Today’s Daily Tech News – 26 July 2026

Apple is currently lobbying the US government to allow the purchase of memory chips from China for its upcoming devices. Meanwhile, American chipmaker Micron is fighting hard to block the move, resulting in a massive showdown between the two giants right on the President’s desk.

In a massive regulatory shift, the European Commission has adopted binding requirements ordering Google to open up Android devices to rival third-party AI assistants. Google must also share portions of its anonymized search data with competitors starting in 2027.

Researchers at UC Riverside, in collaboration with Google DeepMind, have created a tool that goes beyond identifying fake videos. It can now trace the specific AI generator used to create a deepfake by scanning for unique, unintentional “fingerprints” left behind in the video frames.

A strange paradox is gripping Silicon Valley. While US tech companies are pouring record-breaking amounts of money into AI infrastructure, they have simultaneously slashed over 140,000 jobs in 2026, signaling a massive shift in workforce demands.

Nvidia has partnered with SK Group to build over $500 billion worth of AI data center infrastructure. This astronomical figure makes it the largest artificial intelligence infrastructure deal in history.

Google is introducing a selfie video feature to help users recover locked accounts securely. While it simplifies the process, cybersecurity experts are urging caution, noting that facial data is increasingly targeted by AI-driven fraud.

At its Advancing AI Summit, chipmaker AMD unveiled a new lineup of AI processors. The company is betting heavily on agentic AI and inference workloads, projecting the overall compute market will skyrocket to $2 trillion by the end of the decade.

Amazon is heavily expanding all AI teams. Wait, scratch that! Amazon is actually cutting jobs in its Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) unit. The layoffs are part of a broader consolidation to redirect resources to immediate, customer-facing AI features.

The Trump administration is actively monitoring recent AI security incidents. In response, US lawmakers have proposed legislation that would grant the government the power to order a direct “kill switch” on any AI model deemed a threat to human life.

Alphabet (Google’s parent company) has increased its 2026 capital expenditure guidance by a massive $15 billion, pushing its total AI spending target to $205 billion as cloud demand continues to surge globally.

A major update for WhatsApp finally lets users create accounts directly from their iPads! The update also brings PDF viewing/annotation and lets users easily share music straight to their WhatsApp Status.

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is developing a revolutionary offline UPI system. It uses secure tokens and NFC to allow digital merchant payments even when neither party has active internet connectivity.

Under the IndiaAI Mission, the Indian government has officially identified and will support 20 indigenous sovereign AI models. These models span large language models (LLMs), speech recognition, and domain-specific applications to boost local infrastructure.

Orienspace’s Gravity-1 mission successfully launched from the sea. This marks a massive milestone for China’s expanding private space sector and highlights its growing offshore launch capabilities.

Defying the trend of AI-driven job cuts in the finance sector, JPMorgan Chase has announced it will hire 1,000 technology professionals for its Global Capability Centers (GCC) in India, focusing on cloud architecture and cybersecurity.

OpenAI has alerted US authorities after learning that highly advanced AI tools were allegedly used to complete a sophisticated cyberattack on Hugging Face in just a few hours—a process that normally takes human hackers weeks to execute.