Science and Technology

Microsoft says servers unexpectedly went offline, disrupting Outlook email, Teams, Copilot and other services.

Thousands of Microsoft users reported trouble accessing their email and connecting to work apps after a widespread outage hit Outlook and other services on Thursday.

Reports of problems with Outlook, the company’s email client, climbed to about 130,000 on the outage tracking site Downdetector shortly after 1pm Eastern Time (18:00 GMT), with some users saying emails weren’t being sent or received, while others couldn’t open their inboxes.

By just before 3pm (20:00 GMT), that figure had fallen to about 77,000.

Users also reported having trouble accessing Microsoft’s workplace messaging app Teams and its AI assistant Copilot, along with other Microsoft 365 services. The company said the issues could impact users in any region.

Microsoft said on X that servers were unavailable and failing automatic health checks, putting pressure on those still operating. It said it was testing a configuration change to redistribute traffic that was elevated on parts of its infrastructure and restarting affected services to bring them back online.

“We’re working to safely return them to service,” the company said.

Microsoft did not state when it expected services to be fully restored.

United States President Donald Trump travels to the Chinese city of Shenzhen next week for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, where he is due to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The trip comes as Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s outgoing chief executive and one of Trump’s closest allies in Silicon Valley, faces mounting scrutiny over his relationship with Alice Huang, a former Megaspeed executive whom US officials suspect of working for Chinese intelligence. China has denied the allegations.

On Thursday, Nvidia announced that Huang would step down as chief executive.

Huang accompanied Trump on his May visit to Beijing.

His presence mattered for Nvidia, which has struggled to secure approval to sell its H200 AI chips in China. Now, his place in the next delegation is in doubt.

So could Trump’s closeness to Huang push his administration towards a tougher line on China? Here’s what you need to know:

How did Huang shape the US-China chip thaw?

As founder and CEO of Nvidia, Huang pushed Washington to ease restrictions on the sale of advanced chips to China, arguing that wider use of US technology would help Washington hold onto its lead in AI development.

In December 2025, Trump did approve sales of the H200, Nvidia’s second-most powerful chip, to China, with 25 percent of proceeds to be paid to the US government.

He did so despite opposition from China hawks in both parties.

Huang was a surprise late addition to Trump’s delegation to Beijing in May, in hopes of unlocking stalled H200 sales. Despite Trump’s decision to allow the sales, shipments were low because of slow import approvals from the Chinese government in a bid to support domestic chipmakers.

No breakthrough was announced.

Trump has stood by Huang throughout his recent personal scandal, calling him an “honourable guy”.

Will the Nvidia scandal prompt Trump to take a tougher stance with China?

Not immediately.

Huang’s removal from Nvidia’s board and the scandal leading up to that are unlikely to significantly affect relations between Washington and Beijing, which Steve Okun, a Singapore-based geopolitical analyst, told Al Jazeera is “a stalemate at best”.

Instead, if the US continues to impose restrictions on AI product sales to China, AI diversion and diffusion – how products are traded around the world both formally and informally – would be much more likely to cause tension between the two nations.

Gabriel Wildau, managing director at the advisory firm Teneo, told Al Jazeera earlier this week that Trump “shows no sign that he intends to disrupt the current US-China rapprochement”.

But he warned that the president “may face new pressure from Congress and hawkish voices inside his administration”.

Carsten Holz, an expert on the Chinese economy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said Trump “would not seem to have a coherent China policy and therefore his position in the upcoming talks in Shenzhen is hard to predict”.

Huang’s personal affairs “will be of little relevance” to China-US relations, he told Al Jazeera.

Where is the pressure to be tougher with China coming from?

Mostly from Congress, where control of both houses will pass to the Democrats in January.

Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at the technology research group Omdia, said a tough US line on AI and China was not Trump’s alone, calling it “one of the rare political consensuses domestically across the aisle”.

Trump, he said, “will do whatever he can to protect his contribution and legacy on this matter”.

On Wednesday, Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Coons asked Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House chief of staff Stephen Miller to preserve all records on Nvidia’s chip exports to China.

“This incident raises significant concerns about the federal government’s ability to effectively enforce our export controls and protect our national security,” the senators wrote.

The news website Axios reported that Lutnick had held up a planned crackdown on firms suspected of funnelling Nvidia chips to China.

Meanwhile, procurement notices seen by the AFP news agency show that a Chinese university linked to the country’s defence establishment bought Nvidia H200 chips through a third party in September and October.

How has China responded?

Beijing has rejected the spy claims and accused Washington of using them as cover to impose stronger restrictions and semiconductor export controls on China.

“The US side should stop fabricating such ‘spy’ narratives as a pretext for imposing a technological blockade,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Mao Ning said on Thursday.

But Mao also said China is willing to work with the US to implement the consensus reached by the two leaders.

Omdia’s Su said China “has no interest in not engaging with Trump, given substantial interest in Nvidia graphics processing units”.

Chinese chipmakers may also gain from better access to US technology.

Shares in Moore Threads, MetaX and Cambricon, China’s leading makers of graphics processors, jumped nearly 10 percent on Thursday.

What happens after Shenzhen?

Holz, the Chinese economy expert, noted that the use of advanced Nvidia chips in Singapore data centres to serve customers in mainland China was “not new information”.

Still, Okun expects the pressure to build next year.

He said Congress could pass the Remote Access Security Act, aimed at stopping Chinese firms from reaching advanced chips through the cloud.

The Department of Commerce, he added, could put export controls on Megaspeed or require licences for advanced chips sent to countries such as Singapore and Malaysia.

If that happens, it will strain the US-China relationship in 2027, he said, adding “but that’s not going to happen next week”.

DEVELOPING STORYDEVELOPING STORY,

Nvidia loses more than $600bn in market value as CEO Jensen Huang steps down amid espionage and affair allegations.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has stepped down from the company following his reported affairs with a suspected Chinese spy and an Nvidia executive.

The $4.2 trillion tech giant has lost more than $600bn in market value this week as Huang’s scandals rocked the company, which supplies most of the chips powering advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technology. The stock slid more than 10 percent in premarket trading on Thursday.

The company appointed Colette Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer and executive vice president, as interim CEO on Thursday.

Nvidia’s board met on Wednesday night to discuss ousting Huang, whose relationship with the alleged Chinese spy triggered investigations by the FBI, the United States Congress and the California-based tech giant. Nvidia is also facing a shareholder class-action lawsuit.

The alleged Chinese intelligence asset, Alice Huang, is a former executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed, Nvidia’s primary business partner in Southeast Asia. Founded in 2023, Megaspeed has been investigated over whether it helped Chinese companies access its $4.8bn stock of powerful Nvidia chips.

The affair has raised national security concerns in the US, which restricts chip sales to China over concerns that the Chinese military, intelligence agencies or companies could use the advanced technology.

Huang, 63, is Nvidia’s co-founder, president and CEO. A close ally of United States President Donald Trump, he has pushed to ease US restrictions on chip exports to China. Trump said earlier this week that Huang told him he had “absolutely no idea” that he was in a relationship with an intelligence operative.

Huang owns about 3.6 percent of Nvidia’s stock, making him one of the richest people in the world. He is a powerful figure in the AI industry, which has driven record stock market and wider economic gains.

Nvidia’s board, which hired a law firm to investigate the affair with Alice Huang, met to decide Huang’s fate on Wednesday shortly after the New York Times reported that Huang also had an extramarital relationship with a Nvidia vice president who reports to him.

Nvidia’s stock has tumbled since the scandal erupted, falling to a 14-year low, the Reuters news agency reported.

The maker of Claude is looking to raise up to $64.4bn in one of the largest IPOs in history next week.

Anthropic is seeking a valuation of $1.4 trillion for its upcoming IPO, with the company looking to raise as much as $64.4bn in what would be one of the largest stock market debuts in history.

The company, which makes the Claude AI chatbot, launched its investor roadshow on Tuesday, with reported plans to go public next week.

According to its filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Tuesday, Anthropic plans to offer 825 million shares priced between $70 and $78, giving it a valuation of up to $1.4 trillion when potential shares are included.

It has also secured $26bn in a separate private placement backed by some of the world’s largest tech companies, including Google, Nvidia, Microsoft and AMD.

The listing is being closely watched as a major test for how much investors are still willing to bet on AI companies, which have driven huge gains in tech stocks and the broader US market.

The $1.4 trillion valuation is lower than earlier estimates, which had suggested Anthropic could be valued between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion, as concerns grow about the company’s enormous infrastructure spending and recent swings in AI stock prices.

Those concerns extend beyond Anthropic, with investors increasingly questioning whether AI companies can make enough money to justify their soaring valuations and sustain the boom.

Despite the uncertainty, Anthropic’s growth has been explosive.

The company reported revenues of $17bn in their third quarter, up from $1.4bn a year earlier, as its net losses narrowed. On Tuesday, Anthropic said it was on pace to generate about $81bn in annual revenue, $10bn higher than its estimate a month earlier.

The company credits its growth to the demand for Claude, including from industries like healthcare, financial services and legal services.

But to keep up with that demand, Anthropic has committed almost $900bn to computing costs with partners including Amazon and Google, a massive financial bet on continued demand for its product.

The IPO also lands in an uncertain political climate, with Democrats having just won control of both chambers of the US Congress in the midterm elections last week. The new Democratic-led House of Representatives and Senate have raised the prospect of more regulation of AI companies and new restrictions on the construction of data centres that power the technology.

AI stocks slid after the midterms, with the Nasdaq falling 5.5 percent on Thursday, its biggest one-day drop in more than a year. The selloff, also driven by declines at Nvidia, whose CEO was targeted by an alleged Chinese spy, wiped out trillions of dollars from the market.

Markets have since recovered some of those losses, though the Nasdaq dipped slightly below 1 percent on Tuesday. Some analysts argued the sell-off was an overreaction and that the election was unlikely to derail the expansion of data centres.

The decision comes after ​an OpenAI agent breached ​an Australian government website in June.

Australia will make it mandatory for artificial ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠intelligence companies to immediately report when their ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠AI models go rogue and to open their models for evaluation, the government said.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Tuesday the government had accepted all recommendations from a rapid review into the breach, which “include ⁠⁠mandatory AI company reporting when ⁠⁠it comes ⁠⁠to misaligned behaviour or cyber-incidents, and consideration of reforming criminal ‌‌law in cases of serious misconduct”.

“Australia is the first mover in this space, and we want to make sure that we continue to work so that we can reap the potential benefits from AI,” he said.

The decision comes after OpenAI-powered models hacked into an Australian government health data system in June, slipping past its digital defences and accessing files without authorisation.

Top AI firms have recently raised the alarm regarding the risk of humans losing control of their systems, calling for AI development to slow down to a pace that allows it to be safely regulated.

Earlier this year, Anthropic’s safety research scientist Evan Hubinger went so far as to say he believes there is a greater than 10 percent chance that AI could “kill all humans” within a decade.

Rapid incident notifications

The new Australian AI regulator will oversee security controls throughout the development and deployment of AI systems, identify and manage serious risks, and conduct independent ‌‌evaluations of AI models.

The AI standards would also mandate rapid notification to the government of incidents such as “misaligned behaviour” conflicting with developers’ intentions.

Australian government documents define frontier AI as the most sophisticated models at the cutting edge of current technological capability.

Albanese told OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman that the US company took too long to inform the government of the incident. OpenAI apologised for the breach and its slow response.

Inquiry recommends law changes

A government inquiry into the June breach made several recommendations, including that the government consider changing the law.

The proposed AI regulator would follow Australia’s appointment of an eSafety Commissioner in 2015. The office describes itself as the world’s first government agency dedicated to keeping people safer online.

Since December last year, the commissioner has been enforcing a world-first ban on Australian children younger than 16 holding accounts on popular social media platforms.

United States-based chipmaker Nvidia is investigating its chief executive officer, billionaire Jensen Huang, after he confirmed he had an intimate relationship with a woman accused of working for Chinese intelligence.

In an announcement on Sunday, Nvidia said the probe would be conducted by a “committee of independent directors” with outside counsel.

“While the board has no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised, the board’s inquiry will examine all available information,” Nvidia’s board of directors said.

It said the board continued to have “confidence in Jensen and his leadership team”. Huang will continue to lead Nvidia during the probe.

The investigation follows a report in The New York Times last month that Jensen may have been the target of a Chinese espionage plot.

China and the US have been in competition to dominate key tech sectors like artificial intelligence (AI).

Amid the AI boom, Nvidia has seen demand for its chips and programming interfaces explode, resulting in the company being valued in the trillions of dollars.

For years, the US has sought to restrict the export of advanced chips to China, fearing the Asian superpower could gain an edge over its technology and military sectors.

But on October 29, The New York Times said it had obtained exclusive information that a Chinese woman named Alice Huang, or Huang Le, sought to cultivate close ties with Jensen Huang in an effort to glean information about Nvidia’s technology.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington, DC, has denied any allegations of spying in the case.

The New York Times also reported that Alice Huang’s employer, Megaspeed, had become one of Nvidia’s largest buyers, purchasing some $4.8bn in equipment from the US firm.

Jensen Huang’s ties to Alice Huang, who is of no relation, spurred fierce bipartisan backlash in the US Congress in the aftermath of the report.

“For months, bipartisan members of Congress have raised concerns about NVIDIA’s advanced AI chips going to China,” Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote in a statement.

“NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang and NVIDIA’s board owe Congress answers. And we need to pass bipartisan legislation we have ready to stop advanced American technology from going to China.”

Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives also called on Huang to appear and testify before Congress about the affair on November 18.

“It is vital that Congress determines the extent to which US national security has been placed at risk,” Republicans John Moolenaar, Brian Mast and Rick Crawford said in a statement.

In an email to Nvidia staff on Sunday, Huang had admitted to having an extramarital relationship.

“I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse ‌for what I did,” Huang said.

Nvidia has grown rapidly in recent years with the rise of AI, producing chips for large language models developed by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Google.

Huang has also been closely working with US President Donald Trump since the Republican leader returned to office in 2025.

In August of that year, the Trump administration announced it would take a 15 percent cut of certain Nvidia chip sales to China.

Trump reportedly bought as much as $1.6m in Nvidia stock and sold about $1m in August, ahead of November’s midterm elections.

After the midterm races last Tuesday, stocks for AI-related companies, including Nvidia, tumbled in reaction to widespread Republican losses.

Trump has pushed back against calls to regulate AI companies, but many Democrats during the midterms campaigned on placing restrictions on the companies, including on the construction of data centres.

Nvidia lost $450bn in market value in a single trading day last week, but it rebounded on Friday, regaining 4 percent of its losses.

The unnamed individual will be the first foreign national to visit China’s space station as part of Shenzhou-24 mission.

China’s Manned Space Agency has selected a Pakistani astronaut as a payload specialist for its upcoming Shenzhou-24 mission, making the unnamed individual the first foreign national to visit the country’s space station.

The Pakistani astronaut would join China’s Shenzhou-24 mission, as part of bilateral cooperation under Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, Chinese state media reported on Saturday.

China has not identified the astronaut nor given a date of departure, but the mission is expected to take place by the end of the year.

Pakistani pilots Zeeshan Ali and Khurram Daud spent months training at the China Astronaut Research and Training Center in Beijing for a mission.

Last February, Pakistan and China, longstanding strategic and diplomatic partners, entered into an agreement, establishing a Chinese government-led programme to train Pakistani astronauts. China is Pakistan’s largest trading partner and a key foreign investor.

The China National Space Administration will also deploy Jinnah-1, Pakistan’s inaugural lunar rover. Weighing 35kg (77lb) and fitted with specialised scientific equipment, the rover is tasked with analysing plasma behaviour, radiation, and the composition of lunar soil.

The training programme includes practical operational exercises and intensive Chinese language lessons to prepare the candidates for the mission.

Beijing’s China Central Television reported that after completing a short-term in-orbit flight, the astronauts would return to Earth on board the Shenzhou-23 spacecraft.

China invested heavily in its space programme in recent years – catching up with its main rival, the United States – and aims to land astronauts on the Moon by 2030.

The US, Russia, and China are also racing to build nuclear reactors on the Moon. While the US space agency, NASA, announced plans to develop a nuclear reactor on the Moon by the end of 2030, Russia has been working with China and aims to do the same by 2036.

The reactors will be needed to power the mining of frozen water trapped deep in the moon’s craters, which scientists believe could supply drinking water, air, and rocket fuel for future bases. The reactors would also provide power for lunar bases.

Data centres face protests across Europe due to the massive amounts of computing power and water they use.

Protesters in the Netherlands have broken into a construction site for a new Microsoft data centre in Amsterdam, the latest action in a growing movement sweeping Europe.

Several hundred activists occupied the site in the Sloterdijk district on Friday, responding to a call for a two-day protest across Europe against data centres, which handle the large processing workloads associated with artificial intelligence (AI). Demonstrators clashed with police as some climbed a crane and set off flares.

Nathan Timmer, of the protest group Geef Tegengas – which translates as Push Back – told local broadcaster AT5 that demonstrators were occupying the site in an effort to stop construction.

“We don’t want it to be built. Nobody needs it,” Timmer said. “The only thing this will be used for is AI slop. AI warfare, data surveillance and committing genocide. We don’t want that.”

Pro-Palestinian activists also joined the demonstrations in the Dutch capital. By late afternoon police were escorting activists off the construction site, though some remained, local media reported.

Dutch police said they detained 150-200 people suspected of trespassing during the protest.

Microsoft said it was aware of the Amsterdam demonstration.

“We understand that people feel strongly about the project, and we respect their right to express those views peacefully,” a spokesperson said. “However, we do not condone any actions that are unlawful or that put people’s safety at risk.”

Data centres face resistance around the world due to the massive amounts of computing power and water they use. Activists argue that the boom in facilities serving cloud computing and AI is moving faster than public consultation and environmental oversight.

Dozens of civil society and grassroots groups have said they will join the “Stop Dirty Data Centres” events on Friday and Saturday in 15 European countries, including Ireland, Poland, Denmark, Finland, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, France and the United Kingdom, organisers said.

In Germany, a dozen protesters gathered in front of a data centre on the outskirts of Berlin on Friday.

“We want to put a stop to this blind construction of data centres around Germany, regardless of any environmental concerns,” said protest spokeswoman Caro Weber. “This is really, really dangerous for our future.”

About 100 people also protested against data centres in front of the Polish parliament, representing communities around Warsaw where new centres are planned.

In Italy, the fast-growing data centre industry is facing an equally rapid rise in grassroots opposition, particularly in the northern Lombardy region, the country’s main hub for digital infrastructure.

Oakland, California – Protesters dressed as cardboard robots chanted and danced to a drumbeat as they protested against new data centres outside Oakland City Hall last month.

Their concerns largely focused on how the centres — which process large amounts of digital information — might strain the energy grid.

The result, they argued, would not only be environmental harm but also sky-high electricity bills for local households.

“Power prices have gone up so much in Oakland that some people are thinking of shutting off their power,” said Carlos Gutierrez, an activist for Communities for a Better Environment, an environmental justice group.

“And the city is planning to provide power to a data centre instead.”

Opposition to data centres is growing across the United States, as residents express concern about their rapid expansion.

More than 3,000 data centres already operate in the country, with more than 1,500 others in development, according to the Pew Research Center.

But the backlash is perhaps most striking in California’s San Francisco Bay Area, a region considered to be the heart of the artificial intelligence (AI) boom.

Major AI companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta are based in the Bay Area, and the industry’s growth has been credited with fuelling a local economic renaissance.

Data centres house the advanced computer chips and servers needed to run AI-powered services such as Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

But they also require 24-hour power and a large supply of water to cool their processors.

Even with such cooling technology, data centres are notorious for emitting heat, leading to an increase in land surface temperatures as high as 9 degrees Celsius (16 degrees Fahrenheit).

A midterm election issue

Concerns about the cost of rapid data centre growth, both environmentally and financially, have catapulted the issue into the discourse around Tuesday’s midterm elections.

In the final two months before the vote, at least seven Bay Area cities, including San Francisco and Richmond, have passed temporary moratoriums on data centre construction.

They include Oakland, which passed a data centre moratorium on October 6, after days of protest.

Local politicians competing in Tuesday’s midterms have also used the topic as a wedge issue, to rally support among certain pockets of voters.

One of the most closely watched races in the Bay Area is for the seat left vacant by longtime Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi. After 39 years in the House of Representatives, Pelosi is retiring at the end of the year.

Two Democrats are competing in Tuesday’s election to fill her position in Congress: San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan and state Senator Scott Wiener.

Each one has staked out a different position on AI data centres. Wiener, for instance, opposes any ban on data centres.

“A blanket data centre moratorium could undermine AI regulation,” he told the publication Mission Local.

Chan, meanwhile, has pledged to seek a nationwide moratorium on data centres, at least until responsible AI regulation is put in place.

“Let’s start with a moratorium on data centres. Allow us to have that moment to regulate artificial intelligence,” she said at a debate in October.

Chan played a leading role in passing San Francisco’s moratorium in early October.

A poll from the University of Southern California showed Wiener leading Chan 47 percent to 41, as of mid-October.

Navigating public backlash

“Right now, data centre opposition is an issue that unifies the US public like no other,” said Shum Preston, a political analyst based in San Francisco.

So far, there has been relatively little opposition to the data centre moratoriums in local hearings. But he speculates that there may be several reasons for the lack of pushback to the bans.

Among them are the surveys indicating widespread public backlash to data centre creation.

An October CNBC poll found that 63 percent of registered US voters oppose building data centres within 16 kilometres, or 10 miles, of their homes.

“Data centres poll very poorly, and developers probably don’t want to put their supervisor friends in trouble ahead of elections. So they probably let this pass,” Preston said.

He also signalled that the short-term nature of the moratoriums may be a factor.

Certain Bay Area cities like San Francisco, Brisbane and Oakland paused construction on data centres for 45 days, with the option to extend the ban later.

Opponents of the moratoriums “will be more vocal when” the 45 days end, Preston said. By that time, the heat of the midterm election season will also have settled, he added.

“That’s when the hearings will get more contentious,” he said.

Not long enough?

Another hurdle facing the moratoriums is the lack of transparency surrounding data centre construction.

Supervisor Shamann Walton, who sponsored San Francisco’s moratorium ordinance, has argued that the city’s definition of “data centres” is outdated.

Created in 2001 — long before the AI boom — the city planning code defines data centres as “internet service exchanges”, a definition that may not accurately characterise the technology today.

Walton said the outdated language has made it hard for authorities to count how many data centres exist in the city.

Not being able to identify data centres can also prevent city officials from monitoring their power and water usage.

“We cannot use 2001 rules to regulate 2026 technology,” he said in a September 14 statement.

Another issue is the time it takes to carry out the necessary environmental assessments. The moratoriums may not offer enough time for a comprehensive review.

“Forty-five days is hardly enough time to document and study the impacts and then frame regulations,” said Roger Lin, senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, a US environmental nonprofit.

He added that legal barriers limit access to such information from the data centres themselves.

“Data centres often have nondisclosure agreements, so even local air quality boards may not know the impact of data centres on air quality,” said Lin.

Supporters tout economic benefits

Still, AI industry supporters have touted the growth of the data centres as evidence of a flourishing industry, with positive downstream effects for US communities.

Anthropic, for instance, is preparing an initial public offering (IPO) that is likely to raise billions of dollars.

But critics warn that the company’s growth may not translate into an economic boom for the San Francisco Bay Area overall.

Instead, residents fear unequal economic growth that primarily benefits the wealthy. Already, San Francisco faces some of the highest and fastest-growing home rental prices in the country.

At a hearing at San Francisco City Hall, a resident vented their frustrations about the data centres to the supervisors.

“This city is less for humans and more for robots and billionaires,” the resident said.

Both sides signed a digital trade deal, as Trump’s trade threats push Washington’s allies to seek closer ties elsewhere.

The European Union and Canada have launched what they described as an Alliance for the Future, as Ottawa prepares to become the bloc’s first so-called “associate member”.

Prime Minister Mark Carney hosted the Canada-EU summit in Montreal and signed a digital trade deal, alongside other agreements. Also at the Friday summit were European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa.

The term “associate member” has no legal basis and is contested by some EU states. However, its use underscores the desire of Canada and the EU to forge closer relations, as United States President Donald Trump continues to threaten Washington’s traditional allies with trade tariffs if they do not play by his rules.

“Canada and the EU are working to establish the closest possible partnership, which will be far from full membership, but which will make Canada the first associate member of the European Union,” Carney posted on X.

“Today in Montreal, we have taken a major step forward by establishing more than twenty measures that will increase affordability, create opportunities and ensure our sovereignty on both sides of the Atlantic.”

In a joint statement following the summit, the two sides announced an agreement under which the European Investment Bank will invest in critical Canadian resources, particularly raw minerals. They also said they would advance cooperation on artificial intelligence security and safety.

“A more dangerous and divided world has fundamentally changed the requirements of sovereignty. It is no longer enough for nations to feed, fuel and defend ourselves,” the statement said.

It added that “true sovereignty” requires secure access to critical minerals, semiconductors, payment systems, energy, vaccines, space-based communications and AI.

Ukraine was also on the meeting agenda, with Carney announcing Canada’s participation in the EU’s 90 billion euro ($103bn) support loan for Kyiv. Carney said Canada would make an initial contribution of 500 million euros ($558m).

Opportunities for students in Canada and the EU were also discussed. Both sides said they would launch negotiations aimed at deepening Ottawa’s participation in Erasmus+, the EU’s flagship student exchange programme.

Carney and Trump are currently engaged in a trade dispute, with talks under way to reach a deal between the two countries.

Within a week, two of the three largest cloud computing companies in the world signed 20-year contracts for nuclear electricity. Amazon has taken 690 megawatts from Constellation’s Calvert Cliffs plant in Maryland, including 190 megawatts of additional generating capacity expected between 2030 and 2032. Google has signed an agreement that will bring 890 megawatts of additional nuclear capacity into the United States. Constellation is investing more than $4.3bn to upgrade 11 reactors across Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Neither agreement, however, involves building a new nuclear reactor. Rather, they are paying to generate more output from reactors that already exist – some of which are even older than the companies themselves.

A few years ago, such agreements would have seemed inconceivable. Nuclear power had fallen out of favour following accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979, Chornobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011. Germany phased out nuclear power, while Japan shut down its reactors after Fukushima, although it has since begun restarting them. In many democratic countries, advocating for nuclear energy became politically difficult.

Today, an undamaged reactor at Three Mile Island is being brought back into service, with Microsoft contracted to buy its output for 20 years. The US Department of Energy is providing up to $4.4bn in loans to support the restart of three shuttered plants, with the aim of restoring about 2.25 gigawatts. Palisades in Michigan, which was closed in 2022, is contracted to be generating again by March 2027. If successful, it would become the first US commercial nuclear plant to restart after entering decommissioning.

What has changed?

The quiet reversal

In the last decade, the industry’s answer to AI’s energy problem was efficiency – things such as better chips, smaller models and smarter cooling seemed appealing and feasible. Industry conferences featured discussions about performance per watt, with modern artificial intelligence (AI) chips performing more computation per unit of electricity than their predecessors.

Yet those efficiency gains did not reduce overall electricity demand. Instead, each gain was quickly put towards something larger. Even when DeepSeek demonstrated that a competitive model could be trained at a fraction of the computing cost many had expected, the result was not a reduction in industry spending. Instead, laboratories continued planning more training runs, models that reason for longer, agents that work continuously in the background, and video generation.

This would not be the first time something like this has happened in history. In 1865, William Jevons observed that more efficient steam engines made Britain burn more coal, not less, because cheaper power created uses that had not existed before. The International Energy Agency estimates that global data centre electricity demand will more than double to around 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, even assuming continued improvements in efficiency.

Hence, the industry has changed strategy – unable to shrink demand, companies are now buying up supply.

The arithmetic of waiting

Money, however, cannot solve every problem quickly.

A new large reactor takes a decade or more from decision to electricity. Tech companies are investing in small modular reactors to power their data centres, although many of these projects are not expected to deliver electricity until the early 2030s. So far, very few of these have been built anywhere in the world. Thus, while reactor restarts and upgrades are the faster option, the “fast option” still means 2027, 2028, 2029, or beyond.

AI capital expenditure, however, does not operate on that same calendar. The chips being installed this year could be overtaken by newer technology long before the 20-year electricity contracts powering them expire. This discrepancy underpins all of these announcements, yet the industry has not addressed the implications if demand weakens while contractual obligations remain.

Who pays in the meantime

This is where the story stops being about technology.

Most of these deals sit inside PJM, the grid operator serving roughly 67 million people across 13 American states and Washington, DC. PJM uses capacity auctions to secure sufficient electricity-generating resources for future demand, with the associated costs ultimately passed on to consumers through their electricity bills. Capacity prices have reached the regulatory price cap in three consecutive auctions. According to the grid operator’s independent market monitor, data centre demand contributed approximately $29.4bn in capacity costs across the four most recent auctions. In the latest auction alone, around $6.3bn of these costs were attributed to data centre demand, including forecasts for facilities that have yet to be built.

In effect, households are already paying higher electricity capacity charges, partly because of projected demand from facilities that may never become operational. The Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that, by 2028, the typical household within PJM could face an additional $70 per month in electricity costs if current trends continue. These rising costs are also having political consequences. Recent US polling shows growing public dissatisfaction with data centres, with electricity bills among the main concerns. In response, Virginia has established a separate electricity rate class for data centres, Ohio has introduced minimum billing requirements, and Illinois is debating legislation.

The aim of the Google agreement is to tackle this objection. Its underlying principle is that major new electricity consumers should bring additional generation capacity rather than compete with existing users for an already constrained supply. This approach represents a constructive step towards mitigating the pressure that data centres place on electricity systems.

However, the arrangement remains voluntary. In October 2026, US federal regulators rejected most of PJM’s proposal to require large new electricity consumers to provide their own generation capacity. As a consequence, the industry is voluntarily offering a commitment that regulators have so far declined to impose through PJM’s proposed rules. This poses the question: how long will such voluntary commitments remain viable if the costs of fulfilling them begin to rise?

What the Gulf should take from this

For Gulf countries preparing their own AI infrastructure expansion, the US experience offers a warning about the costs of getting these arrangements wrong.

For countries with abundant energy resources, the expansion of AI infrastructure presents a significant opportunity.

Qatar’s sovereign fund has committed to a $20bn joint venture with Brookfield for AI infrastructure, beginning with a first phase of roughly 300 megawatts and potentially expanding to near 1.5 gigawatts. Abu Dhabi is pursuing plans for up to five gigawatts of AI data centre capacity. Saudi Arabia is targeting almost two gigawatts through HUMAIN. The region’s competitive advantage is substantial. As demand for AI computing grows, access to electricity is becoming an increasingly important factor in determining where computing infrastructure is built. The Gulf is well positioned to capitalise on this demand.

However, the scale of the proposed developments warrants scrutiny. If the proposed 1.5-gigawatt build-out is completed in Qatar, it would represent electricity demand equivalent to approximately 12 percent of the country’s installed generating capacity. Electricity allocated to AI infrastructure cannot simultaneously serve other purposes, meaning the opportunity costs of these projects deserve serious consideration.

In the United States, the debate over AI infrastructure is becoming increasingly centred on who ultimately bears the cost of its electricity demands, with many of the major commitments already in place. The Gulf is in a rare position of being able to settle that question first: what the industrial tariff is, who funds the new generation, what happens to the contracts when the hardware ages, and what long-term economic benefits the country would see beyond energy revenues and a limited number of jobs.

While hosting AI infrastructure can generate considerable economic value, the greater strategic opportunity lies in determining the conditions under which that infrastructure operates. For Gulf countries, the opportunity to establish these terms exists now, before large-scale commitments constrain their options.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

United States Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has sparked uproar with comments he has made denying Arab contributions to mathematics, science and literature.

In a high-voltage rant on Monday, the US health secretary said, “There’s five hundred million Arabs in the world. And yet they don’t produce science. They don’t win the Nobel Prize. They don’t win the Fields Prize. They don’t win the Wolf Prize. They don’t produce literature.”

RFK Jr, who has been involved in anti-vaccine campaigns and has promoted a debunked theory linking vaccines to autism, made the comments during a US election campaign event in Grand Rapids, Michigan while supporting Republican nominee Mike Rogers, who is up against Arab-American Democrat nominee Abdul El-Sayed, in a tightly contested battle for Michigan’s Senate seat in next week’s midterm elections.

Critics said the comments were racist, Islamophobic and factually inaccurate, pointing to modern and historic Arab innovation in multiple fields.

Here’s how Arabs have made vital contributions to the human understanding of maths, science and literature through the centuries.

Arab contributions to maths, science and humanities

The period known as the Islamic Golden Age, from around 750 AD to 1258 AD, produced many key Arab contributions to medicine at a time when Europe was said to be in its Dark Ages. During this time, Arabic was the language of science and scholarship.

1st-4th centuries: The numerals 0-9, which originated in ancient India, were adopted by Arab mathematicians who spread them across the world. They displaced Roman numerals as a more advanced number system in mathematics.

8th century: Arab and Persian mathematicians were studying the ancient Indian concept of zero in mathematics in Baghdad, long before the Europeans. The number zero was crucial to the development of mathematics – but was absent from widely used Roman numerals in Europe.

813-833: The Arab mathematician Muḥammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi – one of those studying the number 0 – is often referred to as the “father of algebra” as he was the first to treat the method as a separate mathematical discipline in his work, Al-Jabr. This method provided the first linear and quadratic equations, still used as a core part of mathematical study today.

965-1040: Ibn al-Haytham, known as the “father of modern optics”, explained the role that light entering the eye plays in human vision. He was born in Basra in Iraq, but spent most of his working life in Cairo attending to noble families.

936-1013: Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi, called “the father of modern surgery”, was considered the greatest surgeon in the Middle Ages. He wrote a 30-volume encyclopaedia detailing medical practices and designed and illustrated many surgical instruments. Born in Azahara, in Andalusia, he was known as Abulcasis in Europe.

9th century: Fatima al-Fihri founded the University of al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco. It is often cited as the oldest continually operating university.

1213-1288: Ibn al-Nafis described pulmonary circulation – the process by which blood passes through the lungs – several centuries before Europeans understood it. He wrote more than 110 volumes of work on surgery, ophthalmology and philosophy while working as a chief physician in Egypt.

915-965:  Abu al-Tayyib al-Mutanabbi, regarded as the greatest poet in the Arabic language, was Yemeni and grew up immersed in Bedouin Arabic culture. He wrote in classical Arabic and many of his verses became sayings used in everyday Arabic.

1100-1165: Muhammad al-Idrisi was a geographer known for making the Tabula Rogeriana, one of the most accurate and detailed medieval world maps, and a high point of Islamic geography. He was born in Ceuta in Morocco.

Prize-winning Arabs

In more modern times, RFK Jr’s assertion that Arabs do not win Nobel prizes for science and literature is very far from the truth. Here are some of the highlights:

1960: Nobel Prize for Medicine

Peter Medawar won the Nobel Prize for Medicine for work on for work on acquired immune tolerance, which underpins organ transplantation. He was born in Brazil to a Lebanese father.

1966: The Fields Medal

Michael Atiyah won the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award for mathematics, in 1966. He was born in London to a Lebanese father and Scottish mother. Educated in Egypt, he spent much of his childhood in Cairo and Khartoum.

1988: Nobel Prize for Literature

Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his body of work, including the Cairo Trilogy, which the Swedish Academy said formed “an Arabic narrative art that applies to all mankind”. He is still the only winner of the prize who wrote in Arabic.

1990: Nobel Prize for Chemistry

Elias James Corey won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for developing retrosynthetic analysis. He is an American of Lebanese descent.

1993: Wolf Prize for Chemistry

Egyptian Ahmed Zewail won the Wolf Prize for Chemistry. The Wolf Prize is an international award which has been presented to living scientists and artists every year in Israel by the Wolf Foundation since 1978.

1999: Nobel Prize for Chemistry

Zewail also won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for pioneering femtochemistry, which is the study of chemical reactions on extremely short timescales. He also won the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 1993.

2005: Nobel Peace Prize

Egyptian scientist Mohamed ElBaradei shared his Nobel Prize with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which he led.

2018: Wolf Prize for Chemistry

Omar M Yaghi,  born in Jordan to a Palestinian refugee family, won the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 2018 for work on metal-organic frameworks. He shared the prize with Japan’s Makoto Fujita. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) condemned his acceptance of the award because the prize is awarded by an Israeli foundation.

2023: Nobel Prize for Chemistry

Moungi Bawendi won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots. He was born in France to a Tunisian father, but based in the US.

2025: Nobel Prize for Chemistry

Yaghi also won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for developing metal-organic frameworks. These are crystalline materials with large internal cavities that can capture and store gases, harvest water from air, and trap pollutants. He shared the prize with Susumu Kitagawa from Japan and Richard Robson from Australia.

In a post on X, vaccine scientist Peter Hotez of the Texas Medical Center weighed in on historical Arab scholarship, saying, “It was the Arab scientists of the Middle Ages who kept Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen alive to hand it down in the Renaissance.”

Broadcaster Mehdi Hasan described RFK Jr’s comments as “racist” and, in a post on X, wrote: “One of the men who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry last year was a Palestinian-American, Omar Yaghi.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations called for the US health secretary to be removed. It said: “To stand on a public stage as a sitting US cabinet official and dehumanise half a billion people – and millions of Muslim and Christian Arab Americans – with fabricated, white supremacist talking points is utterly disqualifying for public office. His sweeping erasure of Arab contributions to humanity is not only maliciously false, but it also fans the flames of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate at a time when communities are already vulnerable to bigoted attacks from other public officials nationwide.”

For months before carrying out Canada’s deadliest school shooting in almost four decades, Jesse Van Rootselaar was consulting an unlikely adviser on how to perpetrate mass murder.

“In a hallway, indoors, or a crowded classroom, the 870 [Remington shotgun] is brutal … Close quarters is its playground,” OpenAI’s ChatGPT guided the 18-year-old, according to reports.

On February 10, 2026, Van Rootselaar shot his mother and half-brother at home before going to a school in the small British Columbia town of Tumbler Ridge, where he killed another six people – including five students – before taking his own life.

Earlier this week, on October 14, US authorities charged a Washington State man with allegedly conspiring with Van Rootselaar to plan the attack. But the mass shooting incident has raised questions that go beyond the traditional legal understanding of culpability.

The British Columbia government in September filed a civil lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, accusing them of failing to prevent the incident and claiming they were aware of the conversations that turned deadly. Families of the victims also filed separate lawsuits. OpenAI’s leadership issued a public apology for their failure to notify authorities.

The company has not responded to requests from Al Jazeera for its comments on the lawsuits.

But as the case against OpenAI progresses, it has spurred a familiar debate: Where should a line be drawn between reporting potentially dangerous behaviour and protecting an individual’s privacy?

“The question of whether companies should be required to turn such information over to law enforcement is extraordinarily difficult, particularly if they don’t already screen chats for indications of such types of threats,” United States-based civil liberties lawyer Jenin Younes told Al Jazeera.

“Forcing companies to implement a surveillance system implicates very serious civil liberties concerns, and that’s probably a bridge too far for me,” Younes added.

“On the other hand, AI gives individuals access to types and quantities of information they didn’t have previously that may facilitate the commission of mass casualty events, a concern it’s not easy to dismiss.”

AI’s ability to distinguish thoughts from threats

One of the biggest challenges facing AI companies is determining whether a user expressing violent thoughts actually intends to act on them.

In August, Anthropic, the company behind AI chatbot Claude, flagged a user to San Francisco police after discovering conversations allegedly threatening its CEO, Dario Amodei.

According to the San Francisco Standard, citing a police report, the user had claimed to possess an AR-15 gun and suggested he had Amodei “in his sights”.

However, when contacted by the newspaper, the man said he was joking and had no intention of carrying out any form of violence. The person was neither charged nor detained, the Standard said.

Fazl Barez, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford specialising in AI safety and governance, said current AI models cannot “reliably” determine whether an interaction with an AI chatbot “is purely hypothetical or is likely to lead to harmful behaviour”.

“Suppose you are a creative writer working on a fictional story and want to explore how a murder plot might unfold. From the context, it may be clear that this is simply a fictional narrative. If the threshold for flagging potentially harmful content is too low, such a writer could be wrongly flagged,” he told Al Jazeera.

“Similarly, consider a graduate student in biology or chemistry studying pathogens that, if misused, could have serious consequences. They might be trying to understand the risks associated with these pathogens and how to mitigate them. Such discussions may be necessary for legitimate research and education. Even when the subject matter is sensitive, they should not automatically be flagged without considering the broader context.”

The researcher said identifying a credible threat may require examining a user’s interactions across multiple conversations, rather than relying on isolated statements.

Barez said someone experiencing intrusive violent thoughts might turn to a chatbot for support, while another person planning an attack may reveal their intentions gradually across several conversations.

“Distinguishing between the two requires careful consideration of context, intent and patterns of behaviour, rather than relying on individual statements alone,” he added.

Chinmayi Sharma, a law professor at Fordham University, said the debate has parallels with the duty imposed on mental health professionals to warn identifiable third parties about credible threats.

However, she said there was a key difference – therapists have professional training, knowledge of their patients and enforceable standards governing their conduct. AI companies do not necessarily have comparable safeguards.

“My concern with AI companies is that right now there’s not a concerted effort to hire mental health professionals, sociologists, individuals that would have the unique expertise on what the indicators of threat are here,” Sharma told Al Jazeera.

“Secondly, licensed professionals are accountable to concrete, legally enforceable standards in their discipline. We don’t have something like that for AI companies.”

The privacy dilemma

The privacy implications extend beyond whether AI companies can accurately identify threats. Millions of people use chatbots to discuss relationships, emotional distress, mental health concerns and deeply personal experiences.

Civil liberties lawyer Younes said many users may not realise how vulnerable those conversations could be to disclosure.

“They often reflect a person’s innermost thoughts, questions, and desires. The majority of people assume that these dialogues will never be viewed by another person,” Younes, president and legal director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said.

Younes warned that the consequences of greater monitoring could extend well beyond those planning violence.

“If people fear their chats can be turned over to law enforcement simply because they express disturbing thoughts/violent fantasies etc, many will be dissuaded from using them,” she told Al Jazeera.

Younes argued that forcing companies to establish systems for monitoring users and reporting conversations could raise serious constitutional concerns in the US, including protections against unreasonable searches.

Meanwhile, Fordham’s Sharma also raised an issue about who could be disproportionately affected by heavy monitoring by AI chatbots.

“The concern is always there about either intentional or unintentional targeting, because if you have models trained on what we consider dangerous speech, they’re almost always going to reflect biases,” she said. “Certain minorities’ speech is over‑flagged as a threat, while other comparable speech is not.

“Even in a world in which everyone is benevolent, we should still be concerned about disparate outcomes,” she said, warning that machines could reproduce such disparities at scale.

‘Not a licensed therapist’ – When do AI companies become liable to report?

While AI companies may face moral pressure to prevent violence, their legal obligations are less clear, legal experts say.

Bryan Choi, a professor of law at the University of Colorado Boulder, said US law recognises a duty to warn in certain circumstances, including when mental health professionals become aware of imminent threats or when a special relationship exists between parties.

But those principles do not necessarily apply to AI companies.

“Under present case law, it seems unlikely that a company such as OpenAI would be held to have such duties to warn,” Choi told Al Jazeera. “The chatbot is not a licensed therapist. There is no special relationship between the company and the victims.”

Choi said existing negligence and product liability laws could potentially be applied to AI companies, but proving responsibility would present significant challenges.

Finding a balance

Fordham’s Sharma suggested that independent institutions could help establish reporting standards rather than leaving decisions entirely to private companies or requiring immediate disclosure to police.

Such bodies she said could develop procedures for assessing threats and explore ways of sharing only relevant information while protecting users’ identities and other personal details.

Meanwhile, Younes argued that users should, at a minimum, be clearly informed about whether their conversations are monitored and what circumstances could lead to information being shared with law enforcement.

“This is almost certainly an issue that will be wrestled with over the coming years, and I’m not sure anyone knows the solution at this particular point in time,” she said.

“Events that have not yet occurred will likely influence how these policies are shaped.”