Nvidia completed its climb, passing Microsoft to become the most valuable public company on earth — a title held by a chipmaker for the first time in the modern market era. The week's cautionary tale came from the auto industry: a ransomware attack on CDK Global, the software backbone for roughly 15,000 dealerships, froze car sales across the country and dragged on for days, another demonstration that a single vendor can be a national single point of failure. And Apple, eleven days after unveiling Apple Intelligence, said its marquee AI features won't launch in the EU this year — blaming the Digital Markets Act's interoperability requirements.
The FCC closed its extraordinary regulatory month by fining the nation's largest wireless carriers nearly $200 million for selling customers' real-time location data to third parties without consent — the biggest privacy enforcement in the agency's history. On Capitol Hill, UnitedHealth's CEO admitted under oath that the company paid a $22 million ransom over the Change Healthcare attack, and that intruders got in through a single server lacking multi-factor authentication. Apple then closed the week with the largest share buyback in corporate history — $110 billion — as iPhone sales fell 10% and the company teed up its AI reveal.
At 3:30 a.m. on Thursday, AT&T's network began failing nationwide — and for the better part of twelve hours, tens of thousands of Americans couldn't call 911, because a botched software update during a network expansion had taken down the country's largest carrier. It was the week's loudest infrastructure failure but not its most damaging: two days earlier, ALPHV ransomware operators had breached Change Healthcare, the UnitedHealth subsidiary that processes a third of America's patient records, beginning a payments blackout that would strangle pharmacies and providers for months. Between the two disasters, Nvidia reported earnings so strong — data-center revenue up 409% — that a single day's gain added $277 billion in market value.