THE RUNDOWN

Sony's disc manufacturing operation in Austria is already being repurposed — the man who runs it confirmed the pivot is underway. This comes alongside broader reporting that the physical game disc, which defined console gaming for three decades, is effectively finished. Digital downloads and streaming have quietly won the format war, and Sony is acting accordingly.

Why it matters for Ghana: Digital-only gaming cuts out the secondhand disc market that many African gamers rely on for affordable titles — worth watching as consoles push harder toward subscription and digital-only models.

A European politician who was actively serving on an EU committee looking into spyware abuses had his phone compromised using NSO Group's Pegasus tool. The hack was carried out by a government customer of NSO, which means a state actor deliberately targeted someone whose job was to hold that exact industry accountable. It's a brazen move that will almost certainly intensify regulatory pressure on the spyware industry in Europe.

Why it matters for Ghana: African governments and civil society figures have previously appeared on Pegasus target lists. This case keeps the pressure on for international rules around commercial spyware — which directly affects journalists and activists across the continent.

At an internal Meta all-hands, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly told staff that the company's AI agent development hasn't progressed as quickly as he'd hoped. This is notable coming from someone who has staked Meta's next chapter on AI — it's a rare moment of candour from a CEO who usually projects confidence. It doesn't mean Meta's AI work is failing, but it does suggest the timelines the industry projected a year ago were optimistic.

Remember Mozilla's beloved read-it-later app Pocket, which was shut down last year? Meta has launched a completely unrelated app also called Pocket — this one is focused on generative AI games. It's already in app stores but appears unavailable in the US for now. The naming choice is either bold or tone-deaf depending on how much you mourned the original. You can read more about emerging AI tools that are reshaping how we interact with content.

On the one hand, Tesla reported Q2 vehicle deliveries up 25% compared to last year, with real momentum building in Europe — genuinely good news for the company. On the other hand, a Tesla driver in Texas is now facing manslaughter charges after his vehicle struck and killed a woman inside her own home last month. The two headlines together capture exactly why the conversation around autonomous and semi-autonomous driving is so charged right now.

Google and Amazon are both struggling to meet their net-zero commitments, and the culprit is pretty clear — the massive energy demands of running AI infrastructure at scale. Data centres are consuming far more power than either company projected, and the gap between their climate promises and their actual emissions trajectory is widening. It's an uncomfortable truth the industry has largely avoided saying directly.

Why it matters for Ghana: As African nations consider hosting more data infrastructure to serve local AI demand, the energy cost conversation is one policymakers need to have early — before the commitments are made.

Cloudflare is rolling out tools that let website owners block AI company web crawlers — the bots that scrape content to train large language models. The hosting giant wants publishers and site owners to have real control over whether their content feeds AI training datasets. It's a meaningful shift, and one that smaller publishers and African media outlets hosting on Cloudflare could benefit from directly. This fits into the broader ongoing debate about who owns the web's content.

Finnish quantum computing firm IQM listed on the Nasdaq today at a valuation of around $1.9 billion, becoming the first European quantum company to go public. But in a refreshingly honest move, the company's leadership acknowledged that the future of quantum technology remains genuinely uncertain. It's a reminder that quantum computing is still very much a long-term bet, not an imminent revolution.

True Anomaly and Rocket Lab are conducting Top Gun-style orbital fly-bys for the US Space Force — essentially manoeuvring satellites close to other objects in orbit on behalf of the US military. It marks a significant moment in the commercialisation of space security, with private firms taking on missions that were once purely government territory.

The FAA has proposed new rules that would allow supersonic passenger jets to fly over American cities — but only if they can do so without a disruptive sonic boom. Companies like Boom Supersonic have been working on quieter supersonic designs, and this regulatory shift could be the unlock the industry needs to make faster-than-sound commercial travel a real option again.

That's your Thursday briefing. The disc is gone, the spyware is still very much here, and even the people building AI are admitting the timeline isn't what they promised. Stay sharp out there.