Tech News Digest: Thursday, 7 May 2026

Thursday's tech roundup brings fresh AI model releases, a major UK data centre announcement, and more signs that the side hustle economy is being turbocharged by automation tools. Here's what you need to know heading into the weekend.

Google Unveils Gemini 2.5 Ultra — The Most Capable Model Yet

Google DeepMind officially launched Gemini 2.5 Ultra on Wednesday, claiming top-of-leaderboard performance across coding, maths, and multimodal reasoning benchmarks. The model is available via the Gemini API and will roll out to Google Workspace users over the coming weeks. In the UK, Google Cloud's London and Hertfordshire regions will serve the model with reduced latency — a significant win for British enterprises keen to keep data on-shore. Developers on the free tier get limited access, while paid tiers unlock extended context windows of up to two million tokens. Early reviews from UK fintech teams suggest it handles complex document analysis impressively, though prompt costs remain a consideration for high-volume applications. Google says a distilled "Ultra Lite" variant will follow in Q3 2026.

Apple Acquires British AI Startup Synthient for Reported £400m

Apple has quietly snapped up London-based Synthient, a startup specialising in on-device personalisation AI, in a deal understood to be worth around £400 million. The acquisition is Apple's largest UK purchase in over a decade and signals the company's continued push to run sophisticated AI models locally on iPhones without shipping data to external servers. Synthient's 60-person team, based in Shoreditch, will join Apple's machine learning division and is expected to remain in London. The deal underscores London's status as a global AI hub, with the city consistently ranking among the top three globally for AI investment. For UK tech workers, it's a reminder that building niche, privacy-focused AI tools can attract serious acquisition interest from the biggest players in Silicon Valley.

OpenAI Expands ChatGPT Enterprise to NHS Trusts

OpenAI announced a new partnership with NHS England to trial ChatGPT Enterprise across five NHS Trusts, covering administrative tasks, patient correspondence drafting, and clinical documentation support. The pilot, which runs through the end of 2026, comes after months of negotiation over data governance and GDPR compliance — a particular sticking point given the sensitivity of health data. Crucially, NHS data will not be used to train OpenAI's models under the agreement. Healthcare workers will access the tool via a secure, NHS-branded portal. The move has drawn both enthusiasm from overstretched admin teams and caution from clinical unions, who want clear protocols on human oversight before AI touches anything patient-facing. The results of the pilot could shape NHS-wide AI adoption policy.

Microsoft Copilot Gets Deep Excel Integration for Small Business Owners

Microsoft rolled out a significant Copilot update for Microsoft 365, adding deep natural-language integration with Excel that lets users describe analysis in plain English and have the AI generate formulas, pivot tables, and charts automatically. For UK small business owners and freelancers who live in spreadsheets, this is a genuinely useful upgrade — no more hunting for VLOOKUP syntax at midnight. The feature is available immediately to Microsoft 365 Business subscribers at no extra cost. It supports UK English date formats and currency symbols out of the box, which sounds minor but has historically been a pain point. Side hustlers running e-commerce stores or consulting practices have flagged this as a time-saver for weekly reporting. Microsoft says natural-language SQL queries for Power BI are coming in the next update.

UK Government Launches £500m AI Skills Fund for Reskilling Workers

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology unveiled a £500 million AI Skills Fund aimed at reskilling 200,000 UK workers over three years. The fund will subsidise AI literacy courses, coding bootcamps, and specialist machine learning programmes delivered through a mix of universities and private training providers. Priority sectors include manufacturing, logistics, and the public sector — areas where AI adoption is accelerating fastest but where the existing workforce lacks technical skills. Notably, the fund includes a provision specifically for over-50s, a demographic historically underserved by tech retraining initiatives. Critics have called the budget too modest given the scale of disruption, but skills advocates have welcomed the direction. Applications for training providers wanting to join the scheme open on 1 June 2026.

That's your tech news for Thursday, 7 May 2026. Bookmark sheddad.tech for your daily digest.