Three generations across two years with one goal: bringing high-performance handheld gaming to life

At Computex in Taipei, Taiwan, the world got a glimpse into the first handheld gaming device powered by the all-new Intel® Arc™ G3 Extreme processor.

Created by Taiwan-based MSI, the Claw 8 EX AI+ is now available for sale in an eye-catching “void purple” color exclusive to the device.

But creating an all-new handheld design isn’t like building a laptop.

It took Intel and MSI over two years to conceptualize and design the Claw 8 EX AI+, which incorporates best practices from laptop designs and key learnings from previous generation handhelds. Together, Intel and MSI have crafted a device that’s a fraction of the size and weight of a regular mobile PC

Here are three things you need to know about how Intel’s top engineers helped MSI to create the Claw 8 EX AI+.

#1: A multi-generational engineering commitment that builds on past learnings

This isn’t the first time Intel and MSI have worked together on a handheld design: MSI’s previous generations handhelds were based on Intel® Core Ultra Series 1 (codenamed Meteor Lake) and Intel® Core Ultra 200V series (codenamed Lunar Lake) processors.

With the Intel® Arc G-Series processor family, Intel took a different approach by creating a purpose-built SoC optimized for handheld gaming.

“We distilled everything we learnt from the last two generations of handheld designs into a new category of devices that set a new standard for handheld experiences,” explained Nish Neelalojanan, said Intel’s senior director of Product Management, Client Computing and Physical AI Group.

Neelalojanan explained how past experience guided Intel’s engineers to remain laser-focused on creating a handheld device that provided the best gaming experience.

To achieve this, engineering teams made use of the unmatched efficiency of Intel Arc G3 Extreme to improve the handheld design and experience.

Elsewhere, software optimizations dramatically increased battery life and ensured the device remains cool to the touch under load for user comfort.

Additionally, Intel collaborated with key software leaders like Microsoft to ensure a seamless gaming experience via Xbox Mode on Windows 11.

The end result?

The MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ is the first Intel-based handheld to offer console-like accessibility, while also improving performance by freeing up system resources and precompiling shaders, leading to smoother gameplay.

#2: Striking a fine balance in a tightly enclosed space where “every millimeter counts”

With past handhelds, gamers typically faced a tough decision – prioritize the best gaming performance at the expense of shorter battery life or choose to extend gaming sessions at the expense of performance.

Those binary decisions are a relic of the past.

“I think one of the biggest reasons gamers should choose the new MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ is the incredible performance leap we’re seeing with the new Intel® Arc™ G3 Extreme platform,” said Joseph Shih, Claw product manager, MSI, explaining how top games like Cyberpunk 2077 now runs up to 37% faster, offer smoother frame rates and faster responsiveness.

Shih credits that huge leap in performance to the close collaboration between Intel and MSI.

“The key challenge in building any handheld is balancing performance, thermals, battery life, and comfort inside a very compact device – where every millimeter counts, as it will affect signal quality and compromise the end-user experience,” said Shih.

“From day one, both teams worked closely on motherboard layout, cooling, and power optimization to find the right balance between performance and efficiency.”

In one example of a close collaboration leading to a positive outcome, engineers decided to place the CPU and the DRAM components on opposite ends of the board to maximize space and optimize thermal efficiency, without affecting performance.

Other handheld designs tend to place these components next to each other to maintain signal strength.

“In a handheld, signal quality is extremely sensitive, so Intel’s signal simulation and validation support was critical to helping us achieve the right balance of stability, efficiency, and performance in such a compact body,” said Shih.

“What I really appreciated was how closely both teams worked behind the scenes. It genuinely felt like one engineering team focused on building the best possible handheld gaming experience for gamers,” Shih explained.

#3: The first successful power-on, pushes handheld gaming into AAA territory

Bruce Cheng fondly remembers January 2026 – it’s the month the joint Intel-MSI successfully powered on the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ for the first time.

It was the moment that signaled two hard years of shared engineering work had finally paid off.

Cheng, director of Advanced Co-engineering in Intel’s Customer Client Engineering group says that moment validated that the tough board-level circuitry decisions and hours of discussions with his MSI counterparts were the right bets.

“This was the first sign that the long, hard road made across three generations of handheld design discussions were paying off. It was proof that the performance gains we aspired to achieve were not just theoretical,” said Cheng.

The hard work didn’t end there. In the months to come, Cheng and his team would double down on performance tuning the handheld to where it mattered most – running AAA-games – while also carrying out additional engineering validation to ensure the device met the highest specifications.

That wasn’t all.

The joint team also monitored the dynamics of game titles – especially as gaming trends and preferences shift faster than in the laptop business.

“This learning mindset of continuous feedback loops and openness by both teams to revisit assumptions, make tough decisions and to course correct quickly was critical to our ability to deliver on time,” Cheng explained.

The first of many more handheld designs

While the MSI Claw 8 Extreme AI+ is the world’s first handheld design based on the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip, it won’t be the last.

At Computex Taiwan, Intel revealed more designs from its OEM partners like Acer and OneXPlayer are coming to market soon.

“The Arc G3 family for handheld devices proves we can bring PC-class performance and flexibility to handhelds, while offering smooth immersive gameplay and extended playtime. We’re proud of our collaboration with MSI as our pioneering partner for Intel-powered handhelds and look forward to seeing what the industry does next with Arc G3,” said Neelalojanan.

The Small Print:

Performance varies by use, configuration and other factors. Learn more at intel.com/performanceindex.  Performance results are based on testing as of dates shown in configurations and may not reflect all publicly available updates.  See backup for configuration details.  No product or component can be absolutely secure.

Your costs and results may vary.  Intel technologies may require enabled hardware, software or service activation.

Intel does not control or audit third-party data. You should consult other sources to evaluate accuracy.

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NEWS HIGHLIGHTS:

• The U.S. is at an inflection point. Artificial intelligence is reshaping global competition and increasing the need for secure, domestic semiconductor production.
• U.S. leadership in the AI era will be defined by innovation, domestic manufacturing, and workforce readiness. Strong semiconductor leadership is essential to economic growth, national security, and long-term global competitiveness.
• For nearly 60 years, Intel has helped power the digital age and continues to strengthen the U.S. innovation ecosystem through a nationwide R&D and manufacturing footprint.
• Intel’s end-to-end capabilities across design, manufacturing, and advanced packaging, along with its foundry model, position the company to provide the foundation for AI at scale.
• Looking ahead, Intel is focused on advancing the technology and talent that will define the next 250 years of U.S. leadership.

As artificial intelligence reshapes global competition, the next chapter of the American story will depend on how the nation leads in innovation, builds critical technologies at home, strengthens its workforce, and expands opportunity for future generations.

For nearly six decades, Intel has been an integral part of that story, advancing breakthroughs that have powered the digital age and helped transform industries around the world. Today, that work continues through a nationwide footprint spanning research, development, and manufacturing across Oregon, Arizona, New Mexico, California, and a planned site in Ohio, bolstering the nation’s innovation infrastructure needed for the AI era.

Growing AI demand across the global economy is increasing the importance of secure, domestic semiconductor production and the systems that power it. Intel’s approach—spanning silicon design, manufacturing, and advanced packaging—along with Intel Foundry’s integrated systems foundry model, is designed to deliver the performance and scale required for the AI era while advancing U.S. leadership in critical technologies. Intel Xeon processors, the most widely deployed host CPUs, also play a foundational role in AI, supporting key capabilities in memory, security, and orchestration.

Together, these end-to-end capabilities—spanning design, manufacturing, and advanced packaging—position Intel as an important foundation for the AI era and renewed U.S. technology leadership. This progress is reflected in 2026 recognition across independent benchmarks, including Fortune’s list of America’s Most Innovative Companies, a Platinum designation on the American Opportunity Index’s Where You Work Matters list, and inclusion on TIME’s inaugural list of America’s Most Iconic Companies, showcasing Intel’s sustained influence on U.S. industry and innovation.

As the nation marks this milestone year, Intel is partnering with America250, the national, nonpartisan organization established by Congress to lead the commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Through this collaboration, Intel supports initiatives that celebrate American innovation and technological achievement and highlight the builders shaping the future—reflecting a shared commitment to inspiring the next generation of innovators, entrepreneurs, scientists, and engineers.

This work is grounded in a simple idea: that strong domestic technology leadership is essential to economic growth, national security, and long-term global competitiveness. Intel is advancing that vision through continued investment in U.S.-based manufacturing and through initiatives like USAI, which aim to expand secure, responsible AI solutions for government and public sector applications.

Equally important is investing in people. The future of American innovation depends on a workforce equipped with the skills to succeed in a rapidly evolving technology landscape. Intel’s Semiconductor Education Pathways Program (SEPP) strengthens education pathways from K-12 through post-secondary education and supports professional upskilling. SEPP focuses on investments that support local workforce needs and build a talent pipeline through scholarships and fellowships for masters and Ph.D. students, faculty development and career and technical education (CTE) programs. Through collaborations with education partners and national initiatives, Intel is working to expand access to AI education and training across communities nationwide.

Advancing AI for American Youth, Intel’s AI-Ready Schools Initiative is rolling out nationwide, delivering 500 AI PCs to 250 K–12 schools with AI-optimized software, and comprehensive professional development to support safe, effective AI learning. The program includes more than 750 hours of open teaching content and professional development. Intel has committed to expanding educator training 10x to increase AI readiness across U.S. classrooms and help the next generation become responsible innovators, creators, and builders—not just consumers.

Intel is also supporting “Fostering the Future,” a ‘Be Best’ signature initiative by the First Lady, through a series of immersive AI bootcamps for foster care youth. Intel is providing $250K in grants to community colleges across key Intel sites to help equip foster youth with foundational AI skills and prepare them for future educational pathways and technology-focused careers.

As the Official Compute Partner of the McLaren Formula 1 and Arrow McLaren IndyCar teams, Intel will be present at key moments throughout the season, including the Freedom 250 IndyCar race in Washington, D.C., helping bring visibility to this milestone year.

Across these efforts, Intel’s focus remains consistent: advancing the technologies and talent that will shape the next chapter of American innovation in the AI era. As America looks ahead, Intel is working to help build a more resilient, secure, and competitive future, powered by trusted technology, domestic manufacturing and a workforce prepared for what comes next.

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Samsung is bringing intelligent innovation and premium mobile experiences to more users with the recently launched Galaxy A57 5G and Galaxy A37 5G. As smartphones become increasingly central to how people create, connect, work and play, Samsung continues to make meaningful innovation more accessible, delivering powerful performance and advanced camera experiences. Samsung is continuing its mission to democratise innovation by bringing some of the most-loved Galaxy S series experiences to more people.

The new Galaxy A series devices are designed for people who want smarter, more intuitive mobile experiences without stepping into ultra-premium price territory. Whether it is managing busy schedules, creating social content, staying organised, or protecting personal memories, the Galaxy A57 and A37 make advanced mobile technology feel accessible, useful, and seamlessly woven into everyday life.

At the heart of this shift is Samsung’s approach to making flagship  features part of the mainstream smartphone experience.

Imagine sitting in a lecture, a brainstorming session, or a family meeting where ideas are flying across the room faster than fingers can type. With Voice Transcription, users can record conversations and convert speech into text in real time, helping students capture notes effortlessly, young professionals keep track of meetings, or content creators quickly turn ideas into captions and scripts. It transforms the smartphone into a practical productivity companion that works quietly in the background while life moves at full speed.

Photography and content creation have also become more intuitive with Object Eraser[1]. Everyday moments are rarely picture-perfect on the first try. A stranger photobombing an exquisite sunset photo, an unwanted sign in a travel snap, or clutter distracting from a carefully styled outfit can all be removed with a few taps. What once required advanced editing apps or desktop software can now happen directly on-device, giving users the freedom to create cleaner, more polished content instantly.

Then there is Circle to Search[2] with Google, a feature that feels almost futuristic in its simplicity. Users can simply circle an object, phrase, or image on their screen to instantly learn more about it without switching between apps. Spot a pair of sneakers you like on social media? Circle them to search. Watching a recipe video and curious about an ingredient? Circle it. It reduces the space between curiosity and discovery, making information feel more immediate and naturally integrated into how people already use their phones.

Samsung has also introduced upgraded Bixby[3] into the Galaxy A series experience, creating a more conversational and intelligent way to interact with your device. Instead of navigating endless menus, users can simply ask Bixby to set reminders, search for photos, manage schedules, or help control connected devices. In busy households, during commutes, or while multitasking through a packed day, it becomes a digital assistant that simplifies small but meaningful daily interactions.

Privacy, too, is becoming increasingly important in a world where smartphones carry deeply personal memories and sensitive information. Private Album offers users an added layer of security for photos and videos they want to keep separate from their main gallery. Whether it is important documents, family moments, creative projects, or personal memories, users have more control over what stays visible and what stays private.

What makes the Galaxy A57 and A37 particularly significant is not just the inclusion of these features, but what they represent. Samsung is narrowing the gap between flagship and mid-range experiences, ensuring that more users can enjoy intelligent, AI-powered mobile technology regardless of budget.

For many consumers, smartphones are now long-term lifestyle investments. People want devices that can keep pace with work, entertainment, creativity, and communication without compromise. By introducing premium-inspired functionality into the Galaxy A series, Samsung is reshaping expectations around what accessible smartphones should be capable of delivering.

The result is a mobile experience that feels smarter, more personal, and more empowering. One where innovation is no longer reserved for a select few, but designed to fit naturally into the lives of everyday users across South Africa.

[1] Results may vary depending on shooting conditions including multiple subjects, being out of focus or moving subjects.

[2] Circle to Search is a trademark of Google LLC. Results for illustrative purposes only. Available on select devices and internet connection required. Works on compatible apps and surfaces. Result may vary depending on visual matches. Check responses for accuracy.

[3] Bixby service availability requires Samsung Account login and data connection. Available functions and features may vary by country, region and language. Bixby only recognises certain accents and dialects of English (UK), English (US), English (India), French (France), German (Germany), Italian (Italy), Japanese (Japan), Korean (South Korea), Mandarin Chinese (China), Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish (Spain) and Spanish (Latin America). Other supported languages may be added in the future. Not all accents, dialects and expressions may be recognised, and actual performance may vary depending on pronunciation, voice level and the surrounding environment. Use of Bixby may be limited in certain situations such as when recording media (Video/Game/Voice), during calls, Maximum Power Saving mode, Emergency mode and Samsung Kids. Service availability may vary by country/service provider/language/device model/OS version. Bixby controls selected apps, other apps to be supported. To control SmartThings enabled devices with Bixby, first connect the devices to the SmartThings app. For more information, visit the SmartThings website (www.samsung.com/smartthings).

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News Summary:

• Industry and research leaders including Dassault Systèmes, Databricks, Lilly, Schrödinger, Snowflake, the UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design and dozens others are adopting, and Anthropic and OpenAI are integrating, NVIDIA BioNeMo Agent Toolkit to bring agentic life sciences workflows to researchers and scientists.
• NVIDIA BioNeMo Agent Toolkit — including NVIDIA Nemotron, NemoClaw, OpenShell and BioNeMo — gives agents accelerated life sciences tools spanning biology, chemistry, genomics and drug discovery.
• New NVIDIA BioNeMo tools give agents the context and know-how to execute scientific computing — improving accuracy, task completion and token efficiency.

BIO—NVIDIA today announced NVIDIA BioNeMo Agent Toolkit, which provides domain-specific tools and skills for the agentic life sciences era.

Including more than a decade’s worth of NVIDIA life sciences libraries, tools and open models, the toolkit enables AI agents, scientists and labs to work together by gathering evidence, reasoning across findings, running computational experiments and recommending the next best steps to accelerate discovery.

It gives any agent or AI platform — from general-purpose assistants to specialized scientific agents, software platforms and in-house biopharma systems — the tools needed to synthesize and summarize scientific knowledge, call models, evaluate results, reason and execute next actions.

The toolkit includes NVIDIA BioNeMo™ and is powered by NVIDIA NIM™ microservices, NVIDIA Parabricks^®, NVIDIA NeMo™ and NVIDIA Nemotron™ technologies, along with accelerated computing and skills — providing an open and trusted foundation for agentic life sciences.

More than 50 leading companies are already using it to advance scientific discovery, tapping into agent-callable skills for tasks including protein structure prediction, molecular docking, generative chemistry, genomic analysis, protein design and biomarker discovery.

“Frontier models are the brains. BioNeMo is the scientific toolbox. Together, they give AI agents the skills of a PhD research assistant and the speed of a supercomputer,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “For the first time, researchers can build AI agents that understand scientific knowledge, use scientific tools and execute scientific workflows. This is a new way to do science — one that can dramatically accelerate discovery across biology, chemistry, genomics and medicine.”

Open model and research organizations — including the Arc Institute, Open Molecular Software Foundation and the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design (IPD) — are working with NVIDIA to use BioNeMo to advance frontier models and make them more accessible through agent-ready workflows. The IPD collaboration has accelerated runtimes for state-of-the-art biodesign models like RosettaFold3, resulting in 2x faster performance than the prior-generation model, and many additional applications to accelerate protein design efforts are ongoing, giving researchers tools at a scale and cost not before possible.

“Every tool we’ve built for protein design is only as powerful as the scientists who can efficiently access it,” said David Baker, professor of biochemistry at the University of Washington School of Medicine and director of the Institute for Protein Design. “The next leap in science won’t come from a single discovery; it will come from the speed of iterative designs and agents that can repeatedly reason through the complexity of biology at a speed humans never could.”

Agent-Ready Tools and Skills for Life Sciences
Life sciences is one of the world’s most important scientific frontiers, with global scientific R&D reaching $3.8 trillion and annual pharmaceutical budgets approaching $300 billion.

Agentic workflows can help the industry iterate faster while reducing costs and maximizing the probability of success. With the toolkit allowing developers to transform general-purpose agents into life sciences agents in minutes, researchers can run experiments faster, continuously learn from results and close the loop between hypothesis and discovery, with some companies extending this iteration into physical labs.

A general-purpose agent can struggle to navigate scientific workflows efficiently, needing to infer the correct tools, inputs, outputs and biological meaning along the way. With BioNeMo Agent Toolkit, agents can call the right tools, interpret results more accurately and gain scientific insights faster and more reliably.

NVIDIA is optimizing the entire BioNeMo platform by turning libraries, models and frameworks into agent-callable tools.

This includes harnessing NVIDIA Agent Toolkit technologies such as NVIDIA Nemotron open models for the reasoning foundation, the NVIDIA NeMo RL library for reinforcement learning and NVIDIA NemoClaw™ blueprints for secure, private agents that can reason across tasks, call tools and interact with data continuously.

NVIDIA NIM microservices help agents call models and perform tasks. The NVIDIA OpenShell™ runtime provides a controlled executable environment.

The toolkit’s components enable agents to complete workflows such as:

• Virtual Screening: Agents can help researchers identify small-molecule drug candidates by generating and screening compounds, docking them to a target, predicting binding strength and filtering for drug-like properties. Then, the agent can output which candidates should be prioritized, compressing screening timelines from days to minutes.
• Genomic Analysis and Target Discovery: Agents can help researchers transform raw sequencing data into prioritized genetic insights and biological targets. NVIDIA Parabricks accelerates alignment and variant calling, while genomic foundation models score variant effects and the agent ranks the most disease-relevant candidates for further study.
• Protein Binder Design: Agents can help researchers design and validate candidates computationally before work begins, compressing traditionally labor-intensive design work.
• Deep Biomedical Research: Agents connect real-world data to reasoning models to improve the efficiency and accuracy of various scientific and clinical development processes, including literature review, protocol generation, clinical trial screening and pharmacovigilance with the NVIDIA Biomedical AI-Q Research Agent.
• Medical Imaging Analysis: Agents can help researchers process, segment, synthesize and reason over medical imaging data to support biomarker discovery, accelerating evidence generation across research workflows.

Life Sciences Ecosystem Builds With NVIDIA BioNeMo
Companies across the technology and life sciences ecosystem are using the toolkit to advance agentic workflows.

Frontier labs and scientific agent builders including Anthropic, Edison Scientific, Lila Sciences, OpenAI and Owkin are integrating with BioNeMo to help agents move from answering questions to completing scientific work. NVIDIA accelerated models and analysis libraries help shorten the time from hypothesis to insight.

Scientific data and workflow platforms from Benchling, Certara, Databricks, Snowflake and Seqera are using BioNeMo Agent Toolkit to connect data systems with AI-powered science. BioNeMo skills can help agents query biological and chemical datasets, prepare model-ready inputs, launch reproducible workflows, analyze outputs and return insights directly within the platforms scientists and data teams already use daily.

Diagnostics and pharmaceutical companies including Lilly and Natera are using BioNeMo Agent Toolkit to scale repeatable agentic workflows across discovery, translational research and clinical insight.

AI-native biology companies including Boltz, Basecamp Research, Chai Discovery, Dyno, PerturbAI and Proxima have collaborated with NVIDIA to develop tools to accelerate model-powered therapeutic design workflows.

Computer-aided drug discovery software providers including Dassault Systèmes, Cadence (OpenEye) and Schrödinger are integrating the toolkit’s capabilities into scientific applications used across discovery teams. Then, agents can help orchestrate molecular generation, docking and prediction, turning computer-aided design platforms into systems where researchers can ask questions, launch analyses and identify next-best actions faster.

Lab instruments and automation companies including Automata, HighRes, Tecan, Thermo Fisher and autonomous data generation platform Medra are connecting systems with computational discovery powered by BioNeMo skills.

AI clouds and AI infrastructure companies including Baseten, Modal and Nebius are using the toolkit to help developers build life sciences workflows as reliable hosted services. By supporting BioNeMo skills and tools through scalable application programming interfaces, managed compute and production inference environments, these companies can help move agentic biology workflows from prototypes into accessible services for researchers and enterprises.

Availability
BioNeMo Agent Toolkit and skills are available now through the NVIDIA developer resources page and GitHub.

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News Summary:

• NVIDIA Halos for Robotics is the industry’s only full-stack, open robotics safety system, extending NVIDIA Halos’ proven autonomous vehicle safety to robotics and physical AI to give machines that sense, decide and act in the real world a single common safety architecture.
• Safety is built in every layer, with NVIDIA IGX Thor and Holoscan Sensor Bridge for AI compute and sensor connectivity, the Halos OS software stack for safety functions and applications, and the NVIDIA Halos AI Systems Inspection Lab to help partners prepare for third-party certification with confidence.
• Humanoid robotics and physical AI innovator Agility is the first company to team with NVIDIA to incorporate elements of Halos for Robotics into its proprietary safety system, bringing a new standard of responsible automation to factories, warehouses and logistics operations.

NVIDIA today announced NVIDIA Halos for Robotics, the industry’s first full-stack, comprehensive safety system for robotics and physical AI that unifies AI compute and safety.

Agility, a leading humanoid robotics and physical AI company, is the first to use NVIDIA Halos for Robotics to build safety into its humanoids working in factories, warehouses and logistics operations for customers including Amazon, GXO, Schaeffler and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada.

The next generation of autonomous robots will operate in dynamic environments alongside humans, using AI foundation models, accelerated compute and distributed sensors. Scaling these systems requires a full-stack safety architecture.

NVIDIA Halos enables companies to rely on a standardized, unified safety architecture that connects AI compute, system software, sensor data, safety applications and inspection for robotic systems.

“Physical AI is transforming how factories, warehouses and logistics operations work, and robotics teams need a unified safety architecture to scale autonomous systems into these environments,” said Deepu Talla, vice president of robotics and edge AI at NVIDIA. “With NVIDIA Halos for Robotics, developers and system builders can harness NVIDIA’s proven autonomous vehicle safety foundation to develop safer robots faster and bring them into industrial operations alongside workers with greater confidence.”

A Full-Stack Foundation for Robot Safety

Drawing on 18,600+ engineering years of autonomous vehicle safety development, NVIDIA Halos for Robotics provides developers with a common safety architecture for building, validating and deploying physical AI systems.

The system spans the key layers needed for robot safety:

• NVIDIA IGX Thor™ and NVIDIA Holoscan Sensor Bridge provide industrial-grade AI compute, built-in safety and sensor connectivity for real-time robotics and safety workloads.
• NVIDIA Halos OS provides the software stack for robotics safety, including Halos Core to support safety-related operating functions and safety applications built with the NVIDIA Halos Outside-In Safety Blueprint, which extends robot perception using external cameras and AI agents to dynamically control robot behavior in industrial settings.
• The NVIDIA Halos AI Systems Inspection Lab is the world’s first ANSI National Accreditation Board (ANAB)-accredited program for functional and AI safety for physical AI, helping partners prepare Halos integrations for third-party certification by leading certification bodies including TÜV Rheinland, UL Solutions, TÜV SÜD, exida, SGS and CertX.

“As AI-enabled robotics moves into industrial environments, the industry needs standardized, internationally recognized frameworks to assess safety across increasingly complex systems,” said Laurie E. Locascio, president and CEO of ANSI. “ANAB’s accreditation of the NVIDIA Halos AI Systems Inspection Lab confirms the program has the competence and impartiality to evaluate robotic AI systems against recognized safety requirements, giving companies a rigorous and internationally recognized foundation for their path to certification.”

Agility Incorporates Halos for Industrial Humanoids

Humanoid robots are designed to operate in dynamic environments alongside workers, equipment and other robots that are constantly in motion. That requires safety engineered for every layer of the stack.

Agility is extending its leadership in humanoid safety by teaming with NVIDIA to integrate NVIDIA IGX Thor and Halos Core into its proprietary safe human detection system for its humanoid robot Digit, which is designed for industrial work in logistics, manufacturing and warehouse operations. For Digit, NVIDIA IGX Thor delivers industrial-grade AI compute with built-in safety capabilities, while Halos Core supports the software layer for safety-related operating functions.

Agility will also participate in the NVIDIA Halos AI Systems Inspection Lab. Together, Agility and NVIDIA will use the lab to ensure Digit’s safety-related software, AI components and cybersecurity protections meet rigorous standards such as IEC 61508, ISO 13849 and ISO/IEC TR 5469 before final third-party certification.

“For humanoids to deliver value at scale, safety has to be built into the robot and validated across the entire system,” said Peggy Johnson, CEO of Agility. “Partnering with NVIDIA to implement and optimize the Halos for Robotics system extends our leadership in responsible automation, which is a nonnegotiable requirement for bringing humanoids safely into industrial workflows. This collaboration unlocks true human-robot teamwork, driving the long-term returns that will power next-generation manufacturing and logistics operations.”

A Robotics Safety Ecosystem Built for Scale

The NVIDIA Halos for Robotics ecosystem brings together partners across software, systems, sensors and silicon, industrial applications and certification bodies to support safety from development through deployment:

• Software: Acontis, FreeRTOS and QNX support the real-time operating environment, safety communications and embedded software layers needed for functional safety development.
• Embedded systems: Advantech and NexCobot deliver safety-designed NVIDIA IGX-based systems for robotics deployments.
• Sensors and silicon: Infineon, NXP Semiconductors, STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments contribute sensor, safety microcontroller and other semiconductor technologies.
• Industrial applications: FORT Robotics, Inventec, KION Group, Lyte AI and Neurealm are developing functional safety agents using the NVIDIA Halos Outside-In Safety Blueprint.
• Assessment Agencies: TÜV Rheinland is inspecting NVIDIA IGX Thor, Halos OS and Holoscan Sensor Bridge for functional safety certification readiness, building on TÜV SÜD’s inspection of Thor SoC and Halos Core for ISO 26262.

The NVIDIA Halos AI Systems Inspection Lab includes more than 40 companies across manufacturers, certification bodies and safety vendors working to move safe physical AI systems from design to real-world deployment. TÜV Rheinland, TÜV SÜD, UL Solutions, exida, SGS and CertX all recognize the NVIDIA Halos AI Systems Inspection Lab as part of their certification process.

Availability

NVIDIA Halos Core for NVIDIA IGX™ is available in early access for registered developers in Linux and Linux plus QNX OS for Safety 8.0 configurations. The open source NVIDIA Halos Outside-In Safety Blueprint, part of the Halos Applications layer of Halos OS, is now available in early access on GitHu.

Learn more about NVIDIA Halos for Robotics in this technical blog and webpage. 

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Expanded Access to Next-Generation NVIDIA AI Infrastructure Equips Millions of Researchers to Advance AI HPC and Scientific Discovery

News Summary:

• Barcelona Supercomputing Center’s EuroHPC AI Factory, BavariaAI’s Blue Swan, IT4LIA, HLRS’s HammerHAI, NAISS’s Mimer EuroHPC AI Factory and more are building on next-generation NVIDIA AI infrastructure across 23 countries, accelerating the work of over 3 million researchers.
• NVIDIA AI infrastructure is powering over 90% of Europe’s AI factory buildout with 800 AI exaflops deployed or announced since last year.
• NVIDIA is supporting initiatives to accelerate AI-driven climate science, healthcare and clean-energy decarbonization, including work with Siemens Energy on hydrogen-capable gas turbine burners.
• Barcelona Supercomputing Center, CINECA, Fraunhofer and Jülich Supercomputing Centre are the latest institutes to use the CUDA-Q platform to integrate quantum processors, extending Europe’s leadership in quantum-GPU supercomputing.

ISC High Performance 2026 — NVIDIA today announced that a record 35 NVIDIA AI HPC supercomputers are in development across Europe — equipping more than 3 million researchers with next-generation infrastructure for continental AI, accelerated science and industrial innovation.

The systems represent Europe’s largest one-year expansion of supercomputers, spanning national supercomputing centers, AI factories and academic research institutions. Built on full-stack NVIDIA AI infrastructure, the systems will support research across climate science, healthcare, clean-energy decarbonization, quantum computing and fundamental science.

The NVIDIA Blackwell and NVIDIA Hopper™ platforms are powering the majority of Europe’s AI factory buildout, with 800 AI exaflops deployed or announced since last year. With NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand networking, NVIDIA CUDA-X™ libraries, NVIDIA NIM™ microservices and NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, NVIDIA provides a full-stack platform for science, spanning model training, simulation, inference and agentic AI.

“AI is the new instrument of science, and Europe is building the infrastructure to put it in the hands of millions of researchers,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “With NVIDIA accelerated computing, researchers can simulate more complex systems, train scientific AI models and build agentic AI workflows that turn Europe’s data and expertise into breakthroughs for the world.”

Supercomputers including Barcelona Supercomputing Center’s EuroHPC MareNostrum5 AI upgrade, BavariaAI’s Blue Swan, IT4LIA, HLRS’s HammerHAI and NAISS’s Mimer EuroHPC AI Factory are among those based on advanced NVIDIA AI infrastructure.

“BSC is committed to building AI infrastructure that advances science, industry and society,” said Mateo Valero Cortés, director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. “With the upgrade to MareNostrum5 and NVIDIA accelerated computing, the consortium composed of Spain, Portugal and Türkiye will make available to European researchers the tools to tackle some of the world’s most complex challenges, from climate modeling to biomedical discovery.”

“With the project ‘Blue Swan Platform,’ Bavaria is working on an innovative and independent, multimodal AI foundation model for important application areas like health and robotics,” said Bavarian Minister of Science Markus Blume. “This will allow us to provide a powerful AI tool for science and industry that fully meets European standards. For this ambitious goal, we are currently building a special computing infrastructure at Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen — the biggest GPU cluster you can find at any German university.”

“IT4LIA marks a strategic step in strengthening Europe’s AI and HPC ecosystem, providing a high-performance infrastructure to the research and innovation ecosystem,” said Gabriella Scipione, high-performance computing director of CINECA. “Through advanced accelerated computing, EuroHPC with CINECA, the Italian Ministry of University and Research, and the Italian Cybersecurity Agency are creating a trusted environment for open AI model development and applications across agritech, cybersecurity, meteorology, climate and manufacturing, strengthening Europe’s technological autonomy and reinforcing Italy’s role in the global AI landscape.”

“Germany has long been a leader in engineering, science and industrial innovation,” said Michael Resch, director of the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart. “With HammerHAI, Germany’s first AI factory, we are building on that foundation with secure, national AI infrastructure that will help researchers and industrial users accelerate simulation, inference and scientific discovery, strengthening Europe’s ability to turn advanced computing into real-world breakthroughs.”

Europe’s latest AI infrastructure expansion includes advancements at:

• Barcelona Supercomputing Center’s AI Factory, the first EuroHPC AI-specific installation: Will expand MareNostrum 5 with NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 and NVIDIA GB200 NVL4 systems, connected by the NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand platform. Delivering up to approximately 20 exaflops of AI training and 33 exaflops of AI inference performance, the system will accelerate generative AI, climate modeling, health and biotech research, sustainable agriculture, energy systems and government AI services.
• BavariaAI’s Blue Swan: Brings 1,000 GPUs via NVIDIA GB200 NVL4 systems and NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking to FAU Erlangen and LRZ supercomputing centers. Delivering up to 11 exaflops of AI training and 22 exaflops of AI inference performance, the platform will support Bavaria’s foundation model initiative, advancing open multimodal models for science, public administration, health research, robotics and perception.
• IT4LIA: An AI factory with over 8,000 GPUs via NVIDIA GB200 NVL4 systems, NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand networking and NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, delivering 82 exaflops of AI training and 164 exaflops of AI inference performance.
• HLRS’s HammerHAI: Will equip Germany’s first AI factory with over 850 GPUs via NVIDIA GB200 NVL4 systems connected with NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand. Delivering up to approximately 8 exaflops of AI training and 15 exaflops of AI inference performance, HammerHAI will give researchers and industrial users secure AI infrastructure for engineering simulation, large language model inference and scientific discovery.
• NAISS’s Mimer AI Factory, owned by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking: Hosted at Linköping University, this supercomputer will deploy 100 NVIDIA GB200 NVL4 systems, totaling 400 GPUs, with NVIDIA ConnectX^®-8 networking. Delivering up to 4 exaflops of AI training and about 7 exaflops of AI inference performance, Mimer AI Factory will advance Sweden’s AI science ecosystem across life sciences, materials research, autonomous systems, trustworthy AI and data-driven innovation.

AI for Climate and Decarbonization

NVIDIA is supporting initiatives that deploy AI infrastructure and software to help researchers apply AI to scientific challenges including climate and Earth systems modeling, biomedical research, and clean-energy technologies such as fusion, hydrogen and carbon capture.

Accelerated simulation and industrial engineering are already enabling breakthroughs in clean-energy research.

Siemens Energy is using the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio, accelerated by NVIDIA technologies, including NVIDIA Omniverse™ libraries, CUDA-X and AI infrastructure, to unify design, computational fluid dynamics simulation and manufacturing for gas turbines built to run on up to 100% hydrogen — a complex physics challenge involving extreme heat, fluid dynamics and combustion behavior.

The workflow supports rapid, simulation-driven design iterations for complex gas turbine burner configurations, followed by fast technology validation using additively manufactured combustors. This cuts simulation times by up to 77% to advance hydrogen-capable, low‑carbon gas turbines.

Quantum-GPU Supercomputing Advances in Europe

NVIDIA is enabling European supercomputing centers and institutions to develop and run useful hybrid quantum-classical applications using NVIDIA CUDA-Q™, an open, qubit-agnostic platform for hybrid computing, extending Europe’s leadership in quantum-GPU supercomputing.

CINECA, EuroHPC and Pasqal are integrating a neutral-atom QPU at the CINECA supercomputing center. The Pasqal hybrid environment is deploying the CUDA-Q platform through integration with Slurm. CUDA-Q provides Pasqal and CINECA with a platform for developing and running quantum applications including for optimization and materials science use cases.

Fraunhofer FOKUS is facilitating the integration of NVIDIA CUDA-Q with the quantum programming language Eclipse Qrisp. Qrisp, initiated at Fraunhofer FOKUS and being further developed by the Eclipse Foundation, enables researchers to more easily write complex quantum algorithms which can then be simulated, optimized and run with NVIDIA CUDA-Q.

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center has recently deployed a new analog quantum computer from QPU builder Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech, through the EuroHPC JU initiative. Qilimanjaro integrated NVIDIA CUDA-Q into its quantum software development kit, QiliSDK. Qilimanjaro is also working toward making its QPU available in the NVIDIA CUDA-Q platform for seamless control of quantum accelerated workflows at BSC.

Researchers at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, working with a team from NVIDIA, set a world record by fully simulating a universal 50-qubit quantum computer. The simulation was run on JUPITER, powered by its NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips. Jülich’s JUQCS-50 (for 50 qubits) quantum simulator allows researchers to now test the largest possible quantum problems on supercomputers, to scale quantum computing.

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Apple continuously invests in new features and services to help developers succeed and users discover their next favorite app. New App Store capabilities rolling out this year will give developers more flexibility to market their apps, acquire new users, and offer brand-new business models for Apple In-App Purchase.

New Ways to Market Apps and Games

This year, developers will have more ways to showcase their apps on the App Store with Creative Assets, rich images and videos that appear in the product page header and search results. In addition to standard screenshots and previews, these assets can be used to highlight a brand, promote seasonal offerings, or showcase new content. They also work with custom product pages and product page optimization, so developers can test and learn what resonates best. App Store Connect also supports a product page preview so developers can see how their Creative Assets, descriptions, and screenshots appear on iPhone and iPad across languages, in Dark Mode, and in portrait or landscape.

The new Asset Library helps developers move faster across marketing workflows, with one place in App Store Connect to manage all Creative Assets, app preview videos, and screenshots. Developers can reuse assets across custom product pages and In-App Events, eliminating redundant uploads and streamlining their promotional campaigns across the App Store. Developers can also submit assets for App Review approval independent of an app update, ideal for rolling out seasonal imagery or coordinating with an Apple Ads campaign without delay.

Enhanced Discovery and Engagement

To complement these new marketing capabilities, the App Store is getting new ways to connect users with experiences they are looking for. To help more people find apps and games they will love, the App Store will introduce new Personalized Collections based on user interests, along with App Notes that explain why specific apps are recommended. These tailored recommendations can appear on the Apps, Games, and Search tabs, evolving over time based on a user’s app usage and downloads. Personalized Collections and App Notes start rolling out this week in English in the U.S., with additional languages and regions coming soon.

To further boost discovery and monetization, game developers will also be able to showcase special offers to attract and engage players on the Apple Games app, using Featuring Nominations to propose plans for an in-game offer or a limited-time discount to the App Store editorial team.

Scaling Businesses with New Subscription Capabilities

The App Store is a powerful engine for economic growth, and Apple is continuously investing in new ways to help developers scale their businesses and reach new audiences. This year, the App Store will enhance Apple In-App Purchase, providing developers with new ways to offer subscriptions at scale. Powered by StoreKit 2, developers will be able to enable subscriptions for groups and organizations within their app using two new configuration options to easily build multi-user in-app purchase experiences.

Volume purchasing through Apple Business and Apple School Manager allows developers to offer subscriptions to enterprise and education buyers who already procure apps at scale. Seat assignments are managed seamlessly through existing device management workflows, which means apps and subscriptions can be deployed across an organization on infrastructure IT already trusts.

Developers will be able to use group purchases to offer their subscriptions to a range of users, from independent creators working together to full production companies. Group purchases let a subscriber buy seats as a single purchase and then invite others to access the subscription. With Apple-provided invite functionality, it’s seamless for people to invite, accept, and join a subscription. Because each subscriber joins from their own account, it’s easy to see and manage who’s in their group. Developers can conveniently set up both options from one place in App Store Connect. Volume purchasing will be available this fall, with group purchases coming this winter.

To help build long-term value and increase subscriber retention, new App Store Bundles will give developers the ability to partner together and offer users more for less. By expanding beyond a single-developer catalog, these new bundles will allow users to subscribe to multiple favorite apps from different developers at a better price. Developers will also be able to create Suites, offering subscription packages that aren’t available as standalone purchases.

Retention Messaging is rolling out to all developers in App Store Connect. These new tools let developers engage subscribers by allowing them to provide additional value during the cancellation process with tailored communications or special offers.

Streamlined Submissions

App Review plays a vital role in keeping the App Store a safe and trusted place for users, and Apple continuously works to make the submission process more efficient for developers. Updates to Apple In-App Purchase submissions will further simplify app management and boost developer productivity, allowing developers to group multiple In-App Purchases and related items into a single, unified App Review submission.

To further simplify the development and submission process, apps and games on the Mac App Store no longer require Intel support. This allows developers to ship Apple silicon-only binaries, eliminating the need to maintain multiple builds.

Supporting New Time Allowance Features

Once apps and games on the App Store are downloaded to a child’s device, parents can use powerful and intuitive tools, like Screen Time, to help manage when a child can use those apps. New Time Allowances in iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 give parents more flexible ways to manage the time their kids and teens spend in apps across categories, including Entertainment, Games, and Social Media. Time Allowances are developed based on expert research and tailored to a child’s age range to give parents a helpful starting point. Parents can adjust these settings based on what they determine is best for their child. And new Schedules let parents choose which apps kids and teens have access to at different times of day, making it easier to help keep them focused when it matters.

Developers will also have new ways to ensure their apps are properly categorized for these features within App Store Connect. To support Time Allowances, the age rating questionnaire will be updated in July, allowing developers to indicate if their app includes social media capabilities, such as interacting with user-generated content through a social feed. Apps will automatically be sorted into the appropriate Time Allowance category: Social Media, Entertainment, Games, or Other. This helps ensure that apps with social media features are accurately categorized and age-rated, providing parents with tools they can use to make informed decisions for their families.

The App Store continues to evolve to support a growing developer community while maintaining high standards for user safety and trust. With these updates, Apple is providing developers with the capabilities and flexibility to connect with a global audience, deliver safe experiences, and build sustainable businesses.

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At WWDC26, Apple unveiled the next generation of Apple Intelligence, Siri AI, powerful parental controls, and an expansive set of software improvements across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, visionOS, and tvOS.

CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA Today, during the Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple previewed its upcoming software releases that will deliver the next generation of Apple Intelligence and introduce Siri AI, an entirely new version of Siri that is profoundly more intelligent, knowledgeable, and capable. The releases also bring powerful and intuitive new features to help parents create safe digital experiences for kids, as well as improvements that further elevate the software design and performance of Apple products while making them more responsive, delightful, and easier to use with iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, visionOS 27, and tvOS 27.

“Apple products are an essential part of people’s lives, and this year we’re bringing powerful new capabilities to empower our users in even more ways,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “We’re delivering the next generation of Apple Intelligence across our platforms; introducing Siri AI, a profoundly more intelligent, knowledgeable, and capable Siri; expanding child safety features with intuitive new tools for families; and making our software platforms faster, more reliable, and more delightful than ever before.”

Next Generation of Apple Intelligence and an Entirely New Siri Experience

Leveraging a bold new architecture uniquely designed to protect users’ privacy, the next generation of Apple Intelligence powers Siri AI and brings helpful new features to apps users rely on every day.

• iPhone 17 Pro shows a Siri AI screen featuring a description of a cricket ball over a photo of the object.
• iPhone 17 Pro shows a Siri AI screen featuring a suggested itinerary for a day in New York City.
• iPhone 17 Pro shows a Siri AI screen featuring a search of photos from the previous weekend, with subject matter and specific people called out in the search.
• iPhone 17 Pro shows a Siri AI screen featuring Siri mode in the Camera app, with a description of pho and nutrition information over a photo of the dish.
• iPhone 17 Pro shows a Siri AI screen featuring a suggested response over a conversation in Messages.
• iPhone 17 Pro shows a conversation between the user and Siri about Bosque de Chapultepec.

Siri AI is an entirely new version of Siri deeply integrated into iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple Vision Pro. It can draw on personal context understanding to search across messages, emails, photos, and more, and get things done across apps with even more systemwide app actions. Additionally, Siri AI can answer questions related to the content on a user’s screen or go out to the web to get up-to-date information using broad world knowledge and generate a helpful answer. A dedicated Siri app allows users to revisit a past conversation or kick off a new one — all in one place — and uses iCloud to privately sync conversational history across a user’s products.

The next generation of Apple Intelligence powers tremendous new features in apps across the system. In Photos, Spatial Reframing enables users to improve the composition of a photo after it’s been taken.

In addition to Siri AI, the next generation of Apple Intelligence powers tremendous new features in apps across the system to simplify the things users do every day, like editing images in Photos, browsing across multiple tabs in Safari, expressing creativity with Image Playground, communicating in Messages and Mail, and so much more.

• An Image Playground screen shows a generated image of two astronauts wearing classic spacesuits and walking across a Martian desert with the option to describe a change.
• A MacBook Pro screen shows a text conversation window as well as a Notify Me message letting the user know there’s an update about when a summer camp’s registration opens.
• iPhone 17 Pro displays a Messages conversation with one-tap suggestions to create a note or reminder about bringing a sweater.

New Parental Controls and Significant Updates to Screen Time

Powerful and intuitive new features that are easy to use help parents manage what their kids can see, who they can talk to, and when they have access to apps. By setting up a child account, parents can immediately enable age-appropriate protections across the system, and with Setup Assistant, parents can choose exactly which apps to make available and stay in control of what gets added over time. With communication safety features, parents can require approval for each new contact their kids connect with and enable automatic interventions if explicit or violent content is being shared.

• iPhone 17 Pro shows the setup page for a child account.
• iPad shows an Ask to Browse prompt that says “You will need a parent or guardian’s permission to browse” above a website.
• iPad shows a screen that says “Allowed Apps” and prompts the user to choose which pre-installed apps a child can use.
• iPhone 17 Pro shows a Communication Safety screen that says, “Are you sure you want to see this image? This image may show blood or a hurt person or a hurt animal.”

New tools aimed at building healthier screen time habits make it easy to set daily total time allowances across Entertainment, Games, and Social Media apps, with a daily time allowance recommendation based on guidance from leading clinical and child development experts that gives parents a helpful starting point. Schedules let parents manage which apps their children have access to at different points in the day, and Screen Time has been redesigned to be more intuitive for parents, offering an at-a-glance view of their kids’ average device usage and top apps.

To help parents stay informed and learn more, Apple has launched a dedicated website that features the latest tools, helpful resources, and answers to common questions — like how to get started.

• iPhone 17 Pro shows a Time Allowances screen with the prompt to set how long a child can use apps and websites within various categories, including Entertainment, Games, and Social Media.
• iPhone 17 Pro shows a screen that prompts the user to set when and for how long a child can use various categories of apps and websites.
• iPhone 17 Pro shows the setup for which categories of apps and websites are allowed during a specific time window labeled “School” and noted as 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.

More Responsive, Reliable, and Delightful Experiences Across Software Platforms

The 2027 releases make Apple products even more responsive, reliable, and delightful to use through design refinements, performance improvements, and enhancements to the ways users work, communicate, share memories, enjoy music with AirPods, track their health, and more.

Improvements across platforms push key system capabilities forward so everyday tasks feel faster, smoother, and more enjoyable. For example, iPhone and iPad apps launch up to 30 percent faster,¹ photos load up to 70 percent faster after being taken,² and AirDrop transfers are up to 80 percent faster.³ During network transitions, moving between cellular and Wi-Fi networks is more seamless than ever, and browsing and transferring files between external drives and iPad is up to 5x faster — making it just as fast as Finder on Mac.⁴ In Spotlight, Photos, and Mail, the search experience has been rebuilt to make it more stable and efficient to help users find exactly what they are looking for. And in Mail, a completely new ranking system surfaces even more relevant results in Top Hits.

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A new slider in Settings gives users the option to personalize Liquid Glass, adjusting it anywhere from ultra-clear to fully tinted to match their preference.

Refinements to the software design deliver an even more focused and approachable experience across apps and platforms. A new slider in Settings gives users the option to personalize Liquid Glass, adjusting it anywhere from ultra-clear to fully tinted to match their preference, and app icons have been updated to be sharper and more defined. On Mac, updates reincorporate cornerstones of the macOS design that users have always loved, including a more uniform toolbar across the top of apps, edge-to-edge sidebars, colored sidebar icons, and more.

Additional features coming this fall:

• iCloud Shared Albums introduce cross-platform photo sharing with full-resolution support.

• The Health app brings support for perimenopause and menopause in Cycle Tracking, including notifications about cycle deviations inclusive of perimenopause.⁵

• On Apple Watch, a new dynamic app grid features the icons for five Siri-suggested apps, users can open a widget in the Smart Stack with a new tap gesture, and a new Find My app consolidates Find Devices, Find Items, and Find People.

• AirPods users can now enjoy custom EQ to further personalize how their AirPods sound. And with expanded Apple GymKit functionality, users with AirPods Pro 3 can sync their heart rate data through iPhone while enjoying incredible audio quality.

• Apple Vision Pro users can now turn panoramas into spatial scenes and use them as personal Environments, and connecting to Wi-Fi is up to 3x faster.

• Apple Maps brings an enhanced Flyover experience, which combines aerial imagery with AI, allowing users to enjoy even more detailed visuals.

• iPhone 17 Pro shows an album in Photos called “Aegean Adventure.”
• iPhone 17 Pro shows a Cycle Tracking screen with an alert for irregular periods, while a second iPhone 17 Pro shows a screen asking the user to mark any symptoms they’ve noticed, such as fatigue, hot flashes, or mood changes.
• iPhone 17 Pro is pictured next to AirPods and features an audio customization screen.
• An Apple Vision Pro screen shows a mountain panorama.
• iPad shows an aerial view of buildings in Apple Maps.

Availability

• The new features are available for testing starting today through the Apple Developer Program at developer.apple.com, and a public beta will be available through the Apple Beta Software Program next month at beta.apple.com. New software features will be available as a free software update this fall. For more information, visit apple.com/ios, apple.com/ipados, apple.com/macos, apple.com/watchos, apple.com/tvos, and apple.com/visionos.

• Users who enable Apple Intelligence on supported products set to a supported language will have access this fall with iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, and visionOS 27.

• Apple Intelligence is available with support for these languages: English, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Japanese, and Korean. Some features may not be available in all regions or languages. For feature and language availability and system requirements, see apple.com/apple-intelligence.

• Apple Intelligence and Siri AI in iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, and visionOS 27 are available on iPhone 16 models or later, iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, iPad mini (A17 Pro), iPad models with M1 or later, MacBook Neo (A18 Pro), Mac with M1 or later, Apple Vision Pro, Apple Watch Series 9 or later, Apple Watch Ultra 2 or later, and Apple Watch SE 3 when paired with an Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone nearby.

• Some Apple Intelligence features, including image generation, have daily usage limits because they rely on powerful server models. Increased access is available with most iCloud+ subscription plans, which also include Apple Intelligence support for compatible Home cameras.

• New Siri AI features are available for developer testing starting today across iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, and visionOS 27. Siri AI will be available for developer testing in a future watchOS 27 beta.

• Siri AI will be available as a beta later this year for users with a supported device set to English, and Apple will quickly expand support for more languages.

• Mac and Apple Vision Pro users in the EU will be able to access Siri AI when set to a supported language. Siri AI will not be available initially in the EU in iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS.

• Siri AI and the other new Apple Intelligence features will not be available in China while Apple works through regulatory requirements.

• Features are subject to change. Some features may not be available in all languages or regions, and availability may vary due to local laws and regulations. For more information about availability, visit apple.com.

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RTX Spark — a 1-Petaflop Superchip, the Full CUDA and RTX Ecosystem, and Windows-Native Agents — a New Beginning for Personal Computers

News Summary:

• NVIDIA RTX Spark powers the world’s first Windows PCs purpose-built for personal agents, featuring 1 petaflop of AI performance, industry-leading power efficiency, full-stack NVIDIA AI and graphics technology, and up to 128GB of unified memory.
• NVIDIA and Microsoft collaborate to deliver a native Windows experience for personal agents, including new security primitives and NVIDIA OpenShell to run agents securely on primary devices.
• RTX Spark lets creators, AI developers and gamers render ultralarge 90GB+ 3D scenes, edit 12K 4:2:2 video, generate 4K AI videos, run 120B-parameter LLMs with up to 1 million tokens context using agents locally, and play AAA games at 1440p and over 100 frames per second.
• Adobe is rearchitecting Photoshop and Premiere from the ground up for RTX Spark to deliver 2x faster AI and graphics performance.
• RTX Spark-powered slim Windows laptops with all-day battery life and premium displays, as well as compact desktop PCs available this fall from ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft Surface and MSI, with models from Acer and GIGABYTE to follow.
   

NVIDIA GTC Taipei—NVIDIA today unveiled NVIDIA RTX Spark™, a new superchip that reinvents Windows PCs for the era of personal AI agents — offering a new class of computer that moves from tool to teammate.

Designed for AI, creating and gaming, RTX Spark brings together 30 years of NVIDIA innovation — including NVIDIA CUDA®, NVIDIA RTX™, DLSS, FP4, NVIDIA TensorRT™, NVIDIA OptiX™, Reflex and G-SYNC® — to slim Windows laptops with all-day battery life and small, ultraefficient desktop PCs.

“The PC is being reinvented,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “For forty years, you launched apps. Click. Type. With RTX Spark and Microsoft Windows, you ask — and the PC does the work. RTX Spark brings everything NVIDIA has built — CUDA, RTX, our AI platform — into a single superchip. Local agents. Frontier models. Creative workflows. RTX games. All on a laptop. This is the new PC. The personal AI computer.”

The RTX Spark superchip features an NVIDIA Blackwell RTX GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores and fifth-generation Tensor Cores with FP4 precision, connected via the NVIDIA NVLink®-C2C chip-to-chip interconnect to a high-performance, 20-core NVIDIA Grace™ CPU.

MediaTek, a market leader in Arm-based system-on-a-chip designs, collaborated with NVIDIA on the custom CPU design, contributing to its best-in-class power efficiency, performance and connectivity.

Purpose-Built for Personal Agents
AI agents have reached an inflection point, with open source projects such as OpenClaw and Hermes Agent achieving record-breaking numbers on developer networks like GitHub and OpenRouter. Yet broad adoption has been limited by the inability to run agents securely and privately on users’ primary PCs.

NVIDIA and Microsoft are partnering to address this challenge by delivering a robust, secure Windows platform for on-device agents.

The collaboration begins with a strong foundation — new Windows security primitives and the NVIDIA OpenShell™ runtime — to ensure agents run safely and under full user control.

The new Windows primitives deliver identity, containment, policy and end-to-end security capabilities to build and run agents natively. NVIDIA OpenShell provides additional policy capabilities for the user to define what agents can and cannot do, the ability to intelligently route queries to local models based on the user’s privacy policies, and the ability to disguise personal information in queries sent to cloud models.

This robust security and privacy layer is being adopted by leading agent developers such as Hermes Agent and OpenClaw in their new Windows apps. These new apps will make it easy and secure for users to access powerful on-device agents that can execute tasks in Windows applications, reason through cross-app workflows, generate images and video, code plug-ins and apps, and semantically search local files.

“We are strong supporters of deploying agents like OpenClaw securely into the Windows ecosystem,” said Vincent Koc, chief architect at the OpenClaw Foundation. “Running solutions like OpenShell and the Microsoft security primitives on RTX Spark will enable users to leverage a fully integrated stack for private, personal agents running on device.”

Powering agents on local devices requires both robust security and performant hardware. RTX Spark features up to 1 petaflop of AI compute and 128GB of unified memory to meet the processing demands of on-device agents.

“At Nous, we expect tasks to increasingly run on device as personal agents like our Hermes Agent become more capable and ubiquitous,” said Dillon Rolnick, CEO of Nous Research. “RTX Spark and NVIDIA OpenShell give Hermes users a powerful and secure environment for agents to run and work alongside you. You realize you’re buying a full-fledged assistant, not a typical laptop.”

From this foundation, NVIDIA and Microsoft’s collaboration will expand to new RTX Spark-powered Windows agent experiences accessible from the Windows taskbar user interface.

“Our goal is to deliver unmetered intelligence to every home and every desk with Windows,” said Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft. “RTX Spark marks a real breakthrough towards that vision.”

Full-Stack RTX Creating and Gaming
RTX Spark delivers the full NVIDIA AI and graphics technology stack to creators, AI developers and gamers.

Users can render ultralarge 90GB 3D scenes with OptiX and DLSS, edit 12K 4:2:2 video with the NVIDIA Blackwell decoder, run 120-billion-parameter large language models with 1 million tokens context, and play AAA games at 1440p resolution and over 100 frames per second with ray tracing, DLSS and Reflex.

In addition to support for existing technologies, RTX Spark will power new RTX capabilities, including DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction featuring a second-generation transformer model — coming to Blender 5.3 and dozens of games — and RTX Video with 4x Frame Generation, coming to ComfyUI.

RTX technology boosts performance, enhances image quality and adds powerful AI features in over 1,000 games and applications. Over 100 Windows software providers such as Adobe, Blackmagic Design, Blender, CapCut, ComfyUI and OTOY, and game developers such as KRAFTON, NetEase, Remedy Entertainment, Riot Games and XBOX are embracing the new RTX Spark platform.

• “Blackmagic Design and NVIDIA have accelerated video production for many years,” said Grant Petty, CEO of Blackmagic Design. “Portable, lightweight RTX Spark laptops with fantastic battery life are going to help our customers take the next leap in on-the-go production.”
• “Rendering is entering a new era where path tracing, AI and real-time workflows are converging into powerful new neural media artist tools,” said Jules Urbach, CEO of OTOY. “Our work with NVIDIA to bring OTOY Octane with Render Network support to RTX Spark will deliver a new class of portable systems for creators.”
• “The combination of RTX Spark’s processing capabilities and large unified memory will make it one of the best-performing laptops to run diffusion models,” said Yannik Marek, cofounder and creator of ComfyUI. “ComfyUI users can now run highly complex, multimodal workflows and generate ultra-high-resolution images and videos with unprecedented speed on a portable device.”
• “RTX Spark laptops change the game by multiplying the amount of context processing and putting it directly into a beautiful, portable chassis,” said Georgi Gerganov, founder of llama.cpp. “Highly optimized models running locally through llama.cpp with RTX Spark’s AI performance will unleash the next wave of personal, private agents.”
• “We worked closely with NVIDIA to support a great gaming experience and are excited to expand access to XBOX on RTX Spark devices, making it easy for players to discover and play with XBOX on PC,” said Jason Ronald, vice president of Next Generation at XBOX.
• “RTX Spark allows even more gamers to experience NetEase titles like ‘NARAKA: BLADEPOINT’ on ultrathin, high-performance laptops the way the developers intended,” said Long Cheng, senior vice president of Thunderfire BU at NetEase.
• “Remedy is looking forward to bringing its games together with NVIDIA to these stunning new RTX Spark laptops,” said Mika Vehkala, chief technology officer of Remedy Entertainment.
   

Delivering Powerful Creative Experiences
NVIDIA is partnering with Adobe to rearchitect Adobe Premiere and Photoshop for RTX Spark. Firefly-powered Generative Fill in Photoshop and Generative Extend in Premiere are among the hundreds of accelerated tools that deliver creative power, precision and control. RTX Spark takes these capabilities further, delivering up to 2x faster AI, editing, coloring and effects across creative workflows.

“The best creative work in the world happens in Adobe tools from Adobe Firefly to Photoshop and Premiere, and the expansion of our partnership with NVIDIA and Microsoft will make those experiences faster and more powerful than ever,” said Shantanu Narayen, chair and CEO of Adobe. “Together, we are building AI-native creative experiences for RTX Spark that deliver the performance, intelligence and responsiveness people need to create at the pace of their ambition.”

Adobe Premiere will feature a new video pipeline that taps into RTX Spark’s unified memory, Blackwell GPU and TensorRT software, delivering real-time performance for editing and color correction, GPU-accelerated AI performance and more efficient rendering of complex timelines. In addition, Adobe’s Substance 3D Painter and Stager will run natively on RTX Spark for smoother and more responsive 3D texturing and scene creation workflows.

Adobe’s next-generation Photoshop engine will be optimized for GPU-accelerated compositing, enabling live filters, high dynamic range and modern natural brushing. The AI-native pipeline is built to harness the full power of RTX Spark, including TensorRT.

Adobe will further extend Premiere and Photoshop to allow users to create, edit and design with Windows agents, providing creators with a collaborative teammate to accelerate their workflows.

Updates to Adobe’s creative apps like Premiere, Photoshop and Substance are expected to start rolling out alongside RTX Spark availability.

Premium Designs in All Sizes
Engineered to be as slim as 14 millimeters and as light as three pounds, RTX Spark laptops will be available in 14- to 16-inch sizes and feature precision-machined aluminum chassis that blends durability with a clean, modern design. Color-accurate tandem OLED displays with NVIDIA G-SYNC technology provide stunning visuals for creative work and immersive gaming.

Small, ultraefficient RTX Spark desktops are built for agents, creative workloads, gaming and everyday productivity. Major hardware makers are rallying around RTX Spark, with many designs already in development.

• “The next generation of PCs must be powerful, intelligent, mobile and beautifully designed,” said Jonney Shih, chairman of ASUS. “With RTX Spark, ASUS has the platform to build systems that define the future of personal computing.”
• “Creators shouldn’t have to choose between portability and performance,” said Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies. “With RTX Spark, Dell is delivering RTX performance and massive unified memory in the XPS 16 Creator Edition, a laptop built for people who demand the most from their hardware.”
• “Developers and creators demand uncompromising performance wherever they work in the agentic AI era,” said Bruce Broussard, interim CEO of HP Inc. “Our upcoming HP OmniBooks powered by NVIDIA will be one of the thinnest RTX Spark laptops, combining NVIDIA’s RTX performance, the breadth of the Windows ecosystem and the efficiency of unified memory to deliver unprecedented portable power for agentic developers.”
• “The NVIDIA RTX Spark represents an exciting leap forward for AI-native computing,” said Yuanqing Yang, chairman and CEO of Lenovo. “Our long-standing partnership with NVIDIA continues to turn breakthrough innovation into real-world impact. With Lenovo’s engineering and design expertise, global scale and comprehensive AI device portfolio, we are delivering a whole new level of AI experiences to creators, gamers and AI developers together, offering more choices to customers to build smarter AI for all.”
• “For users who want AI acceleration, advanced content creation and strong gaming performance in a single device, RTX Spark is a compelling new platform,” said Jeans Huang, CEO of MSI. “It has enabled MSI to redefine what a compact, efficient PC can deliver.”
• “Surface has always exemplified the best of what a Windows PC can be. With Surface Laptop Ultra, we’re bringing that focus to creators, developers and engineers who need serious performance in a device that is thoughtfully designed, portable and deeply connected to the Windows tools and platform they count on,” said Brett Ostrum, corporate vice president of Surface at Microsoft. “Our work with NVIDIA will deliver a Surface built for the way ambitious work gets done.”
   

NVIDIA and Microsoft’s collaboration to deliver agents in the Windows experience extends from personal to frontier agents with NVIDIA DGX Station™ for Windows — scaling the Blackwell architecture to enterprise developers by putting an AI supercomputer for running agents deskside.

Availability
RTX Spark laptops and compact desktops will be available this fall from leading manufacturers including ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft Surface and MSI, with models from Acer and GIGABYTE to follow.

Tune in to the keynote at Microsoft Build, running June 2-3, to learn more about Windows agent capabilities for developers, including new Windows security and containment primitives and NVIDIA OpenShell.

Watch Huang’s keynote and learn more at NVIDIA GTC Taipei.

The post NVIDIA and Microsoft Reinvent Windows PCs for the Age of Personal AI appeared first on Tech Scene ZA.

Powered by Intel edge infrastructure, a local California network demonstrates how micro-servers can deliver high-speed connectivity at a low cost.

BELLFLOWER, Calif. — A young woman unwillingly must leave her disabled mother at home to walk to the local library just to use the public internet to pay the household bills. A few blocks away, a family rations its online time, relying entirely on a son’s cellular data plan to check critical medical updates because traditional broadband is too expensive. At the weekly outdoor farmers market, small business owners regularly turn away customers because weak cellular signals prevent them from accepting credit cards.

These are the everyday realities in Bellflower; a suburb of 75,000 people located just 25 minutes outside of Los Angeles. Despite its proximity to America’s second-largest city, the community has long suffered from persistent cellular blind spots and high telecom costs that have left vulnerable residents behind.

Now, a new municipal network called Bellflower Connect is aiming to bridge this digital divide. By using a private wireless network of solar-powered micro-servers with Intel® Xeon® processors inside, and AI-driven cybersecurity at the edge, the public-private partnership offers an affordable, low-power blueprint for community broadband that organizers plan to scale to 50 additional U.S. cities under 150,000 people over the next few years.

Cutting the Red Tape

To get the network off the ground, the city of Bellflower waived standard permit charges, allowed reception towers to be built on public buildings, and bypassed lengthy request-for-proposal processes. This allowed project partner Tradewinds Networks to enter into a long-term revenue-sharing contract with the city. The funding was split through a public-private agreement, using a $1 million municipal transportation grant alongside $2 million put up by Tradewinds.

The program also includes a workforce development element, training local students to become certified wireless broadband technicians. Having won the 2025 Mobile Breakthrough Award for Social Impact, Tradewinds Networks aligned the Bellflower Connect project to meet sustainable goals, taking into consideration city health, economic development, innovation, and sustainability.

“This model allows us to aggregate services and delivery while making the network self-sustaining,” said Keith Alexis, chief technology officer and founder of Tradewinds Networks. “We then share revenues back with the community, which enables us to keep up a sustainable ecosystem that drives loyalty and usership. Additionally, our AI-based GuardTower solution runs on Xeon to keep the system secure.”

In May 2026, Bellflower, California city officials along with Tradewinds Networks chief technology officer and founder Keith Alexis, center, held a ribbon cutting ceremony officially opening the Bellflower Connect smart city network. One of the newly constructed Intel-based micro-server towers is behind them. (Credit: Tradewinds Networks)

Bringing Power to the Edge

The secret to keeping user costs so low lies in how the data is handled. Traditional wireless networks rely on sending data back and forth to distant, massive cloud data centers packed with expensive, power-hungry graphics processors. That data journey requires heavy infrastructure and immense electricity, costs that big telecom companies pass on to consumers.

Bellflower Connect skips the cloud entirely. Instead, the network uses a fleet of 80 slim solar towers and repeaters placed around town. Each tower backhauls to central locations that feature compact Dell PowerEdge XR8000 series servers running a 4th Generation Intel Xeon processor. This allows data to be processed right there in the city, and in some cases, on the street corner, a concept known as edge computing.

Because Xeon processors are highly scalable and versatile, they “snap” into these lightweight towers easily, operating at a fraction of the cost, power, and space required by a standard cloud setup.

“By having off-the-shelf Intel Xeon system-on- chip processors directly in the towers, street corner or city facilities versus sending information through the cloud, the system is scalable, modular, and information is processed faster, at a lower cost, and using less power,”
–Vijay Kesavan, a principal engineer for Intel’s Network and Edge Group.

This local computing footprint also creates a digital foundation for future municipal upgrades. According to Kesavan, cities can easily snap new services right into the existing Xeon infrastructure, such as smart street lighting, air quality or traffic sensors, and water utility leak detection.

High Tech at Low Cost

While connection to the network is entirely optional, the financial impact on residents who have been using it has been immediate. Qualifying low-income households receive free internet access through a home modem that links wirelessly to the nearest neighborhood tower. Other residents can opt-in for $15 per month, while local businesses can access the network for $39 per month. Alexis notes that’s far below traditional commercial carriers.

As of May 2026, about 60 households are using the service during its early rollout phase. By the time construction finishes in mid-2027, organizers expect 10,000 households connected to the network. Free public Wi-Fi will also blanket local parks, libraries, and the city’s outdoor markets.

Local business owners are already preparing for the transition. Joe Ung, owner of Cassidy’s Corner Café, is opening a new location in Bellflower that will use the network for his operations and customer Wi-Fi.

“Having easy, affordable, accessible internet is a win-win for everyone,” Ung told KTLA-TV in an interview about the new network in May. “A lot of times people don’t see the everyday expenses of running a small business. Anywhere you can save, it’s a huge benefit.”

Scaling the Blueprint

The expansion beyond California is already underway. Wrightsville, Arkansas, is scheduled to begin Phase 1 of its network installation this summer, with eight additional U.S. cities currently navigating the design review and approval pipeline.

Though the yearlong rollout has faced logistical hurdles, project leaders say the community response validates the effort.

“We’ve had many difficulties assembling the model for this network, from rising costs to delayed fiber delivery,” Alexis said. “But residents have testified about the value they’ve gotten from it in city hall meetings. When installers meet residents who tell them how this is changing their lives, it makes it worth finding solutions to this complex problem.”

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