2025 highlights: December

Technology highlights for December 2025 included: 

- Accenture and Palantir Technologies formed the Accenture Palantir Business Group to accelerate the delivery of advanced AI and data solutions for global clients.

- Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced the new Graviton5 chip. Graviton5 has 192 cores and a 5x larger cache. New Graviton5-based Amazon EC2 M9g instances deliver up to 25% higher performance compared to the previous generation. 

For the third year in a row, more than half of new CPU capacity added to AWS is powered by Graviton, and 98% of the top 1,000 EC2 customers, including Adobe, Airbnb, Atlassian, Epic Games, Formula 1, Pinterest, SAP, Siemens, Snowflake, and Synopsys, have already benefited from Graviton's price performance advantages, AWS said.

Parent company Amazon announced plans to bring AI to millions of Indians by 2030. The company said it is on track to invest US$12.7 B in local cloud and AI infrastructure and will bring the benefits of AI to over 15 million small businesses through its different businesses. Amazon has also committed to bringing AI literacy and career awareness to 4 million government-school students by 2030.

- Apple announced changes impacting iOS apps in Japan to comply with the Mobile Software Competition Act (MSCA). Developers can now distribute apps on alternative app marketplaces and to process app payments for digital goods and services outside of Apple In-App Purchase.  

Apple cautioned that the new requirements could lead to malware, fraud and scams, and privacy and security risks. "Apple has worked with Japanese regulators to introduce protections from new threats — including important safeguards for younger users," the company said. 

- Australia's ban on social media accounts for anyone under 16 began on December 10, 2025. 

“Although this is a huge step in the right direction, banning under-16s completely from social media could be extremely challenging to implement. Children are the most relentless when it comes to circumnavigation, so the checks will need to be robustly enforced. There are already indications that some kids have been able to bypass the restrictions in place, so these will need to be ironed out," said Jake Moore, Global Security Advisor at ESET.

"It highlights how important it is to get the features right the first time—especially when the rest of the world is watching to see how impactful the new restrictions are. Regulators will need to remain firm with any accounts set up by children and remove them as quickly as possible if they want to call this a success.”

- Binance became the first crypto exchange globally to receive a global licence under the Abu Dhabi Global Market's regulatory framework.

- Digital Realty partnered with BW Digital to strengthen cross-border data centre (DC)-to-DC connectivity between Singapore and Indonesia.

Under the agreement, the companies will jointly support the rollout of BW Digital’s Nongsa Changi Cable System (NCC), a new submarine system designed to connect Batam in Indonesia with Singapore, while also overseeing its integration with Digital Realty’s SIN12 data centre in Singapore. 

Source: GSMA Intelligence, in the GSMA Digital Nations 2025 report. Digital Nations Index: aggregate scores, 2025. Singapore tops the list of leading digital nations, followed by Australia and Japan. Brunei leads the list of emerging digital nations, followed by Indonesia and then Sri Lanka.

- The GSMA pegged Indonesian enterprises as having one of the region’s strongest appetites for digital transformation. A GSMA Intelligence survey of more than 580 companies across ASEAN showed firms in Indonesia expect to channel an average 10% of their revenues into digital transformation between 2025 and 2030, above both the ASEAN (10.4%) and global (9.8%) averages.  

- OpenAI released its latest flagship model, ChatGPT 5.2, as well as ChatGPT Images, which edits images precisely as opposed to generating a completely new and possibly different picture each time. The company also shared that the average ChatGPT Enterprise saves 40–60 minutes a day with AI. 

- Vertiv announced a new manufacturing facility in Johor, Malaysia. Scheduled to be fully operational in Q126, the facility will make power and thermal management solutions, including coolant distribution units (CDU), as well as modular and prefabricated data centre deployment solutions.  

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