Electric vehicle enthusiasts are probably right to feel a little disheartened about the state of the United States’ transition to EVs. But they should take heart that our region is an outlier. The other side of the Atlantic still seems relatively positive about the whole idea, even as Europe’s car market recovers more slowly from the pandemic than the rest of the world. Last year, overall vehicle sales in Europe barely ticked up, rising 2.2 percent from 2024. EV sales, meanwhile, increased by 29 percent, bringing market share to an impressive 19.5 percent.

That’s according to data from automotive analyst JATO Dynamics, which finds that the big winner has been Volkswagen. Last year, its EVs outsold those from Tesla for the first time as sales of VW’s electric offering grew by 56 percent, while Tesla’s shrank by 27 percent.

The digital publishing platform Substack has told some of its users that their data was stolen in a security breach. The affected account holders had their email addresses and phone numbers scraped in a hack that occurred in October 2025.

In an email posted on Bluesky, Substack CEO, Christ Best, said the company became aware of the breach on February 3, which involved an ”unauthorized third party to access limited user data without permission.” While internal metadata was also shared in the hack, Best said that credit card numbers and other financial details were not. No passwords were obtained either.

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, beat Wall Street expectations on Wednesday, and is planning a sharp increase in capital spending in 2026 as it continues to invest deeply in AI infrastructure.

Alphabet on Wednesday reported profit of $34.5bn in the recently ended quarter, as revenue from cloud computing soared 48%.

The company also forecast spending between $175bn and $185bn this year, a figure much higher than analysts’ expectations of roughly $115bn.

In an earnings call, investors pressed Alphabet’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, on the significant increase. “We’ve been supply constrained, even as we’ve been ramping up our capacity. Obviously, our CapEx spend this year is an eye towards the future,” Pichai said, in response. “We are constantly planning for the long-term.” Pichai added that he expects Google to “go through the year in a supply-constrained way”.

Meta has finished pretraining its new AI model codenamed ”Avocado,” according to an internal memo.

The model is the company’s most capable pretrained base model, The Information reports, citing an internal document. Pretraining is the first phase of AI development, where a model learns basic patterns and relationships from large amounts of data.

Avocado outperforms the best freely available base models, according to the memo from Megan Fu, a product manager at Meta Superintelligence Labs. In knowledge, visual perception, and multilingual performance, it can even compete with leading fully trained models – even though Avocado hasn’t gone through the second training phase yet. This phase, called post-training, refines models for specific tasks.

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, beat Wall Street expectations on Wednesday, and is planning a sharp increase in capital spending in 2026 as it continues to invest deeply in AI infrastructure.

Alphabet on Wednesday reported profit of $34.5bn in the recently ended quarter, as revenue from cloud computing soared 48%.

The company also forecast spending between $175bn and $185bn this year, a figure much higher than analysts’ expectations of roughly $115bn.

In an earnings call, investors pressed Alphabet’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, on the significant increase. “We’ve been supply constrained, even as we’ve been ramping up our capacity. Obviously, our CapEx spend this year is an eye towards the future,” Pichai said, in response. “We are constantly planning for the long-term.” Pichai added that he expects Google to “go through the year in a supply-constrained way”.