Development by UK firm Nscale heralded by ministers as largest of its kind in country loses anchor tenant

The development of a huge AI datacentre hailed by the UK government has received a fresh setback after Microsoft pulled out of the project over concerns about power supplies.

The development by the British company Nscale, heralded by ministers as the country’s largest AI datacentre when it was announced in 2025, was planned to open at Loughton in Essex next year.

Discover-Tech’s Controlium software lets clients mass-profile internet users then covertly hack targets, say researchers at University of Toronto

An Israeli advertising agency has been serving millions of online adverts that allow “zero-click” spyware to be used against targets, researchers at a Canadian university have said.

Citizen Lab, a digital investigations research unit at the University of Toronto, said it believed dozens of devices at the Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera had been compromised by spyware delivered through ads run by Discover-Tech, which describes itself as a specialised digital advertising agency.

While some viral online graphs suggest less bot activity, Zelenskyy’s claims of improved social media discourse do not entirely pass muster

Over the weekend, Ukraine carried out at least three airstrikes on datacentres belonging to the Russian search engine company Yandex. Reports suggest at least two of these datacentres took significant damage, with Telegram footage appearing to show one on fire. Yandex acknowledged the strikes, and Russian media reported that several websites appeared affected by the downed datacentres.

On Monday, Volodymyr Zelenskyy suggested the strikes had dampened Russia’s massive disinformation operation, saying: “It suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social platforms. There was less hate, less division and fewer provocations.”