In just four weeks, we saw generative agents leave beta, hyperscalers flaunt agentic AI infrastructure, and quantum labs smash coherence records. Capital kept pouring into big bets, regulators sharpened their pencils, and the line between cloud and AI are blurring even further. Buckle up for the second half of the year where scale, safety, and sovereignty will dominate every roadmap.

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Artificial Intelligence

ChatGPT Agent goes live

OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT Agent, a unified model that autonomously selects tools, fetches data, and delivers step-by-step plans, rolling out immediately to Pro, Plus, and Team tiers. Early adopters report 40 percent faster workflow completion and smoother plug-in chaining. Privacy groups are pressing OpenAI to clarify how the agent logs third-party API calls.

Apple investors push for a megadeal

With shares sliding, Tim Cook told CNBC he is “open” to a record-size AI acquisition, renewing chatter about a possible Perplexity AI buy that could eclipse Beats many times over. Analysts say a purchase would slot directly into Apple Intelligence for on-device search and sidestep Google traffic-acquisition fees. Board discussions are said to hinge on whether Perplexity’s data licenses meet Apple’s stringent privacy standards.

Meta stalls ‘Behemoth’ Llama 4

Internal doubts forced Meta to delay its monster Llama 4 “Behemoth” model to the fall, fuelling industry worries that simply scaling parameters is hitting diminishing returns. Engineers are now testing sparsity techniques to tame compute costs and energy draw. The pause also gives Meta time to harden safety layers after recent red-team leaks.

xAI lines up US$12 billion in debt

Elon Musk’s xAI is working with bankers to raise up to US$12 billion, signalling that the capital arms race for GPU clusters is far from over. The debt package is expected to fund a 100-hectare Texas compute campus powered by solar and modular nuclear reactors. Banks reportedly priced the deal assuming future government AI-security contracts.

Thinking Machines Lab’s seed buzz continues

Coverage of Mira Murati’s US$2 billion seed round kept reverberating, underscoring investor appetite for agentic multimodal research. The six-month-old lab has already demoed a reasoning engine that chains video, code, and simulation data in one prompt. Competitors worry the funding will drain senior talent from Big Tech labs.

Regulations

The EU AI Act makes Europe’s risk-based rules the default standard for any AI system that reaches EU users, forcing global developers to document training data, prove human oversight, and meet tiered safety tests or face fines up to seven percent of worldwide revenue.

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Cloud Computing

OpenAI signs US$30 billion Oracle deal

Project Stargate will tap 4.5GW of OCI datacentre capacity, vaulting Oracle into the top tier of AI infrastructure providers. A new Nevada campus will come online in 2026 with direct fiber to OpenAI’s San Francisco HQ. Oracle claims the agreement doubles its high-density GPU footprint overnight.

AWS debuts Bedrock AgentCore

At AWS Summit New York, Amazon launched AgentCore plus a US$100 million fund to help enterprises deploy agentic AI at scale and with governance baked in. The toolkit ships with Guardrails for policy checks and native connectors to ServiceNow and Salesforce. Early pilot customers include BMW and Pfizer.

Google Cloud sets Guinness record

A 2,000-developer hackathon on July 27 earned Google Cloud the title for the world’s largest AI-agent training event, spotlighting its growing developer mindshare. Participants generated more than 5,000 open-source agent templates now hosted in Agentspace. Google plans quarterly repeats to cement ecosystem momentum.

Microsoft sovereignty doubts surface

Under Senate questioning, Microsoft admitted it “cannot guarantee” data sovereignty for EU customers if compelled by U.S. authorities, raising fresh cloud-trust questions. German regulators called the statement “troubling” and signaled stricter procurement reviews. Rivals such as OVHcloud are seizing the moment to market fully EU-controlled stacks.

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Quantum Computing

Finland shatters coherence record

Aalto University researchers measured millisecond-scale transmon coherence, leapfrogging prior 0.6ms marks and edging closer to error-corrected qubits. The team credits fluxonium shielding and ultra-pure aluminum films. Modeling suggests the advance could cut logical-qubit overhead by 30 percent.

Rigetti hits 99.5 % two-qubit fidelity

Rigetti’s modular architecture delivered a new gate-fidelity high, validating its tiled-chip roadmap toward larger fault-tolerant systems. The 128-qubit Ankaa-3 processor beat DARPA’s latest benchmark by a full percentage point. Rigetti says commercial customers will access the chip via its QCS cloud before year-end.

IonQ raises US$1 billion

A fresh equity offering boosts IonQ’s cash pile to nearly US$1.7 billion, funding its push for 100k high-fidelity qubits by decade’s end. Intel Capital joined as a strategic investor to co-develop barium ion traps. The raise also earmarks funds for a new Maryland fab slated for 2027.

Lucy photonic computer on track

France’s Quandela and Germany’s Attocube advanced the EU’s Lucy project, aiming to demo scalable photonic qubits that run at room temperature. The latest milestone integrated on-chip interferometers with telecom-band emitters, a key step for fiber-based quantum networks. A public demo is scheduled for December.

Orbit-ready quantum demonstrator

A July 30-31 roundup confirmed plans for the first quantum processor launch into low-Earth orbit, opening a path to space-based error correction. The 12-qubit payload will hitch a ride on an ESA Vega flight in early 2026. Engineers will test radiation hardening and laser-link entanglement between satellite and ground stations.

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In summary, agents are out of the lab and into the wild, cloud vendors are racing to own sovereign and agentic stacks, and quantum milestones keep shrinking error budgets. Expect more cash, more compliance heat, and sharper performance records as 2025 barrels toward its final quarter.

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DJ Leamen is a Machine Learning and Generative Al Developer and Computer Science student with an interest in emerging technology and ethical development.

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