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6.3 billion more in three years

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The US thing with data centers has become a matter of first order and reason for rejection by a large part of the population. In addition to the pollution issuethese enormous infrastructures represent a brutal burden on the electrical network and citizens have been seeing for years how your electricity bills become more expensive. Well, they are going to go up even more. what has happened. They tell it in New York Times. Each year, PJM organizes an auction in which electric companies bid the price at which they are willing to offer electricity during peak demand. The results of the last auction amount to 6.3 billion dollars that will be added to the final bill of clients over the next three years. Why is it important. PJM acknowledges that, despite attempts to increase capacity: “electricity demand is growing faster than new generation can be built to meet it.” And they do not hesitate to name the culprit of this situation: “the main engine of this growth is the data centers”, enormous infrastructures that are being built at a speed that the electrical grid cannot match. In figures. PJM is the largest electricity operator in the United States and its network serves 13 states, including Virginia, where the largest cluster in the world is located with more than 650 data centers. The 6.3 billion extra costs will be distributed among 67 million households, but the serious thing is that this is the last of many increases. According to Monitoring Analytics, the company in charge of monitoring the PJM market, since 2024 these auctions have already led to an increase of $29 billion in the bills of all clients. Slowness. States and consumer advocacy associations criticize that PJM is very slow in connecting new generation energy such as solar, wind or batteries, solutions that would help alleviate the strain on the grid. We saw this recently when the heat wave stressed the network so much that had to allow data centers to connect their diesel generators. In states like California or Texas they did not have the same problem because they have an extensive battery system that allows them to store energy for this type of situation, but in the PJM area they are not prepared. And now what. PJM depends on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, so states can’t do anything to stop price increases. Governors’ hands are tied, but that doesn’t mean they can’t do anything. In 2024, the governor of Pennsylvania sued PJM for the increased cost of the bill. The result was an agreement that capped the price set in the auction. For its part, the state of New York has announced a statewide moratorium that prevents building large data centers for a period of one yearwhile evaluating their environmental and energy impact. Image | Xataka with Magnific In Xataka | The myth of the decentralized internet, on a map: a third of the world’s data centers are in a single country

how a probe launched in 2006 woke up and warned Madrid from 9.5 billion km

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About 9.5 billion kilometers from Earth, a ship built by humans more than two decades ago continued to advance through a region of the Solar System that we barely know. He had left in January 2006had left Pluto behind and had been in hibernation for 321 days, almost silently, while its trajectory took it further and further away from us. So after almost a year, New Horizons sent the signal confirming his awakening. It did not bring spectacular images nor did it announce a great discovery: it simply told us that it had come out of its dream and was still in good condition. That signal did not respond to an order sent from Earth that same morning. Before going into hibernation, the team had uploaded a sequence of instructions to the main computer that told the probe when to wake up its systems. New Horizons executed that programming on June 23 and came out of hibernation without needing a new order from our planet. Only then did he send his message to us. When the Deep Space Network station near Madrid received itabout eight hours and 52 minutes had passed since waking up. From this station near Madrid confirmation was received that New Horizons had woken up and was still in good condition. Hibernating didn’t mean turning off the ship and hoping it would come back on months later. During that period, a good part of its systems remained disconnected to reduce consumption and wear, but the flight computer continued to monitor the general condition while the vehicle rotated stably on itself. Once a week, in addition, it sent a simple beacon to indicate if everything was still in order. This way, the team could know that New Horizons was still healthy without maintaining constant communication or unnecessarily occupying the ground antennas. The system that remained in control was not like the computers we carry in our pockets. The command and data management system is supported by a 12MHz Mongoose V processorprotected against radiation and designed to resist rather than run. This component distributes orders among the subsystems and executes routines that allow the probe to react without immediate intervention. Upon certain failures, the ship can initiate a recovery, switch to backup components, or send a request for help. At that distance, autonomy is not an added function, but a condition for survival. The probe also could not send each measurement at the time it was obtained. His observations were stored in two 8 GB solid state drivesa main one and a backup one, while the computer organized and compressed them for later transmission. Seen from our current devices, that memory is almost insignificant; in deep space, forces you to manage each data carefully. The team had to prioritize and wait until the vehicle could point correctly toward our planet. Discovering something was only the first part: we still had to get it to us. A space probe designed to last The next problem was keeping alive a machine that was traveling further and further away from the source of energy that illuminates our planet. New Horizons does not rely on solar panels, but rather a radioisotope thermoelectric generator that uses the heat released by the decay of plutonium-238 to produce electricity. The power it delivers slowly decreases over the years, so each instrument turned on implies a decision. On the other hand, the insulating layers retain the heat generated by the electronics themselves, while automatic heaters intervene when this protection is not enough. After visiting Pluto and Arrokoth, New Horizons continues to move outwards from the Solar System Finding us from the far reaches of the Solar System requires much more than turning on a transmitter. The spacecraft observes the stars and compares what it sees with a catalog stored on board to determine where it is facing. Its small thrusters then make the necessary adjustments to align the main antenna with the Earth. That antenna cannot move independentlyso the entire vehicle must be placed in the correct direction before starting unloading. Only then can the stored data begin a nearly nine-hour journey to us. The paradox of that hibernation was that New Horizons was still doing science. Although the controllers were not sending commands or downloading information, three instruments remained active to study the particles, plasma and dust surrounding the probe. SWAP, PEPSSI and accountant Venetia Burney continued to take measurements and retain them for when regular communication could resume. The mission had reduced much of its activity, but not its ability to observe: even during the longest sleep in its history, outer space continued to pass through its sensors. A ship launched two decades ago does not age like one of our devices: no one can bring it back, change a part, or connect it to a more powerful energy source. What the team can do is teach you how to better manage what you still have. Before its final sleep, New Horizons received a crash protection update to address the gradual drop in power and increased communication delays. Her awakening was not, therefore, an isolated trick, but the result of twenty years of learning to keep her alive from a distance. Images | NASA | In Xataka | NASA is looking for four people who want to live a year on Mars without leaving Earth

Intel just put 5 billion and an asterisk on the table

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Europe has been trying for years gain weight on the world map of semiconductors. It is not just about manufacturing more chips, but about reducing dependence on supply chains concentrated outside the continent and regaining ground in the most advanced processes. The United States pursues a similar objective and has reinforced its efforts to attract investmentsfactories and jobs linked to strategic technologies. This industrial race has left a striking scene: one of the largest American companies in the sector has decided to bet billions on expanding its production on European soil. That company is Intel, that has announced an investment of 5,000 million euros to expand and modernize its Leixlip complex, in Ireland. The goal is to increase production of Xeon 6 processors and certain upcoming Xeon products made with Intel 3, the most advanced process the company currently produces in Europe. The move, however, comes after the manufacturer canceled its industrial projects in Germany and Poland. The European Union reinforces its production, but the fine print forces us to clarify how far this victory really goes. More capacity in Ireland, but a European chain still incomplete The core of the plan is not to build a new factory or expand the clean room, but to better equip Fab 34, Upgrade your facilities and extend your automated network that moves the wafers during the numerous stages of the production process. This infrastructure will allow the different modules of the campus to be integrated more fluidly and increase the efficiency of the whole. Intel began rolling out the program in early 2026, although it has not detailed when it will complete the improvements. The expected result is a greater volume manufactured with Intel 3 taking advantage of the existing space. Fab 34 began full-scale production in 2023 and turned Leixlip into Intel’s large European advanced manufacturing center. The installation was born working with Intel 4, used in the first Core Ultra, and later incorporated Intel 3 for the Xeon processors. Both technologies use extreme ultraviolet lithography, known as EUV, to print smaller, more complex structures on wafers. When it began its activity, Fab 34 became the first European factory to use this technique in high-volume production. Main entrance to the Robert N. Noyce Building, Intel headquarters in Santa Clara, California The expected increase responds, according to Intel, to greater demand for server processors and infrastructure linked to artificial intelligence. Although GPUs and accelerators attract much of the attention, data centers still need CPU to run general loadsmanage resources and maintain the platforms on which these specialized systems work. The Xeons occupy precisely that space within their catalog. Expanding the volume of Intel 3 would allow us to better supply that market without waiting for a new plant to be ready. The disbursement also comes after a major financial pivot around Fab 34. In 2024, Apollo contributed $11.2 billion and acquired 49% of a joint venture tied to the facility’s production, although Intel maintained ownership and operational control of the factory. The company repurchased that stake in April 2026 for $14.2 billion. Three months later, it again commits capital to the Irish infrastructure after recovering 100% of that company. Intel’s European bet had been much more ambitious. The company introduced Fab 34 as one piece of a future chain that would combine wafer production in Ireland with two new advanced factories in Magdeburg, Germany, and an assembly and testing facility in Wrocław, Poland. That deployment was to cover within the Union several of the main stages necessary to convert a wafer into a finished processor. The projects were postponed in 2024 and definitively abandoned a year later, when Intel decided to adjust its investments to expected demand. The 5,000 million asterisk appears there. Europe will be able to manufacture a greater volume of advanced wafers, but it will still not have the complete framework that Intel had promised to build within the EU. The company maintains its main assembly and testing operations in the United States and Asia, after canceling the Polish facility that was to cover those stages. Leixlip reduces some of the external dependence, although it does not by itself convert Xeon production into a fully European chain. Images | Intel In Xataka | SK Hynix is ​​betting that the memory cycle is dead. He proves it by doing just what always killed him.

Instagram and Facebook are “addictive” by design. And Meta faces a fine of 12 billion dollars

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The European Commission has concludedpreliminarily, that Meta violates the Digital Services Act (DSA) due to the “addictive” design of Instagram and Facebook. The organization and Meta have been arguing for years over a multitude of aspects related to the security and privacy of their social networks but, this time, the move could be very expensive for Mark Zuckerberg’s company, as it could be forced to redesign both applications and face a fine of up to $12 billion. por that. The conclusion of the European Commission comes after an investigation of more than two years which, if confirmed, would force Meta to change the internal functioning of two of the most used social networks on the planet. And it comes at a time when regulatory pressure on big technology companies for the protection of minors it doesn’t stop growingboth in Europe and in the United States. In detail. According to has explained The European Commission itself in an official statement, Meta “did not adequately assess the risks of its addictive design for the physical and mental well-being of users, including minors and vulnerable adults.” The European organization points directly to several specific functions: Personalized recommendations. Autoplay (automatic playback of content). The infinite scroll. Push notifications. Brussels maintains that these tools push the user to continue viewing content almost unconsciously, which the institution itself describes as going into “autopilot mode.” It also ensures that Meta ignored available data on the time that minors spend on Instagram and Facebook at night, as well as the role that formats such as reels or stories could play in excessive or compulsive use of the applications. Between the lines. What is striking is not only that Brussels points out the design of the apps, but also questions the tools that Meta already offers to limit their use. The Commission states that screen time controls, even those enabled by default for teenagers, “can be easily dismissed” and do not truly reduce use of the service. Regarding parental control, consider that it only works if parents have technical knowledge and dedicate time and effort to configure it, something that, according to the organization itself, limits its real effectiveness. Nor does he consider the mental health warnings that Meta offers in its “safety center” as sufficient. With these arguments, the Commission proposes that Meta should introduce specific design changes: deactivate functions such as autoplay and infinite scroll by default, incorporate effective screen pauses and adjust its recommendation system so that it depends less on keeping the user engaged, according to the institution’s own statement. How much money is at stake. If the conclusion is confirmed, Meta could be fined up to 6% of its annual worldwide turnover. Taking 2025 revenues as a reference, close to $201 billion, the penalty could be close to $12 billion. That can make goal. It should be noted that these are still preliminary conclusions and that there is still no firm sanction. Meta has the right to defend himself, review the documentation in the file and respond in writing before Brussels adopts a final decision. In parallel, the case will be consulted to the European Committee for Digital Services. The context does not play in favor of Meta. This research It has been open since May 2024and it has not been the only one. In parallel, the company faces another European investigation into its age verification systems for children under 13 years of age, whose preliminary conclusions were published in April, as detailed by the Commission itself. In addition, Brussels is preparing a report, scheduled for next Monday, on a possible ban on the use of social networks for minors under 16 years of age throughout the community bloc, according to they count from The Verge. Pressure also comes from the United States. In August, Meta will sit on trial over whether its applications are intentionally addictive, in a case in which several states are jointly demanding compensation that could reach $1.4 trillion. depending on the medium. And it would not be the first judicial defeat, since in March, a Los Angeles jury already declared Instagram and YouTube responsible for damaging the mental health of a 20-year-old girl, in a case that forced the companies to pay 6 million dollars jointly, according to share from Bloomberg. QEU says the Comywentn. “Protecting the physical and mental health of Europeans must be a priority for social media platforms,” ​​he said. declared Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice President of the European Commission for Technological Sovereignty, Security and Democracy. Virkkunen added that the Digital Services Law “offers a clear framework to hold platforms accountable for the addictive design of their services and their effects”, and assured that Brussels is “fully committed” to enforcing European regulations. What Meta says. A spokesperson for the technology giant declared to the BBC that the company did not agree with the conclusions, “which do not properly take into account the important measures we have taken to protect teenagers.” “We share the European Commission’s commitment to providing adolescents with safe and positive online experiences, and we will continue to engage constructively with them,” it continued. And now what. The case enters a phase of allegations that may be prolonged. This is not the first time that the DSA has resulted in sanctions, since the norm itself has already been used to fine X 120 million eurosand with 200 million euros to the Chinese e-commerce giant Temu. We’ll see what happens with Meta. Cover image | Guillaume Perigois and Goal In Xataka | Anyone can tag you on Instagram to generate AI deepfakes with your photos. It’s Meta being Meta

$30 billion worth of Broadcom chips

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Apple has announced an extension of your agreement with Broadcom which, according to the company itself, will exceed $30 billion. For the company, it is the largest single commitment within its American Manufacturing Program (AMP), but it is also another handful of bills that once again demonstrates how the semiconductor industry is being the central axis of the strategy of big technology. The context. Apple has been trying to demonstrate to Donald Trump’s government for more than a year that is moving part of its production chain to American soil. And it has no other choice, since this commitment is framed within of the 600 billion dollar investment plan in four years that the company announced in 2025, after Trump threatened to impose 25% tariffs on iPhones if Apple did not manufacture more components in the country. According to collect According to the Financial Times, that promise is similar to another similar one that Apple already made during Trump’s first term, when it committed to investing $350 billion in the United States. In detail. The new agreement with Broadcom provides for the production of more than 15 billion chips manufactured in the United States and will create hundreds of jobs, according to Apple. its official statement. Broadcom, which was already working with Apple to supply connectivity components, will expand and modernize its plant in Fort Collins, Colorado, with an additional investment of $1.5 billion. That plant will manufacture advanced radio frequency components, including FBAR filters, which allow Apple devices to connect to mobile, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth networks. Neither Apple nor Broadcom have yet confirmed when they will have everything ready to work with this new capacity. Between the lines. The announcement comes two days after Broadcom will inform to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it had signed new long-term agreements with Apple to develop custom ASIC-type chips (application-specific integrated circuits, increasingly used in artificial intelligence workloads) that will extend until 2031, according to collects Reuters. So the $30 billion figure now confirmed by Apple puts concrete numbers on those long-term deals. In the last year, Apple has been replacing some of the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity chips that it previously bought from Broadcom with its own designs. This had raised doubts among investors about whether Broadcom would lose weight as a supplier, something similar to what happened with Qualcommwhose 5G modems Apple has been phasing out in favor of its own C-series chips. However, it appears that Broadcom will continue to supply other RF components and, according to Bloombergis also working on technology that will support the first artificial intelligence server that Apple plans to deploy next year. The voices. Apple CEO Tim Cook has qualified the components that will be manufactured in Fort Collins as “essential to deliver the performance and connectivity our customers expect,” and thanked President Trump and his Administration for “supporting important projects like this.” For his part, Broadcom’s CEO, Hock Tan, said he was “proud to continue working with Apple after decades of joint success” and highlighted that the agreement will allow it to expand its manufacturing footprint in Colorado. Why it is important. Apple is not massively restructuring its global supply chain, which remains highly concentrated in Asia. Your strategy, as explains the Financial Times, has been to focus on chips, which are the highest-value components in its devices, and announce purchase commitments with manufacturers that already operate in the United States, such as TSMC in Arizona, Texas Instruments in Texas or GlobalFoundries in New York. The Broadcom deal is, so far, the biggest piece of that puzzle. And now what. The announcement comes at a time of transition for Apple. Tim Cook will step down as director of the company on September 1, position that John Ternus will assumecurrent hardware manager. Cook will remain with the company as CEO and, according to Bloombergis expected to maintain his role as the main interlocutor with the White House, a role that has been key to sustaining Apple’s relationship with the Trump Administration in recent months. In Xataka | The US taught that access to advanced AI can be cut off. China is studying the same thing, according to Reuters, and Europe is watching from the outside

Xbox wants to have 1 billion players a day. It’s what 25 Steam would do on their best day

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Another day in the video game industry, this Monday Microsoft announced layoffs at Xbox. 1,600 at once, five studios to make a living and another 1,600 layoffs over the next few months. To carry out the restructuring, what is known as “Xbox reset”Microsoft put Asha Sharma at the head of the company who came from one of the company’s AI divisions and who arrived with a clear mission: to break with the past. After weeks of good words, drastic decisions began and, in a release gigantic, justified the decisions of layoffs and restructuring (the consequences of which we still do not fully know, since we have been learning about layoffs in different Xbox studios for two days). There are interesting data, such as extreme bureaucracy within Xbox that had complicated things in recent years, the enormous investment in Game Pass and the fact that caught my attention the most: the number of daily players that Xbox wants. Because Sharma talks about wanting a billion people to be “entertained” with Xbox every day. And, after wondering what it means to have a billion people every day on your platform, I have only been able to come to one conclusion: I would like to see how they do it. The Xbox of a billion players and the old woman’s account I don’t say this in a defiant sense, but out of genuine curiosity. I would like to see how Xbox, or any company, for that matter, is able to bring together a billion people a day on its platform. Sharma comments that they see themselves capable of achieving that goalbut the point is that there are many more stimuli than ever and, furthermore, setting these goals only has one consequence: when they are not met, there will be more ‘resets’. Let’s go in parts. The changes they are making seek to ensure that “Xbox has a bigger future, not a smaller one.” Furthermore, he notes that “the next decade of games will be bigger, more global and more creative than anything we’ve seen before.” Said like this, you may think that they are going to invest a lot (they themselves say that they are going to invest a lot, but with a better focus and discipline), but there is a problem: are there really that many players willing to be on your platform? What is an Xbox? Answering the first question, players… there are. We are more than 8,000 million people throughout the world and esteem what’s there around 3 billion people who play video games. This in total, not on a daily basis and, furthermore, you must keep in mind that everything is mixed here: the accounts include everything from the most ‘Eat’ of ‘Call of Duty’ to your grandfather who plays ‘Candy Crush’ or a Facebook game. Responding to the second, Sharma says they want a billion people entertained with Xbox. And not only those who have a console count (whose sales are quite poor), but also those who play from PC and Xbox games on Steam and platforms like PS5. That is, everything that has the Xbox seal. That said, let’s tell why one billion people seem to get it “easy” Yes, you have so many franchises and you are present everywhere, but things get complicated if we put the magnifying glass on the few games that can really help the company achieve those figures. They are all estimates, but we would talk about 110 million monthly players in ‘Minecraft’, between 70 and 90 million (counting mobile phones) monthly in ‘Call of Duty’ and between 200 and 300 million players diaries in ‘Candy Crush’. There we see the dimension of mobile games, really, and how they crush those on more traditional platforms. ‘World of Warcraft’ too would enter there, with about 9 million monthly players. These are figures that many companies would like, but they are far from those 1,000 million a day that Sharma points to. To further contextualize, Steam, which is another of the huge video game platforms, had its historical peak of players a few months ago, reaching more than 42 million. In the last 24 hours, almost 39 million people connected and, as we see in graphs like Steamdb, they are very stable… and in growth. Well, Sharma wants the same as they would get 25 Steams every day. As a player, I would love to have so many people because it would allow, perhaps, the industry to be somewhat more sustainable because there would be many more players among which smaller studios could find their place to grow, but the problem I see with these accounts is that, publishing that you want there to be 1,000 million people on your platform, the only result (the most likely, at least) is failure. And when you fail in such a large company when you have set this as an objective, the manager is not the one who pays the bill: it is the employees. It’s something we see constantly and We come from three years of constant layoffs in the industry to be optimistic about the issue. What we have seen these days is that they are changing the strategy in that sense. They are releasing the smaller studios that do not sell to bet on what makes money. An example is King (‘Candy Crush’) and Mojang (‘Minecraft’), which They will report directly to herwith Sharma being the one who will make the decisions to achieve the objective. Another thing is whether people who watch the ‘Fallout’ series, a game series whose license belongs to Xbox, count as “people entertained by Xbox.” We just have to wait and see what happens, but it is evident that Xbox’s turnaround is there, releasing studios that were developing games with soul to bet on what makes money. After all, it is the objective of every company. In Xataka | The best time to buy an electronic device was yesterday. The second best time is today

Microsoft bet 80 billion that you would play hundreds of titles. It failed because you just wanted to play the same old game.

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I have dozens of games in my library. Do you know how many I play? to two: from time to time I play a FIFA (I’ll always continue to call it that, I’m afraid) and if I get around to it I’ll hit the old ‘Battlefield 1’ that still has me conquered. In recent years I have enjoyed ‘Ghost of Tushima’, ‘Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’ or ‘Sifu’, for example, but while I was spending hours on those half a dozen titles, many others that I have in my library are simply collecting dust. Surely many of you play many more games and invest much more time in this, and Microsoft was surely thinking of you when it configured its future strategy. Xbox’s ambition was great until it wasn’t The idea in 2020 was clear, and those responsible for Microsoft said that There were 2.8 billion gamers in the world and they wanted to conquer them all. As? Well, with two great projects: Spend a million in buying video game development studios to constantly grow the catalog, and, of course, Create the ‘Netflix of video games’ with Xbox Game Pass Both ideas seemed to make a lot of sense and many gamers, especially those of us who were from Xbox, felt excited by that ambition. Xbox Game Pass seemed to be really exceptional for gamers and a nightmare for Sony, and although the operation to buy Activision Blizzard and franchises like ‘Call of Duty’ It was exceptionally expensive.the play again seemed like a fantastic bet for players of all types. But lo and behold, it wasn’t. These days we have known that Microsoft has spent close to $80 billion on agreements that would give it access to titles such as the aforementioned ‘Call of Duty’ or ‘Skyrim’, so that these video games could be available from day 1 or almost from the first moment on Xbox Game Pass. They wanted to create a catalog that would allow gamers to play hundreds of titles, including the most recent “triple A” titles, as part of the subscription to that service. They were wrong. And we also thought that the idea made sense. less is more The truth is that the strategy has not worked out well for them. The company has announced that will lay off 3,200 employees in its Xbox division20% of its staff, and will also allow five development studios to leave the company to follow their own path again. Maybe the answer wasn’t having more games. Steam already gave a strong clue at the beginning of 2025 when it pointed out that its platform It had become a video game dump.: Of 19,000 titles in 2024, almost no one played 80% of them. As in many other areas, the long tail theory prevails: interest is concentrated in a handful of contents that, on their own merits (perhaps seasoned with some luck) become absolute successes. The reality for the vast majority of gamers is the same: there are too many games on the market and people simply don’t have time to play all of them. Let’s be handsome or uglyWe insist, there is no time for so many video games. My colleague Jose García wrote in 2021 his particular reflection on how many we have become new digital Diogenes When it comes to video games: we get countless new games (most of them free) on Epic Games, Steam or GOG, but we have them collecting virtual dust in our library because we will never play many of them. My situation was also reflected in another text by Isra Fernández: Being a gamer after having children is complicated. The Netflix of video games was a utopia The picture that this situation paints for us is one that we intuited and made sense, but that we deceived ourselves by rejecting. Creating the Netflix of video games was impossible because video games are radically different to series or movies. While one consumes series or movies once and abandons them probably forever, gamers return to the video games we like again and again. We don’t spend an hour or two on them, but dozens and even hundreds of hours both in solo games and in games against other players on the internet. The way of consuming both content is precisely what destroys the illusion that a Netflix of video games makes sense. Xbox Game Pass offers us hundreds of titles so we can try them (and buy them) if we want, but we rarely do. I myself enjoyed Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for three years, and although I tried around twenty titles during that time, I always ended up returning to my classics. The options were wonderful, but I just didn’t have time for them. because when I wanted to play, I wanted to go back to my FIFA or my ‘Battlefield 1’. Microsoft itself already accused the problem when it gave us the worst news two years ago by raising the price of Xbox Game Pass. That was not enough, because a few months later he uploaded it again. The service was becoming more exclusive than ever, and it was doing so for one simple reason: they weren’t making enough money with it. But there is another problem that It is not just about consuming, but about producing. The “Netflix rhythm” is also unviable: there four scriptwriters start writing and in six months the platform releases a series that people devour in a weekend. In video games things are different, with increasingly longer and obscenely expensive developments. The famous availability of games available on “day 1” does not help either. That AAA video games worth 70 or 80 euros are available for free to subscribers was wonderful for us, but a shot in the foot for the company’s accounts. Building loyalty was important, but that was killing income for developments like these in which a lot of time and money is invested. The conclusion is clear in retrospect: Microsoft’s strategy was fantastic for … Read more

4.1 billion euros and no turning back

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The Court of Justice of the European Union has definitively closed one of Google’s longest antitrust litigations in Europe. And the organization confirmed this Thursday the fine of 4.1 billion euros imposed by the European Commission for the company’s use of Android to harm its rivals, as reported by the court itself in a statement. The sanction is final, so the company has no further opportunity to appeal. What has happened? The origin of this case dates back to 2018, when Brussels imposed Google a record fine of 4,340 million euros for forcing mobile phone manufacturers to pre-install Google Search, the Chrome browser and the Google Play store if they wanted to have access to the rest of the Android ecosystem, in addition to preventing them from installing alternative versions of the operating system, according to collect Bloomberg. In 2022, a lower EU court slightly reduced the amount up to 4.1 billion euros, although it maintained many of the Commission’s arguments. Google appealed that decision to the Court of Justice of the EU, which has now rejected the appeal and has definitively ruled in favor of the regulator. The largest antitrust fine. For Brussels, Google abused its dominant position to shield its search engine and its applications from the competition. This is the largest antitrust fine that the company has received in Europe and, according to share To CNBC, lawyer Alex Haffner, partner at the Fladgate firm, represents the closing of what could be called the “first phase” of the Commission’s fight with big technology based on classic competition laws. In detail. The Commission detected three illegal practices in the Android deal: First: it forced manufacturers to pre-install Google Search and Chrome as a condition of being able to license the Google Play store. Second: it paid large manufacturers and operators in exchange for installing its search engine exclusively. And third: it prevented manufacturers from launching phones with versions of Android not approved by Google itself, according to details Bloomberg. Google has always defended that Android offers more options to users and supports thousands of businesses in Europe. A company spokesperson has assured CNBCthat the ruling “does not recognize the significant investment” made to keep Android open, interoperable and free, although it has stressed that the company has already adapted its contracts to comply with the original decision since 2018. Between the lines. This ruling comes at a particularly delicate time for Google in Europe. The company has already accumulated nearly 11,000 million euros in antitrust fines in the last two decades, according to Reutersand last year the Commission already imposed another sanction of 2,950 million euros for its practices in digital advertising. The ruling also opens the door for companies that consider themselves harmed by these practices to claim compensation on their own, an avenue that has already begun to be explored, since from Bloomberg remember that Google was condemned just a day before to pay nearly $2 billion to Klarna in other related antitrust litigation. On the other hand, the organization FairSearch, which submitted the original complaint to the Commission in 2013, has qualified the ruling as “an important victory against Google’s anti-competitive conduct in the mobile market.” And now what. The regulatory focus in Brussels is no longer so much on traditional competition laws as on Digital Markets Law (DMA) and the Digital Services Lawthe new legislative tools with which the EU monitors big technology companies. Google already faces other files opened under these rules, including one for favoring its own services in search results and another for its practices in the application store. Added to this is the open investigation into whether the company unfairly harms certain news results, notes Bloomberg. The current political background doesn’t help either. And the president of the United States, Donald Trump, has threatened tariffs 100% to countries that impose digital taxes on US technology companies, a measure that directly affects countries like France or Spain, CNBC points out. Everything indicates that regulatory pressure on Google in Europe will continue to intensify in the coming months. We’ll see what happens. Cover image | Guillaume Perigois and Alex Dudar on Unsplash In Xataka | “To say that it is a bubble is a blasphemy against AI”: a man who has invested a fortune in OpenAI

South Korea has a plan to dominate in memory chips and robotics. One of a billion dollars

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South Korea has put on the table a megaproject for the AI ​​era. This is an initiative made up of three public-private projects spread across semiconductors, data centers and the promising industry of “physical AI”, that is, robots and autonomous systems. The advertisement seeks something very specific: that the country does not depend only on selling memory, but on manufacturing other physical products that it anticipates will be consumed massively. Memory chips rule. The largest item of this ambitious plan is, as we all expected, the one destined for the country’s semiconductor industry. Samsung and SK Hynix have committed to investing $585 billion in new manufacturing plants in the southeast of the country, in addition to strengthening factory construction in the Seoul region. They want to double the production of DRAM memories in five years. The future belongs to data centers. The second large part of this plan corresponds to the data centers that are precisely going to take advantage of a large part of those memory chips. SK Group, CS Group and Naver will invest $357 billion to build large-scale AI data centers in areas until now far from the country’s technology centers. According to the Ministry of Science, the final ambition is to achieve a combined capacity of 18.4 GW by 2035, which would make South Korea one of the world’s great AI “nodes.” Robotics, of course. More surprising is the third leg of the plan: the South Korean government has declared that “physical AI” is a “national strategic industry.” These systems, which allow robots or autonomous vehicles to interact with the real world, also want to be part of the future of the country’s technology industry. In three years they want to create a foundational AI model with the philosophy of “models of the world“—the same in which Yan LeCun or Fei-Fei Li work—. Hyundai has its own plan. The South Korean auto industry giant has set aside $5.8 billion to create a robot manufacturing plant and data center. It’s no coincidence: Hyundai is in fact the parent company of Boston Dynamics since 20221, and is already using its local supply chain to help the American company increase production of its Atlas humanoid robot. The goal: build 30,000 units per year in 2028. Humanoid robots in factories. South Korea wants to commercialize humanoid robots in several key industries before 2028, and to achieve this it wants to train the people who will work with them. The joint plan includes a section that talks about training 10,000 new “AI robotics specialists” in the next five years. But. The announcement coincides with an important internal debate: there are political proposals that seek distribute part of the extraordinary profits of the chip manufacturers, and the unions already see the imminent threat of robotics that will replace positions in all types of assembly chains. The opposition to the South Korean government has also criticized the location of these new production centers, which according to them respond more to a political calculation than to a good industrial strategy. In Xataka | Samsung had been the absolute king of technology in South Korea for decades: SK Hynix has just surpassed it

Samsung and SK Hynix have pledged $880 billion in chips and AI. It’s a South Korean survival story.

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President Lee Jae Myung has summoned the leaders of the world’s two largest memory companies, calling them “national heroes” and describing the plan as a matter of “survival.” This is not usual in political rhetoric. South Korea has presented its largest coordinated technological investment plan in history: At least 1.35 trillion won (about $880 billion) in semiconductors and AI data centers. Samsung and SK Group will build two chip factories each in the southwest of the country. And other companies, led by Naver, will build 8.4 gigawatts of data center capacity before 2029. Why is it important. South Korea produces most of the RAM and HBM on the planet. SK Hynix is ​​the main supplier of HBM chips to NVIDIA, and Samsung is the second. With Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft announcing more than 700 billion in capex by 2026, the memory supply chain is the bottleneck that can stop all that expansion. Apple and Microsoft have already announced price increases for their devices due to the increase in the cost of these components. In figures: 880 billion dollars in total investment, equivalent to about 5% of South Korea’s GDP in 2024. 4 new chip factories in the southwest of the country. 8.4 gigawatts of AI data center capacity by 2029. $295 billion: China’s five-year semiconductor investment plan, the benchmark South Korea has in mind. Between the lines. The plan is industrial but also has a lot of politics: Lee’s approval rating has fallen to its lowest level since he took office a year ago, pressured by the economy, the weak won and housing. Locating the factories in the southwest (far from the Seoul metropolitan area, where all advanced production is concentrated) responds to an agenda of territorial redistribution that Lee has made an electoral banner. Yes, but. The announcement did not sit well with the markets. Samsung fell about 5% on the day of the event and SK Hynix fell 1.7%. Investors have read it as a warning of possible oversupply if demand for AI chips slows before factories are operational. Added to this are the known material challenges in this sector: building state-of-the-art factories requires quantities of water, electricity and talent that the government has promised to support… but without yet detailing how. The context. This is not the first time that the Asian country has announced this type of commitment. The difference now is the urgency: the boom of AI has accelerated deadlines and the competitive framework has changed. Japan subsidizes TSMC to build on its soil, China has been closing the gap for years with state financing and the United States has committed tens of billions through the CHIPS Act. In Xataka | Who are Openchip, the Catalan company that designs RISC-V chips… and has just received 115 million from the Government Featured image | Daniel Bernard

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