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The United States knows that Venezuela’s subsoil is full of rare earths. The big problem is that he doesn’t know where

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The announcement that American companies could access to Venezuela’s vast oil has reignited a much broader ambition of Donald Trump’s administration. Because the Latin American nation has something that Washington desperately seeks, something that China he has plenty. He crux It’s how and how much. Beyond crude oil. Yes, the “b” side of the North American “landing” in Venezuela also seeks to explore the mineral potential of the country as part of “the national security of the United States.” The experts they point out that, in addition to crude oil, there would be unverified reserves of critical minerals and possible large quantities of rare earths, key inputs for defense and technology. However, the lack of reliable data, doubts about economic viability and operational risks in areas with the presence of armed groups and mining illegality turn the objective into an enterprise. much more complex that the oil reopening itself, with significant environmental impacts associates to energy-intensive mining. The supply chain and the bottleneck. Even if the extraction obstacles were overcome, the decisive challenge appears in processing. The refining of rare earths is concentrated in more than 90% in Chinaa domain constructed for decades through subsidies, industrial expansion and lax environmental regulations. This position has made rare earths a sensitive point of trade tensions between Washington and Beijing, with export controls that have highlighted the fragility of American supply chains. The consensus among analysts is that this industrial and geopolitical advantage cannot be reversed quickly, so new deposits without their own refining capacity would contribute little to short-term strategic resilience. Why it is important. It we have counted other times. The classification of “critical minerals” covers a broad set of raw materials essential for the economy and security, from aluminum and copper to a specific group of 17 elements known as rare earths, essential for high-performance magnets, advanced electronics and military systems. Although these elements are not scarce in the Earth’s crust, their extraction and refining are technically demanding and expensive. In the United States there are efforts to develop domestic capabilities, but start-up times are often measured in years or decades, which explains the temptation to look for external solutions that, in practice, rarely offer immediate results. Geological potential and structural limits. It happens that, unlike other countries with confirmed reserves, Venezuela does not appear in international lists as a relevant producer of rare earths, an explained absence for decades of opacity institutional during the governments by Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro. Still, the country is believed to host deposits of coltan and bauxitesources of metals considered critical such as tantalum, niobium, aluminum and gallium. Projects like the Orinoco Mining Arc They sought to capitalize on that potential, but have been marked by illicit mining, lack of investment, a shortage of qualified labor, and a volatile regulatory environment that discourages international operators. A strategic mirage in the medium term. If you like, the final evaluation of the experts is clear: although the Venezuelan subsoil may hide valuable resources, its contribution to the security of supply of the United States it would be marginal on the near horizon. Without solid geological data, without security guarantees and without processing capacity independent of the Chinese circuit, Venezuela’s mineral interest seems more an extension of the geopolitical pulse than a practical solution, at least in the short term. In that context, the American bet faces a paradox: the country offers a lot on paper, but little that can be translated into real advantages over the next decade. Image | Mauricio CampelloRawPixel In Xataka | The US did not need to shoot to enter Caracas. All it took was an invisible weapon and unexpected “help” from Russia In Xataka | While the whole world looks at oil, Venezuela’s true treasure is hidden in the basements of London: its gold

Agentic AI was the new race for Big Tech and Meta was far behind. It has bought the company most capable of recovering

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Meta has closed the purchase of manusa Singapore-based artificial intelligence startup, for more than $2 billion. Throughout this year, Meta has reinforced its AI operations by acquiring several companies focused on different specialties. In July bought Play AIfocused on voice with AI. In August acquired WaveFormsan audio-focused startup. And in September was done with Rivosa company specialized in the design of semiconductors and RISC-V chips. Manus’s is already the fourth major purchase this year, and it is his hope not to be diluted in the race to dominate AI when all this time he has focused his efforts on Llama and his open weights approach. Why it is important. The Agentic AI (agents capable of performing complex tasks with minimal human supervision) has long become the new battlefield for big technology companies. Although companies like Microsoft or OpenAI had sufficient resources to develop in this field, Meta needed to strengthen its position in this segment if it did not want to be left behind. Manus came to reach 100 million dollars in annual recurring revenue just eight months after its launch, which offers Meta a product that generates money right away, something not very common in this sector. What does Manus do? The startup rose to fame in March with a video demo that went viral, showing how its AI agent was able to produce detailed research reports, build custom web pages, filter job candidates, plan vacations, and analyze investment portfolios. All using AI models developed by companies such as Anthropic and Alibaba. At the time, Manus even claimed to surpass OpenAI’s Deep Research. Currently, the company has around 100 employees, mainly in Singapore, offers subscriptions of $20 to $200 per month and already has a user base of millions. Initial success. Manus emerged a few months after the debut of DeepSeekthe Chinese model that shook the foundations of the industry due to its capabilities supposedly developed with less computing power than its American rivals. Just like account WSJ, the startup secured a $75 million funding round led by Benchmark in April, which valued the company at $500 million. Among its investors are firms such as Tencent, ZhenFund or HSG. Untying ties in China. The parent company behind Manus, Butterfly Effect, was founded in 2022 in Beijing by two Chinese entrepreneurs, including its CEO Xiao Hong, known as ‘Red’. Although most of its researchers and engineers were located in China, Manus launched outside the country because it used American AI models that are not available there. Shortly after securing its investment with Benchmark, the company officially moved its headquarters to Singapore. According to account WSJ, Manus has ruled out developing a version for the Chinese market. Goal declared to Nikkei Asia that, following the acquisition, Manus will have no ties to Chinese investors and will no longer operate in China. All existing investors have been excluded from the operation, according to they count from Bloomberg. What’s coming now? Meta plans to keep Manus running independently while integrating its agents into Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, platforms where Meta AI is available. According to WSJManus CEO Xiao Hong will report directly to Javier Olivan, Meta’s chief operating officer. “Joining Meta allows us to build on a stronger, more sustainable foundation without changing how Manus works or how decisions are made,” Xiao stated in the official announcement. No return guarantees. Mark Zuckerberg continues his mission to prove that AI can deliver tangible returns. Goal plans to spend $600 billion in American infrastructure over the next three years, much of it related to AI. Just like assures Bloomberg, it is an amount that causes some skepticism in some investors, since there are no guarantees that this expense will generate significant income soon. Cover image | TechCrunch In Xataka | NVIDIA has paid $20 billion to “license” Groq’s technology. He actually bought it

Christmas has become the big business of happiness, and that turns sadness into something revolutionary

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“The second most important fact about Christmas is that it is one of the times of year when the suicide rate increases.” This is how a text by Alasdair MacIntyre, one of the most important moral philosophers of the 20th century, begins. circulates on the internet every Christmas. We know that the data is not true (no more people commit suicide at this time) and, in fact, we are not even sure that this text was written by MacIntyre (although the reference also appears in his main work): However, it is something that keeps repeating itself over and over again. It will be because, despite the lights and the fanfare, there are many people who approach the ‘happy holidays’ as something deeply sad. The great Christmas dissonance. There are many ways to view Christmas, but in almost all of them there is something of a great social celebration of happiness. It is the time of sharing, of meeting loved ones, of reconciliation, of taking advantage of the time as if another spring were not going to come after the barren winter. But what if we don’t want/need/can feel that way? That is, what if in the middle of that chorus of messages, posters and songs that tell us that we should be fine, what we feel is that, simply, “we are not”? Usually, when the implicit norm is “feeling grateful, generous and happy”, anything that goes beyond that is perceived with a mixture of shame and self-criticism; puts on a “good face” (emotional performance) and fatigue, irritability and you end up burning. And everything we lack. “Christmas is also a recounting”, said the writer Gonzalo Torné. “It is the day that as children they taught us what our family landscape was, the people who were interested in us and whom we could count on. And the day that, absence after absence, we confirmed the fragility of what as children we learned as something stable.” The duels. It is a quite precise text: during this type of festival, all the duels that we carry behind us are also activated. It’s not just about “nostalgia”, it’s about everything a ritual of remembering absences on which we have built our lives. Just as the idea that MacIntyre mentioned at the beginning does not fit the data, the truth is that, among the population treated in psychiatric emergencies at Christmas, the “stressors that are repeated the most“are loneliness and being-without-family. A “pressure cooker.” Because, let’s face it, last year up to 20% of Spaniards They experienced political fights at some family dinner. Six out of ten, in fact, avoid talking about controversial topics not to argue: the great “polarization” is converting all in one problem (that adds to material stress and unequal loads). Many reasons, only one why. MacIntyre said that much of this is because “we have lost any ability to understand our lives as something that embodies a narrative structure—not to mention narratives in which there is hope for a happy ending.” No need to go that far. Everything seems to indicate that it is something simpler: Christmas runs the risk of becoming something sad when it becomes an emotional obligation. That is the great design problem of these parties, which, being made to “feel accompanied”, by contrast, make losses, inequalities and fractures visible. We need to reclaim sadness… also at Christmas. In recent years, and with increasing force, positive thinking has become fashionable. Ideas like “You have to be optimistic”, “Don’t give up” or “Always positive, never negative” have become true mantras of our time. But as he says the teacher Jose César Peralesfrom the University of Granada, positive thinking has serious problems that we overlook due to its friendly and adorable appearance. Our culture, increasingly full of characters, is gradually distancing us from a simple truth: that “we suffer, hate or are envious because they are the way we live reality. Denying it, embracing an irrational and meaningless positivism, is the contemporary way of denying ourselves.” Isn’t Christmas a good time to accept ourselves? Image | Bryan Heng In Xataka | Toledo promised them happy holidays with its 49-day mega Christmas. Until the neighbors said ‘not so fast’

Its digital notebook function is a big plus

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Until recently, those of us who enjoy making annotations in books (including yours truly) had a great handicap when it came to reading digitally, since we could not enjoy this option. But this changed with the arrival of Kindle Scribea electronic book reader which is also digital notebook and that has surprised me very pleasantly. Amazon Kindle Scribe (16GB) | Redesigned screen with uniform edges The price could vary. We earn commission from these links The perfect Kindle for those who love reading and writing The screen of this Kindle Scribe is one of its main assets. It has a diagonal of 10.2 inches and has a resolution of 300 dpi. Although if there is something that it is characterized by, it is the adjustable warm light that it integrates. This adapts to the environment and the moment in which you are using the device, something that seems like magic. The design of this Kindle Scribe is very light and you can easily operate it even with one hand (despite its large screen). This has made it one of my inseparable companions to keep me entertained during my travels. This electronic book reader from Amazon incorporates a premium pencil (with several spare tips), so you can comfortably use its touch screen. Thanks to this accessory, you will be able to make notes, underline and write as if you were doing it in a paper notebook, since the experience is very realistic. You may also be interested in these Kindle Amazon Kindle (16 GB), the lightest and most compact Kindle The price could vary. We earn commission from these links New Amazon Kindle Colorsoft: with 16 GB of storage The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Some of the links in this article are affiliated and may provide a benefit to Xataka. In case of non-availability, offers may vary. Image | Fran León and Amazon In Xataka | Which Kindle to buy: buying guide with recommendations to get it right with Amazon e-book readers In Xataka | Amazon Kindle: guide with 27 functions and tricks to get the most out of your e-book in 2025

The big problem with putting solar panels on crops is shade. The University of Jaén has found a solution

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In search of fulfilling the decarbonization goalswe are filling the field with solar panels. Giants like China can do it combining other activities well, but in the case of smaller countries, things change. Spain is an examplewith a field irrigated by crops that is also being plagued by panels. Now, a research team from the University of Jaén has found the key to continue deploying solar panels without interfering with crops. A panel with minimal shading that does not compromise its energy generation. The agrovoltaics. Different reports have pointed out how the temperature will increase by 1.5 to 3.2 degrees If we continue the same as until now. For this reason, the European Union marked the milestone of 30% of its energy comes from renewables by 2030 to, in 2050, achieve climate neutrality. Wind is important, but what almost all countries are embracing is photovoltaics. The price of the plates has fallen to the ground thanks to the China overproduction and it has begun to be deployed massively. The problem is what we mentioned: it takes up a lot of space, which opens a direct conflict with the farmland. There, agrovoltaics is becoming established as a solution to place panels that do not interfere with the cycle of some crops, and mixes with beekeeping and the livestock. But if we want to continue expanding photovoltaics, panels that provide less shade are needed. Panels and photosynthesis. That is where the solution devised by the University of Jaén comes into play. In a study Published in Science Direct, researchers detail a technology that allows a panel to efficiently generate electricity, while allowing crops to receive enough light to perform their optimal photosynthesis cycle. To do this, the team has taken into account two technical parameters: the average visible transmittance and the average photosynthetic transmittance. In practice, they indicate the amount of light useful to the plants that reaches them after passing through the panel, and they point out that different studies estimate that, for most crops, the minimum value should be around 60%. In that spectrum, plants produce normally. Status of the “transparent” panels“The photovoltaic industry has been working on this for some time. There are two approaches: Non-wavelength selective panels: They are those that absorb a large part of the solar spectrum and achieve transparency by reducing the color of the material or leaving gaps between the cells. With them, transparency is not adequate. Wavelength Selective Panels: They are those that absorb, above all, ultraviolet and near-infrared radiation, but allow a large part of the visible light to pass through. It is what the plants need and, in this case, the transparency of the panels is greater and more suitable for crops. RearCPVbif. In the two groups the industry is testing very different technologies, from polycrystalline silicon to organic cells and color-sensitized panels, but the Spanish team’s approach is somewhat different. The semi-transparent photovoltaic modules They are the STPVs, but what is proposed by the University of Jaén is a system called RearCPVbif, or “Bifacial Rear Concentrator Photovoltaic.” Unlike conventional semi-transparent designs, this technology concentrates and redirects reflected light towards the back of the bifacial cells, generating an increase in electrical production without reducing optical transparency, which is what allows light to reach the plants. It is an STPV, but with rear optical concentrators. In statements to PV-MagazineÁlvaro Varela-Albacete, co-author of the research, points out that STPV technology is being underused and that, with these rear concentrators, there is “a substantial increase” in energy generation without compromising optical transparency. “And how much is the transparency factor? 60%, according to the study, so it would be suitable for most horticultural crops. Next steps. In the study they also mention that they have taken into account that a crucial aspect for agricultural viability is thermal behavior, indicating that, in their tests, the cell temperature was below 70 degrees. This is important so that the panels do not create a “greenhouse” that affects crop patterns. And most importantly: this technology has already attracted attention. Numerous promising studies are published throughout the year, but their application is not always clear. In the case of this ReadCPVbif technology, the co-author of the study, Eduardo Fernández, points out that they are already engaging in conversations with different organizations to accelerate the development of the technology. Now, the route hour includes an evaluation of the benefits for crop growth, with different test campaigns on real crops. In any case, it aims to be a particularly relevant technology in the intensive horticulture that occurs in regions of Spain such as Almería, where apart from the sea of ​​plastic, also the photovoltaic sea is rising. If the two things can be combined, it would be a great step for both sectors. Images | University of Jaen, Σ64 In Xataka | Almería has been Europe’s great “sea of ​​plastic” for years. Now it wants to be another sea: that of solar panels

Big Tech is turning India into the new darling of its AI expansion

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Microsoft just announced an investment of $17.5 billion in India over the next four years, the technology giant’s largest in Asia. amazon has followed in his footsteps with 35,000 million dollars until 2030. Google already had announced 15,000 million for the same period. The big tech companies They are turning to the Asian subcontinent like never before, and it makes all the sense in the world. Why India has become irresistible. The Asian country brings together three characteristics that make it a strategic target for technology companies: a population of more than 1.4 billion inhabitants with growing access to the internet and smartphones, infrastructure costs significantly lower than in other Asian markets such as Japan or Singapore, and a government that actively promotes digital transformation. According to Ericsson dataan active smartphone in India consumes an average of 36 GB per month, 44% more than in North America and 71% more than the global average. Additionally, the country’s data center capacity has increased 2.5-fold since 2021, reaching 1.5 gigawatts. The perfect time for investments. The race for artificial intelligence has accelerated this trend. Microsoft plans to open its largest cloud region in India, located in Hyderabad, by mid-2026. The company will also expand its three existing data center regions in Chennai, Hyderabad and Pune. For its part, Google will build an AI hub in Visakhapatnam which will include data centres, power sources and fiber optic networks. These investments seek to stay ahead of the competition in a market where demand for cloud services and AI tools is growing rapidly among companies, startups, and government agencies. Beyond data centers. Investments are not limited to physical infrastructure. Microsoft has committed to train 20 million workers from this country in AI skills by 2030, doubling its initial goal. The company claims to have already trained 5.6 million people since January 2025. Amazon, for its part, claims to have digitized to more than 12 million small businesses and enabled $20 billion in cumulative e-commerce exports. Both companies are integrating their technologies into the Indian government’s digital public platforms, such as the e-Shram and National Career Service systems, which serve more than 310 million uncontracted workers. The battle for digital sovereignty. A key element of this strategy is the proposal of “sovereign” solutions. Microsoft has launched its Sovereign Public Cloud and Sovereign Private Cloud specifically for customers in India, allowing data and workloads to remain within the country’s borders. As the company announced, Microsoft 365 Copilot will process data within India by the end of 2025, making the country one of the first four global markets to receive this capability. “This investment signals India’s rise as a reliable technology partner for the world,” counted Ashwini Vaishnaw, Minister of Electronics and Information Technology. There are challenges. Despite investment enthusiasm, India presents significant obstacles. Irregular power supply, high energy costs and water shortages in several regions complicate the expansion of resource-intensive data centers. These factors could slow the deployment of AI infrastructure and raise operating expenses for cloud providers. However, New Delhi is deploying incentives for AI and semiconductor projects, it has relaxed some regulatory requirements and fosters alliances with telecommunications operators and local technology companies to continue adding value to the global AI race, from local territory. Capacity or mass consumerism. The interesting thing would be to know if India will obtain real technological capacity of its own in the face of so much investment or if it will simply consolidate itself as another consumer market for Big Tech. The government has approved semiconductor projects worth more than $18 billion under its India Semiconductor Mission, seeking to reduce dependence on imported chips. “India is becoming a hot spot for technology investments,” pointed out Dan Ives, analyst at Wedbush Securities. It remains to be seen what all this materializes into. Cover image | İsmail Enes Ayhan and Naveed Ahmed In Xataka | Steve Jobs hated obedient teams: he paid his managers to contradict him, not to obey him

We criticize the EU a lot with its obsession with regulating Big Tech. There are at least two examples that justify this obsession

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The Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the AI Law They are two of the great exponents of something that the European Union is highly criticized for: his regulatory obsession. It is true that these regulations restrict companies and can slow down European innovation – this has happened with AI – but these worrying side effects are accompanied by others that are much more welcome. Especially because this regulation has made the world a little more interoperable. There are two great examples of this. First example: USB-C. The adoption of the USB-C connector as the mandatory Being able to charge mobile devices and other hardware products is undoubtedly positive for users. Although the standard has its own problemsits use as a universal connector has avoided the use of proprietary connectors that made interoperability difficult and caused greater problems for the environment in the form of electronic waste. Second example: Universal AirDrop. We have also recently seen how Google offered support on the Pixel 10 to be able to transfer data to an iPhone or iPad thanks to AirDrop support in QuickShare. That support will be extended to other Android phones soon, and that improves interoperability between both platforms. From now on it will be much easier to transfer photos directly from mobile to mobile (be it iPhone or Android) wirelessly, and there we have to thank the European Unionwhich forced Apple to modify the way AirDrop works to comply with the DMA. And there is still more. These efforts to improve interoperability will soon be even more rewarded. Google and Apple have announced their collaboration in making portability between different platforms much easier. Thus, changing from an Android mobile to an iPhone or vice versa it’s going to be easier thanks to the efforts that both companies are making. Why have they made that decision? Again, due to the “regulatory obsession” of the EU. The EU sticks out its chest. Euroregulators in fact celebrated this decision by Google and Apple these days, and affirm that the renewed interoperability “is an example of how the Digital Markets Act (DMA) offers benefits to both users and developers.” That same regulation was what allowed iOS 26 to add support to transfer an eSIM to and from an Android mobile, for example. The EU against (almost) everyone. The EU’s regulatory obsession may often be criticized, but the truth is that it is the great reference when it comes to confronting the unlimited ambition of Big Tech. It has done so in the past with the RGPD or with the DSA and the DMAand now with the AI ​​Law. In all of them the ultimate goal is normally reasonable, although it often happens that the regulation ends up being exaggerated or, as with AI, comes too soon. The last chapter of obsession. European regulators suspect that Google is using content from news publishers and other creators to train their generative AI without permission and without offering compensation. These practices may constitute an abuse of Google’s dominant position in the market, which would negatively affect both competition and content publishers themselves. This research also affects “AI Overviews,” which extract and summarize information from other websites, potentially reducing traffic to those original sources. Brussels Effect. The application of these regulations in a market like the European one causes the so-called “Brussels effect”. For large technology companies such as Apple or Google, it is more efficient and profitable to adopt a single standard for all their products worldwide than to design specific versions only for the European market. Thus, this obsession not only benefits us European citizens (when it does), but also ends up becoming the de facto standard worldwide, as has happened with the USB-C connector. This regulation ends up becoming a powerful engine of global change. It is not perfect by any means, and we are seeing it with the AI ​​Law or the cookie nightmare, but even in those cases the EU seems to have realized and is trying to change things. The challenge of the AI ​​Law. If the DMA pursues interoperability, the AI ​​Law seeks transparency and compensation to prevent these monopolies from consolidating in this era of generative AI. The investigation into Google is not only a defense of copyright, but a preventive measure against competition. Meanwhile, the US and China seem turn a blind eye and we have even seen how the leaders of big technology companies They ask that copyright laws not be applied arguing the famous “fair use” of those contents that have little de jusot, at least for content providers. In Xataka | All the big AIs have ignored copyright laws. The amazing thing is that there are still no consequences

While Big Brother sinks, ‘The House of Twins 2’ triumphs with a wild, online and unfiltered reality show

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This past December 7, a digital reality show achieved what seemed impossible: surpassing the format that for decades had been the undisputed king of Spanish reality shows, ‘Big Brother’. ‘La Casa de los Gemelos 2’, produced by brothers Carlos and Daniel Ramos for YouTube and Kick, attracted more than 200,000 simultaneous viewers during its inaugural gala. The figure is especially significant when compared to the parallel collapse of ‘Big Brother 20’, which Mediaset has been forced to cancel early after registering historic audience lows. But what is broken is not the format, but how it is presented. The first edition. How we count on your daythe first edition of ‘The House of Twins’, released on October 12, 2025, raised questions about the limits of unfiltered entertainment. That experiment, an imitation of ‘Big Brother’ that worked with the fauna cultivated in the Twins’ debates, completely lacked structure: there was no presenter or rules, and the Ramos trusted that the mere coexistence of explosive TikTok personalities would generate content for a full week. The result was both an operational disaster and a viral phenomenon. The program reached peaks of 48,000 viewers connected simultaneously and exceeded one million accumulated views in just nine hours of broadcast. The house became the scene of physical fights between contestants such as La Marrash and La Falete, there was visible consumption of alcohol and substances, destruction of furniture and moments of tension that they bordered on criminal. The program was emergency canceled in the early hours of October 13. A subsequent debate attracted 150,000 spectators and became trending topics number one in Spain. Reality television without filters. The next step was to professionalize the format, but without losing that fundamental idea along the way. And the Ramos bet heavily on this new iteration. As revealed by Kiko Hernández himself in the program ‘We are nobody’, the production has a budget of more than 600,000 euros, a figure well above what is usual in Spanish digital entertainment. The prize for the winner is doubled compared to the first edition: 100,000 euros for those who resist until December 31. Familiar faces. The creators have gone directly to the Mediaset ecosystem and derivatives: José Labrador, from ‘Gandía Shore’; Eros Vidal and Gabriella Barbu, from ‘Temptation Island’; Nissy Lahr, from ‘Secret Story’, make up a core of personalities that the Spanish public already knows. Them they add up Kiko Hernández as master of ceremonies, Víctor Sandoval as “dictator” of the house, and Coto Matamoros as “executioner” in charge of punishments. To bait the audience. From the first moment at the premiere, audiences skyrocketed and the program became trending on social networks. Among the most significant moments, an accidental nude of La Marrash during a moment of lack of control or the reunion between Kiko Hernández and Coto Matamoros, two figures who had not met on screen since ‘Crónicas Marcianas’, and between whom great tension was palpable. Kiko took the opportunity to attack Mediaset and to the fame that ‘Big Brother’ drags: “There has never been a rape here, right?”, he said in reference to the case of Carlota Prado in ‘Big Brother Revolution’. The ‘Big Brother’ disaster. While ‘The House of Twins 2’ celebrated its digital success, ‘Big Brother 20’ was the star of the most resounding failure in the history of the format. The premiere in September 2024 it barely achieved a 17.4% sharesetting the program’s worst inaugural mark. But the decline accelerated week after week until hitting rock bottom in November with a devastating 11.3% share and only 636,000 viewers. The panic in Mediaset was unleashed with the abrupt cancellation of the daily strip and erratic programming decisions. The domino effect reached the entire chain: Telecinco closed November with a 9% monthly quota, its worst historical record for that month, chaining five consecutive months under the 10% threshold. On December 5, Mediaset decided close the program before Christmasproducing a triple expulsion to accelerate the pace of the programs. Two months in broadcast, record down. The problem is not the format. Some analysts talk about a flat casting and without charisma, too sweetened content, and viewers have complained that practices that gave excitement to the galas, such as on-set interviews, have been abandoned. ‘The House of Twins 2’ recovered precisely the elements that made the original ‘Big Brother’ great: 24-hour retransmission without manipulative editing, authentic profiles even if they are uncomfortable, and freedom for conflicts to develop organically. While Telecinco must comply with strict regulations on child protection schedules, advertising limits and content control, the Ramos brothers operate on YouTube and Kick with almost total freedom which allows them to experiment without corsets. The program allows itself the morbidity and transgression that the public demands, but without the restrictions that paralyze conventional television. In Xataka | ‘Temptation Island’ is one of the few things that works on Telecinco. So much so that they are already recording a new season

Google’s TPUs are the first big sign that NVIDIA’s empire is faltering

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It was 2013 and Jeff Dean, one of the directors of Google, he realized something along with your team: if each Android user used their new voice search option for three minutes a day, the company would have to double the number of data centers to cope with the computational load. At the time, Google was using standard CPUs and GPUs for this task, but they panicked and realized they needed to create their own chips for those tasks. This is how it was born Google’s first Tensor Processing Unit (TPU)an ASIC specifically designed to run the neural networks that powered its voice services. That grew and grew and in 2015, before the world knew it, those first TPUs accelerated Google Maps, Google Photos and Google Translate. A decade later, Google has created TPUs so powerful that they have almost unintentionally become a surprising and unexpected threat to the almighty NVIDIA. There it is nothing. Blessed panic. Google TPUs keep their promise Until now when an AI company wanted to train its models, turned to advanced NVIDIA chips. That has changed in recent times, and in fact we have seen two recent signs that certainly pose a turning point. Missing from that timeline is the last and most striking member of this family, Ironwood, presented in April 2025. Source: Google. The first is the release of Claude Opus 4.5, an exceptional modelespecially in programming tasks. Those responsible for Anthropic already they explained that this new model does not depend only on NVIDIA, but combines the power of three different proposals: that of NVIDIA, but also Amazon’s Trainium and Google’s TPUs. But it is also that Google has given the bell because your brand new AI model Gemini 3 He has been exclusively trained using the new Ironwood TPUs that were presented in April and have become a real sensation. As we said, Google started that project in 2013 and launched its first TPU in 2015, but that internal need became a blessing, because what Google I couldn’t know is that these TPUs would end up arriving at the right time: the launch of ChatGPT turned them into a fantastic opportunity to strengthen your AI infrastructure, but also to be used for training and inference of your AI models. From there we end up reaching the current Ironwood TPUs, which in their seventh generation are exceptional both in inference as in training (as its use has demonstrated for Gemini 3). Google has managed to squeeze even more out of its chips and has doubled the peak FLOPS per watt compared to its previous generation. Source: Google. The efficiency and power of these chips gives a very notable jump compared to their predecessors, and for example they achieve double FLOPS performance per watt which was achieved with Trillium chips. If we compare them with the TPU v5p of 2023, the chips manage to reach 4,614 TFLOPS, 10 times more than the 459 TFLOPS of those models from two years ago. It’s an extraordinary leap in performance (and efficiency). The key to 2025: Google now lets others use its TPUs But in the evolution of TPUs there is another differentiating element in 2025. This has been the year in which Google has stopped “being selfish” with its TPUs. Before only she could use them, but in recent months she has reached agreements with OpenAI —which also seeks make your own chips— and especially with Anthropic. The performance of Ironwood is already comparable to that of the GB200 and even the GB300 from NVIDIA. Source: SemiAnalysis. That second alliance is especially monumental as part of that outsourcing strategy. Google is not only renting capacity in its cloud, but facilitating the physical sale of hardware. The agreement covers one million TPUs: 400,000 units of its TPUv7 Ironwood sold directly through Broadcom, and 600,000 rented through Google Cloud (GCP). In a deep report in SemiAnalysis It is revealed how from a technical perspective, the TPUv7 Ironwood is a formidable competitor. The performance gap with NVIDIA is closing, and Google’s TPU is practically the same as NVIDIA’s Blackwell chip in FLOPS and memory bandwidth. However, the real advantage lies in the cost. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of an Ironwood server is estimated to be 44% lower for Google than for an NVIDIA GB200 server, allowing the search giant to offer very competitive prices to clients like Anthropic. To help even more in that race, they point out in SemiAnalysis, Google has another ace up its sleeve. This is Google’s Inter-Chip Interconnect (ICI), a network architecture that allows up to 9,216 Ironwood chips to be connected using a 3D torus topology. Google also uses optical circuit switches that allow optical data to be routed without electrical conversion, reducing both latency and power consumption. This allows you to reconfigure the topology of that network on the fly to avoid (or mitigate) failures and optimize different types of parallelism. NVIDIA’s “moat” with CUDA is narrowing We have often repeated that although semiconductor manufacturers already have flashy chips —tell AMD– In fact the true strength from NVIDIA is in CUDAthe software platform that has become the de facto standard for AI developers and researchers. Google also wants to change things here. During the last few years the company tried to focus on Python libraries such as JAX either XLAbut in recent times has started prioritizing native PyTorch support —a great competitor of TensorFlow— in its TPUs. That’s crucial to making it easier for engineers and developers to start migrating to their TPUs instead of NVIDIA GPUs. Before it was possible to use PyTorch on TPUs, but it was cumbersome, as if one had to speak a language using a dictionary in real time, while for NVIDIA GPUs that was the “native” language. With XLA Google used an intermediate library as a translator to be able to use PyTorch, but that was a nightmare for developers. Native support allows Google TPUs to behave just like NVIDIA GPUs in the … Read more

Spain already sells more electric cars and plug-in hybrids than gasoline. With a (big) asterisk

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The plug-in vehicle is expanding in Spain. For the first time, our country has recorded more sales of plug-in vehicles (plug-in hybrids and electric) than gasoline and, of course, diesel cars. Or, in other words, they add up to more than pure combustion vehicles per fuel type and come close to exceeding the sum of both. The data, however, has important nuances. you will have read it. And it makes sense, because the data is striking. For the first time, Spain has added more sales of plug-in vehicles than pure combustion vehicles. The figures for last November are, according to ANFACthe following: Gasoline cars: 21,147 units Diesel cars: 4,979 units Plug-in hybrid cars: 11,999 units Electric cars: 9,316 units Therefore, the duel is as follows: Sum of combustion vehicles: 26,133 units Sum of plug-in vehicles: 21,315 units. The first. The news is that for the first time the sum of cars with plug They have surpassed pure combustion gasoline. Cars that do not have any type of electrification continue to represent 22.47% (28.15% if we extend the photograph to the entire year 2025) but this energy is clearly declining. Cars with a plug have already reached 22.65% market share. But the big change is in the year’s accumulated results. This has shot up to 19.29% when a year ago it stood at 11.06%. Growth between January and November 2025 has skyrocketed by 100.12%. That is, twice as many cars of this type have been purchased. The hybrids. Once again, the non-plug-in hybrid is the best-selling type of car. According to ANFAC data, it was the best-selling type of car last November, with 41,034 units and a market share of 43.60%. This data does not stop growing. In the accumulated of the year, the market share is 41.85% and is almost four percentage points more than in the same period of 2024 (38.09%). In total, they have grown 26.04% in sales so far this year. These hybrids are mostly gasoline. But of the more than 40,000 units last November classified as hybrids, 3,852 of them are hybrids with diesel engines, which begins to give some clues about what we are talking about. Right now, non-plug-in hybrids that run on diesel are 1,000 units away from surpassing pure combustion diesels. Why do we talk about an asterisk? Because in their accounts, the microhybrid cars They count the same as a hybrid. There is no way to know how many of the more than 40,000 hybrids sold in Spain in November 2025 and the more than 437,621 units sold so far this year actually correspond to electric hybrids. What is popularly known as a “Toyota hybrid.” In fact, among the best-selling hybrids so far this year we find cars like the Citroën C4, the Dacia Dusterhe Renault Austral or the Nissan Qashqai. All of them have electric hybrid versions but also light hybrids (also called mild hybrid or microhybrids). In fact, the last two only have versions with the ECO label and although of the four engines, two are mild hybridthey all add up as hybrids in the final count. The controversy of mild hybrid. The controversy with the light hybrid or mild hybrid It comes because it is an effective formula for manufacturers to minimally electrify a car to receive approval from the authorities but with a purely cosmetic impact on the car’s consumption or emissions. With the same engine, a car that uses this type of hybridization barely improves the data approved by its pure combustion brother. In Spain, these cars have some advantages over pure combustion cars despite the fact that their real impact is minimal. In MadridFor example, a car mild hybrid It is exempt from paying 75% of the Tax on Mechanical Traction Vehicles (IVTM) during the first six years. These cars also receive the ECO label from the DGT, which is key when receiving more benefits in Low Emission Zonesspaces where circulation is restricted taking into account the car’s environmental labeling. In some cities they also have advantages such as discounts when parking on the street. A redefinition? It is not expected. Neither when it comes to defining them as hybrids nor when it comes to giving them the ECO label. Recently, in the Congress of Deputies The new Sustainable Mobility Law was approved. It was intended to include the study of a review of environmental labeling, but an amendment by the Popular Party prevented it from being included. this will take place. The creation of a new category or the non-provision of the ECO sticker to these cars is, however, a problem. The main obstacle is what to do with the thousands and thousands of cars mild hybrid that have already been sold and that have received their ECO sticker. Provide different labeling to the new cars, despite the fact that they are in the same situation as the current ones, can create a discriminatory situation, but a retroactive withdrawal of the stickers already delivered is not contemplated either. Photo | juice In Xataka | Catalonia wants to restrict circulation to cars with DGT label B in the ZBE: these are the deadlines and the cities

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