world

All the money in the world won’t satisfy AI’s RAM hunger

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There is no RAM for so much AI. At this point in the film, no one can ignore that we are fully immersed in a new component crisis. Unlike the perfect storm that shook the technology industry in 2020, the new crisis is due to something very specific: the voracity of data centers and the artificial intelligence. In recent weeks we have seen negativity everywhere, but now one of the main people responsible for the lack of RAM comes to say that things are not going to stay the same. They are going to get worse. 30% of the goal. Chey Tae-won is not just anyone. This is the CEO of SK groupone of the largest conglomerates in the world and a South Korean giant that controls everything from the energy industry to chemicals and telephony. In addition, it has SK Hynix, one of the largest manufacturers of memories from around the world. If there is an authorized voice in this crisisof course it is yours. And what did he say? Well, there’s still a RAM storm left for a while. In a recent interview, stated that memory supply will be more than 30% below AI demand for this year. That is, by turning all their production to high-performance memory for AI, completely abandoning the consumer sector, they will be far from be able to satisfy what companies like NVIDIA they are claiming. structural problem. As we say, we have been talking about the state of the industry for weeks, but now we understand the extent to which the consumer sector has taken a backseat to memory manufacturers. That “we have given everything and we are going to fall within 30% of the goal” is tremendously revealing and explains the reason why everything with a memory chip is rising in price. Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung are the three companies that lead production by memory. They make both consumer memory (that of the mobile phone, the PC, the routerTV or car) as a professional (high-bandwidth HBMs), but their production is not unlimited: if they want to increase performance in one type of memory, they must lower that of the other. And that’s what’s happening: the AI ​​business is memory hungry, and for every unit of high-bandwidth memory produced, several units of standard memory must be sacrificed for other devices. This creates a bottleneck and an “unprecedented” shortage, according to Micron’s vice president, as the AI ​​industry is consuming all memory production capacity, creating a tremendous shortage in the conventional branch. All sold. As consumers, buy an SSD, a RAM module and a Large capacity HDD is a luxury right now, but to those who control chip production, it’s going well for them because they are selling all production before starting to “print” chips. Chey Tae-won himself has commented that the profit margins on his HBM4 chips are stratospheric, around 60%. Micron has already commented that all of its HBM memory production capacity for 2026 is already sold, and These are statements similar to those of Western Digital a few days ago. This implies that they have already sold components that do not exist for graphics cards that do not exist and that will power data centers that do not yet exist. abandoning ship. Samsung, SK and Micron are expanding their production lines and opening factories, but getting clean rooms It’s a slow process for them to start making chips, and Micron’s new plants, for example, aren’t expected to start making RAM until 2028. And when they do, it’ll likely be memory for data centers, not consumer price relief. In the end, there are only a few suppliers for many manufacturers, and that has another consequence: there will be brands that they have to get out of the car. The CEO of the SK group has commented that “there will probably be PC and smartphone manufacturers that will end up abandoning their businesses”, but he has not been the only one. A few days ago, the boss of Phison, a company that makes memory controllers, pointed in the same line. And it is easy to understand: if a manufacturer with low volume costs much more for memory, it has two options: sell a PC/mobile with less RAM or sell that same product much more expensive. Neither is a good idea. The price of 32 GB of DDR5 RAM from Crucial. Micron’s Crucial no longer exists Not very hopeful forecasts. The big question is when this solution will end. From SMIC, the large Chinese foundry, it is estimated that storm remains for a while because everyone wants to build their infrastructure for the next decade over the next two years. There are analysts who estimate that manufacturers – such as those in the automotive sector – are stockpiling AI out of “panic” that it will run out and now HBM4 memory is being produced, but in a few years there will be superior technology that will make AI faster and more capable… and the industry will turn to it again if the bubble doesn’t burst first. Domino. Meanwhile, companies like TeslaIntel or the Japanese giant SoftBank They want to get fully into the DRAM market and the companies Chinese companies like CXMT have an opportunity to meet the demand for AI for devices such as laptops. And, although we now see how it has impacted the price of loose components, we have to wait to see what happens in already assembled devices. Lenovo has pointed that the price of laptops is going to rise, but there are also warnings about important price increases in mobile phones, above all in low and mid-range devices, where the price of RAM represents a large part of the product cost. As I have said before, we have to cross our fingers so that the mobile phone or PC does not break, since once it is time to change it, paying the price will not be something pleasant. Images | Xataka, Bananovaya In Xataka | We … Read more

South Korea has had the most catastrophic birth rate in the world for years. And now it has finally managed to grow

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For a few years now, talking about demographics in South Korea has made it necessary to first take out a clinex package. Despite all his attempts (and there have been not a few) the country seemed condemned to suffer an uncontrollable ‘bleed’ of birth rates and see the seams of its economy tighten. It may sound exaggerated, but it is good to remember that he said goodbye to 2024 by declaring “super aged” and that there are academics who warn that the nation is emptying (literally). With that backdrop, Seoul has started 2026 with a positive fact: wins babies. And it also does so for the second consecutive year. The big question that arises now is… Are we facing a change in trend or just a mirage? The figure: 254,457. It is provisional data (the definitio will not arrive until the summer), but even so it has arrived like manna in a country accustomed to every piece of news about demographics involving a national drama. Last year South Korea registered 254,457 birthsa good balance no matter where you look at it. To begin with because it means 6.8% more that in 2024 and leaves the largest percentage increase since 2007; but those are only two of the possible readings. More babies per woman. Another interesting reading is the one that tells us about the “fertility rate”, the average number of babies that (at a statistical level) a woman is expected to have throughout her reproductive life. A few years ago that indicator plummeted to 0.72very far from the “replacement rate” (2.1 children per woman) that allows societies to remain stable. The data is still below that red line, but at least it has grown: in 2025 it passed from 0.75 to 0.8. Not only that. Reuters remember that the South Korean Government had optimistic estimates that suggested that this rate would grow to 0.75 in 2025 and 0.8 in 2026, which appears to be recovering positions faster than expected. In Seoul the trend is even more pronounced. There the indicator rose 8.9%, going from 0.53 to 0.63. The data is still very poor and they are far away to solve the problem that Korea has, but they suggest a change of cycle. Breaking the bad streak. That the birth rate is increasing in South Korea is news, but it is even more so if (as is the case) that growth is maintained for two years. In 2024 the country has already registered a positive fact (breaking up with eight exercises of consecutive falls) that now invites us to think about whether it has really found the right way to encourage its young people to have more offspring. Of course, the country has invested time, efforts and especially economic resources in that objective, in which it is played from the social sustainability and the march of his industry to issues as relevant as national defense. More weddings, more babies. 2025 has not only been a good year in maternity hospitals. It has also been for the wedding planners. Marriages increased by 8.1% in 2025, reinforcing the 14.8% rebound already recorded in 2024. This is good news because, in a conservative society like South Korea (the percentage of births outside of marriage It’s surprisingly low.), weddings are often considered an early indicator of a rebound in birth rates. Trend or mirage? That’s the million dollar question. That South Korea has been trying to activate its birth rate for years is undeniable, as is the fact that it has invested large resources in this effort and that they have been involved in the effort since the public institutions to the business world. However, there are other factors at play that suggest that the recent growth in the South Korean birth rate could be more circumstantial than structural. That is to say, in reality we would be facing a kind of demographic ‘mirage’. The hangover of the pandemic. When explaining the phenomenon, there are those who point to the influence of the pandemic. Not so much in the birth rate itself as in marriages. It is true that more South Koreans are getting tired and that this indicator will probably influence the birth rate in the coming years, but it is also true that many couples had to postpone their plans during the pandemic. “The number of marriages has increased for 21 consecutive months, from April 2024 to December last year, as couples who had delayed their marriages due to COVID-19 have tied the knot,” recognize Park Hyun-jung, director of the government office that analyzes population trends. He himself admits that today it is very difficult to establish a clear “correlation” between government policies and improved birth rates. A demographic with ‘echo’. There are those who point out, however, another factor that would be directly influencing South Korean demographics: history. The explanation I broke it down Rapahel Rashid recently in Guardian and provides an alternative theory. More babies have been born in the South Korea of ​​2024 or 2025 simply because the same thing already happened in the Korea of ​​30 years ago. To be more precise, more or less during the first half of the 1990s (1991-1995) there was a peak of around 3.6 million of babies who today enter their thirties and begin to become parents themselves. Reviewing history. We explain ourselves. Paradoxical as it may be, in the 1950s and 1960s Korea had a very different problem than today: a very high fertility rate which led authorities to launch family planning programs. The objective: guarantee the country’s recovery after the war. The message that was launched was very simple: have fewer children (two, one) and guarantee them a better life. It worked so well that by the early 1980s the fertility rate had fallen below the replacement margin and Seoul decided change course. By doing so, it favored the rebound that would now be heating up the birth rate. According to that theory, what we see today is actually a … Read more

While half the world is worried about aging, one industry is rubbing its hands: the elevator industry

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The world ages. And at a good pace too. If the World Health Organization (WHO) hits the nail on the headin 2050 the percentage of people over 60 years of age will double that of 2015. From representing 12% it will become close to 22%. Beyond the percentages, this aging translates into challenges in economic, health and social matters. Also in juicy business opportunities, like the one that he thinks he has before him the elevator industry. In their case, an older world will be a world with more work. What has happened? That TK Elevator has shaken the elevator sector by openly recognizing that the gradual aging of the planet (very visible already in Europe or countries like Japan either Korea) represents a lucrative business opportunity. The reason is simple: the more elderly, the greater the need for elevators in buildings. Especially since these and their services are also aging. “A growing trend”. If TK’s words have generated so much expectation, it is because it is not just any company. The firm, based in Düsseldorf, is a heavy weight within the sector, where it is responsible for both manufacturing machinery and maintaining it. Their models can be found in emblematic skyscrapers in New York, although the bulk of their business comes from much more modest buildings occupied by homes, offices or shops. His prediction about the future of the sector in an increasingly aging world has not been made anywhere either. has shared it with one of the most influential newspapers in the US, Financial Times. “As the population ages there is a need to install elevators. We see this becoming a growing trend,” recognize the firm’s executive director, Uday Yadavl. The example of Japan. During his interview, Yadaval cited a specific case: Japan, perhaps one of the countries that is most clearly suffering from the winds of demographic winter. Although all your attempts to reactivate its population engine (and there have been many), the birth rate continues at levels historically low while on the streets it is increasingly easier to find elderly people. According to Our World in Datathe country has the highest “old-age dependency ratio” (the ratio between people over 64 and people of working age) in the world: in 2021 it exceeded 50%, which means that there are only two people of working age for every elderly person. And since then demographic indicators have not exactly improved. It is estimated that about 30% of the country’s population is 65 or older, which is equivalent to tens of millions of people. A widespread phenomenon. Japan is not the only nation facing an aging population, a problem with which Europe fights and other countries, such as South Korea either China. In general the WHO has warned that the trend seems to be accelerating globally and remember that in 2020 the number of people aged 60 or over exceeded that of children under five. “In 2030, one in six people in the world will be 60 years old or older,” insists the WHO, recalling that by then the world population over 60 years old will total 1.4 billion people, well above the 1,000 in 2020. Demographics (and more). It’s not just that more and more older people live in cities and need elevators to get to their homes, it’s that the buildings themselves need renovations. At the end of the day, we age… and the blocks in which we reside. Yadav estimates There are about 22 million elevators worldwide, of which a third (30%) are more than two decades old. In practice, this translates into an immense number of facilities that probably need improvements and tune-ups, a demand that, assures the manager from TK Elevator, is already “growing in a meaningful way.” “More than remarkable”. Although his weight in the sector gives him special relevance, Yadav is not the first to have publicly recognized the good forecasts that the elevator industry has. Last summer Roland Berger published a report in which he provided several insights into the global elevator market, valued according to his calculations at 107 billion dollars. After “several ups and downs” in recent years, marked by COVID-19 or the real estate crisis in China, companies now face a “more than notable growth panorama.” A trend that connects the sector with the flourishing silver economythe economy driven precisely by aging. Images | Zhuojun Yu (Unsplash) In Xataka | In Japan there is no doubt that they live worse than 30 years ago. Houses are literally getting smaller.

Tokyo is one of the few cities in the world that has managed to maintain housing prices. His secret: build

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“If you can’t solve a problem, make it bigger.” This oft-repeated maxim (and mistakenly coined for Dwight D. Eisenhower) can be good advice when it comes to housing: Expanding the scope of a problem can make new solutions possible. Japan is the world’s best example of an advanced industrial democracy with abundance of affordable housing with low carbon emissions. To build. The key to Japan’s success is its unusual degree of national control over zoning and building rules. Centralized authority trumps local housing obstructionism. Tokyo builds more housing in a year than all of California or all of England, which have 3 or 4 times its population. In the largest megalopolis in the world, the way Rents stay low in the long term is to build. National decisions. The political scientist Grant McConnell wrote on the classic articulation of the view that the national government is more likely to solve difficult problems than state or local governments. Small can be beautiful, the reasoning goes, but it can also be provincial, backward and oligarchic. This logic fits well with the housing issue: Putting much more at stake, all at once, in one big fight, rather than piece by piece in hundreds of separate local fights, could disrupt the housing war. More homes around the world. The world has provided some examples of this. Japan has had extraordinary success in housing construction. He has long been a leader and expanded his leadership even further in recent years. Germany, Austria and Switzerland have always had good records, behind Japan but still performing well. France has stepped up, at least in Paris. These countries generally employ rule-based (or “by right”) building permit systems: if your plans check the stipulated boxes, building authorities have no choice but to sign. The Anglo-Saxons. On the other hand, English-speaking countries, including Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States and New Zealand, are lagging behind. Their permit systems are often more discretionarygiving local officials the power to approve or reject buildings at will. In many parts of these countries, especially their large cities, housing is expensive because it is scarce. For now, the Anglosphere suffers the worst housing shortages and prices. The Japanese case. The Asian country is the best example of the maxim of “magnifying” problems. Japan’s national government controls the use of land and buildings to a greater extent than national authorities in other countries. This control has grown in recent decades, even as other nations have gone into lockdown. The number of homes built per year in industrial democracies has fallen by more than 60% since 1970, according to The Economist. Meanwhile, housing construction in Japan has remained solid at all timesbroad public interest in abundant housing has triumphed over obstructionism. What did they do? To boost construction and lower prices, Japan redoubled efforts to allow more housing construction. He resorted, in particular, to administrative changes in building codes. “To help the economy recover from the bubble, the country eased the regulation of urban development,” explained Hiro Ichikawa, a construction development advisor. in the Financial Times. “If it hadn’t been for the bubble, Tokyo would be in the same situation as London or San Francisco.” Build, build and build. The results, in abundant housing, low prices and low carbon urban formswalkable and transit-focused, are notable. The city of Tokyo had 13.5 million residents in 2018. But the city built 145,000 new residences that year. Tokyo’s achievement was particularly surprising considering that the prefecture has very little vacant land, so almost all of those 145,000 homes were located in an existing neighborhood. The astonishing pace of housing construction in the capital has continued for years. Tokyo routinely builds more new homes than all of California (which has three times its population) or, in some years, all of England (which has four times its population). It has increased housing construction by 30% since the turn of the century, even as its population peaked and began to decline in 2007. disposable houses. It is true that Japan demolishes houses much earlier than other industrialized countriesso a large portion of their housing starts are replacement housing. But the much criticized Japanese culture of “disposable houses” It is actually one of the secrets of its success. Japan’s rigorous and up-to-date earthquake safety laws, plus a cultural attachment to new homes, mean that tiny houses in Japan often depreciate completely in just 30 years and are replaced soon after. Because housing is renovated quickly, the country has a much better chance of installing larger buildings. In parts of the US, where buildings typically have an economic life of 100 years, you only have one chance per century to replace a house with an apartment building. In Japan, you get three. More housing. The prefecture has tripled its stocks of housing in the last 50 years and has expanded the number of residences in the city by about 2% annually since 2000. In fact, its overall housing unit growth rate was three times faster than London or New York in the 2010s. Among the 14 megacities around the world, only Singapore and Seoul surpassed Tokyo in the pace of overall housing growth. Thanks to the Japanese program to govern housing, Tokyo Prefecture and the world’s largest metropolis have completely avoided residential closures. Japan seems to have learned the maxim attributed to Eisenhower: if you can’t solve a problem, make it bigger. In Xataka | In its crazy rise in housing prices, Madrid has just broken a barrier: that of the most expensive apartment in its history In Xataka | Tenants and owners are not the same type of Spaniards: some pay €400 more than others for the same home Image | Yu Kato

ended up having access to 6,700 devices around the world

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You don’t have to have a house full of devices to depend on the cloud. All it takes is a connected robot vacuum cleaner so that some of its information passes through external servers and we can manage it from anywhere. The model has been standardized and, in principle, works. But that normality breaks down when questions arise about who can see what. That is what an American technology publication published regarding the DJI ROMO: A user claimed to have accessed data and activity from thousands of devices around the world before the issue was fixed. Curiosity and risk. The story begins with something much more trivial than one might imagine. Sammy Azdoufal, an AI strategy manager at a vacation rental company, only wanted to control his own DJI ROMO with a PS5 controller “because it was fun,” as explained to The Verge. To do this, he developed a homemade application that began to communicate with DJI servers. The unexpected thing was that it was not just his vacuum cleaner that responded. Instead of a single device, thousands began to appear, spread across different countries, which recognized it as if it were its owner. What I could see and control. What came next is what really changes the tone of the story. During a live demonstration, Azdoufal showed how his tool was detecting devices in real time: in just nine minutes he had cataloged 6,700 robots in 24 countries and collected more than 100,000 messages sent by them. Each one reported information every few seconds through a protocol called MQTTcommon in connected devices, indicating their serial number, which room they were cleaning, how far they had traveled or when they returned to the charging base. As Azdoufal himself explained, he did not need to “hack” the company’s servers in the classic sense. What he did was analyze how his own ROMO communicated with DJI’s infrastructure and extract the private token associated with his device, that is, the credential that allows him to authenticate to the system. To decipher these protocols, he resorted to the well-known AI tool Claude Codewhich he used as support in the reverse engineering process. The problem, always depending on your version, is that once authenticated as a valid client, the servers did not properly limit which messages you could subscribe to receive. The official version and patches. The company maintains that it detected the vulnerability in late January through an internal review and began remediation immediately. According to its statement, it deployed a first patch on February 8 and a second update on February 10 to cover nodes that had not received the initial fix. DJI admits “a backend permission validation issue” related to MQTT communication between device and server, although it says unauthorized access was “extremely rare.” It also highlights that the transmission was encrypted using TLS and that data from European devices is stored on AWS infrastructure located in the United States. Questions on the table. If a user was able to detect that level of exposure almost by accident, one might wonder how these systems are internally audited and what controls are in place before a product hits the market. We are not talking about just any appliance, but rather a device with sensors, a camera and permanent connectivity within the home. Azdoufal himself even questioned the presence of a microphone in a vacuum cleaner. It is not a new debate: in recent years Other manufacturers have faced similar incidents with robots capable of transmitting video or storing images. A change of scenery for DJI. After years dominating the air with drones and stabilization systems, the company decided to apply its engineering to domestic soil. The result was DJI ROMO, a robot vacuum cleaner that combines optical and LiDAR sensors to generate precise maps and avoid obstacles, supported by planning algorithms and the DJI Home app to manage zones, modes and alerts. It is not a simple mechanical appliance, but a connected platform that depends on continuous data to function with that precision. And that is where security takes on a determining role. Images | DJI In Xataka | How often should we change ALL our passwords according to three cybersecurity experts

Discord wanted to implement an age verification system. Until the world came crashing down on him

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Discord has backtracked on one of his most controversial plans of recent years. The messaging and voice platform, with more than 200 million active users, has slowed down your system of global age verification until the second half of 2026 after its initial announcement sparked a firestorm of criticism. When people have started leaving in droves and looking for other alternatives, the company has thought twice. Chaos. Discord announced a few weeks ago which would implement an age verification system to ensure that adult content only reached adult users. The idea was that all accounts would start with a “teen-appropriate” setting by default, unless they could prove they were of legal age. The problem: The communication was so horrible that a significant part of the community understood that the platform was going to ask everyone for facial scans and ID documents in order to continue using it. The result was chaos. Distrust. In October of last year, Discord confirmed that had suffered a security breach at one of its third-party providers. This exposed sensitive data, including photographs of identity documents, of approximately 70,000 users. That background was very fresh when the announcement of the new system came. Added to this was that among the partners who were being considered to implement the verification Person appeareda company with financial ties to Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir, a company known for its contracts with US government immigration and surveillance agencies. And of course, for many users, this combination was simply unacceptable. What Discord says was really going to happen. In a release Posted on Tuesday, Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy stated that more than 90% of users would never have needed to verify anything, because most do not access age-restricted content or modify default security settings. In addition, it ensures that the platform already has internal systems capable of determining the age of majority of many users automatically, analyzing signals such as the age of the account, whether it has a linked payment method or the type of servers to which it belongs. According to Vishnevskiy, this system does not read messages or analyze the content posted by users. Recognizing mistakes, with nuances. “The way this landed led many of you to believe we were demanding facial scans and document uploads from everyone,” Vishnevskiy wrote. “That’s not what’s happening, but the fact that so many people believe it tells us that we failed at the most basic thing: clearly explaining what we’re doing and why.” That said, it is worth remembering what points out the media PC Gamer, since Discord did not make any of these concessions until after the avalanche of criticism. What changes now? The platform promises several things before relaunching the system globally. Among them, adding more verification options, including means of payment, publishing detailed information on its website about each third-party provider and their data practices, and requiring that any company that offers facial age estimation do so entirely on the user’s device, without sending biometric data to any server. On Persona, Discord confirms that it ran a limited test with them in the UK in January and decided not to continue, precisely because it didn’t meet that last requirement. A global address. Discord is not new, and it is happening in a much broader context. The United Kingdom, Australia and Brazil already have legislation that requires platforms to verify the age of their users to access adult content. Europe and several US states they go in the same direction. Discord argues that by building its own system, it can demonstrate to regulators that it is possible to verify age without collecting identity data. In countries where there is already a legal obligation, the system will remain active regardless of the global delay. Cover image | Discord and own assembly In Xataka | “We will not flood our ecosystem with soulless AI garbage.” We already know what Asha Sharma wants to do as CEO of Microsoft Gaming

In 1985 the most valuable company in the world had 400,000 employees. In 2026 the most valuable company in the world will have 40,000 employees

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36,000 employees. Is the approximate number of the template of what, today, is the most valuable company in the world: NVIDIA. It may seem like a lot of employees, but the figure takes on another dimension when we compare it to what was the most valuable company in the world, IBM, which once had a whopping 400,000 employees on its payroll in 1985. More inhabitants than many cities The IBM of the 80s needed a veritable army of employees to function. It reached its peak in 1985, with a total of 405,000 employees hired all over the world, a figure that exceeds the population of cities such as Alicante, Bilbao or Córdoba. Currently, large technology companies have enormous staff, but all of them are very far from what IBM was (except for Amazon which due to its global retail business, has a much larger staff). According to bullfincher datathis is the number of employees of the big tech: Alphabet (Google): 190,000 Microsoft: 228,000 Apple: 166,000 Goal: 78,000 NVIDIA: 36,000 The case of NVIDIA draws attention, which with only 36,000 employees stands out as the most valuable company of the moment. Right now its market capitalization is 4 trillion dollarsalthough reached 5 billion at the end of last year. And what about the money? But let’s get to the important thing: How much money did IBM generate with that workforce? They count in The Chip Letter that, in 1985, IBM brought in 50,000 million dollars, which adjusted for inflation it would be about 150 billion dollars. Let’s see how it looks compared to what big technology companies entered in 2025: Alphabet: 402.8 billion Microsoft: 281.7 billion Apple: 416,000 million Goal: 200,000 million NVIDIA: 130 billion (2024) IBM was a true giant in its time, but even adjusting for inflation, its income pales compared to what big technology companies earn today. The only exception is NVIDIA, which has not yet reported its results for 2025, so the figure is that of 2024. Still, if we compare the volume of employees, NVIDIA makes each employee much more profitable. We talk about $3.61 million per employee compared to $370,000 per employee in the case of IBM, almost ten times more profitable. Productivity has skyrocketed How have companies managed to maximize profitability per employee? The key is in digitalization and how it has boosted productivity. Already in 2013 there was talk that technology had made Productivity will increase by 480% since the 70s. If we go to the specific case of IBM and NVIDIA, the first was mainly dedicated to the manufacture of mainframe computers or mainframesa process that in itself was much more laborious, at a time when manufacturing more meant having more employees on production lines. NVIDIA is a company fablessmeaning that those who manufacture their GPUs are other companies like TSMC, and they also do it with much faster and more efficient automated processes. This leaves its 36,000 employees “free” to focus on chip design and architecture, allowing them to scale faster and with much less labor. However, there is something in which no technology company manages to surpass what IBM once was: its degree of transversal dominance. He kept around the 70% market share mainframes, But it was also a leader in minicomputers, microcomputers and the software that accompanied them, from databases to compilers. Image | Apple (edited with Gemini) In Xataka | Company CEOs say AI is saving them a day of work a week. Employees say otherwise

There was a time when Megaupload conquered the world of downloads. And their king was Kim Dotcom: Crossover 1×39

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At the beginning of the 2000s there were practically no legitimate alternatives to access film, series or music content through streaming, so there were those who took advantage of the circumstance to propose “dark” options. P2P networks were clearly one of those options, but we also attend at that time at the birth of phenomena like Megaupload. This platform became an absolute internet giant, and its creator, Kim Dotcom, is already a living part of the history of the network of networks. This hacker and entrepreneur managed to put an entire industry in suspense while making gold and living like a king. However, justice ended up going after him, and that spelled the end of Megaupload. The raid that ended with his arrest It became news with worldwide coverage, and that marked the definitive end of that platform. Two years later, Mega would appear, a much more “formal” and less obscure alternative, but Dotcom would end up breaking away from it shortly after creating it. Since then this entrepreneur has become a kind of political activist who tries by all means to ensure that justice I couldn’t unload all my weight against him. Whether he does or not remains unknown, but one thing is certain: the story of Kim Dotcom and Megaupload They deserved their own episode. of Crossover. On YouTube | Crossover In Xataka | Megaupload, rise and fall from grace of the portal that changed downloads on the Internet forever

While the world fights for the most advanced chips, there is a company making gold with the ones that go inside your washing machine

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If you have walked through an industrial estate, you have surely come across the typical warehouse with the sign “Spare Parts and Bearings (Insert name)”. And it’s easy for you, at that moment, to wonder what the hell a bearing is and how the rest of the businesses are closing, except for ‘Rodamientos Paco’. Well, in the world of technology there is also a ‘Paco Bearings’. Is called Texas Instruments and, in full era of sophisticated chips, artificial intelligence and quantum computingis breaking it with something very specific. Boring chips. In short. Companies are in the middle of the results presentation period. In this round, the managers inform their shareholders about the direction of the company, while allowing us to learn about data on upcoming devices or business plans. Texas Instruments usually goes unnoticed in these more ‘techie’ times, but they are finishing up a fiscal year with very positive numbers. The fourth quarter they closed with 4,420 million and anticipate increasing to 4,680 million in the first quarter. In the last three months, its share value has increased by 18%. Its shares are among the highest among companies in the same sector and, as we said before, the curious thing is that it is doing all this almost silently. Live outside the hype. You can constantly read information about cutting-edge chips on Xataka. It is true that the current nature of components is marked by the current RAM memory crisis either of SSDsbut the snapdragonthe Apple Silicon, the latest from NVIDIA or AMD It is what usually marks the conversation. They are the most sophisticated and interesting chips, but a coffee maker does not need a chip like that. That’s where Texas Instruments comes into play. Because calling their chips “boring” is not an exaggeration. They are outside the AI ​​hype, the data centers and the most exciting features because its market is different: sensors, connectivity, controllers. Where are Texas Instruments chips? In routers, smart refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners, as secondary chips in televisions, in remote controls, in calculators or in smart smoke detectors. But they not only make chips, but also another series of integrated circuits for wireless communications, signal processing in all types of devices and even sensors that detect tire pressure, engine temperatures or the air conditioning system. Texas Instruments chips and sensors are in… everything. Even in weapons. An example of a tiny sophisticated chip in the headphone stick… with only 16 KB of RAM. Because you don’t need more Huge investment. And the company is not sitting idly by with the huge amount of money it is making with its ubiquity strategy. a few days ago, Bloomberg reported on the agreement that Texas Instruments had reached to buy Silicon Labs. Also American, also with ‘boring’ chips that They are inside ‘things’ of all kinds. The operation is not closed, but the smell of it caused Silicon Labs shares to increase 51% to more than $206. The curious thing? That Texas Instruments is willing to pay more: up to $231 per share to investors. The operation has not been closed, but there is talk of a purchase of 7.5 billion dollars, well above the 4.5 billion that Silicon Labs is “worth.” Great year ≠ perfect year. All of this is… outrageous, but it indicates something very specific: they are spending a lot of money to reinforce a huge, stable market that goes unnoticed in a time when everything revolves around artificial intelligence and sophisticated technology. The purchase of Silicon Labs, paying such a high premium per share, shows that they know very well what they are getting into and the value of a market in which they are a key player. But one thing must also be noted: although revenues rose, annual profits did not increase at the same rate. He total invoiced increased by 13%, but as they have also invested more, this increase in costs reduced the profit margin, which “barely” increased by 4.2%, with some quarters being worse than others (in Q4 they fell by 3.5%). They haven’t had a perfect fiscal year, but there is one thing that is undeniable: they are still the kings of their niche. If we can describe being everywhere as a “niche”. In Xataka | While half the world looks for an alternative to Taiwan, Jensen Huang is very clear about the harsh reality: there is no

The world has been fascinated by the collapse of the Mayans for decades. In reality, almost everything we thought we knew was wrong.

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They cultivated fields, raised livestock, built some of the most amazing buildings on the planet, developed a rich culture that included advanced astronomical knowledge that still intrigue today to the experts. The Mayans are one of the most fascinating civilizations on the planet. And rightly so. Without it it is impossible to tell the history of Central America. However, little by little and as technology allows us to delve into their secrets, we begin to understand something: much of what we thought we knew about the Mayans was wrong. And that includes its collapse. What happened to the Mayans? The question is very simple. His answer not so much anymore. As our knowledge of the Mayan civilization has expanded (thanks to resources such as LiDAR technology) has also mutated the idea that historians had of its decline. I remembered it recently in Guardian Marcus Haraldsson remembering what we know about Tikalone of the largest urban centers of the Mayans, located in what is now Guatemala. “Sudden and disastrous”? The most recent stele located at the site dates back to the year 869 ADwhich leaves the question of what happened in Tikal from that date on. For a time historians assessed the possibility of a “sudden and disastrous” collapse that marked its fate; But today that explanation seems increasingly distant. Now experts are leaning towards another option: a broad period of decline of around 200 years during which farmers moved north and south and powerful urban centers were abandoned in favor of settlements such as Chichén Itzá, Uxmal or Mayapán, towards the north of the Yucatán Peninsula. There is even talk of the period Classic Terminalwhich goes from the years 750 to 1050. Changing perspective. This perspective has been adapted over the decades and goes beyond the period of decline of the Mayan civilization. “We are no longer really talking about collapse, but about decline, transformation and reorganization of society, as well as a continuity of culture,” comment to Guardian Kenneth E. Seligson, associate professor of archeology at California State University (CSU). “There have been several similar changes in places like Rome. (But) we rarely talk about the great Roman collapse anymore because they re-emerged in various forms, just like the Mayans.” But… What happened? What exactly happened for many of the main Mayan settlements (not all) to begin to collapse towards the 9th and 10th centuries It remains a complex and highly discussed topic. Today the authors point out a combination of factors including changes in trade routes, adverse weather, severe and prolonged droughts and wars, among others. The truth is that in the middle of 2026, researchers continue collecting clues that helps us clear up unknowns about that period. The importance of water. You don’t have to go far back to read new discoveries that tell us precisely about the collapse of the Mayan civilization. Last August a group of scientists published a article in which they basically emphasized the “important role” that “prolonged droughts” played in the Mayan decline. For their study, the researchers analyzed a stalagmite located in a cave in the Yucatan, a true geological and archaeological treasure if its oxygen isotopes are analyzed. The examination revealed a series of periods of severe drought between 871 and 1021, during the Terminal Classic, stages marked by water shortages during which the Mayans found it “extremely difficult” to grow their crops. It may seem exaggerated, but the study revealed eight droughts during the rainy season that lasted at least three years. Not only that. The longest drought lasted about 13 years. Other previous studies, carried out from sediments collected in the Chichankanab lagoon or stalactites rescued in Belizehad already suggested the role that climate played in the Mayan collapse. Question of droughts (and something else). Months after that study, in November, Benjamin Gwinneth, from the Université de Montréal (UdeM), published another that helps complete the ‘photo’. The Canadian institution recalls that between 750 and 900 AD the population of the Mayan lowlands suffered “a significant demographic and political decline” that coincided with “episodes of intense drought.” What Gwinneth’s work questions is whether this collapse is explained only by the lack of water. Curiously, their research is also based on the analysis of sediment samples dating back to around 3,300 years ago. And what exactly did he do? Gwinneth dedicated himself to analyzing samples taken from Laguna Itzán, in present-day Guatemala, near an archaeological site Maya. To be precise, they focused on three “geochemical indicators” that reveal the evolution of fires, vegetation and population density in the area (something they estimate thanks to fecal stanols) for thousands of years. The first conclusion they obtained is that the first settlements appeared in the area 3,200 years ago and for centuries the Mayans cultivated, burned to clear forests and used the ashes as natural fertilizer. It also gradually increased the population of the area. Over time they even changed their “agricultural strategy”, dispensing with fire. A “stable” climate. The second conclusion (and this is the interesting part) is that, unlike Mayan populations located further north that did suffer “devastating droughts”, in Itzán the climate was relatively “stable” thanks in part to its geographical location, near the Cordillera. Curiously, that did not free Itzán from the crisis that they suffered in other areas of the Mayan world. The question is obvious: Why? If it kept raining there, what dragged them into the crisis? “Although there was no drought in the area, the population decreased during the Terminal Classic period. Indicators show a drastic drop, traces of agriculture disappear and the site was abandoned,” Gwinneth points out.which recalls that some archaeologists place the beginning of the Mayan collapse in the Itzán area. Why is it important? Because it suggests that drought (no matter how stubborn) is not enough on its own to explain the Mayan decline. “The answer lies in the interconnection of Mayan societies,” reflects the expert. “Cities did not exist in isolation. They formed a complex network of commercial ties, … Read more

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