Versus Say More Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable Selects Creator Playbook In My Bag Trending Now Back to School Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age Switch Off Mashable Voices All Series This could be bad for rural customers. Alex Perry is a tech reporter at Mashable who primarily covers video games and consumer tech. Alex has spent most of the last decade reviewing games, smartphones, headphones, and laptops, and he doesn't plan on stopping anytime soon. He is also a Pisces, a cat lover, and a Kansas City sports fan. If you're a 90s, 80s, 70s, or 60s kid, this photo might induce some nostalgia.

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son (left) and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attend an event in Tokyo in February 2025. Apollo Global Management is in talks with SoftBank Group about boosting the size of a loan to $9 billion from $5.4 billion to help the Japanese firm finance its investment in AI giant OpenAI. The size of the financing, which is backed by assets in SoftBank's Vision Fund 2, hasn't been finalized, the people said, requesting not to be identified because the discussions are private. Representatives for Apollo and SoftBank declined to comment. Apollo made the so-called net-asset-value (NAV) loan to SoftBank's venture capital fund in 2021 and boosted it by $900 million last year to $5.4 billion.

Huawei set to unveil China's best answer to Nvidia AI chip reign People walk past the Huawei booth, where the Atlas 950 SuperPoD system is displayed, during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on July 17. | REUTERS Huawei Technologies is set to unveil new AI technology this week in defiance of U.S. export control curbs, advancing its ambition to replace Nvidia in China and compete on the global stage. Huawei's rotating chairman Wang Tao will present its upcoming Ascend 960 AI chips, to be commercially available in 2027, at the company's annual summit in Shanghai on Thursday. Some critical details that analysts will watch out for include whether the new component will be powerful enough for training frontier AI models. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.

SoftBank gets upsized $11.9 billion loan in OpenAI funding push SoftBank Group secured an $11.87 billion two-year loan from about 20 banks to support its investment in U.S. artificial intelligence firm OpenAI, exceeding its earlier $10 billion target. SoftBank Group secured an $11.87 billion loan to support its investment in U.S. artificial intelligence firm OpenAI, people familiar with the matter said, up from its earlier target of $10 billion. The Japanese conglomerate sealed the two-year facility last week, attracting commitments from around 20 banks, said the people, asking not to be identified because they're not authorized to speak publicly. The financing comes as some executives are now voicing the need to slow the pace of AI development due to escalating risks from the technology. OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said in an interview with Fortune that his company wouldn't proceed with a public offering this year as it addresses safety-related concerns.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. What you need to know before buying and using an eSIM on your next trip. Landing in Japan without mobile data can make a long travel day much harder than it needs to be. The minute you arrive you'll likely rely on your phone for train routes, maps, translation, reservations, and messages, so it's best to sort out getting connected before your flight. I've lived in Japan for nearly a decade, both in cities and the countryside, and I've used several different ways to stay connected. These days, I've found an eSIM to be the easiest option. But there are a few things worth checking before you buy one.

Five years ago, people who hang out in the stranger corners of the web started arguing that the internet was mostly fake . It had been this way since about 2016, they said, when Google introduced its artificial neural network for machine translation. Supposedly, from that point forward, online interactions began to be replaced, until nearly every message and picture had been posted by a bot. Everywhere you looked, websites were "empty and devoid of people," as one scholar of the theory put it. This wasn't true, but the core idea was tethered to a real phenomenon.

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I wore the world's first HDR10 smart glasses TCL's new E Ink tablet beats the Remarkable and Kindle Anker's new charger is one of the most unique I've ever seen I wore the world's first HDR10 smart glasses TCL's new E Ink tablet beats the Remarkable and Kindle Anker's new charger is one of the most unique I've ever seen Downsizing from a'big three' carrier can save you big money, but it has its downsides. A few weeks ago, I shared my journey of switching over to Mint Mobile, after being a T-Mobile customer for more than a decade. As you may have guessed, the move was easy to justify, with mounting price increases and forced plan upgrades being the main reasons. But going from a big household name such as T-Mobile to a smaller brand like Mint has taught me a thing or two about the downsides of Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs), too. They're mostly tolerable, with some unique fixes and lifestyle changes that I've picked up over the past few months.