Koray Kavukcuoglu takes over day-to-day running of the lab and reports directly to Sundar Pichai. The change lands alongside Jeff Dean's departure from Google after 27 years to found a new company.

By Oliver Grant

Image: John Sears / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The entry bar doubles for newcomers, but existing partners are untouched by it. The change that actually bites them is a 10 million view floor on Shorts revenue, and Premium Lite is now rolling out to every country with Premium.

YouTube has changed its Partner Program for the first time since 2018, and the headline everyone reached for was the easy one: the bar to get in has doubled. That is accurate. It is also the part fewest people will feel. Read properly, the announcement YouTube published on 10 August contains three changes, and only one of them is about getting in. From 1 February 2027, a new channel applying to the programme needs 8,000 qualified watch hours over the…

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Samsung unveiled zHBM at the FMS 2026 conference, claiming four times HBM4's transfer speed at a quarter of the power. SK hynix and Sandisk used the same stage to publish the first open High-Bandwidth Flash spec.

The thing slowing AI down right now is not the processor. It is the distance data travels between the processor and its memory, and that distance exists because in current designs the memory sits next to the chip rather than on top of it. Samsung's answer, shown on 4 August at the Future of Memory and Storage conference in Santa Clara, is called zHBM: stack the high-bandwidth memory vertically, directly above the AI accelerator. The company says zHBM…

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That is about US$14.5 billion for a single month, 5.6% more than June, with January to July running 37.0% ahead of last year. High-performance computing, where AI chips sit, was 66% of second-quarter revenue.

If you want to know whether the money pouring into artificial intelligence is still pouring, the most useful company to watch is not Nvidia or OpenAI. It is the Taiwanese contract manufacturer that makes almost everybody else's chips. TSMC reported July revenue of NT$467.58 billion, roughly US$14.5 billion, in the monthly figures it publishes on its investor relations monthly revenue page. That is a record month: up 44.7% on July 2025 and 5.6% on June.…

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Novels, school textbooks and audiobooks are passed around as files inside closed messaging groups. Portugal's book trade will publish an impact study before the end of the year to size the losses properly.

Book piracy has stopped living on obscure websites and moved to where everyone already is. In Portugal, novels, school textbooks and audiobooks now circulate as files inside Telegram and WhatsApp groups, and the trade puts the loss to publishers at more than €75 million. The mechanics are simple, which is exactly why they are hard to stop. Someone buys or scans a title, drops the PDF or EPUB into a group with hundreds of members, and the file chains…

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The watermark is inaudible, sits inside the waveform itself and is meant to let platforms recognise a Suno-made track. It lands with record labels suing the company and Europe's AI transparency rules already in force.

Suno said on 6 August that it will start marking the tracks its AI produces. The watermark is embedded in the audio, nobody hears it, and the point is that a partner platform can look at a song and tell it came from there. The announcement came in a post signed by co-founder and chief executive Mikey Shulman, which describes the mark as durable and resistant to tampering without affecting the listening experience. One line is worth holding onto: the…

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MEO has finished upgrading 5G infrastructure along the whole Blue Line and expects the Red Line done by September. Vodafone says its own network is modernised across 95% of Metro stations.

Anyone who rides the Lisbon Metro knows the rhythm: signal on the platform, nothing in the tunnel, back again three stops later. That is being fixed line by line. MEO has completed the 5G infrastructure upgrade along the entire Blue Line, and expects the Red Line reinforcement to be finished in September. Vodafone, separately, says its own network is now modernised across 95% of Metro stations. A tunnel is close to the worst case for a radio signal. There…

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The PRR-funded ION platform can navigate to peripheral lung nodules that conventional bronchoscopes struggle to reach. It is the second such unit on the Iberian Peninsula.

A man of about 70 with suspected lung cancer became the first patient in Portugal to undergo a robotic bronchoscopy. The procedure took place at the Portuguese Institute of Oncology in Lisbon and lasted a little over 40 minutes. The technology is called ION, and it solves a specific problem in respiratory oncology. Nodules that show up in the outer reaches of the lung, far from the main airways, are hard to get to with a conventional bronchoscope.…

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Apple has asked a California court for early discovery against two OpenAI staff, claiming new evidence about unannounced products. OpenAI's answer, filed 6 August, calls the suit rotten at the root.

OpenAI has answered, and answered hard. On 6 August it asked a California court to throw out Apple's trade-secrets suit in full, calling the case rotten at the root. Pulling the other way in the same docket, Apple asked for early production of evidence involving two OpenAI employees, senior systems engineer Chang Liu and hardware director Tang Yew Tan, saying it has gathered fresh indications that proprietary information about unannounced products was…

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The Digital Decade report gives Portugal 97% very-high-capacity network coverage against an EU average of 85.5%. On basic digital skills it scores 59.2%, below the EU's 60.4%.

Building a network and teaching people to use it are two different jobs, and Portugal is only good at one of them. The European Commission's annual Digital Decade report puts Portugal near the top on everything that gets buried in the ground. Very-high-capacity network coverage has reached 97%, up 2.5 points during 2025, against an EU average of 85.5%. 5G reaches 65.2% of homes. And unusually, rural and inland coverage sits above the EU average, which for…

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Neuraspace combined €9.6 million of Portugal's recovery-plan money with €6 million of private capital from Lince Capital, Explorer Investments and Armilar. It goes into optical sensors and the defence line, NeuraspaceDEF.

There is a company in Coimbra whose job is to know, at any given moment, where more than 600 satellites are and what is heading towards them. It is called Neuraspace, it started in 2020, and it has just closed a €15.6 million funding round. The money arrives from two directions. Some €9.6 million comes from Portugal's Recovery and Resilience Plan; the remaining €6 million is private capital, in a round led by Lince Capital, Explorer Investments and…

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App review found content violating Apple's rules. Telegram deleted it, banned the account behind it, and the app returned to the store.

For a few hours on Tuesday, Telegram was simply gone from the App Store. Not a regional block, not a server problem. The app stopped being available to download anywhere in the world, with no warning and no immediate word from Apple. The explanation came afterwards, and it is serious. Apple's review team found child sexual abuse material in the app, a direct breach of its store rules. The company confirmed it had removed Telegram while the matter was…

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The UK Ministry of Defence picked the Portuguese company's AR5 for CORVUS, its new surveillance capability, on a ten-year contract. Production goes to Swindon, engineering to Bristol and Southampton.

The UK Ministry of Defence has selected Tekever to deliver CORVUS, the British Army's new surveillance capability. The contract could reach £400 million, roughly €460 million, over the next ten years. At its heart is the AR5, the Portuguese company's autonomous platform. It replaces Watchkeeper, the drone the British Army has flown for more than a decade, and should start entering service later this year, subject to contract signature and final approvals.…

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Michigan joined Minnesota in reporting hacks on its water systems, with federal officials citing at least seven states. The FBI is investigating a coordinated campaign.

There is one thing almost nobody thinks about protecting and everybody uses before breakfast: the water in the tap. In the United States, that blind spot has just become expensive. Michigan reported cyberattacks on nine of its water systems on Saturday, days after Minnesota counted more than thirty. Federal officials say the problem now spans at least seven states. The FBI is investigating what it calls a coordinated campaign against one of the most basic…

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The National Advanced Computing Centre gets a new home on the University of Minho's Azurém campus, with works due to finish in September 2026.

Talk about supercomputers in Portugal and the conversation almost always ends up in Sines, or on Deucalion. But the infrastructure that actually holds up the country's scientific computing is getting a new home somewhere less obvious: the University of Minho's Azurém campus in Guimarães. The National Advanced Computing Centre's new data centre represents a €5.1 million investment, and the build, awarded to the dst group, is due to finish in September…

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