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European Union regulators on Friday fined Elon Musk’s social media platform X 120 million euros ($140 million) for breaches of the bloc’s digital regulations that they said could leave users exposed to scams and manipulation.The European Commission issued its decision following an investigation it opened two years ago into X under the 27-nation bloc’s Digital Services Act, also known as the DSA.It’s the first time that the EU has issued a so-called non-compliance decision since rolling out the DSA. The sweeping rulebook requires platforms to take more responsibility for protecting European users and cleaning up harmful or illegal content and products on their sites, under threat of hefty fines.The Commission said it was punishing X, previously known as Twitter, because of three different breaches of the DSA’s transparency requirements. The decision could rile President Donald Trump, whose administration has lashed out at digital regulations, complaining that Brussels was targeting U.S. tech companies and vowing to retaliate.The company did not respond immediately to an email request for comment.EU regulators had already outlined their accusations in mid-2024 when they released preliminary findings of their investigation into X.Regulators said X’s blue checkmarks broke the rules because on “deceptive design practices” and could expose users to scams and manipulation.Before Musk acquired X, when it was previously known as Twitter, the checkmarks mirrored verification badges common on social media and were largely reserved for celebrities, politicians and other influential accounts.After he bought it in 2022, the site started issuing the badges to anyone who wanted to pay $8 per month for one.The means X does not meaningfully verify who’s behind the account, “making it difficult for users to judge the authenticity of accounts and content they engage with,” the Commission said in its announcement.X also fell short of the transparency requirements for its ad database, regulators said.Platforms in the EU are required to provide a database of all the digital advertisements they have carried, with details such as who paid for them and the intended audience, to help researches detect scams, fake ads and coordinated influence campaigns. But X’s database, the Commission said, is undermined by design features and access barriers such as “excessive delays in processing.”Regulators also said X also puts up “unnecessary barriers” for researchers trying to access public data, which stymies research into systemic risks that European users face.“Deceiving users with blue checkmarks, obscuring information on ads and shutting out researchers have no place online in the EU. The DSA protects users,” Henna Virkkunen, the EU’s executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy, said in a prepared statement. Kelvin Chan, AP Business Writer
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FIFA has invited more teams than ever for a World Cup priced largely for fans in the 1%. The process of figuring out which teams in the expanded 48-nation field will play where begins with Friday’s draw at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.Cape Verde, Curaçao, Jordan and Uzbekistan will appear in soccer’s premier event for the first time when next year’s tournament is played from June 11 to July 19 at 16 sites in the United States, Mexico and Canada.“I’m quite optimistic because to qualify you need to beat the other teams of your confederations, and that’s a sign of quality,” former Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger said Thursday as red carpets were installed at the Kennedy Center. “The teams are not there by coincidence.”President Donald Trump of the U.S. and Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico are expected along with Canada Prime Minister Mark Carney. Instead of soccer gear, the Kennedy Center gift shop still was filled with socks of Shakespeare, Beethoven and Verdi along with shelves of red and white holiday nutcrackers.The world’s top 11-ranked teams have all qualified, with No. 12 Italy among 22 nations competing in playoffs for the final six berths to be decided March 31.Led by captain Lionel Messi, who turns 39 during the tournament, Argentina seeks to become the first nation to win consecutive World Cups since Brazil in 1958 and 1962. Messi will look to extend his record of 26 games played and enters with 13 career goals, three shy of Miroslav Klose’s record.Games will be played at 11 NFL stadiums along with three in Mexico and two in Canada, where construction is underway to add 17,000 temporary seats to BMO Field, raising capacity to around 45,000. Attendance will top the record 3.59 million in 1994.“We basically set the new tone in terms of attendance, in terms of surrounding the tournament with a lot of entertainment and glamor,” said Alan Rothenberg, head organizer of the 1994 World Cup in the U.S. “We did a lot of things that kind of broke the ice with respect to how you present the tournament as something other than just a soccer tournament.”FIFA announced initial ticket prices of $60-$6,730, saying they would be dynamic, up from $25-$475 for the 1994 tournament in the United States. It has refused to release a complete list of prices, as it had for every other World Cup since at least 1990. The governing body also is selling parking passes for up to $175 for a single match, a semifinal in Arlington, Texas.FIFA spokesman Bryan Swanson did not respond to a request for FIFA President Gianni Infantino to discuss ticket prices.Sixty-four nations will participate in the draw, 30% of FIFA’s members, but just 42 countries are assured of sports. Among the playoff teams, Albania, Kosovo, New Caledonia and Suriname are trying to reach the World Cup for the first time.With the expansion, the top two teams in each of 12 groups advance along with the eight best third-place teams. Some nations could reach the new round of 32 with three points.“I think we’re going to be in pretty good shape,” said former U.S. midfielder Tab Ramos, who during his playing days mapped out permutations for advancement. “We have a good team, so I’m not worried as much as I’ve been in the past about about this draw.”Opta Analyst’s computer projects the U.S. has a 0.9% chance of winning the Americans haven’t reached the semifinals since the first World Cup in 1930. Spain tops the forecast at 17%, followed by France (14.1%), England (11.8%), Argentina (8.7%), Germany (7.1.%), Portugal (6.6%), Brazil (5.6%) and the Netherlands (5.2%).In a new twist, FIFA said the top four teams in the rankings Spain, Argentina, France and England will avoid each other until the semifinals if they finish first in their first-round groups.Specific sites for most matchups and kickoff times won’t be announced until Saturday. In 1994, there were just seven night games. A team’s group play sites will be restricted to an Eastern, Central and Western regional. The 1994 World Cup draw in Las Vegas was apolitical, featuring performances by Stevie Wonder, Barry Manilow, James Brown and Vanessa Williams plus comedian Robin Williams, who called the draw screen “the world’s largest keno board,” yelled “Bingo!” when Greece was selected.This draw figures to be more akin to the ceremony for 2018 tournament in Moscow, opened by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump, who has campaigned for a Nobel Peace Prize, is expected to be awarded FIFA’s own peace prize that Infantino established after traveling to several events with Trump.But the main event is the pulling of balls from bowls to create groups. Retired tars Tom Brady of the NFL, Shaquille O’Neal of the NBA and Wayne Gretzky of the NHL along with three-time AL MVP Aaron Judge will assist in a ceremony to be run by former England captain Rio Ferdinand.“There is the angst and the looks of sheer terror and disappointment and/or joy and elation from the coaches and from the staffs,” said former U.S. defender Alexi Lalas, now Fox’s lead soccer analyst. “It really gets kind of real for people.” AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer Ronald Blum, AP Sports Writer
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So far, Nvidia has provided the vast majority of the processors used to train and operate large AI models like the ones that underpin ChatGPT. Tech companies and AI labs dont like to rely too much on a single chip vendor, especially as their need for computing capacity increases, so theyre looking for ways to diversify. And so players like AMD and Huawei, as well as hyperscalers like Google and Amazon AWS, which just released its latest Trainium3 chip, are hurrying to improve their own flavors of AI accelerators, the processors designed to speed up specific types of computing tasks. Could the competition eventually reduce Nvidia, AIs dominant player, to just another AI chip vendor, one of many options, potentially shaking up the industrys technological foundations? Or is the rising tide of demand for AI chips big enough to lift all boats? Those are the trillion-dollar questions. Google sent a minor shockwave across the industry when it casually mentioned that it had trained its impressive new Gemini 3 Pro model entirely on its own Tensor Processing Units (TPUs)another flavor of AI accelerator chips (GPUs). Industry observers immediately wondered if the AI industrys broad dependence on Nvidia chips was justified. After all, theyre very expensive: A big part of the billions now being spent to build out AI computing capacity (data centers) is going to Nvidia chips. And Google TPUs are looking more like a Nvidia alternative. The company can rent TPUs in its own data centers, and its reportedly considering selling the chips outright to other AI companies, including Meta and Anthropic. A (paywalled) report from The Information in November said Google is in talks to sell or lease its GPUs so they can run in any companys data center. A Reuters report says Meta is in talks to spend billions on Googles TPUs starting in 2027, and may begin paying to run AI workloads on TPUs within Google data centers even sooner. Anthropic announced in October that it would use up to a million TPUs within Google data centers to develop its Claude models. Selling the TPUs outright would, technically, put Google in direct competition with Nvidia. But that doesnt mean that Google is gunning hard to steal Nvidias chip business. Google, after all, is a major buyer of Nvidia chips. Google may see selling TPUs to certain customers as an extension of selling access to TPUs running in its cloud. This makes sense if said customers are looking to do the types of AI processing that TPUs are especially good at, says IDC analyst Brandon Hoff. While Nvidias GPUs are workhorses capable of a wide range of work, most of the big-tech platform companies have designed their own accelerators that are purpose-built for their most crucial types of computing. Microsoft developed chips that are optimized for its Azure cloud services. Amazons Trainium chips are especially good at e-commerce-related tasks like product suggestion and delivery logistics. Googles TPUs are good at serving targeted ads across its platforms and networks. Thats something Google shares with Meta. They both do ads and so it makes sense that Meta wants to take a look at using Google’s TPUs, Hoff says. And its not just Meta. Most big tech companies use a variety of accelerators because they use machine learning and AI for a wide variety of tasks. Apple got some TPUs, got some of the AWS chips, of course got some GPUs, and they’ve been playing with what works good for different workloads, he adds. Nvidias big advantage has been that its chips are very powerfultheyre the reason that training large language models became possible. Theyre also great generalists, good for a wide variety of AI workloads. On top of that, theyre flexible, which is to say they can plug in to different platforms. For example, if a company wants to run its AI models on a mix of cloud services, theyre likely to develop those models to run on Nvidia chips because all the clouds use them. Nvidias flexibility advantage is a real thing; its not an accident that the fungibility of GPUs across workloads was focused on as a justification for increased capital expenditures by both Microsoft and Meta, analyst Ben Thompson wrote in a recent newsletter. TPUs are more specialized at the hardware level, and more difficult to program for at the software level; to that end, to the extent that customers care about flexibility, then Nvidia remains the obvious choice. However, vendor lock-in remains a big concern, especially as big tech companies and AI labs are sinking hundreds of billions of dollars into new data center capacity for AI. AI companies would prefer instead to use a mix of AI chips from different vendors. Anthropic, for one, is explicit about this: Anthropics unique compute strategy focuses on a diversified approach that efficiently uses three chip platformsGoogles TPUs, Amazons Trainium, and NVIDIAs GPUs, the company said in an October blog post. Amazons AWS says its Trainium3 chip is roughly four times faster than the Trainium2 chip it announced a year ago, and 40% more efficient. Because of the performance of Nvidia chips, many AI companies have standardized on CUDA, the Nvidia software layer that lets developers control how the GPUs work together to support their AI applications. Most of the engineers, developers, and researchers who work with large AI models know CUDA, which can cause another form of skills-based organizational lock-in. But now it may make sense for organizations to build whole new alternative software stacks to accommodate different kinds of chips, Thompson says. That they did not do so for a long time is a function of it simply not being worth the time and trouble; when capital expenditure plans reach the hundreds of billions of dollars, however, what is worth the time and trouble changes. IDC projects that the high demand for AI computing power isnt likely to abate very soon. We see that cloud service providers are growing quickly, but their spending will slow down, Hoff says. Beyond that, a second wave of demand may come from sovereign funds, such as Saudi Arabia, which is building the Humain AI hub, a large AI infrastructure complex that it will fund and control. Another wave of demand could come from large multinational corporations that want to build similar sovereign AI infrastructure, Hoff explains. There’s a lot of stuff in 2027 and 2028 that’ll keep driving demand. There are plenty of chipmaker challenges Nvidia stories out there, but the deeper one delves into the economic complexities and competitive dynamics of the AI chip market, much of the drama drains away. As AI finds more applications in both business and consumer tech, AI models will be asked to do more and more kinds of work, and each one will demand various mixtures of generalist or specialized chips. So while there is growing competitive pressure on Nvidia, theres still a lot ofgood reasons for players like Google and Amazon to collaborate with Nvidia. In the next two years, there is more demand than supply so almost none of that matters, says Moor Insights & Strategy chief analyst Patrick Moorhead. Moorhead believes that five years from now Nvidia GPUs will still retain their 70% market share.
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