Tech
CES 2026: Rubber hits the road for Qualcomm automotive | Computer Weekly
Qualcomm has unveiled a slew of products and partnerships for the connected automotive market that are seeing real-life application.
Specifically, at the CES 2026 trade show, the firm announced it has teamed with Chinese startup Leapmotor for what it calls the world’s first cross-domain integrated service powered by its Snapdragon Cockpit Elite and Snapdragon Ride Elite automotive platforms; expanded its technology relationship with Google to provide what the firms call a leading foundation for transforming the automotive industry; and a collaboration with manufacturing group ZF to provide “cutting-edge” and scalable advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) that combine advanced artificial intelligence (AI) compute and perception capabilities.
In the former partnership, Leapmotor’s flagship model, D19, will become the first mass-production vehicle powered by a dual Snapdragon Elite (SA8797P) automotive platform in a collaboration that will support the car manufacturer’s advancement towards a more centralised vehicle architecture, and make cars easier and more efficient to build, delivering more responsive features for drivers and passengers.
Qualcomm sees the collaboration as highlighting the growing value of deep chipmaker-automaker integration at the vehicle‑architecture level, and offering a scalable blueprint as the industry accelerates towards centralised computing and fully software‑defined vehicles.
The in-vehicle technology has been designed to unify cockpit, driver assistance, body control and connectivity – including Wi-Fi 6 and 5G mobile comms – on one system. Making its debut at CES 2026, the dual‑chipset architecture is claimed to deliver “exceptional” compute performance to streamline vehicle electronics, reduce system complexity and enable more advanced AI capabilities across the entire vehicle.
The central domain controller has the ability to unify into high‑performance system key vehicle domains, such as intelligent cockpit; driver assistance; body controls including lighting, climate, doors and windows; and the vehicle gateway. The dual‑chipset setup also provides the compute headroom needed for real‑time coordination and advanced AI, including emerging agentic AI workloads.
With the Qualcomm Oryon central processing unit, Qualcomm Adreno graphics processing unit and Qualcomm Hexagon neural processing unit working in parallel, the platform can run both a full‑modality large AI model for the cockpit and a vision-language-action multimodal model for driver assistance. The result is said to be more intelligent, responsive and future‑ready driving experiences.
Among other key system capabilities is the ability to support up to eight displays, including multiple 3K and 4K screens, and up to 18‑channel audio for immersive in‑car entertainment. The system also enables over-the-air updates, remote diagnostics and remote vehicle control, with its service‑oriented architecture offering more than 200 modular capabilities for flexible, user‑defined experiences.
Driver assistance is designed to support up to 13 cameras and multiple sensors, including LiDAR, vehicle-millimetre‑wave radar, ultrasonic sensors and a high‑precision IMU, to deliver reliable L2 driver‑assistance. Other features include parking‑to‑parking, with the controller engineered to help vehicles handle complex daily and urban scenarios.
In-vehicle connectivity allows reliable communication between all of the vehicle’s systems, while also supporting voice calling, emergency services, Bluetooth, Wi‑Fi and precise location services such as global navigation satellite system.
Beginning with Snapdragon-powered embedded Android infotainment systems, Qualcomm’s relationship with Google has lasted over a decade, and the latest chapter of this partnership will see the firms aim to establish end-to-end automotive technology that integrates Snapdragon Digital Chassis with Google’s automotive software.
Overall, Qualcomm and Google are setting out to establish a unified reference platform aimed at establishing accelerating development cycles, strengthening quality assurance and streamlining production for vehicle manufacturers. This, say the companies, will empower automakers to create next-generation vehicles that better anticipate, react and adapt to driver needs with agentic AI.
Specifically, they will be working on simplifying the deployment of advanced, next-generation AI agents with Gemini Enterprise for automotive – an evolution of the Automotive AI Agent announced at the IAA Mobility show in Munich in 2025. By aligning Snapdragon Cockpit Platforms with Google’s AAOS roadmaps, starting with Android 17, the companies say they are creating a foundation for next-generation SDVs and in-vehicle infotainment systems.
Intelligent mobility
The intelligent mobility technology is said to have been redefined for the generative AI era, connecting vehicles to the cloud using a flexible architecture that blends on-device and cloud models. This approach is designed to enable real-time personalisation for drivers and help speed up the roll-out of new features such as advanced voice-driven and pro-active assistants.
For drivers, the intended benefits include smarter, safer and more adaptive vehicles – with dynamic personalisation, and multimodal interfaces with always-on AI-driven features that can help enhance convenience and safety.
ZF and Qualcomm Technologies are collaborating to provide an ADAS service that combines advanced AI compute and perception capabilities powered by Qualcomm Technologies’ Snapdragon Ride system-on-chips.
ZF’s ProAI supercomputer will integrate Snapdragon Ride Pilot and Vision stack for faster time-to-market and deliver turn-key systems to automotive manufacturers, bringing together automotive computing and real-time perception, enabling automakers to deploy scalable ADAS services across a wide range of vehicle types and automation levels. This ranges from regulatory functions up to Level 3, whereby a vehicle handles all driving tasks in specific scenarios, letting the driver divert attention from the road.
With Snapdragon Ride, the ZF ProAI supercomputer is capable of serving as a domain, zone or central controller, while supporting enhanced computer vision, sensor fusion and decision-making control logic, or all of these functions in a single end-to-end AI model.
The companies want to extend their cooperation to the development of a multi-domain mixed criticality solution for ADAS and in-vehicle infotainment systems.
Tech
The Oceans Just Keep Getting Hotter
Since 2018, a group of researchers from around the world have crunched the numbers on how much heat the world’s oceans are absorbing each year. In 2025, their measurements broke records once again, making this the eighth year in a row that the world’s oceans have absorbed more heat than the years before.
The study, which was published Friday in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Science, found that the world’s oceans absorbed an additional 23 zettajoules’ worth of heat in 2025, the most in any year since modern measurements began in the 1960s. That’s significantly higher than the 16 additional zettajoules they absorbed in 2024. The research comes from a team of more than 50 scientists across the United States, Europe, and China.
A joule is a common way to measure energy. A single joule is a relatively small unit of measurement—it’s about enough to power a tiny lightbulb for a second, or slightly heat a gram of water. But a zettajoule is one sextillion joules; numerically, the 23 zettajoules the oceans absorbed this year can be written out as 23,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
John Abraham, a professor of thermal science at the University of St. Thomas and one of the authors on the paper, says that he sometimes has trouble putting this number into contexts laypeople understand. Abraham offers up a couple options. His favorite is comparing the energy stored in the ocean to the energy of atomic bombs: The 2025 warming, he says, is the energetic equivalent to 12 Hiroshima bombs exploding in the ocean. (Some other calculations he’s done include equating this number to the energy it would take to boil 2 billion Olympic swimming pools, or more than 200 times the electrical use of everyone on the planet.)
“Last year was a bonkers, crazy warming year—that’s the technical term,” Abraham joked to me. “The peer-reviewed scientific term is ‘bonkers’.”
The world’s oceans are its largest heat sink, absorbing more than 90 percent of the excess warming that is trapped in the atmosphere. While some of the excess heat warms the ocean’s surface, it also slowly travels further down into deeper parts of the ocean, aided by circulation and currents.
Global temperature calculations—like the ones used to determine the hottest years on record—usually only capture measurements taken at the ocean’s surface. (The study finds that overall sea surface temperatures in 2025 were slightly lower than they were in 2024, which is on record as the hottest year since modern records began. Some meteorological phenomena, like El Niño events, can also raise sea surface temperatures in certain regions, which can cause the overall ocean to absorb slightly less heat in a given year. This helps to explain why there was such a big jump in added ocean heat content between 2025, which developed a weak La Niña at the end of the year, and 2024, which came at the end of a strong El Niño year.) While sea surface temperatures have risen since the industrial revolution, thanks to our use of fossil fuels, these measurements don’t provide a full picture of how climate change is affecting the oceans.
“If the whole world was covered by a shallow ocean that was only a couple feet deep, it would warm up more or less at the same speed as the land,” says Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth and a coauthor of the study. “But because so much of that heat is going down in the deep ocean, we see generally slower warming of sea surface temperatures [than those on land].”
Tech
Skullcandy Headphone Deals: Crusher Evo, ANC 2, PLYR 720 and More
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ICE Agent Who Reportedly Shot Renee Good Was a Firearms Trainer, Per Testimony
Jonathan Ross, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer identified by multiple news outlets as the federal agent who shot 37-year-old Renee Good in Minneapolis on Wednesday, is a veteran deportation officer in ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division, according to sworn testimony from the federal district court in Minnesota obtained by WIRED. A member of a Special Response Team, ICE’s version of a SWAT team, he’s had duties as a firearms trainer and led teams drawn from multiple federal agencies including the FBI, Ross testified.
The testimony stems from a December 2025 trial related to a June incident with parallels to the interaction that led to Good’s killing.
In June according to Ross’s testimony, he led a team seeking to apprehend a man named Roberto Carlos Muñoz-Guatemala, who was on an administrative warrant for being in the United States without authorization. Because the man’s home was across from a school and immigration agents had no authority to enter his home, Ross testified, they instead trailed him in unmarked vehicles.
Muñoz-Guatemala’s attorney did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
According to the December testimony and a New York Times account of an FBI agent’s affidavit associated with the case, Ross approached Muñoz-Guatemala and asked him to roll down his window and open his door. Ross, who testified that he had been driving an unmarked vehicle, was dressed in ranger green and grey, and wore his badge on his belt, broke the driver’s side back window and reached into the vehicle, at which point Muñoz-Guatemala pulled away.
While being dragged at a speed he claimed seemed like “40 miles an hour at least, if not more,” Ross pulled out his Taser and fired it at the driver. Muñoz-Guatemala continued to drive, and succeeded in shaking Ross from the car. At trial, Ross testified that he suffered injuries that required 33 stitches.
According to the affidavit, Muñoz-Guatemala called 911 to report that he’d been assaulted by ICE, which led to his arrest. Last month, he was convicted of assault on a federal officer with a dangerous weapon.
Reports from the Minnesota Star-Tribune and The Guardian identified Ross as the shooter who killed Good, a mother and recent transplant to Minneapolis, during an immigration enforcement action in the city. Video of the incident appears to show a federal agent firing shots into Good’s vehicle as she attempted to leave the scene. The officer did not appear to have been struck by the vehicle, and Good appeared to be turning the wheel to avoid contact, video analysis by The New York Times and the Washington Post shows.
At Thursday’s White House press briefing, vice president JD Vance answered questions about the incident, and his responses included numerous identifying details about Ross, mainly relating to his interaction with Muñoz-Guatemala. “That very ICE officer nearly had his life ended, dragged by a car, six months ago, 33 stitches in his leg,” said Vance, “so you think maybe he is a little bit sensitive about somebody ramming him with an automobile?”
Department of Homeland Security secretary Kirsti Noem has repeatedly described Good’s actions as an intentional act of “domestic terrorism.” An FBI investigation into Good’s killing is ongoing.
DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told WIRED in a statement that the department is “not going to expose the name of this officer. He acted according to his training.” McLaughlin added that federal immigration agents “are under constant threat from violent agitators” because of “doxxing” and that the Minnesota Star Tribune, which first published Ross’ name, “should delete their story immediately.”According to Ross’ December testimony, he served in the Indiana National Guard and was deployed to Iraq from 2004 to 2005 as a machine gunner on a patrol truck, then joined Border Patrol in 2007 after finishing college, working near El Paso, Texas.
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