Story 1 — Alphabet investors push for safeguards on cloud and AI
A shareholder coalition is asking Alphabet to explain how it governs government use of its cloud and AI technology, citing concerns about surveillance and contract guardrails.

Story 2 — EU AI rules talks stall
EU countries and lawmakers failed to reach a deal on a watered-down version of the AI Act after 12 hours of negotiations, with talks set to resume next month.

Sources

• Reuters — Alphabet investors push for safeguards on use of its cloud, AI tech
• Reuters — EU countries, lawmakers fail to reach deal on watered-down AI rules

Story 1 — EU shifts Digital Markets Act focus toward cloud and AI
EU regulators said they are turning attention to cloud services and artificial intelligence under the Digital Markets Act, including assessing whether some AI offerings qualify as core platform services and investigating whether Amazon and Microsoft should be labeled gatekeepers for cloud services.

Reuters — EU rules reining in Big Tech will now target cloud services and AI, regulators say

Story 2 — Medtronic reports unauthorized access to corporate IT systems
Medtronic said an unauthorized party accessed data in certain corporate IT systems, and stated it has not identified impacts to products, patient safety, manufacturing and distribution operations, or financial reporting systems.

Medtronic — statement on unauthorized system access

Story 1: EU Chips Act II draft would let the Commission invest directly in fabs
Why it matters: A more active EU role could reshape where semiconductor capacity gets built and how resilient supply chains become.

Bloomberg: EU Chips Act Revamp Would Let Commission Invest Directly in Fabs

Story 2: Over 40% of UK firms suffered a cyber attack last year, survey finds
Key figures: Forty three percent of businesses reported a breach or attack; roughly six hundred twelve thousand businesses reported at least one incident; phishing affected thirty eight percent.

Reuters: Over 40% of UK firms suffered cyber attack last year, survey finds

Story 1 — CopyFail: a critical Linux patch race
Ars Technica reports a newly publicized Linux local privilege-escalation flaw, CVE-2026-31431 ("CopyFail"), with exploit code circulating as many distributions race to ship kernel updates.

Ars Technica — The most severe Linux threat to surface in years catches the world flatfooted

Story 2 — China’s four-month AI enforcement campaign
Reuters reports China’s cyberspace regulator is launching a four-month campaign, in two stages, focused on AI application "malpractices" including security evaluations, data poisoning, registration, and labeling of AI-generated content.

Reuters — China launches months-long campaign against AI misuse

Story 1: GitHub rushed to fix a critical remote code execution vulnerability in less than six hours after it was reported by Wiz Research, and said a forensic review found no signs of exploitation.

The Verge — GitHub rushed to fix a critical vulnerability in less than six hours

Story 2: A London tribunal ruled Microsoft must face a mass lawsuit that could be worth up to two point one billion pounds, alleging it overcharged customers to run Windows Server on rival cloud providers.

Reuters — Microsoft must face two point eight billion dollar UK lawsuit over cloud computing licences

Story 1 — Vercel April 2026 security incident
Vercel says it identified unauthorized access to internal systems that originated with the compromise of Context.ai, a third-party tool, and led to decryption of some customers’ non-sensitive environment variables. Vercel says npm packages published by Vercel were not compromised.

Source: Vercel security bulletin

Story 2 — Microsoft investment in Australia
Reuters reports Microsoft said it will invest twenty five billion Australian dollars, about seventeen point nine billion U.S. dollars, in Australia by the end of twenty twenty nine to boost AI and cloud capacity, cybersecurity, and skills development.

Source: Reuters

Today’s story: Cadence lifts annual revenue forecast on sustained AI chip-design boom.

• Cadence raised its fiscal 2026 revenue forecast to $6.13B–$6.23B, up from $5.9B–$6.0B.
• It reported first-quarter revenue of $1.47B and adjusted profit of $1.96 per share.

Source: Reuters

Story 1: Intel’s AI CPU demand and upbeat outlook
Intel’s shares surged as it pointed to unusually strong demand for CPUs from AI service providers, underscoring that the AI buildout is expanding from training into inference and broader data-center footprints.

• Key figures: Intel shares rose more than 24% to about $83; market cap topped $416B; Intel traded around 90x next-12-month earnings; more than 23 brokerages raised price targets, with a median target of $75 (up from $46.50 about a month earlier).

Source: Reuters

Story 2: Vercel April 2026 security incident
Vercel said an attacker gained unauthorized access to certain internal systems after compromising a third-party tool used by an employee, then pivoting through the employee’s Google Workspace and Vercel accounts to access some non-sensitive environment variables.

• Key details: Vercel traced the origin to a compromise of Context.ai; it published incident updates across April 19–24; and said it found no evidence that npm packages published by Vercel were compromised.

Source: Vercel Security Bulletin