Happy new year from the Mobile World Live team. We may have rested for the festive period but the world of technology did not. Here are five big stories you might have missed while we were away.

1. Meta buys Manus
Manus is a China-based agentic AI company which hailed an arranged marriage to Meta Platforms as “validation of our pioneering work” on general iterations of the technology.

Meta Platforms stated Manus launched its first general AI agent during 2025, and had served more than 147 trillion tokens and created in excess of 80 million virtual computers by the time of its announcement on 29 December.

The AI company is set to bolster Meta Platforms broader AI efforts targeting consumer and business segments.

Financial Times reported the company was once considered to be the “next DeepSeek”, but noted there could be opposition to the takeover among regulators in the US and China.

2. SoftBank Group ups OpenAI investment
The Japanese giant declared it had “fully satisfied its commitment to invest in OpenAI” after completing an additional outlay of $22.5 billion through its SoftBank Vision Fund 2 on 26 December.

SoftBank’s holding in OpenAI was taken to 11 per cent.

It pumped $7.5 billion into the US company and raised $11 billion from third-party investors earlier in 2025.

The Japanese company’s chair and CEO Masayoshi Son said it is “deeply aligned” with OpenAI’s broader ambitions for the technology and the latter’s chief Sam Altman highlighted time-to-market benefits from the tie-up.

3. SKT gives AI hyperscale
South Korean operator SK Telecom (SKT) unveiled an AI model it believes will prove foundational to the nation’s goals for the technology.

The A.Z K1 model “marks the beginning of a full-stack AI ecosystem, encompassing all areas from semiconductors to services”, SKT stated.

A.Z K1 features 519 billion parameters and is a bump to Korean ambitions to rival the US and China in AI technology leadership.

The model feeds information to smaller versions with a particular focus on those with less than 70 billion parameters. SKT intends to provide A.X K1 through its A-dot set-up, among other methods, giving it a potential market of 10 million users from the off.

SKT believes the model will also positively impact South Korea’s semiconductor sector by boosting verification of memory bandwidth and inter-GPU communication speed.

4. RAM costs rocket
Various news outlets predicted a tough 2026 for consumer electronics, in particular PCs and smartphones due to a shortage in RAM.

BBC News reported RAM demand is being driven by the requirements of AI data centres, noting the memory type is as important an element as processors which typically dominate headlines relating to the sites.

Experts told the news outlet higher memory costs would likely be passed on to consumers, speculating this could in turn impact demand for new smartphones and PCs.

The reports were sparked by an IDC analysis in mid-December 2025 in which it warned the situation could go beyond “a cyclical shortage driven by a mismatch in supply and demand”.

5. Apple cuts Vision Pro production
IDC figures also feature in reports Apple cut production of its Vision Pro headset, which the analyst company separately noted struggled to gain traction in terms of shipments during 2025.

Financial Times reported changes in the output from Vision Pro manufacturer Luxshare and highlighted a shift in Apple’s marketing spending, each pitched as a sign the company is falling short in terms of wooing consumers.

The IDC figures referenced offered a gloomy outlook for mixed and virtual reality headsets as a whole, with the company predicting shipments in 2025 would be down 42.8 per cent year-on-year but are likely to pick up again this year.