Technology highlights for August 2026 included:
- Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company, and NVIDIA expanded their collaboration to meet demand for AI infrastructure. The companies plan to deploy 2 million additional NVIDIA GPUs across AWS’s global infrastructure and deepen their work across AI factories, CPUs, networking, open models, data processing and robotics, delivering co-engineered AI solutions.
- Anthropic and Salesforce announced Claudeforce, an expanded partnership that brings together Claude's intelligence and judgment, with Salesforce's data, rules, and trusted workflows.
- Electronic Arts, the global interactive entertainment provider, has been acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners.
- Mastercard completed its acquisition of BVNK, which provides the backend infrastructure that supports fiat and on-chain payments.
Said Nigel Green, head of deVere Group: “Mastercard doesn’t make an acquisition like this on a hunch. This is one of the most conservative, risk-averse companies in global finance putting real capital behind stablecoins as permanent infrastructure, not a passing trend.
“Investors still treating digital currencies as a speculative sideshow are behind a shift that just received one of the clearest institutional endorsements it could possibly get.”
- MBC Group, the media and entertainment conglomerate in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), launched MBC Game Studio.
- MediaTek deepened a longstanding collaboration with NVIDIA to build AI computing platforms — spanning AI infrastructure, local AI computing and automotive. As part of the collaboration, MediaTek will adopt the NVIDIA NVLink Fusion platform to provide hyperscalers, cloud service providers and frontier model developers with a prevalidated path to develop custom xPUs and bring them into NVIDIA NVLink-connected, rack-scale AI factories.- NVIDIA established independent compute financing platforms with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR.
NVIDIA also announced Q2FY27 revenue of US$96.2 B, up 106% from a year ago. Data centre revenue accounted for US$89 B of the total, up 117% from a year ago.
Green commented: "One company produced more revenue in a single quarter than its own chip manufacturer produced in an entire year. People have run out of ordinary language to describe growth like that."
He continued: "A growth rate of 106% at this size doesn’t happen by accident, and it rarely happens at all.
“Companies typically grow fast or grow big. Doing both at once, at this pace and this scale, is exceptionally rare.”
- At the National Day Rally 2026, Singapore's PM and Minister for Finance Lawrence Wong touched on developments in technology, including: "AI agents are becoming more capable very quickly. They will be able to do more on our behalf, with less human supervision. That brings enormous possibilities. But when things go wrong, the consequences can be very serious.
"Ideally, countries should work together to set common rules and safeguards. Unfortunately, this is getting harder. Because the major powers want to move faster and gain an advantage over their competitors. But we must keep trying to find common ground.
"And Singapore will do our part. We will bring countries and companies together. And build coalitions around practical safeguards.
"We will also take action at home. We will not embrace new technologies blindly. We will anticipate the risks, and put appropriate safeguards in place. And we will always ensure that people remain in control."
Geoff Schomburgk, Regional VP, Asia Pacific & Japan, Yubico commented: "Prime Minister Lawrence Wong’s emphasis on safeguarding AI agents while ensuring people remain in control is timely as businesses increasingly use AI to act across critical systems.
"AI agents can help businesses, including SMEs, automate routine work and achieve more with fewer resources. But as these agents gain more access to databases, financial systems, and communication channels, the consequences of a compromised or misdirected agent grow. Their security ultimately depends on the identities and permissions they are given.
"Businesses should therefore build in appropriate human oversight, particularly for high-risk actions. Hardware-backed authorisation can provide a trusted checkpoint, verifying human approval before a consequential action proceeds."
- The Thai Digital Economy and Society Minister Chaichanok Chidchob has called for multifactor authentication across Thailand's government systems after a spate of data leaks.
Takanori Nishiyama, Senior VP Vice President APAC and Country Manager, Japan, Keeper Security noted: "Cybercriminals increasingly log in rather than break in: Verizon's 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report found that credential abuse was the initial access vector in 25% of APAC breaches, second only to vulnerability exploitation at 42%, and that credential abuse appears across 39% of full breach chains globally.
"Thailand's Digital Economy and Society Ministry reported that about 60 million additional Thai-linked credential records accumulated on dark-web markets over the past year. Criminals bought stolen usernames and passwords, then simply logged in through connected application programming interfaces (APIs) to extract data.
"The underlying systems were not directly breached. That distinction is the point: when valid credentials open the door, perimeter defences and even fully patched systems offer little protection. Data tied to senior officials and more than 500,000 citizen records have surfaced across at least 20 state agencies, showing how quickly a credential problem becomes a national one."
Nishiyama pointed out that Japan's policy direction, including the Active Cyber Defense Law and the government's broader shift toward Zero-Trust principles, reflects the same recognition driving Thailand's response. "Static passwords alone can no longer protect systems of national importance," he said.
"Security teams should treat identity as the primary control plane. Enforcing multifactor authentication everywhere, retiring dormant and orphaned accounts and applying least-privilege access ensures a single stolen credential cannot move laterally. Privileged access management helps organizations remove standing privileges, grant just-in-time access and monitor privileged sessions in real time. Thailand's mandated password resets and system cleansing are sound first steps. Organisations should not wait for a breach of this scale to act. Audit who and what can access each system now, and make that review continuous."
- Several companies, from 1Password to the Zurich Insurance Company, have signed a global call for strengthening cyberdefences. In A call for collective action on cyber defense they highlighted the growing threat from AI-driven cyberattacks and outlined a response:
- Recognise that status quo security won’t be enough
- Empower more defenders with cybercapable AI
- Mobilise a collective response
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*SME stands for small and medium enterprise.