Mobile Tech & Gadgets

What is Zapier, what workflows can you do by connecting applications with this platform and what is its price

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We are going to tell you what Zapier is, a popular platform to configure workflows or workflows and create automation. It is an alternative to services like Make.com o IFTTT, specialized in connecting applications and/or artificial intelligence to create automation or AI agents. We are going to start by explaining to you what exactly this platform is, and then we will try to tell you in a summarized way what you will be able to do with it. And we will end by talking about its prices and its free plan, so you can know what it will cost to use it depending on what you want to do with it. What is Zapier Zapier is a platform that allows you create automations between applications and services each other. It does it in a very visual way and without the need for you to write code. It has support for more than 8,000 applications and services, including AI systems. You will configure automations with the ones you choose so that they work together automatically without you having to intervene every time you want them to do something. The way this platform works is create step chainsalso known as workflows. In each of these steps you can configure an action by determining which service or application you want to do it, which can be several steps with the same app or with a different one. Think of this as a chain. First you take a step that does one thing, and with the result of this you take a second step that does another, and thus you create a chain of interactions. You will also be able to make branches so that, depending on whether the result of a previous step is one way or another, the sequence goes one way or another doing different things. Each workflow on this platform is called Zap, and is made up of two fundamental elements. one is the triggerwhich is what we define when and why the automation is executed. And then there are the actionswhich can be one or more, and which are the tasks that Zapier executes in response to the trigger. For example, you can set up a Zap to run every time you receive an email in your Gmail account, and set up steps that automatically save it to Google Drive, and then send you a notification via Slack. With this, you will have configured the initial trigger, the received email, and then two actions one after the other. The interface of this service is very intuitive and is designed for non-technical users. Its strong point compared to other similar platforms such as Make is precisely the ease of usealthough that also implies somewhat less flexibility for very complex flows. What you can do with Zapier Zapier has as many possibilities as there are applications you can link to. There are so many, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed at first. You will be able to automate repetitive tasks such as copy or sync data between platformscreate tasks automatically or synchronize databases. You can also manage emails and forms by automatically saving some data, sending automated responses or filtering emails. In general, you should know what you can do simple automations and even with AIlinking any artificial intelligence model after obtaining its API or using the platform’s integrated AI. Zapier also allows you to automatically post to social networks, send notifications to messaging apps like Telegram or Slack when something happens in another app, save email attachments to the cloud, create calendar events, or generate periodic reports. If you don’t know where to start you have two options. Have the integrations pagewhere you choose two services that you want to link and it gives you proposals for what you can do with them. And then you have the templates pagewhere you can find complex workflow ideas made in Zapier. How much does Zapier cost? Zapier has a basic free plan which is used to start experimenting with it. It allows you to create two-step Zaps, use most apps (although not all), use its AI to create automations, and perform one hundred executions per month. Therefore, although it only allows two-step automations, it is good to start getting familiar with its interface. Your payment plan costs 26.54 euros per monthand in it you can now create multi-step Zaps, use all the available applications and perform 750 actions per month. It also allows you to connect AI bots, something the free version doesn’t have, and basically use all of its features. And then, for 91.60 euros per month you have a team account for up to 25 users with 2,000 actions per month, where in addition to everything in its paid version you can also share Zaps and connections between all team members. These were the prices of the platform itself, but Using AI agents or Chatbots has an additional price There are free plans with 400 agent activities per month or limited AI models, but if you need more you will have to make other payments. Furthermore, if you want a larger share quota for the price of the platform you will also have to pay more. In Xataka Basics | The best AI agents that are faster and easier to use to do tasks for you without complications or long installations

to remove protection

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Michael Colosi is a young technology entrepreneur who, like many other millionairesmoved to southwest Florida attracted by the good weather and the low taxes of the state. In March 2024, Colosi bought two hectares of land in Punta Gorda with the intention of building a house and settling there permanently. What he did not imagine is that, before building a single wall of his future mansion, the county was going to present him with a bill for $118,527. The reason: the possibility that a protected bluebird could nest in their plot. The squatter of a bird. That bird is the Florida scrub-jay, the only bird whose species exists exclusively in that state. For this reason, it has been classified as a threatened species since 1987 under the Endangered Species Act and its fate has been caught at the center of a legal battle that, according to expertscould have consequences for hundreds of other species throughout the US. One of the consequences of this protected species status is that Charlotte County can apply a fee in sections to landowners who want to build in areas considered potential habitat for the bird. In the case of Colosi, taking into account the surface area of ​​its land and the fact that it is located in one of the nesting areas of this bird, the fee amounts to $118,527. Lawsuit for an unfair rate. This rate is applied to the entire plot, regardless of whether it is going to be built on the entire property or only part of it. In fact, his own claim document presented by the millionaire indicates that, if his property had only about 280 square meters less, the applicable rate would be $52,696. That is, less than half for going down to a lower section. Colosi maintains that the system is arbitrary and unconstitutional and that the county has not even checked to see if there are jays on its land. However, he cannot appeal or reduce the rate under any circumstances. Jamie Scudera, the county’s project manager, responded in an email to Colosi that “Your only alternative would be to not buy anything in a jay zone, because there is no other option other than our plan at this time.” Florida scrub jay Two arguments for a historical case. Colosi filed a federal lawsuit in October 2024 with the aim of appealing the fee, but the case has implications that go beyond discussing the amount of the fee. This lawsuit launches two legal arguments that, if successful, they would change the landscape of environmental protection in the United States. The first argument questions that the rate is proportionate and demands that it, at least, be directly related to the real impact of the planned construction. The second, and more controversial, is the argument that the Florida scrub jay should not be protected by federal legislation because it lives only in one state and does not affect interstate commerce which, according to the Pacific Legal Foundation that supports the millionaire, exceeds powers of Congress under the commerce clause of the Constitution. A bird without “economic value” that moves tourists from all over the country. The lawsuit includes a claim that has raised eyebrows among biologists and conservationists: that the Florida scrub jay has “no commercial or economic value.” Wildlife defenders refute this thesis with concrete data. Aaron Bloom, attorney for Earthjustice, points out that more than 1,000 people outside of Florida used the app eBird from Cornell University to record jay sightings only in 2024. Biologists from Yale, Harvard, Cornell and Princeton have visited the Archbold Biological Station expressly to study the species, and Audubon Florida organizes bird-watching tours that bring visitors from all over the country to Florida to observe it. The lawsuit’s argument is that, living only in Florida, the jay cannot affect interstate commerce and therefore does not deserve federal protection. The contradiction that conservationists point out is more than evident: under that logic, a species present in several states would be protected by the law, but one so localized that it only exists in a single territory would be unprotected precisely because it is rarer. The weight of what is at stake. According to Bloom, Defenders of Wildlife has documented 1,229 threatened species in the same situation, so their situation could also change if they allow the Florida millionaire to continue with his lawsuit to save a few thousand dollars. Charlotte County records show that at least 15 jays have been sighted in the Colosi neighborhood in the last year, and that hundreds of homeowners have paid protection fees without question over the last eleven years. The parcel’s own cadastral file warned with a note before the purchase: “The value of the land may be affected by the scrub jay habitat.” So, in theory, the millionaire was informed of the situation before purchasing the plot. What remains in doubt is whether he understood the meaning of that note. The Pacific Legal Foundation, which supports the millionaire in his lawsuit, already led the battle two decades ago to eliminate the bald eagle protection When the bird lived in multiple states, the main difference with the case of the jay is that this species can only live in Florida and has nowhere to go if it loses its habitat. In Xataka | Of all the places there were to build a $400,000 house, this millionaire chose the most unusual: in a tree Image | Flickr (FWC Fish and Wildlife Research Institute, Dan Irizarry), unsplash (Alejandra Cifre González)

The NYT claims to have found Satoshi Nakamoto and the evidence is as conclusive as ever. That is, little or nothing

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On October 31, 2008, someone calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto posted a document nine-page document that proposed a decentralized electronic money system. That was the birth of bitcoin and a phenomenon that has shaken the foundations of the modern economy, but no one has ever been able to know who was really behind that pseudonym. And no matter what they say in The New York Times, we still don’t know. Adam Back. The journalist John Carreyrou became famous for uncover he Theranos fraudand in a new and in-depth investigation published in The New York Times claims to have discovered the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. According to their data, that person is Adam Back, a well-known 55-year-old British cryptographer who is currently the CEO of the Blockstream company. Back denies all these claims, and we fear that this investigation will once again end up like the rest of the previous attempts. He is not just any suspect. In 1997, Back invented HashCash, a mathematical puzzle-solving system that Satoshi explicitly cited in his white paper and that in fact became the basis of the bitcoin mining mechanism. He was an active member of groups of anarchist cryptographers who had been trying to create digital money for decades. And between 1997 and 1999 he published messages on Internet forums that accurately described almost all the fundamental elements of the system. That was like an instruction manual for creating bitcoin, but created a decade before Satoshi Nakamoto published it. Analysis based…on how Satoshi wrote? The methodology followed by Carreyrou is striking. He worked with an AI expert from the NYT to collect messages from crypto mailing lists between 1992 and 2008, merged them into a database with 134,000 messages from 620 different users, and applied three methods of analyzing those messages. In the analysis, it was seen that the British spelling, the same hyphen errors in some terms, the confusion between “it” and “its” or the use of two spaces between sentences pointed to Back writing the same as Satoshi in his document. All circumstantial. This style analysis led Back to be identified as the clear candidate among a group of 12 “suspects.” However, the experts who carried out the analysis were not entirely sure and, for example, another of the traditional candidates in these investigations, Hal Finney, was almost tied in these style matches. Back himself indicated that anyone who writes about cryptography is going to sound just like the rest of the community. Back denies the major. Carreyrou ended up traveling to a bitcoin conference in El Salvador to meet with Back and explain his findings. During their two-hour conversation, Back denied being Satoshi on several occasions. The journalist claimed to have caught Back making a mistake when he stated that “I’m better with code than words”, something that Satoshi Nakamoto also said in a late 2008 message on one of the mailing lists analyzed. Back said he was simply making a general observation about programmers, and the truth is that all of Carreyrou’s evidence was inconclusive. Only Satoshi can prove that he is Satoshi. The bitcoin user community often says that “we are all Satoshi”, in reference to the fact that revealing the real identity of the creator of bitcoin is not relevant. The only way to do this would be for Satoshi himself to reveal himself and prove to be that person by transferring bitcoins from one of Satoshi Nakamoto’s original wallets – where he houses nothing less than 1.1 million bitcoins. Many have tried to unmask Satoshi. They have all failed. We are facing another attempt to reveal the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. It is neither the first nor probably the last. In recent years we have seen several more: Neither then nor now has anything really been proven. The mystery continues. Image | Wikipedia | Michael Fortsch In Xataka | The creator of Bitcoin disappeared 13 years ago. Now your account has just received a million-dollar transfer

Europe cannot be a “technological vassal of the United States”, and the CEO of Mistral is clear about the path

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Mistral is emerging as the pillar of European artificial intelligence. A few weeks ago we said that the French startup had raised another 830 million dollars to create AI data centers in Europe. Arthur Mensch is the CEO of the company and, for some time now, he is establishing himself as one of the powerful voices within the initiative of European technological sovereignty. His new warning is that Europe cannot be a “vassal state” of the United States and he has published a roadmap so that Europe leads AI. It won’t be easy. European swerve. There are those who complain that everything cannot be politics, but really politics is something that permeates many layers and the European turn in search of technological sovereignty has a lot to do with this. It is something that has coincided with the return of Donald Trump because Europe has realized that, between threats and the “I invaded Greenland”, can’t trust his ally. With American technology companies very involved in the ideology set by their Government, there is a demand for sovereign European alternatives that do not depend on American Big Tech nor how they may process your sensitive data. What happens with rockets, satellites, chips and even with Microsoft Office. And AI is no exception. Measures. That’s right where it comes into play. Mistral. As the greatest exponent of European AI (within the Generative AIsince we also have the suite from the Spanish Freepik as one of the most important companies in this field), Mistral and its CEO are voices with a certain weight when it comes to talking about what seems to be the only topic of conversation in recent months. And Mensch has clear that Europe cannot be a “vassal” of US technology companies. For this reason, they have published “European AI: a roadmap to lead it”, a long document in which it urges the institutions of the European Union to speed up procedures and permits to take advantage of its single market position of more than 450 million people and combine the talent of different countries at the service of AI. From European AI, of course. The premises are clear: Attract and retain talent. Unlock the full potential of the single market. Embrace European AI on all economic fronts. Empower Europe with critical infrastructure for AI. 80%. Each of the measures has a series of points that detail what the optimal way to proceed would be (according to Mistral) to achieve European leadership and stop depending on foreign technology. And one of the points to keep in mind is that Europe has the possibility of commanding, but it faces a devastating fact: 80% of the digital infrastructure continues to depend on non-EU providers. To put it down: if a ministry needs an office suite, turn to Google or Microsoft. If a hospital needs an AI, goes to ChatGPT or Huawei. If we limit ourselves to AI, Mistral estimates that only 20% of EU companies have adopted AI and that only 11% of SMEs take advantage of its potential. slap on the wrist to regulatory Europe. What they point out is that this situation makes us vulnerable to extraterritorial controls that put the strategic autonomy of the member countries in check. They defend that this roadmap is not a theoretical exercise, but rather something practical that is based on three key principles: Action over theory. Unity against the fragmentation of each of the governments. And the most important: the speed is questionable. We must find quick ways to attract talent and capital so that the most innovative in Europe are not left behind, trapped in regulations that take time. Ambition. They warn that it is something with potential not only for Mistral, but for the entire ecosystem, an ecosystem in which Mistral is already very, very well positioned. Part of the 830 million they have raised will go to their facilities near Paris where there will be 13,800 NVIDIA GB3000 chips (You can’t become independent from NVIDIA…), but it won’t be the only one. By 2027 they hope to have a €1.2 billion facility in Sweden with 23 MW of computing capacity. In total, they hope to achieve 200 MW of capacity by the end of next year. It is very, very far from China and, above all, from the United States, but although the distance is enormous, it is an important step. The B side of the matter. Now, everything has a twist, and the twist of this enormous amount of money is that this round is not venture capital, but debt financing. The main French banks have lent this money to create data centers and, while the risk capital is not returned, the debt is, and with interest. It doesn’t matter if Mistral’s move turns out well or not, even if the AI ​​bubble bursts: the banks that have lent the money expect to receive it with the aforementioned interest regardless of how business goes. It is an added pressure for the company, but also a sign that they trust in what they are building. In Xataka | ChatGPT’s milestone is not being a good AI: it is having become one of the biggest attention grabbers in history

Anthropic says Claude Mythos is too powerful to go public. The question is if this is nothing more than “the wolf is coming”

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Claude Mythos Preview It is the best AI model ever created. We don’t say it, Anthropic says it, but almost no one else can say it because only a select group of companies has access to said model. The cybersecurity capabilities of the model appear to be astonishingbut more and more experts say that although Mythos is better than its predecessors, it is not the revolutionary leap that Anthropic seems to propose. Is that way of launching the model just an effective way of creating hype? Beware the Anthropic speech. The well-known entrepreneur and analyst Gary Marcus recently gave three reasons why, according to him, the launch of Mythos is not as revolutionary as Anthropic wants us to see. I cited tweets from software engineers and cybersecurity experts who cast doubt on Anthropic’s claims. The company published a study on the capabilities of Claude Mythos Preview that seemed to make it an extraordinary tool for the field of cybersecurity, but at the same time it was so powerful that it could be very dangerous if it fell into the wrong hands. Isn’t that a big deal? Among Claude Mythos’ achievements, Anthropic highlighted how he had found vulnerabilities in Firefox 147. But in reality many of the flaws were basically variations of the same two bugs. If you removed them from the equation, Mythos’ effectiveness rate at finding new exploits dropped a lot, even below Opus 4.6. Anthropic did not hide that fact, of course, but it makes this capacity, for example, not seem so striking. An X user also criticized the use of Cybench as a cybersecurity benchmark when Opus 4.6 almost completely surpassed it. For him, the choice of some of the Anthropic tests was debatable because they were not a challenge to current models. Other models can do the same. The co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, Clement Delangue, stated that Mythos was no big deal. Their argument: they had used small, cheap open models, isolated the relevant code from some examples of the vulnerabilities found by Mythos, and they found the same problems which had already detected the Anthropic model. According to the Epoch Capabilities Index, which measures the capacity of AI models by combining several benchmarks, the leap that Mythos has taken is striking and “departs” from the progressive line of its predecessors. Source: Anthropic. Observer bias. But here it should be noted that in those analyzes they knew where to look because Mythos had already found those problems. We are dealing with observer bias, and in fact the Hugging Face document makes it clear that they even gave him specific clues such as “consider integer overflow”) to find those bugs. And on this observation, another one: Hugging Face does not say that a small model can replace Mythos on its own, but that it can be very good by giving it the appropriate code fragment. Mythos seems more capable of blindly complex security breaches, but it is a huge model and that is why it has greater capacity. Or what is the same: Mythos is better because it has the size, design and resources to be better. Fear, uncertainty, doubt? The language used by Anthropic in this advertisement could be considered to some extent a clear use of FUD (“Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt” -> “Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt”) as a marketing technique. It is a resource that has been seen in the past, and for example OpenAI already said in 2019—years before the launch of ChatGPT—that GPT-2 was too dangerous for a public launch. Obviously it wasn’t, but that certainly served to create expectation about the true capacity of the model. It’s better, but it may not be revolutionary. The results of the benchmarks that Anthropic published already made it clear that although there are very notable jumps in some tests, in others the evolution is much less striking. Claude Mythos was not the best at everything, and now analysts appear who contrast that data with other metrics. For example, with the Epoch Capabilities Index (ECI) from Epoch AI, the startup that has one of the most reputable benchmarks of the industry. And according to this index, Claude Mythos is above his rivals, but not for long. The wolf is coming. The truth is that the launch of Claude Mythos Preview has been really striking and the documents that accompanied that document tell us about a really capable AI model. The problem is that it is impossible to verify it because only a few companies have access to it and can test it. Without that public availability the only thing we can do is trust (or not) what Anthropic tells us, and that is the point: it is not clear that we should do it. The company is interested in us buying this discourse, obviously, but without an independent analysis it is impossible to verify these statements. In Xataka | Anthropic has become the darling of AI and has sought a partner to guarantee its future. It’s not the one we thought

We stopped watching traditional television because of advertising, but YouTube is willing to recover it with unstoppable ads

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A few days ago, YouTube users in smart TVs They began to notice something that many thought they had left behind forever: unskippable 90-second ads in the middle of forty-minute videos. YouTube had promised in March that non-skippables would be 30 seconds long, but the limit has tripled in a matter of weeks. You see the ads. On March 2, YouTube released a statement announcing the global arrival of 30-second non-skippable ads for those watching the platform on connected TVs. More people than ever are using YouTube in the living room, and advertisers want formats that look like traditional television. Only five weeks later, things began to change: this April 7, several users began to publish on the r/YouTube subreddit 90-second ad screenshots, triple the advertised maximum, which could not be omitted in any way. Some media They collected part of the reactions of the spectators, which ranged from fury to inevitable resignation. YouTube’s response. The platform assured that those 90-second ads were not intentional and that it was “investigating” what had happened. The same source published a survey in January in which 87% of more than 8,600 people questioned claimed to have received non-skippable ads lasting more than 30 seconds, and almost a third said they had seen them exceed two minutes. Paradoxically, in 2017 YouTube removed 30-second non-skippable ads considering them precisely “a relic of traditional television.” The accounts come out. YouTube generated 40.4 billion dollars in advertising revenue in 2025. A figure that exceeds the combined sum of Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, which together earned 37.8 billion. The same firm went so far as to declare YouTube “the new king of all media” by estimate its total income at around 62,000 million a year. And it’s not just a matter of raw money: according to NielsenYouTube took over 12.7% of all television viewing time in the US in December 2025, compared to 9% for Netflix. The gap between the two has widened in recent months. More people watch YouTube on TVs than any other screen, and the AI ​​system Google uses to decide which ad format to show (including bumpers 6-second spots, 15-second spots, and the new 30-second non-skippable ones) now have data to decide when a viewer is comfortable enough to tolerate a long ad break. And if you don’t want ads… Anyone who wants to avoid ads has a way out: YouTube Premium, at 13.99 euros per month. There is no middle option, no setting that allows you to opt for shorter or less frequent ads. According to Google itselfthere is no setting to turn off the 30-second format without a paid subscription. The thing is that not even Premium is what it used to be: some service levels include certain types of ads. It is the same pattern that the greats followed streamers: Netflix launched its tier with advertising in 2022; Disney+ followed suit shortly after. “Pay more to see fewer ads” is no longer a promise of digital platforms, it is their business model. What differentiates YouTube from other streaming platforms is that it is not a paid service that has added a free tier with advertising; It is a free platform that has built an advertising business of such magnitude that it can now afford to behave as if it were traditional television. The 90-second ads are another test for Google to discover how far the user’s tolerance can go before they change services or agree to pay. In Xataka | YouTube knows it has a problem with AI “slop” for kids. It turns out that the main culprit is YouTube

These are the ones you receive if there are errors in your 2026 return

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Let’s tell you What are the notices that the Treasury will give you? If you find an error in your declaration in 2026, which is that of the Income 2025 campaign as it is the one that regularizes the last fiscal year. Since last April 8 you can now access and present the online income draft either from your mobilebut if the Tax Agency finds errors it may fine you, even if you have presented a draft generated by it. But before fining her, the Treasury has a series of notices to give you room to make corrections in your statement. These notices are before, during and after making the declaration, and we are going to review them so that you know what they are about and how they work in the event that you receive one. How the Treasury will report your errors When you submit your Income Tax return, a processing process begins that will go through different states. One of them is review, and if the Tax Agency detects discrepancies between what you have declared and the data they have, your income will go to a state of Testingin which they may ask you for more additional information. A few years ago, if errors were detected, the Treasury would simply sanction you, even if you limited yourself to presenting the draft made by them. But now you have the right to make mistakes without bad faith, so there are a series of notices to give you time to correct your declaration and avoid sanctions or inspections. These are the notices that may appear To make corrections to your income tax return: Initial notices: The first notice you will receive will be in tax data. When you access them, the Tax Agency will tell you that you must report some financial income, such as those from online stores or cryptocurrencies. It’s a warning so you don’t forget to add them. When filing your return: When you are completing form 100, which is your Income Tax return, there is a section at the end where your data is reviewed to tell you if there is any discordance or that you have forgotten to write. Simply an algorithm that makes sure that you have filled out everything, and if there are things put in one section that contradict those in another. Warnings section: This is the big news about this year’s income, and it appears precisely in the previous point. When you are in Renta Web to make your online declarationhave a section of Warnings in which you will be told if you have written apparently incongruous information that could cause your declaration to be verified by the Treasury. Notice letters: There is a third level of interaction in which the Treasury sends you a letter after you have filed the return. This letter will tell you that they have detected discrepancies, so that you can assess whether you want to present a complementary declaration that adapts to the information from the Tax Agency. You can correct the information or say that everything is true. In Xataka Basics | Income Guide 2025: calendar, previous steps and how to prepare for the 2026 declaration

It’s a huge problem for AI.

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The United States (like Europe, China and the giants of the Middle East) are in the midst of a real estate race: that of data centers. Nobody wants to be left behind AI race and, for that, they need gigantic enclosures in which to train it. The big problem is that these facilities They consume a lot of energyand there China seems to have the upper hand facing a United States that does not have the best face. In fact, it is estimated that half of its data centers scheduled for 2026 will be delayed not canceled. And it is something they cannot allow. It’s not a money problem. Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Google are going to pool more than $650 billion this year to build artificial intelligence infrastructure. To put it in context, It’s more than the Apollo program cost. that took us to the Moon for the first time or to the great railway expansion of the 19th century. It is private capital that is doing the trick, but although the State does not pay the main bill, it facilitates operations and influences the pace and deployment of massive data centers through regulatory decisions, permitting and energy planning. And the latter is vital. The tyranny of 24/7. My partner Alba coined that term a few days ago to describe the current situation in which companies focused on AI find themselves. AI is intended to help us optimize our electricity consumption by the 2030s, but right now it is only achieving one thing: collapsing the traditional grid. This technology needs a lot of energy and, furthermore, constant, which is causing collapses in the network. The estimate is that the energy consumption of these data centers will increase by 175% between now and 2030. And not only consumption: Google’s emissions have increased by 48% in the last five years and Microsoft’s by another 31%. They were two of the most committed companies with ‘net zero’ by 2050. The other bottleneck. With this in mind, and knowing that the industry is devouring resources such as NAND memories To feed the AMD and NVIDIA platforms used by hyperscalers, we must talk about the other bottleneck in the sector: the energy. On the one hand, there are the plants themselves and we already know that companies have plans for private nuclear plants, gas is booming and coal is used in peaks of demand. On the other hand, there is the equipment that is installed in the data centers themselves. We are talking about transformers, switches, dissipation equipment and batteries. Panasonic is one of the largest manufacturers of batteries for racks of data centers. They are “packages” of batteries that are inserted between the equipment so that, in the event of a blackout or maximum demand, they provide specific energy support. A few days ago they commented that its annual production had already been soldbut the problem is that orders keep coming. Bad forecasts. And there is that bottleneck that we mentioned. As they point out in Bloombergthere are analyzes that already suggest that half of the data centers planned for the United States throughout 2026 will be delayed or canceled. It will be a blow to an industry that cannot stop because there is a lot of money at stake (and even more so the year Anthropic and OpenAI want to become public companies) and where they compete against a China that does not seem to take its foot off the accelerator. The solution is to electrify the grid using renewables, but the problem is that these solutions can provide constant energy, but they are not the best to provide a lot of energy during peak periods. workouts. Large batteries would be needed and, with the parallel rise of electric cars, there are none. The Wood Mackenzie analyst group points out that the United States “does not have enough capacity to stand on its own, so its companies are forced to go to the export market.” Geopolitical paradox. And therein lies the problem. The United States and China are immersed in a technological war, but also a commercial one. This makes it difficult for American companies to buy what they need from the Chinese industry, which is what leads the way in batteries and solar panels. Jensen Huang -CEO of NVIDIA- already commented a few months ago that the international conflict was fine, but that there was no need to be short-sighted and they had to take advantage of what China has to offer. The reality is that data centers are estimated to consume up to 12 GW of energy in 2026 in the United States alone, more than ten million American homes need. And, although the electrical infrastructure represents less 10% of the total cost of a data center, it is impossible for the facility to start operating without it. Now, The US has room for maneuveranother thing is that they activate the levers. Images | campact, Florian Hirzinger (edited) In Xataka | A user has been powering his house with 1,000 laptop batteries and solar panels for ten years. Others are already trying to copy the idea

Laurance Li, CEO of Honor Spain

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Laurance Li is a reference within the mobile telephone sector. He started working for Huawei in Shenzhen in 2008 and has been in the industry since then: first linked to Huawei especially in Mexico and then, starting in 2021, already in Honor. He has experienced from the inside the rise of smartphones, the changes between 2G and 5G and much, much more. On the occasion of the MWC we were able to sit down and talk to him, and the truth is that he is quite clear about where he is going to go. the present and also the future of the smartphone. You can innovate in mobile phones in 2026 Honor may currently be the brand that is experimenting the most with new mobile device formats. For years they have been fighting to lead the folding category, and this MWC they surprised everyone with the Honor Robot Phone. Honor Robot Phone in an image taken during its presentation at MWC Although the most striking thing about the phone is that camera that is “stored” in the back and unfolds, for the CEO of Honor Spain this new type of device is very relevant because They will change the way we communicate with the phone. On the Honor Robot Phone, the camera responds to you, looks at you, reacts to your requests. “There will be communication with you, excitement.” Beyond phones with robotic arms, Honor has been betting on folding phones for some time. In 2023 I visited their factories in Shenzhen and from then on it was one of its main strategic priorities, and the arrival of the Honor Magic V6 comes to endorse it: thinner and with more battery than ever. A foldable that doesn’t look like a foldable from the outside. “I think folding phones are going to be the future,” he says convinced. For now, he believes that many people are not daring to take the leap because of the cost, but he believes that this will change. Honor’s plan to convince people to make that leap? Paradoxically, it happens, in part, through the iPhone and its users: it is no coincidence that in their MWC presentation they spent some time explaining all the compatibility between the iPhone and the Honor ecosystem. “Some iPhone users want to switch, but they can’t because of the ecosystem.” These types of initiatives open the door to more users: “more and more users will choose foldable devices.” “I want to change their minds, but step by step. Apple users can use Android devices and other devices,” he adds. The importance of operators and stores in the present and future of Honor Finding a place in an already complex and competitive market like the Spanish one is not easy, and Honor knows it. It is no coincidence that when we asked how 2025 has gone, much of the conversation focused on highlighting how Honor is growing with some of its great allies. According to figures that Laurance Li shared with us, with MasOrange they have “more than 8% of the smartphone market share.” The figure grows, according to the executive, up to 20% if we talk about tablets sold through the operator. Together with Vodafone, it claims to have “800 points of sale” in which Honor as a brand has direct contact with the consumer. This year they have started working with MediaMarkt. Despite not yet being present in all MediaMarkt stores, 8% of smartphone sales went to Honor and, if we talk about tablets, the figure grew to 10%, according to their figures. They continue working with El Corte Inglés, and it is not strange to go to a store and see a counter decorated with their brand. “It has been a good 2025,” Li summarized when he shared the figures with us. Its goal for the future is to strengthen its presence in these distributors and work more closely with them, but also to look for new partners with whom to continue growing. In terms of market share, Honor ended 2025 growing 18% in Europe compared to the previous year, according to figures from Counterpoint Researchranking as the fourth brand with 4%. Ahead, Apple with 33%, Samsung with 29% and Xiaomi with 6%. In other rankings, however, it appears in fifth place: in Omdia They place Motorola ahead in fourth position. The big question: prices in 2026 It is impossible to talk about mobile phones in 2026 and not talk about the big question: what is going to happen to the shortage of components? In reality… it is impossible to talk about any consumer device and not ask this same question. We have told it ad nauseam: it is not only the RAM crisisbut the crisis of components in general sponsored by the massive proliferation of data centers to serve AI. “This is the biggest challenge in the last 20 years for the phone industry,” Li tells us convinced. On the one hand, he sees it as a way to confirm that Honor’s strategy with Alpha and its plan focused on artificial intelligence is on the right track. On the other hand, it confirms what we have already seen: “increasing the cost of memory will greatly affect entry-level devices.” That is why its strategy involves focusing more on mid-range devices onwards. On these phones “it will impact, but not as much”, as the cost of memory is lower in proportion to the rest of the phone. Where is the mobile phone industry going? Sitting down with Laurance Li to talk is like sitting down with someone who has witnessed firsthand all the changes in the telephone industry. I can’t help but ask you what you think is going to happen next, what you think is going to happen to the current smartphone industry. “We have had different revolutions,” he explains. “2G to 3G, 3G to 4G, 4G to 5G. From 2G to 3G was a big leap for video conferencing, for video calls. From 3G to 4G was … Read more

May your next plane be even older… and you won’t even realize it

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A commercial airplane can carry out more than 60,000 cycles takeoff and landing throughout its useful life, as long as it passes extremely strict periodic inspections. In fact, some aircraft fly for decades, accumulating millions of kilometers without this affecting their safety. Because in aviation, time is not measured in years as much as in maintenance. The big secret of flying in 2026. This week they remembered a piece of information from CNN. Commercial aviation has been operating for decades with a reality that is rarely perceived from the seat: many of the planes that fly through the skies are not new, although they may seem that way. The reason? Thanks to constant maintenance and interior renovations, aircraft of more than 20 or even 30 years can offer a completely modern viewing experience. The passenger sees screens, new seats and renovated cabins, but not the fuselage or its age. That disconnection between appearance and reality is key to understanding what is happening now. Increasingly older. The average age of commercial aircraft is already between 20 and 25 yearsand is slowly increasing due to supply chain issues, delays in manufacturers such as Airbus and Boeing and difficulties with engines and components. In fact, there are models delivered in the 90s that international routes continue to operate without the passenger realizing it, because airlines invest in renovating interiors instead of replacing aircraft. In many cases, maintaining an older aircraft It is much more profitable than buying a new one, especially when the availability of parts and engines allows it. The result is a global fleet that ages silently while appearing otherwise. War enters the scene. And here appears an actor who comes to complicate everything a little more, because the conflict in the Middle East has introduced a new factor that aggravates this trend: rising prices and uncertainty of the fuel. With the Strait of Hormuz affected and the jet fuel prices skyrocketEuropean airlines face months of high costs and potential supply problems. Even with a ceasefire, the recovery of energy flows will be slow, with refineries damaged and shipping routes altered. In this context, each operational decision becomes dominated by the cost of fuelwhich is one of the biggest expenses of any airline. Why this extends the life of older aircraft. Because when the fuel it becomes more expensiveairlines prioritize reducing investments and maximizing use of already depreciated assets. Although newer aircraft are usually more efficient, their acquisition cost and limited deliveries mean that they are not always the immediate option. In parallel, the production delays and in the delivery of new models they force older aircraft to continue operating for longer than expected. The Iran war, stress even more the energy market and global logistics, reinforces this dynamic: replacing aircraft becomes more difficult just when maintaining them is most necessary. Between cost and perception. CNN recalled that airlines have perfected the art of making people invisible the age of their fleetsfocusing the investment on what the passenger perceives directly. We’re talking about new seats, lighting, entertainment systems and redesigned cabins that allow a decades-old plane to compete in experience with one fresh from the factory. At the same time, the slowness in the delivery of new interiors (which can take years) make even these improvements arrive more slowly. Thus, passengers continue to fly on increasingly older aircraft without being aware of it, while the industry adjusts costs in an increasingly demanding environment. The “new” will be more relative. Ultimately, the combination of geopolitical tensionsindustrial shortages and pressure on costs point to a scenario in which the actual age of aircraft will continue to increase. The war in Iran has not only affected the price of fuel, but has revealed the fragility of the global energy and logistics system on which aviation depends. Consequently, the “secret” of the airlines will be prolonged: We will fly on older planes than we imagine, without realizing it, because the priority is no longer renewing fleets at the ideal pace, but rather keeping them operational in an increasingly uncertain and crazy expensive world. Image | RawPixel In Xataka | Global air traffic has a problem: Ukraine and Iran have created a funnel that is driving up prices In Xataka | If you have a trip planned to Vietnam or Japan this year we have good and bad news for you

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