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Samsung's Galaxy XR Headset to Take on Apple with Help from Google and Qualcomm 

Visitors walk past the Samsung Electronics booth during the Korea Electronics Show 2025 at the COEX convention and exhibition center in Seoul on October 22, 2025. (AFP)
Visitors walk past the Samsung Electronics booth during the Korea Electronics Show 2025 at the COEX convention and exhibition center in Seoul on October 22, 2025. (AFP)
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Samsung's Galaxy XR Headset to Take on Apple with Help from Google and Qualcomm 

Visitors walk past the Samsung Electronics booth during the Korea Electronics Show 2025 at the COEX convention and exhibition center in Seoul on October 22, 2025. (AFP)
Visitors walk past the Samsung Electronics booth during the Korea Electronics Show 2025 at the COEX convention and exhibition center in Seoul on October 22, 2025. (AFP)

Samsung Electronics released its Galaxy XR extended reality headset on Tuesday, counting on AI features from Google to propel it into the nascent and uncertain market of computing-on-your-face that is dominated by Meta and Apple.

The headset, resembling those made by others such as Meta, will cost $1,799, or about half of what Apple charges for its Vision Pro headset.

It is the first of a family of new devices, powered by the Android XR operating system and artificial intelligence, in a long-term partnership with Alphabet's Google and Qualcomm.

"There's a whole journey ahead of us in terms of other devices and form factors," said Google's vice president of AR/XR Sharham Izadi in an interview ahead of the launch.

Up next will be the release of lighter eyeglasses, executives said, declining to elaborate. Samsung has announced partnerships with Warby Parker and South Korea's Gentle Monster luxury eyewear.

The race to find new form factors for entertainment and computing, underpinned by AI, has fueled a battle among the biggest technology companies. Instagram-owner Meta overwhelmingly dominates the VR headset industry with about an 80% market share, with Apple trailing behind.

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI is also diving into the market and spent $6.5 billion to buy iPhone designer Jony Ive's hardware startup io Products in May to figure out devices in the AI age.

Samsung has studied the extended reality segment for the past 10 years, and it was not until about four years ago that the company approached Google to jointly develop the project, codenamed "Moohan," meaning "infinite" in Korean, said Jay Kim, executive vice president at Samsung's mobile division.

"We have been agonizing over when to bring the product to the market, and considering various factors such as technology evolution and market situation, we believe that now is the best timing," he said at a briefing in Seoul on Wednesday.

USING GOOGLE AI STRENGTH

The long-awaited Samsung Galaxy XR, first demonstrated last year, combines virtual reality and mixed reality features. The goggles immerse users watching videos, such as on Alphabet's YouTube, or playing games and viewing pictures, while also allowing users to interact with their surroundings.

The latter feature takes advantage of Google's Gemini service, which can analyze what users are seeing and offer directions or information about real-world objects by looking and circling objects with their fingers.

In an interview last week, executives from Google and Samsung discussed how they believe extended reality headsets, which have yet to ignite mass consumer interest, would benefit greatly from the application of Google's powerful multimodal AI features throughout the device that can process information from different types of data such as text, photos and videos.

It's a set of software capabilities that Apple has yet to demonstrate, despite rolling out an updated Vision Pro with a more powerful chip.

"Google entering the fray again changes the dynamic in the ecosystem," said Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, noting that Google's software added $1,000 in value to the device by some estimates. "Google really wants people to get the full experience of Gemini when using this headset."

Customers who buy the device this year will receive a bundle of free services including 12 months of access to Google AI Pro, YouTube Premium, Google Play Pass and other specialized XR content, the companies said.

The prototype for AI-enhanced goggles was ready by the time Apple had launched its Vision Pro headset in 2024, executives said, as they sought to enhance existing applications like YouTube and Google Photos and Google Maps, while creating new immersive experiences.

Like many first generation technologies, it attempts to do multiple things that could have consumer and enterprise applications.

Qualcomm is providing its Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 chip to power the headset.

DIFFICULT MARKET

Many tech CEOs have been seduced by what they say is the next big thing in personal computing, but the market remains tiny by tech standards.

Research firm Gartner estimated the global Head-Mounted Display market is expected to rise by 2.6% from this year to $7.27 billion next year. Lighter, eyeglass-type AI devices such as Meta's smartglasses made in collaboration with EssilorLuxottica Ray-Bans are expected to drive most of this growth.

Despite the expanding competitive landscape, the global virtual reality market, which includes so-called "mixed reality" headsets launching more recently, has faced three consecutive years of decline. Weakening again, shipments in 2025 are expected to fall 20% year on year, according to research firm Counterpoint.

"With a potentially more competitive price point than Apple’s Vision Pro, Samsung’s Project Moohan headset could emerge as a strong contender in the premium VR segment, particularly within the enterprise market," Counterpoint senior analyst Flora Tang.

The Galaxy XR is the first Android XR device. But Samsung has dabbled with face-mounted computing devices dating back a decade, involving slipping a smartphone into a headset, called the Gear VR, in partnership with VR headset maker Oculus. Meta acquired Oculus in 2014.

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Technology

AI to Track Icebergs Adrift at Sea in Boon for Science

© Jonathan NACKSTRAND / AFP
© Jonathan NACKSTRAND / AFP
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AI to Track Icebergs Adrift at Sea in Boon for Science

© Jonathan NACKSTRAND / AFP
© Jonathan NACKSTRAND / AFP

British scientists said Thursday that a world-first AI tool to catalogue and track icebergs as they break apart into smaller chunks could fill a "major blind spot" in predicting climate change.

Icebergs release enormous volumes of freshwater when they melt on the open water, affecting global climate patterns and altering ocean currents and ecosystems, reported AFP.

But scientists have long struggled to keep track of these floating behemoths once they break into thousands of smaller chunks, their fate and impact on the climate largely lost to the seas.

To fill in the gap, the British Antarctic Survey has developed an AI system that automatically identifies and names individual icebergs at birth and tracks their sometimes decades-long journey to a watery grave.

Using satellite images, the tool captures the distinct shape of icebergs as they break off -- or calve -- from glaciers and ice sheets on land.

As they disintegrate over time, the machine performs a giant puzzle problem, linking the smaller "child" fragments back to the "parent" and creating detailed family trees never before possible at this scale.

It represents a huge improvement on existing methods, where scientists pore over satellite images to visually identify and track only the largest icebergs one by one.

The AI system, which was tested using satellite observations over Greenland, provides "vital new information" for scientists and improves predictions about the future climate, said the British Antarctic Survey.

Knowing where these giant slabs of freshwater were melting into the ocean was especially crucial with ice loss expected to increase in a warming world, it added.

"What's exciting is that this finally gives us the observations we've been missing," Ben Evans, a machine learning expert at the British Antarctic Survey, said in a statement.

"We've gone from tracking a few famous icebergs to building full family trees. For the first time, we can see where each fragment came from, where it goes and why that matters for the climate."

This use of AI could also be adapted to aid safe passage for navigators through treacherous polar regions littered by icebergs.

Iceberg calving is a natural process. But scientists say the rate at which they were being lost from Antarctica is increasing, probably because of human-induced climate change.

 

Technology

AMD Predicts Weaker First-Quarter Sales, Shares Plunge on Nvidia Comparisons

An AMD logo and a computer motherboard appear in this illustration created on August 25, 2025. (Reuters)
An AMD logo and a computer motherboard appear in this illustration created on August 25, 2025. (Reuters)
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AMD Predicts Weaker First-Quarter Sales, Shares Plunge on Nvidia Comparisons

An AMD logo and a computer motherboard appear in this illustration created on August 25, 2025. (Reuters)
An AMD logo and a computer motherboard appear in this illustration created on August 25, 2025. (Reuters)

Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday forecast a slight decline in quarterly revenue, raising concerns about whether it ​can effectively challenge Nvidia in the booming AI market and sending its shares tumbling 8% in after-hours trade.

The lackluster prediction comes despite an unexpected boost from sales of certain artificial intelligence chips to China, which began in the last quarter after the Trump administration approved a license for orders that AMD received in early 2025.

And without those sales to China which generated $390 million, AMD's data-center segment would have missed estimates for the fourth quarter.

AMD said it expects revenue of about $9.8 billion this quarter, plus or minus $300 million. That's down from $10.27 billion in the fourth-quarter which was up 34% year-on-year and ahead of LSEG ‌estimates for $9.67 billion.

PALES ‌NEXT TO NVIDIA

Though AMD is seen as one of the ‌few ⁠contenders ​that can seriously ‌challenge Nvidia, investors noted the stark contrast between the two companies' performances. AMD expects an adjusted gross margin of 55% this quarter. Nvidia has said it expects adjusted gross margin in the mid-70% range during its fiscal 2027.

"The expectations for large blowout quarters for AI-related hardware companies have skewed what the market is looking for," said Bob O'Donnell, president of TECHnalysis Research.

The forecast for the current first quarter includes $100 million from sales to China, where the situation remains "dynamic," AMD CEO Lisa Su said on a conference call with investors.

The US government ⁠has placed restrictions on the exports of advanced chips to China, but AMD received licenses to sell modified versions of its MI300 series ‌of AI chips there. Its MI308 chip competes with Nvidia's H20 ‍chip in China.

OPENAI SALES

AMD has accelerated its ‍product launches and is moving into selling full AI systems to better compete against Nvidia, which now ‍provides "rack-scale" systems that combine GPUs, CPUs and networking gear.

Last year, it entered into a multi-year deal to supply AI chips to ChatGPT-owner OpenAI, which would bring in tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue and give the startup the option to buy up to roughly 10% of the chipmaker.

Su reiterated on Tuesday that the company ​expects sales of a new flagship AI server to OpenAI and others to rise rapidly in the second half of this year, saying a global memory-chip crunch will not ⁠slow its plans.

"I do not believe that we will be supply-limited in terms of the ramp that we put in place," Su said.

BEYOND OPENAI

As Big Tech and governments across the globe double down on investing in AI hardware, shares in Santa Clara, California-based AMD have doubled since the start of 2025, outperforming a 60% bump in the broader chip index.

But analysts remain concerned that AMD's success remains tied to a handful of customers that rivals such as Nvidia could try to poach. Reuters reported this week that Nvidia made a $20 billion move to hire most of chip startup Groq's founders after OpenAI held chip supply discussions with the startup.

"Growth appears concentrated in large deployments and specific regions, and China shipments are significant enough to influence a quarter," said eMarketer analyst Gadjo Sevilla.

Revenue in AMD's key data-center segment grew 39% to $5.38 billion in the ‌fourth quarter. But excluding sales of the MI308, which is a data-center chip, that revenue would have been $4.99 billion, below estimates of $5.07 billion.

Technology

Switch 2 Sales Boost Nintendo Results but Chip Shortage Looms

This photo taken on November 4, 2025 shows a woman taking photos of a Super Mario figure at the Nintendo Tokyo store in Tokyo. (AFP)
This photo taken on November 4, 2025 shows a woman taking photos of a Super Mario figure at the Nintendo Tokyo store in Tokyo. (AFP)
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Switch 2 Sales Boost Nintendo Results but Chip Shortage Looms

This photo taken on November 4, 2025 shows a woman taking photos of a Super Mario figure at the Nintendo Tokyo store in Tokyo. (AFP)
This photo taken on November 4, 2025 shows a woman taking photos of a Super Mario figure at the Nintendo Tokyo store in Tokyo. (AFP)

The runaway success of the Switch 2 console drove up Nintendo's net profit by more than 50 percent in the nine months to December, the Japanese video game giant said Tuesday.

But a global memory chip shortage, created by frenzied demand for artificial intelligence hardware, could push up manufacturing costs.

The Switch 2 became the world's fastest-selling games console after launching to a fan frenzy last summer.

It is the successor to the original Switch, which soared in popularity during the pandemic when games such as "Animal Crossing" struck a chord during long lockdowns.

Both are hybrid devices that can be connected to a TV or used on-the-go.

In April-December, net profit jumped 51.3 percent year-on-year to 358.9 billion yen ($2.3 billion), and revenue nearly doubled on-year to 1.9 trillion yen, Nintendo said.

But the firm kept its annual unit sales target for the Switch 2 steady at 19 million, and also held its full-year net profit forecast of 350 billion yen.

"Nintendo Switch 2 got off to a good start following its launch on June 5 and unit sales continued to grow through the holiday season," the company said.

Nearly 17.4 million Switch 2 devices were sold in the nine-month period, it added.

"Maintaining momentum is certainly a big focus for Nintendo," Krysta Yang of the Nintendo-focused Kit and Krysta Podcast told AFP.

A lack of heavy-hitting first-party new games for the Switch 2 in coming months risks hindering growth, although third-party titles such as "Resident Evil Requiem" should help fill the gap, she said.

Nintendo said Tuesday it planned to release "Mario Tennis Fever" this month and "Pokemon Pokopia" in March.

While the firm is diversifying into hit movies and theme parks, consoles remain the core of its business.

The Switch 1 has now sold 155.37 million units -- overtaking the Nintendo DS console to be its best-selling hardware of all time.

But soaring prices for memory chips, used in gaming consoles as well as phones, laptops and other electronics, will likely be a headwind for the company.

Their prices have been pushed up as chipmakers focus on producing the advanced memory chips in huge demand to power AI data centers.

"Nintendo and other console manufacturers are publicly keeping quiet about the impact of the shortage," gaming industry consultant Serkan Toto told AFP.

But "users can forget the past when consoles always became cheaper in tandem with component costs falling over time", with price hikes potentially on the way in 2026, he said.

Yang said she thought a price increase for the Switch 2 "is not out of the question" but added that Nintendo "would likely exhaust all other options" before doing so.