Record workload during the holidays & final sprint in the mega-deal
Friday, December 26, 2025
On Boxing Day, official corporate communications largely cease, but data centers and law firms are buzzing with activity. While the use of AI services skyrockets thanks to newly donated hardware, the architects of the SoftBank deal are racing against time.
Here are the most important AI news stories of the day:
The “Boxing Day” spike: Data centers at their limit
As expected, cloud providers like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are experiencing massive spikes in inference requests today. This is due to millions of newly activated AI-enabled devices (smart glasses, home assistants) that were put into operation over the holidays.
Users of free basic plans (such as ChatGPT Free or Gemini Basic) are reporting increased latency globally, as computing resources are being prioritized for enterprise customers and premium subscribers.
SoftBank & OpenAI: Negotiations are ongoing
Despite the holidays, there’s no pause in the $22.5 billion deal. Financial insiders in Tokyo and San Francisco report that the legal teams are working around the clock to ensure the complex transformation of OpenAI’s governance structure is legally sound by the December 31 deadline.
It is considered certain that the contracts will be signed before New Year’s Eve to secure tax and regulatory benefits for the 2025 fiscal year.
E-commerce: AI agents intercept wave of returns
Today, Boxing Day is traditionally one of the highest-grossing days in online retail, but also the day with the most returns. Initial data from major platforms like Shopify and Amazon shows that this year, for the first time, over 60% of initial contact regarding complaints and returns is being handled entirely by autonomous AI agents.
The success rate (no need to escalate to a human) has increased by approximately 40% compared to last year.
Security warning: AI voice scams on holidays
Security authorities in the EU and the US today issued warnings about a specific wave of “Grandchild Scam 2.0” attacks. Scammers are exploiting the holidays and the heightened emotional vulnerability of family members to fabricate emergency situations using AI-cloned voices (deepfake audio).
The attacks are of such high quality that they are almost indistinguishable from genuine callers.
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