Tech industry

Tech industry

Concluding a strong year for the Elon Musk-led satellite operator, recently authorised Starlink global reseller Sama X has secured licensing from Jordan's Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (TRC) to resell the Space X firm's satellite internet services across the Kingdom, in a bid to simplify access to high-speed internet. Launched earlier in 2025 and backed by Kuwaiti conglomerate Alghanim, the reseller's stated mission is to bring "innovative" satellite connectivity solutions to businesses "right where they are" across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

Tech visionary, Kremlin dissident, FSB agent, free speech absolutist, health guru. These are just some of the labels admirers and critics have attached to Pavel Durov over the past decade. The Russian-born tech entrepreneur founded Russia's version of Facebook before going on to create the messaging app Telegram, launch a cryptocurrency ecosystem and amass a multibillion-dollar fortune, all while clashing repeatedly with authorities in Russia and beyond.

Japanese tech investment giant SoftBank needs to secure $22.5 billion before the end of the year to make good on its commitments to AI partner OpenAI. According to Reuters, there are several levers SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son could pull in order to put the funding package together, including calling on untapped margin loans tied to its stake in British chip design firm Arm Holdings.

This summer, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg moved heaven and earth to recharge his company's lagging AI division, spending billions of dollars to poach top talent across the industry. But it sounds like he's already falling out with the man he hired to spearhead Meta's renewed AI efforts, Alexandr Wang. According to new reporting from the Financial Times, things are tense between the duo.

Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, and Tesla, known as the Magnificent Seven, now have a combined market value of over $20 trillion, making them among the most powerful companies in history. Who is handling their financial records? Another numerically-termed group of powerhouses. The Big Four professional services firms - PwC, Deloitte, EY, and KPMG - are the industry-leading consulting and accounting firms that audit the Magnificent Seven.

The company told staff in a December newsletter that employees eligible for PERM would hear from its outside lawyers in Q1, according to a copy of the memo seen by Business Insider. PERM allows employees to move from working on a visa to securing a green card. Tech companies commonly use it to transition staff from H-1 B status to a green card, which allows them to live and work permanently in the US.

In late 2025, Mark Karpelès, ex CEO of Mt. Gox, lives a quieter life in Japan, building a VPN and an AI automation platform. As Chief Protocol Officer at vp.net-a VPN that uses Intel's SGX technology to let users verify exactly what code runs on servers-he works alongside Roger Ver and Andrew Lee, the founder of Private Internet Access. "It's the only VPN that you can trust basically. You don't need to trust it, actually, you can verify".

The NCMEC's CyberTipline is a Congressionally authorized clearinghouse for reporting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and other forms of child exploitation. Companies are required by law to report apparent child exploitation to the CyberTipline. When a company sends a report, NCMEC reviews it and then forwards it to the appropriate law enforcement agency for investigation. Statistics related to NCMEC reports can be nuanced.

Uber outright rejects applicants convicted of murder, sexual assault, kidnapping and terrorism. However, in 22 states, the Times found Uber can approve applicants convicted of many other offenses including child abuse, assault and stalking, if the convictions are at least seven years old. The extensive investigation also found that in 35 states, these checks are based largely on where someone has lived in those seven years, meaning convictions from other locations could be missed.

The goal, of course, is to avoid the abuses that can happen in monopolies and with the goal of protecting consumer choice and protecting innovation. What happened was that iRobot and Amazon came together for the expressed purpose of creating more innovation, more consumer choice, at a time when iRobot's trajectory was honestly different from where it was several years earlier.

"One day I was sent to a school to carry out some work on the head teacher's laptop, which wasn't connecting to the network," he told On Call. When Mike arrived, he plugged in an Ethernet cable and quickly realized the network port in the head teacher's office wasn't live. "He walked in as I was about to leave, and insisted that the point was indeed live, which he proceeded to demonstrate by showing that he could check for new email," Mike told On Call.

As 2025 comes to an end, it seems fitting to look at how Microsoft's Azure hyperscale cloud is planning to address the second half of the decade. As has become traditional, Azure CTO Mark Russinovich gave his usual look at that future in his presentations at Ignite, this time split into two separate talks on infrastructure and software. The first presentation looked at how the underlying infrastructure of Azure is developing and how the software you use is adapting to use the new hardware.

Amazon is reportedly in advanced talks to invest more than $10bn (£7.5bn) in OpenAI. If the talks succeed, OpenAI's market valuation could climb beyond USD$500bn (£370bn), according to The Information The move would mark a significant deepening of ties between the two companies, as Amazon seeks to position itself at the heart of the AI infrastructure race. The company has appointed former UK chancellor George Osborne to lead its international government engagement strategy,

On Wednesday, shares of MetaX Integrated Circuits Shanghai - a GPU startup founded by former AMD executives - skyrocketed as much as 755% on their first day of trading on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's tech-focused STAR Market, before closing up about 700%. The surge catapulted its chairman and cofounder, Chen Weiliang, into one of China's fastest-rising tech moguls. Chen's stake in MetaX is worth about $6.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

"We want AI to penetrate all aspects of our business," he told ZDNET in a one-to-one conversation at a hotel in London, suggesting his company has created a top-down and bottom-up commitment, where employees are encouraged to explore AI in a tightly governed and secure manner. Also: 5 ways to prevent your AI strategy from going bust Key use cases include conversation summarization to assist support specialists, applying agentic AI to enterprise-grade software engineering, and using gen AI to create effective marketing collateral.

The company extended its lead in logic, DRAM, and advanced packaging technologies while competitors struggled to keep pace with rapidly evolving manufacturing requirements. CEO Gary Dickerson has consistently emphasized the company's focus on "the highest value technology inflections in the fastest growing areas of the market." That strategy delivered six consecutive years of growth through fiscal 2025, culminating in record annual revenue of $28.37 billion (up 4% year over year) and non-GAAP EPS of $9.42 (up 9%).

The Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) alliance is calling for standardized ways to measure energy consumption, saying that the industry cannot deliver on its efficiency and sustainability goals without them. A report issued by the association, which represents mobile operators and vendors, says that energy metering is not sufficiently standardized across the industry, and this hinders efforts to manage the energy footprint of networks.

Of the ten richest men in the world on Forbes' December 2025 list, only two didn't build their fortunes by running or founding a fully tech-driven company. They are the people who now shape how we think, how we have fun, how we vote, how the economy works, and ultimately whether the world moves forward or backward: Elon Musk (X), Larry Page (Alphabet), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Sergey Brin (Alphabet), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Jensen Huang (Nvidia), and Michael Dell (Dell).

IT leaders are setting their operations strategies for 2026 with an eye toward agility, flexibility, and tangible business results.

The Private LTE & 5G network ecosystem: 2025-2030 - opportunities, challenges, strategies, industry verticals report calculates that global spending on private 5G and LTE network infrastructure for vertical industries will grow at a compound annual growth rate of approximately 22% between 2025 and 2028, eventually exceeding $7.2bn by the end of 2028.