ingests live operational data, models workflows and issues real-time directives, rerouting vehicles, reassigning crews and adjusting plans autonomously.

Abu-Ghazaleh brings scale-up experience from Hive AI and Scale AI, where he led GenAI operations and contributor networks. 1001 borrows a consulting-style rollout: embed with clients, co-develop the model, then standardise reusable patterns across similar operational flows.

Investors argue the Gulf is an ideal test bed given sovereign-backed AI ambitions and under-digitised, mission-critical infrastructure. Deena Shakir of Lux says the region is ripe for AI that optimises physical operations at scale, from flight turnarounds to cargo moves.

First deployments are slated for construction by year-end, with aviation and logistics to follow. The funding supports early pilots and hiring across engineering, operations and go-to-market, as 1001 aims to become the Gulf’s orchestration layer before expanding globally.

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AWS outage shows the cost of cloud concentration

A single fault can bring down the modern web. During the outage on Monday, 20 October 2025, millions woke to broken apps, games, banking, and tools after database errors at Amazon Web Services rippled outward. When a shared backbone stumbles, the blast radius engulfs everything from chat to commerce.

The outage underscored cloud concentration risk. Roblox, Fortnite, Pokémon Go, Snapchat, and workplace staples like Slack and Monday.com stumbled together because many depend on the same region and data layer. Failover, throttling, and retries help, but simultaneous strain can swamp safeguards.

On Friday, 19 July 2024, a faulty CrowdStrike update crashed Windows machines worldwide, triggering blue screens that grounded flights, delayed surgeries, and froze point-of-sale systems. The fix was simple; recovery wasn’t. Friday patches gained a new cautionary tale.

Earlier shocks foreshadowed today’s scale. In 1997, a Network Solutions glitch briefly hobbled .com and .net. In 2018, malware in Alaska’s Matanuska-Susitna knocked services offline, sending a community of 100,000 back to paper. Each incident showed how mundane errors cascade into civic life.

Resilience now means multi-region designs, cross-cloud failovers, tested runbooks, rate-limit backstops, and graceful read-only modes. Add regulatory stress tests, clear incident comms, and sector drills with hospitals, airlines, and banks. The internet will keep breaking; our job is to make it bend.

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