Landmark Deal: 62,616 Workers of Samsung Memory Chip Division to Get  £310,000 Each in Bonuses in AI Profit-Sharing Pact

Unionised workers at Samsung Electronics’ memory chip division will receive bonuses averaging about £310,000 each through a landmark profit-sharing agreement, as the AI boom drives up chipmakers’ profits, reported the Guardian. 

Fears of a strike at Samsung were averted after two unions for the world’s largest memory chipmaker said 74% of the 62,616 workers who cast their votes had backed the deal.

The agreement, mediated by South Korea’s government, means Samsung will set aside 10.5% of operating profits at its semiconductor division to pay special bonuses to its chip workers. It should end a bitter five-month dispute.

Trillions of Miles of Data: Your Car is Spying on You, And It's Only Just the Beginning

A worrying probe has found that cars are collecting “a startling amount of data about you”  from “your weight and facial expressions to your destination,” some of which may even raise your insurance costs, reported the BBC. But commuters can limit what the companies collect about you, the report said.

The report explained that companies will tell themselves if commuters wade through their privacy policies. “The information they harvest can include precise location data about everywhere you go, who's in the car with you, what's on the radio and whether you buckle your seatbelt, drive too fast or brake too hard.” The outlet further wrote that  some cars can gather details you might not expect like your weight, age, race and facial expressions. “Do you pick your nose? Some cars have cameras on the inside pointed at the driver's seat. And most come with internet connections that can ship off that data as you drive in blissful ignorance,” the report said.

Microsoft and Uber Say AI is Costing More Than Human Workers

The cost of using AI at the workplace is proving more expensive than human labour. Microsoft dropped the majority of its direct Claude Code licences six months after it was provided to thousands of its engineers to encourage AI-assisted coding, because the token-based billing consumed the team's entire annual AI budget within months, said the Live Mint citing a report by the Verge.  

The outlet explained that at the heart of the problem is how AI computing is priced. Large language models charge per token, the basic unit of text the model processes and generates, according to Fortune. Under this model, greater efficiency and greater use both drive up total spend.

Uber, the ride-hailing company, also had exhausted its entire 2026 AI coding tools budget within just four months of the year, the report said.

The pattern across both companies reveal that the harder firms push employees to use workplace AI, the faster costs accumulate. Bryan Catanzaro, Vice President of applied deep learning at NVIDIA, addressed the issue directly in a recent interview with Axios. “For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees,” he said. 

London Mayor Sadiq Khan Cancels Met Police Palantir Contract, With Pressure to End All Links to AI Firm

The London mayor’s office cancelled the Metropolitan police contract with tech giant Palantir over a “clear and serious breach” of rules as police had only considered one supplier (Palantir), the Guardian reported. The deal would have been Palantir’s largest yet in British policing, after others worth £330m and £240m with NHS England and the Ministry of Defence.

The row comes amid a growing public backlash over the British state’s use of services provided by Palantir, which was cofounded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, and also serves the Israeli military and the US president’s ICE immigration crackdown operations, the outlet said. 

Last month its chief executive, Alex Karp, published a mini-manifesto extolling the benefits of US power and implying some cultures were inferior to others. The cancelled deal was to use AI to detect officers by scanning to see how they might be abusing rosters. The Metropolitan Police Federation, described it as a “big brother” system and criticised the “unchecked use of a controversial AI provider to spy on every single one of our colleagues”.

UK ministers said they are aware of the need for less reliance on foreign AI companies as the technology becomes increasingly applied in the delivery of public services, the report said. 

Data Centres Use of Electricity Up 15% Globally  in Two Years, Study Warns of Societal Backlash

Data centres are consuming 6% of electricity in the UK and US, as the consumption of AI is straining energy supplies prompting “community frustration” and resistance, according to research, quoted by The Guardian. The proportion of electricity used by vast warehouses stacked with microchips to power AI and the internet has risen 15% worldwide in the past two years as annual global investment in datacentres approaches $1tn (£740bn) – nearly 1% of the global economy, according to the International Data Center Authority (IDCA), the Guardian reported.

The exorbitant figures come amid energy shortages in the UK and datacentre developers reporting waits of several years for national grid connections. The IDCA said rising power usage globally was “sparking societal and political concerns” and called on tech companies to become more transparent about their plans for new datacentres to tackle “community frustration”, the outlet said citing IDCA. 

The ET cited experts warning that India’s trillion-dollar digital ambitions may increasingly collide with its warming climate. According to a Press Information Bureau report from March, India’s data centre capacity has already expanded more than 1,500 MW by 2025, and is projected to touch nearly 6.5 GW by 2030.

“Every additional degree of heat outside a data centre forces cooling systems to work harder inside. That means higher electricity consumption, rising water demand and mounting operational costs,” the outlet said.