The biggest acquisition in the history of technology has been tabled. Broadcom, which itself was purchased by Singapore's Avago Technologies in 2016, has made a $130 billion bid for rival chipmaker Qualcomm. If it goes through (and that's a big if), Broadcom would be paying 20 times the amount Candy Crush-maker King was purchased for, or more than 130 times the amount it cost Facebook to buy Instagram. It could even get the equivalent of five LinkedIns for the price. The proposed deal is so big it's nearly double the biggest tech buyout of all time, Dell's $67bn buyout of EMC in 2015. Broadcom's purchase of Qualcomm would make the company dominant in the chipmaking industry.

Computers cannot think, though increasingly, they can do things only humans were able to do. A product of the field of research known as artificial intelligence, cognitive technologies have been evolving over decades. It is now possible to automate tasks that require human perceptual skills, such as recognizing handwriting or identifying faces, and those that require cognitive skills, such as planning, reasoning from partial or uncertain information, and learning. Technologies able to perform tasks such as these, traditionally assumed to require human intelligence, are known as cognitive technologies. Businesses are taking a new look at them because some have improved dramatically in recent years, with impressive gains in computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition, and robotics, among other areas.