Orban Deploys Troops To Guard Energy Sites After Accusing Ukraine Of Sabotage Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on Wednesday again accused Ukraine of plotting to sabotage Hungary's energy infrastructure , following a Ukrainian drone attack on a key Transneft oil pumping station in the Russian republic of Tatarstan early Monday, which was further detrimental to the Druzhba oil pipeline. But Orb...
Orban Deploys Troops To Guard Energy Sites After Accusing Ukraine Of Sabotage Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on Wednesday again accused Ukraine of plotting to sabotage Hungary's energy infrastructure , following a Ukrainian drone attack on a key Transneft oil pumping station in the Russian republic of Tatarstan early Monday, which was further detrimental to the Druzhba oil pipeline. But Orban has now upped the ante, sending a powerful message to Ukraine and its EU backers, having newly ordered troops to protect key energy sites . He has also been denouncing "blackmail" over Hungary's Russian energy purchases and dependency, vowing "we will not give in" . via Associated Press "I have heard the briefings of the national security services and see that Ukraine is preparing further actions aimed at disrupting the operation of Hungary’s energy system," Orbán stated in a video posted on X. He then issued the following: "I have ordered the strengthening of the protection of critical energy infrastructure," before articulating, "This means that soldiers and the equipment necessary to repel potential attacks will be deployed near key energy facilities." Politico has further detailed some the aspects of what this will look like, based on the Hungarian leader's words : Additional police will patrol designated power plants, distribution stations and control centers , Orbán said. A flight ban has also been imposed in Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg county in northeastern Hungary on the border with Ukraine. The accusation adds fuel to a conflict Orbán has stoked with neighboring Ukraine as well as Brussels ahead of an April 12 parliamentary election in which he faces the prospect of defeat. Slovakia has also leveled similar charges against Kiev of late, as the damaged Druzhba pipeline is also among its own key transit hubs of vital Russian oil. The reality is that Ukrainian media and officials have positively boasted of recent actions which harm the two EU members Hungary and Slovak...
Perplexity , the AI-powered search company valued at $20 billion, on Wednesday launched what it calls the most ambitious product in its three-year history: a multi-model agent orchestration platform called Computer that coordinates 19 different AI models to complete complex, long-running workflows entirely in the background. The product, currently available only to Perplexity Max subscribers at $2...
Perplexity , the AI-powered search company valued at $20 billion, on Wednesday launched what it calls the most ambitious product in its three-year history: a multi-model agent orchestration platform called Computer that coordinates 19 different AI models to complete complex, long-running workflows entirely in the background. The product, currently available only to Perplexity Max subscribers at $200 per month , is the company's clearest articulation yet of a thesis it has been refining for more than a year: that AI models are not converging into general-purpose commodities but are instead specializing — and that the company best positioned to win the next era of AI is the one that can orchestrate all of them together. "What has Perplexity been up to last two months? We've silently been working on the next big thing," CEO Aravind Srinivas wrote on X , announcing that "Computer unifies every current capability of AI into a single system." Srinivas said the system treats models as interchangeable tools rather than core products. "It's multi-model by design," he wrote. "When models specialise, they just become tools similar to the file system, CLI tools, connectors, browser, search." Computer arrives at a moment when the AI industry is grappling with a fundamental question: now that foundation models have become extraordinarily capable, who captures the value? The model makers — OpenAI , Anthropic , Google — or the companies that sit above them and turn raw intelligence into reliable, accurate products? Perplexity is making a $20 billion bet on the latter. Inside Computer: how Perplexity built a single interface that delegates work across Claude, Gemini, Grok and 16 other AI models At its core, Computer functions as what Perplexity describes as "a general-purpose digital worker" — a system that can accept a high-level objective from a user, decompose it into subtasks, and delegate those subtasks to whichever AI model is best suited for each one. The Verge described it a...
Microsoft Corp. is compliant with Japan’s antitrust watchdog and its inquiry, the chief of its local unit said, as the company fields an investigation over possible anti-competitive practices involving the Azure cloud services. The country’s Fair Trade Commission is probing whether Microsoft restricted customers’ use of competing cloud services by preventing its software from running on platforms ...
Microsoft Corp. is compliant with Japan’s antitrust watchdog and its inquiry, the chief of its local unit said, as the company fields an investigation over possible anti-competitive practices involving the Azure cloud services. The country’s Fair Trade Commission is probing whether Microsoft restricted customers’ use of competing cloud services by preventing its software from running on platforms other than Azure, Bloomberg and other media reported earlier this week. “Japan is one of the most significant strategic markets for Microsoft and everything we do is operated with integrity,” Microsoft Japan President Miki Tsusaka said at a Bloomberg event in Tokyo Thursday. “I hope that is reflected in the market in terms of day-to-day practices.” She declined to comment further on the details of the investigation. Japan, which is the second-largest economy in Asia after China and a US ally, is a key market to winning a global race for customers against the likes of Amazon.com Inc. ’s AWS and Alphabet Inc. ’s Google Cloud. In 2024, Microsoft said it would invest about $2.9 billion over two years to shore up its AI and cloud computing infrastructure in Japan. The cloud services market is expected to expand rapidly alongside the development of generative artificial intelligence, which depends on vast networks of high-performance servers. While Japan has domestic data center operators — and the government is seeking to nurture them as part of efforts to strengthen national cybersecurity — much of the local market, as in many other countries, is dominated by US providers. The investigation in Japan comes as the US antitrust watchdog ratchets up a probe into Microsoft’s licensing and other business practices to see whether the company illegally monopolizes the enterprise computing market with its cloud software and AI offerings. Research firm IDC expects Japan’s cloud market to reach ¥19 trillion ($121 billion) in revenue by 2029, roughly double the total for 2024. The JFTC has...
Schneider Electric S.E. press release ( SBGSF ): FY Non-GAAP EPS of €8.59. Revenue of €40.15B (+5.2% Y/Y). Q4’25 revenues up +11% organic to €11 billion, a record high quarter o Energy Management up +11% org., led by Data Center o Industrial Automation up +8% org., with continued recovery in Discrete automation
Schneider Electric S.E. press release ( SBGSF ): FY Non-GAAP EPS of €8.59. Revenue of €40.15B (+5.2% Y/Y). Q4’25 revenues up +11% organic to €11 billion, a record high quarter o Energy Management up +11% org., led by Data Center o Industrial Automation up +8% org., with continued recovery in Discrete automation