surpass

Meta will surpass Google in digital advertising for the first time in history

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That Google is the queen of online advertising is one of the great constants of the Internet, but everything indicates that the reign is approaching its end. If the predictions come true, for the first time in history, Meta will be the company that generates the most advertising revenue. Projections. At the moment the surprise has not occurred, but the projections of the advertising analysis firm Emarketer are clear: Meta is going to snatch the throne of online advertising from Google in 2026. Specifically, they project that Meta will earn 243.46 billion dollars from advertising, while Google will earn 239.54 billion. Why is it important. Google’s dominance in the online advertising market was absolute. In fact, that domain has been in the regulators’ crosshairs for years and It has become very expensive for Google. Meta’s surprise, although not by a huge difference, is confirmation that the internet has been reconfigured with social networks and that the cake is much more distributed. Considering that Google has built its empire on the foundation of online advertising, it is even more relevant. The Meta Boost: AI. Meta has a portfolio of products with millions of users such as Instagram, Facebook, Threads and WhatsApp. According to Emarketer, the company has been “incredibly patient” in building solid usage habits in its user base before introducing ads. But what has caused this acceleration has been the integration of AI in content recommendation systems. This has allowed them to increase the viewing time of Reels by 30%, which translates into more advertising and therefore more income, specifically they are expected to reach the 50,000 million only with Reels. Goal Advantage+. It is the suite with AI that Meta offers advertisers. In addition to offering the platform to advertise, Meta also provides a ton of tools ranging from advertising actions to the creation of the ads themselves with generative audio, text and video AI. According to the brand’s results, revenue from video generation reached $10 billion in the last quarter of 2025. It was seen coming. It is not something that happened overnight, but rather The change has been in the works for years.. The displacement of searches was moving to other specialized platforms such as Amazon, Instagram or TikTok. With the emergence of AI, the landscape has become even more fragmented: with chatbots that provide answers to many user queries without us going through the classic search engine. Google is no longer the ‘default’ when doing a search, especially for younger generations who prefer audiovisual content. OpenAI enters the business. A few days ago we talked about OpenAI’s ambitious plans for its newly launched advertising business. The company hopes that, by 2030, they will have generated $100 billion with ads on ChatGPT, that’s nothing. It is still a much smaller amount than those managed by Meta or Google in a year, but it is enough for the impact to be noticeable. With social networks the exodus of searches began and perhaps we are facing the second great displacement. Time will tell. Image | Xataka, with Gemini In Xataka | The US has just opened a new wound in the Google empire: the justice system declares part of its advertising business illegal

Samsung faces a very serious problem to surpass TSMC with its 2nm chips: the 60% curse

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When semiconductor manufacturers produce a chip wafer, some of those cores do not function properly. It’s normal. When they start a new lithographic node your performance per wafer usually has a wide room for improvementbut little by little, as engineers refine their integration processes, this parameter improves. A mature lithography can deliver very high performance to IC manufacturers, but a nascent technology can move in the orbit of 50% performance. Importantly, chipmakers need the per-wafer yield to be at least 60% to ensure node profitability and attract more customers. However, this figure is the minimum admissible. And in reality it must be much higher to optimize the competitiveness of photolithography from a commercial point of view. Currently TSMC and Samsung are manufacturing 2nm chipsbut according to the leaks the performance per wafer of its nodes is very different. And the South Korean company needs its 2nm node to be a success. The 1 and 2 nm nodes are crucial in the itinerary that Samsung has planned This reflection that Han Jong-hee, co-CEO of Samsung, made in mid-2025 express clearly At what point were you then? the largest company in South Korea: “First of all, I sincerely apologize that our stock performance has not met your expectations. Over the past year, our company has not responded appropriately to the rapidly evolving AI semiconductor market.” These words were addressed to his investors. Samsung needs to make its current best chip manufacturing technology a success A very important idea emerges from Jong-hee’s words: the competitiveness of your subsidiary specialized in the manufacturing of integrated circuits is essential for Samsung. Even so, problems were arising from several fronts. “Our technological advantage has been compromised in all of our businesses. It is difficult to see that efforts are being made to drive great innovations or take on new challenges. There are only attempts to maintain the status quo instead of generating disruptive changes,” said an internal statement written by Jay Y. Lee, the company’s president. In this scenario, Samsung needs its current best chip manufacturing technology, 2nm lithography, to be a success. And it’s in it. Integrated circuit producers do not typically make the per-wafer yield of their cutting-edge lithographs public, especially if it is relatively low. However, according to DigiTimes Asia Currently the performance of its 2nm nodes oscillates around 55%, so it is below the 60% threshold that we talked about a few lines above. For this company, it is essential to increase the yield per wafer of its 2nm lithography because with a yield of 55% the percentage of usable chips after advanced packaging probably ranges around 40%. To curl the curl, again according to DigiTimes Asiathe per-wafer performance of TSMC’s 2nm nodes ranges between 60 and 70%which places this Taiwanese company, which is Samsung’s biggest competitor and the leader of the chip manufacturing industryin a very favorable position when it comes to attracting new clients. If Samsung manages to raise the performance of its 2nm nodes above 60% during the coming months, it will put up a fight against TSMC. Otherwise you will suffer. Image | Generated by Xataka with Gemini More information | DigiTimes Asia In Xataka | We already know what the chips that will arrive until 2039 will be like. The machine that will allow them to be manufactured is close

Lace Lithography is Europe’s opportunity to surpass the US and Asia in chip manufacturing. From Barcelona

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Lace Lithography is not just another startup. And it is not because it is developing a new photolithography technique that seeks to break down all the barriers that limit the performance of ultraviolet light technology used by the machines manufactured by the Dutch company ASML. And they are used by TSMC, Intel, Samsung, SK Hynix or SMIC, among other semiconductor manufacturers. A priori, the most prudent thing to do when faced with news like this is to adopt a skeptical stance, but Lace’s work deserves to be taken very seriously. Otherwise it would not have the support of Microsoft nor would it have raised $40 million in financing. The founders of this company are the Norwegian physicist Bodil Holst and the Spanish physicist and engineer Adrià Salvador Palau. These two scientists created Lace Lithography in 2023, and although their headquarters reside in Bergen (Norway), an important part of their research and development team operates from Barcelona. Be that as it may, the most important thing is that the strategy that this company has devised to solve the lithography of the next generation of integrated circuits does not resemble nor to ASML technology nor to any other innovation we have heard of so far. The first prototypes are already ready and the test plant will be ready in 2029 The itinerary that Lace Lithography seeks to follow is very ambitious. Its first prototypes, according to Reutersare already prepared, and intends to develop a test tool and a cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing pilot plant in 2029. In any case, in addition to their plans, we know some details about their technology that are worth investigating. In the integrated circuit manufacturing equipment that ASML designs and produces, ultraviolet light is responsible for transporting the geometric pattern described by the mask so that it can be transferred with great precision to the surface of the silicon wafer. Lace Lithography uses a beam of helium atoms to transfer the pattern described by the chip to the silicon wafer The light used by high-aperture extreme ultraviolet lithography equipment, which is the most advanced machine that ASML has Currently, it belongs to the most energetic portion of the ultraviolet region of the electromagnetic spectrum. In fact, its wavelength extends in the range that goes from 10 to 100 nanometers (nm). The problem is that it is not easy to generate and deal with this form of electromagnetic radiation. And it is not, among other reasons, because it is so energetic that it alters the structure of the physical elements with which it interacts inside the lithography machine. Lace’s technology solves this and other problems that are closely linked to the use of ultraviolet radiation to manufacture chips. And instead of using light, the engineers at this company use a beam of helium atoms to transfer the pattern described by the chip to the silicon wafer. However, the most striking thing is that this beam has the width of a single hydrogen atom (around 0.1 nm), so on paper this solution will make it possible to produce semiconductors ten times smaller than the smallest ones that TSMC, Samsung or Intel are currently manufacturing. “Our technology opens a path that potentially has the ability to expand (chip makers’) agenda, as well as make things possible that otherwise would not have been viable,” Bodil Holst declared. John Petersen, scientific director of lithography at IMEC (Interuniversity Microelectronics Center), the most experienced laboratory in developing new integration and nanotechnology technologies that we have in Europe, maintains that the main advantage of using the helium atom beam is that it allows creating much smaller transistors than the current ones. “They are almost unimaginable,” Petersen pointed out. It sounds really good. Image | Generated by Xataka with Gemini More information | Reuters | Lace Lithography In Xataka | China needs to develop a new type of chips immune to US sanctions. And your scientists have just achieved it

We believed that nothing would surpass the Russian robot that ended up on the ground. Until they made one dance in front of Putin

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When it seemed that the humanoid robotics board was dominated by the United States and China, with proposals such as Neo from 1X startup or the Unitree G1 —which even starred in a moment at the Xataka NordVPN 2025 Awards—, Russia decided to make a move with AIDOL, presented as “the country’s first domestic anthropomorphic robot with AI.” The problem was that its debut did not exactly show technological stability: the robot began to wobble, lost its balance and ended up falling face down in front of the cameras. All this with the music of ‘Rocky’ playing in the background. The scene went viral in a matter of hours, overshadowing any technological message that the manufacturer intended to convey. The explanations came quicklybut the public conversation was filled with parodies and memes. In a context where every step in robotics is also measured in terms of reputation, Russia needed a response that showed more than just a failed prototype. Green, the technological replica of Russia. Now, the images arriving from Moscow show a project of a very different nature. Green is an AI-powered humanoid robot that, according to its creators“can move independently and interact with targets in real space.” All development, from mechanical design and electronics to GigaChat-based artificial intelligence, has been carried out by Sberthe country’s largest bank and an increasingly visible player in the Russian technological ecosystem. The humanoid that danced in front of Putin. His debut was very different from that of AIDOL: Green was presented at the conference Artificial Intelligence Journey 2025where he spoke a few words and then, as we can see on YouTubedanced in front of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. “My name is Green. I am the first humanoid Russian robot that has embodied artificial intelligence. This means that I am not just a program on a screen, but a physical embodiment of technology. I was created by Sber engineers,” the robot said before beginning its demonstration. According to Sber, Green incorporates more than a hundred motors and a large number of sensors, allowing it to maintain balance even during rapid and coordinated movements. This time, the presentation did not only seek to surprise, but rather to convey control, stability and a more mature image of the Russian commitment to humanoid robotics. What it means for AI to become embodied The idea of ​​embodied artificial intelligence, according to Sber, goes beyond running models on a screen. It is not just about responding to what a user writes, but about interpreting the environment through sensors, cameras and microphones, processing that information in real time and physically acting. It means providing technology with perception, movement and the ability to make decisions in real situations. That approach proposes a model where hardware is built around artificial intelligence, and not the other way around. What is Russia looking for with humanoid robots? It remains to be seen whether humanoid robots will end up integrating into everyday life, as anticipated by Elon Musk and other figures in the sector. But, should that scenario materialize, Russia wants to ensure that it will have models developed within its borders. Its strategy aims to build technological sovereignty not only in the hardware of the automata, but also in the AI ​​models that drive them and in the infrastructure necessary to train and execute them. For now, there is no information on whether Green will ever become a commercial product or how much it might cost. It is still a technological demonstration and not a robot designed for the market. It is also not easy to place Russia within the global race for humanoids, because there is still no clear data on their real development, their autonomy or their possible applications. What it does seem is that, for the moment, the United States and China are setting the pace in this industry, with more consolidated and visible projects. Images | Kremlin In Xataka | Satya Nadella made the world love Microsoft again. AI is making people hate it again

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