The first pilot launches in October in the Leiria region, with around 100 workers, while a second tests AI inside five or six mould-making factories in Marinha Grande. The national target is 100,000 SME workers, backed by over €400 million already paid out through IFIC and another €800 million reprogrammed from the PRR recovery fund.

Portugal already had a €400 million plan for artificial intelligence, announced back in June. What it lacked was a date and an address. Now it has both. The Minister of Economy and Territorial Cohesion, Manuel Castro Almeida, told Parliament the goal is to train 100,000 workers at small and medium-sized businesses in artificial intelligence — and that the first pilot launches as soon as October, in the Leiria region, with around 100 workers from various…

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The Series D is led by UC Investments, making its first direct investment in Europe, and Baillie Gifford. In August the talk was of about €500 million at a €5.5 billion valuation; it closed at almost exactly those terms.

TEKEVER, the autonomous-systems company founded in Portugal, has closed the first tranche of a $580 million Series D round, valuing the business at $6.4 billion. The company confirmed the figures itself, with UC Investments (the University of California's fund, making its first direct investment in Europe) and Scottish investment manager Baillie Gifford leading the round.

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At Lisbon AI Week, Observador general director Rudolf Gruner said roughly half the paper's visits came through Google tools, and that share is falling as AI answers people directly. The homepage, over 60% of page views in 2014, is now under 20%.

Lisbon AI Week is running across the city through Sunday, with dozens of events from hackathons to debates on creativity, health and security. At one of them, on AI and the media, a newspaper boss did something AI panels rarely do: he put his own numbers on the table. Rudolf Gruner, general director of Observador, said roughly half of the paper's visits used to arrive through Google's tools (Search, Discover and Google News). That traffic is now falling.…

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A draft royal decree would force data centres to cover 80% of every hour's electricity with newly built renewables. The industry puts nine billion euros at risk and names Portugal as the alternative. The reason for the clampdown is in the decree's own preamble.

The short version doing the rounds this week is easy enough: Spain tightened the rules on data centres, and the industry is threatening to move to Portugal. The long version is sitting in the document nobody opened, and it is considerably more interesting. Spain's ecological transition ministry has put out for public hearing a draft royal decree setting energy, environmental and digital sovereignty requirements on any installation above 1 MW. The…

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Google's sign-to-text feature turns ASL into written English. Portuguese Sign Language is not part of it, and a month after the Portuguese launch there is still no per-feature language list for the rest of Gemini.

When the Pixel 11 reached Portuguese shops in August, one question went unanswered: does the artificial intelligence that fills the whole presentation actually work in Portuguese? For one feature there is now an answer, and it is narrower than the launch suggested. Sign-to-text, sold as one of the range's headline accessibility wins, reads American Sign Language and writes English. This is not a market rollout waiting on a switch somewhere. It is how the…

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OpenAI closed the hole fourteen hours after it was reported and paid a 6,500 dollar bounty. The figure that matters to anyone running a website is the cost: a two-month campaign that also probed Slack and Meta ran on under 3,000 dollars of tokens.

The version of this story that travelled was the catchy one: a team used one AI lab's model to get inside another AI lab. That is documented and true. The detail worth your attention if you run a website sits halfway down the report instead. Start with what happened. On 25 July, three researchers at a security startup called Hacktron AI reached OpenAI staff accounts and, through them, an internal code repository. To prove the access without reading…

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Zunder's station at junction 19, outside Caldas da Rainha, went live on 11 September with 400 kW CCS points and a solar canopy. The bays sized for heavy vehicles are the first public ones in Portugal.

If you drive an electric car between Lisbon and Porto, range has quietly stopped being a conversation. If you drive an electric lorry, it is most of the conversation, because until this month there was nowhere public in Portugal to stop halfway and put charge back into a heavy vehicle. The station the Spanish operator Zunder opened on 11 September at Caldas da Rainha is the first answer to that, on a modest scale. It sits at junction 19 of the A8, beside…

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It went up on a Vega-C from Kourou on 15 September, the first satellite built specifically to measure photosynthesis. It flies at 814km, has three and a half years of life and revisits the same spot every 27 days.

A struggling plant does not change colour on the day it starts struggling. It slows down internally first, and the leaf gives the game away weeks later. Catching that earlier stage is the whole reason the European Space Agency put a satellite up this week. It is called FLEX, and it launched on 15 September aboard a Vega-C from Kourou in French Guiana, on flight VV30. It had company. Copernicus Sentinel-3C rode the same rocket, sitting on top of the launch…

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MEO says the outages were a distributed denial-of-service attack and that no data was accessed. Under the cybersecurity regime in force since April, the operator now owes a 24-hour notification, a 72-hour update and a final report within 30 working days.

If your internet and television dropped out three separate times between Monday night and Tuesday morning, that was not a fault on the line. MEO's own technical analysis points to a distributed denial-of-service attack aimed at its infrastructure, with enough traffic thrown at it to congest the network and degrade service temporarily. The operator was precise about two things. Nobody got into the data, its own or its customers'. And the instability in BGP…

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Dario Amodei published a 3,800-word essay on Saturday arguing the industry should pace itself, with a three-step plan. Sam Altman and Elon Musk backed it within hours. On Sunday Donald Trump called the people asking for it negative forces.

On Saturday the chief executive of Anthropic published a roughly 3,800-word essay arguing that the artificial intelligence industry should deliberately slow the rate at which it improves model capabilities. Within hours, two competitors who agree with him on almost nothing said he was right. The essay is called We Must Pace the Frontier and it sits on Dario Amodei's personal site. It sets out three steps. The first is giving outside evaluators permanent,…

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Portugal closed the second quarter of 2026 with 4.9 million fixed broadband lines. Connections at 1 Gbps or faster overtook the 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps tier for the first time.

Something quiet happened in the regulator's quarterly figures. At the end of June, fixed internet connections running at 1 Gbps or more made up 47.4% of the total, against 46.9% for those between 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps. It is the first time the top tier has come out in front. For years it was the small slice. Now it is the biggest one. Portugal ended the second quarter with 4.9 million fixed broadband accesses, 102,000 more than a year earlier, a rise of…

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The Amazon Leo contract with Arianespace grows from 18 to 24 launches through 2031, with the new flights starting in 2029 on the heavier Ariane 64. Three missions have already put 100 satellites in orbit this year.

Amazon has ordered six more launches from Arianespace, lifting the total number of contracted Ariane 6 flights for its Amazon Leo constellation from 18 to 24. The added flights begin in 2029 on the higher-capacity Ariane 64, and the programme now runs to 2031. It is the largest commercial contract in Arianespace's history, and Amazon Leo is its single biggest customer. That tells you something about where the money in European spaceflight currently sits:…

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ANACOM's draft rules on switching internet providers close for comment on Friday. They hand the whole process to the incoming company and carry a €5,750 ceiling that is already law for phone numbers.

If you have ever switched broadband in Portugal, you may know the gap. The old line is cut, the new one is not up yet, and the two companies spend the week pointing at each other while you tether off your phone. Nobody is responsible, so nobody pays. ANACOM wants to close that gap. The regulator has a draft regulation on changing internet access providers out for public consultation, and comments close this Friday, 11 September. The core of it is a shift…

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Isar Aerospace's Spectrum lifted off from Andøya on 5 September and reached orbit around seven minutes later, deploying five CubeSats. Portugal's Santa Maria has the licence and the geography, but no flight yet.

Europe spent years saying it needed to be able to launch for itself. On Saturday it started being able to say that in the past tense. Spectrum, built by Germany's Isar Aerospace, lifted off from Andøya in northern Norway and reached orbit around seven minutes later, deploying its payloads there. It was the launcher's second flight and its first carrying satellites: five CubeSats plus a non-deployable scientific experiment. It is the first orbital flight…

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The EU regulation gives every member state 24 months from the implementing acts to provide at least one European Digital Identity Wallet, which puts the deadline at 24 December 2026. The source code has to be open, and you choose what you hand over.

There is a date in the European calendar almost nobody has circled, and it changes how you prove who you are. The regulation that rewrote eIDAS says each member state shall provide at least one European Digital Identity Wallet within 24 months of the implementing acts entering into force. Run the clock and it lands on 24 December 2026. Article 5a states the aim plainly: everyone in the Union should have secure, trusted, cross-border access to public and…

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A single particle interaction recorded nearly a mile underground in South Dakota has survived three years of scrutiny. It sits at 2.6 sigma, well short of a discovery, and a Coimbra team has been in the collaboration since it was founded.

One day in June 2023, a xenon atom inside a tank buried nearly a mile down in a disused South Dakota gold mine was nudged by something. It left a faint flash of ultraviolet light and a recoiling nucleus. Three years on, the collaboration that runs the detector still cannot pin that event on any known background. The announcement came this week at a conference in Japan. It is the strongest hint LUX-ZEPLIN has ever put forward, and the thing to say straight…

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Portugal's telecoms regulator ruled on 7 July and published on 31 August: the change went through without 30 days' written notice and without telling subscribers they could leave free. NOS is appealing.

If at some point over the past year an advert started appearing whenever you opened an automatic recording on NOS television, and you do not remember being warned, you were not being careless. So were 821,641 other subscribers, and the regulator has now said the way it was done broke the rules. The fine is €350,000. ANACOM took the decision on 7 July and only made it public on 31 August. An operator that wants to change contract terms cannot simply change…

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REPMUS 2026 has brought 36 navies, 1,500 people, 14 ships and more than 300 unmanned maritime systems to Tróia and Sesimbra, across 1,370 square kilometres of water.

The 16th edition of REPMUS started on Monday at Tróia and Sesimbra, and the scale still takes a moment to absorb. More than 300 unmanned maritime systems, 14 ships supporting them, and 1,500 people from 36 navies. It runs until 25 September. The Portuguese Navy has hosted it since 2010 and calls it, without much modesty, the largest robotics and unmanned-vehicle experimentation exercise in the world. The name is entirely literal: Robotic Experimentation…

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In a California court, Sony argues no reasonable consumer thinks they own the games they buy on the PS Store. In Europe the fight was never about ownership, and the Commission's answer to 1.29 million signatures was still no.

The button says buy. The contract says licence. For twenty years almost nobody cared about the gap, and now it is being argued in two places at once: a federal courtroom in California and a Commission document in Brussels. The courtroom first. Four players sued Sony Interactive Entertainment in June, claiming the PS Store checkout breaches a Californian law in force since the start of 2025 that bars sellers from advertising digital content as a purchase…

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The filing lodged with the Massachusetts regulator names 14 September as the effective date and carries no price at all. Reports put it somewhere between 200 and 300 million dollars.

A company that started in Porto is about to buy one of the best-known meditation apps in the world. Sword Health is taking over Headspace, and the deal surfaced where these things usually surface first: in a form handed to a regulator. The notice of material change was filed with the Massachusetts Health Policy Commission in July and only spotted afterwards. It says OrangeDot, Headspace's parent, will merge with an entity created for the purpose and…

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Invitations went out on 26 August under the line Surprise and Shine. The keynote runs from the Steve Jobs Theater at 6pm Lisbon time, eight days after John Ternus takes over from Tim Cook.

The date has moved from the rumour calendar to the real one. Apple has booked its September keynote for Wednesday the 9th, 10am in California, which is 6pm in Lisbon and 5pm in London. A reasonable hour, for once. The invitation carries the line Surprise and Shine. The venue is the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple Park, and it streams live on Apple's site, the Apple TV app and YouTube. The thing that sets this keynote apart from the previous ten is not on the…

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Meta has upgraded two-step verification from a numeric PIN to an alphanumeric password, added caller context on Android for numbers you have not saved, and started letting you register more than one passkey per account.

WhatsApp has made three changes to how accounts are protected. None of them is a shiny new button, which is rather the point. They all sit at the door a stolen account normally walks through. The one that matters most is two-step verification. Until now that extra layer was a six-digit PIN. It is now a proper password: longer, alphanumeric, special characters allowed. Six digits give you a million combinations, which is not much of a wall in 2026. An…

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The council waved through a preliminary application from the Hyperion group at the Alvega roundabout, next to an EDC ONE site already approved at Pego. At full load the pair would use about 2.8 TWh a year against the municipality's 148.8 GWh in 2024.

Abrantes council has given a unanimous favourable opinion to a preliminary application for a second large data centre in the municipality. The developer is the Hyperion group, the site sits beside the Alvega roundabout, and the footprint runs to roughly 151,000 square metres of ground area and 287,000 square metres of built space. It carries Project of National Interest status, which shortens the administrative clock. It will have company. Since September…

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The Council of Ministers approved a legislative authorisation making the iAP platform compulsory for data sharing between public bodies. What passed is permission to legislate, not the rule itself.

If you live in Portugal you have done this. Queued for a certificate at one counter in order to hand it in at another. Printed a proof of address the state itself issued, so you could give it back to the state. Carried a tax clearance certificate across town to a service that could have looked it up in seconds. On 20 August the Council of Ministers approved a legislative authorisation bill creating a legal regime for the interoperability of data and…

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The Romanian challenger closed June with 960,000 active services, up from 789,000, and revenue of €37.2 million. Mobile did almost all the work.

DIGI arrived in Portugal in 2022 selling tariffs the incumbents would not match. The accounts now show what that bought. The operator ended the first half of 2026 with 960,000 active services, against 789,000 a year earlier — 171,000 new contracts in twelve months, or growth of 21.7%. Mobile is the engine. Of that total, 545,000 are mobile services, nearly 30% up on a year ago. Fixed internet and data reached 186,000 customers, a 29.2% jump, and 147,000…

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Rural Portugal already beats the EU average on 5G and very-high-capacity networks. The gap is the half a million homes with no fibre at all, and a €172.3 million contract now aims at them.

The same table supports an optimistic reading and an impatient one, and both are fair. The optimistic one first. In rural Portugal, 5G now reaches 95.3% of homes and very-high-capacity networks reach 81.6% — a figure the regulator puts 8.9% above the EU average. Fibre to the home covers 73.1% of rural territory, also ahead of the European average. The numbers come from the Connectivity Coverage in Europe 2025 study, and ANACOM sets them out on its facts…

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Any connected product placed on the European market from that date must be built so the user can reach the data it generates. The right has existed since 2025 — what changes is that it stops depending on the manufacturer's goodwill.

Your car logs how hard you brake, where you park, how often the driver's door opens and the moment a sensor started misbehaving. A tractor counts engine hours. A watch counts steps. For years all of that sat somewhere the owner of the machine could not reach. The manufacturer could reach it. So could whoever the manufacturer let in. That changes status on 12 September. From that date, the part of Regulation (EU) 2023/2854 known as the Data Act requires…

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On 20 August in Macaíba, the Brazilian government announced a R$1bn tender for PAX RN, a machine targeting 7,200 petaflops. Alongside it, a second supercomputing hub in Rio with Huawei and iFlytek, dedicated to Portuguese-language models.

There is a quiet race happening on the other side of the Atlantic, and it is about the language spoken in Portugal. On Thursday, at the Augusto Severo science and technology park in Macaíba, the Brazilian government announced a public tender worth one billion reais for PAX RN, a supercomputer targeting 7,200 petaflops — roughly 7.2 quintillion operations a second, which would put it among the ten most powerful machines in the world. The interesting part…

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Adam Mosseri unveiled the first change to Instagram's written logo in ten years on 13 August. The script stays, the serifs are flattened and detached, the app icon is untouched, and the internet has decided it now reads as Instagzam.

Instagram has changed its written logo for the first time since 2016. Head of app Adam Mosseri announced it on 13 August across the official Instagram and Threads accounts, and it is reaching phones worldwide over the following days. What changed is subtle and, once you have seen it, impossible to unsee. The script survived, because it is the part anyone recognises from across a room. But the stroke is more compact and heavier, the serifs have been…

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Active Space Technologies has confirmed it is taking part in EnVision, the European Space Agency mission to Venus. The spacecraft was selected in 2021 and is due to launch in the early 2030s.

Founded in 2004 and based in Coimbra, Active Space Technologies does one fairly narrow thing: bespoke electro-mechanical systems for extreme environments. Instruments, mechanisms, actuators, wireless sensing. Hardware that has to keep working where nothing was designed to work. Which is how it comes to be taking part in EnVision, Europe's mission to Venus. This is not the company's first trip out of the atmosphere. Over two decades it has contributed to…

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