Rubrik Inc. just set up shop in Saudi Arabia by teaming up with Echelon Digital Group, and this marks the company's first real local footprint in the country. The partnership will roll out data protection and cyber-recovery tools for big players in energy, finance, and government sectors across the kingdom and the wider GCC.
The whole thing ties into Vision 2030 goals around digital sovereignty and beefing up cybersecurity infrastructure. Organizations get help locking down critical data and keeping operations running when threats hit.
Both companies are putting money and resources into expanding throughout Saudi Arabia and neighboring Gulf states, with the end goal of helping the kingdom become a major tech hub on the global stage.
Red Hat and AWS teamed up to run generative AI workloads on custom Amazon silicon like Inferentia2 and Trainium3 instead of relying purely on Nvidia GPUs. The setup uses Red Hat AI Inference Server with vLLM optimization to handle any model while cutting costs by 30 to 40 percent compared to GPU-based EC2 instances. Red Hat also built an AWS Neuron operator for OpenShift to make deploying AI stuff on AWS accelerators way less painful.
The partnership targets companies trying to scale inference without blowing their budgets on hardware, and IDC says 40 percent of orgs will be running custom chips by 2027 anyway. Red Hat threw together an Ansible collection for easier orchestration, and they are contributing upstream fixes to vLLM since...
CyberKnight just locked down a partnership with Horizon3.ai to push automated penetration testing across the Middle East and North Africa. The deal got announced at Black Hat with Matt Percival and Tamer Odeh from Horizon3.ai meeting up with CyberKnight's CEO Avinash Advani and Chief Strategy Officer Wael Jaber. Horizon3.ai has run over 180,000 autonomous pen tests, and Gartner recently name-dropped them in the security ops hype cycle under adversarial exposure validation.
The platform automatically chains misconfigs, vulnerabilities, and credential gaps into simulated attack paths across internal, external, cloud, and hybrid setups. That lets security teams see what attackers would actually exploit instead of just ticking compliance...
Zoho dropped a bunch of upgrades to Zoho One that bundle its 50 apps into customizable Spaces for personal tasks, company-wide comms, and department functions like HR or finance. The revamped dashboard pulls data from Zoho and third-party tools into one view, and there is a new visual collab feature called Vani for flowcharts and whiteboarding. The platform serves over 75,000 customers globally, and the average org runs 22 apps from the suite.
Admins get a unified integration panel to track connections between Zoho apps and outside services, plus workflow tools like Smart Offboarding that handle device data and ownership transfers in one shot. Zia, the AI assistant, got deeper hooks across the platform to aggregate insights and answer...
Thales and Arab International Optronics locked in a renewed deal to push Egypt toward tech independence and turn the country into a regional manufacturing hub. The French defense giant is dropping over 800 engineers into the mix to build locally made systems, and the partnership covers everything from fire control upgrades for armored vehicles to laser-guided weapon mods for AIO's X29 platforms. They are also setting up a Thales Academy to train Egyptian military and government people on optics, cybersecurity, AI, and radar tech through certified programs with French university collaboration.
The surveillance side gets combat-tested gear like ground radar and handheld thermal imagers tied into a unified command system for faster threat...
Veeam and HPE just beefed up their partnership with a bunch of new tools aimed at making data backup way less painful for big companies. The big ticket item is a beta plugin that lets Veeam protect VMs running on HPE Morpheus VM Essentials, and they are also bundling HPE Private Cloud Business Edition with the Veeam Data Platform to kill off janky DIY setups. On top of that, the combo with HPE StoreOnce can now squeeze data down at a 60 to 1 ratio, which cuts costs and speeds up restores.
HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 is getting NVMe support plus faster snapshot integrations for quicker backups and recovery. Both companies are rolling out workshops and maturity assessments to help orgs figure out where their cyber resilience actually...
AMD might drop new X3D chips that actually let you game hard without tanking your productivity scores. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 and Ryzen 7 9850X3D are rumored to use fresh Zen 5 CCDs that could hit 5.6 GHz or maybe even 6.0 GHz, and the idea is to match the regular 9950X in multi-core tasks while still crushing it in games. Leakers say AMD wants these processors to work for people who need both single-thread speed and heavy workload muscle.
The new stepping could also let AMD bin lower-quality silicon into a possible 6-core Ryzen 5 9650X, though nothing is locked down yet. Launch window is supposedly the first half of 2026, with CES being the likely reveal spot. If this all checks out, X3D chips might finally escape the gaming-only niche...
ASUS might be sitting on a major data breach after the Everest ransomware crew said it yanked about a terabyte of internal files from the company. The group dropped directory screenshots showing what appear to be firmware repos, dev materials, and engineering docs, but ASUS has not confirmed anything yet. Everest claims this was pure data exfil with no encryption involved, and they are trying to sell the haul instead of locking systems down for ransom.
The leaked samples seem legit based on what security researchers are seeing, and the focus on BIOS code plus proprietary firmware raises serious concerns about exploit risks or tampering down the line. Hardware makers have been getting hammered by groups chasing high-value IP instead of...
Intel's next-gen Panther Lake chips are packing Xe3 graphics that apparently smoked AMD's Radeon 840M by around 26 percent in early benchmark runs. The test involved a four-core Xe3 iGPU on an engineering sample, and the results hint at better efficiency rather than just throwing more cores at the problem. Intel seems focused on squeezing more performance per watt out of mobile platforms, where thermal headroom is always tight.
The 840M has been AMD's bread-and-butter iGPU for budget laptops, so a solid lead over that chip means baseline graphics capabilities are getting a real bump for entry-level machines. Real-world performance will depend heavily on memory configs and OEM tweaking since these early numbers come from synthetic...
