7 – Breaking News & Latest Updates 2026
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Elissa Welle

Elissa Welle

Former Tarbell AI Fellow

Former Tarbell AI Fellow

    More From Elissa Welle

    Elissa Welle
    Elissa Welle
    OpenAI’s AI datacenters in Abu Dhabi are actually being built.

    Photos of the UAE datacenter construction site released Thursday show the footprints of the big buildings that OpenAI and its Stargate partners, Oracle, NVIDIA, Cisco, and SoftBank say will house 16-gigawatts of compute power for everything from curing cancer to sexting. Thus far, construction of the first 200 megawatts is “well underway” to meet the 2026 deadline.

    Construction site with cranes and vehicles surrounding the footprints of buildings.
    Image: G42
    Elissa Welle
    Elissa Welle
    Anthropic launches a new small model called Haiku 4.5.

    The company says it codes just as well as Claude Sonnet 4 but does so “significantly faster” and at a third of the cost. Anthropic’s advanced model is the recently released Sonnet 4.5, which can “break down a complex problem into multi-step plans” and manage several Haiku 4.5s to implement the subtasks concurrently. Haiku 4.5 is now available on free Claude plans.
    Update: Free Claude plans do not default to Haiku 4.5.

    Elissa Welle
    Elissa Welle
    Google and Amazon Web Services announce competing enterprise AI products on the same day.

    According to the companies, these will be secure AI workspace systems that can be tailored to draw only from internal documents and information. Google’s Gemini Enterprise and AWS’s Quick Suite both offer AI agents, chatbots, and automated workflows to take on repetitive tasks.