• Microsoft has fixed no fewer than 974 vulnerabilities in its latest Patch Tuesday release
• Two were already being exploited in the wild, 114 categorized as 'Critical'
• AI is to blame for boosting CVE discovery and also intensifying attacks

Microsoft's September 2026 Patch Tuesday has become its biggest security release on record, with the company issuing fixes for a staggering 974 vulnerabilities across the entire stack.

According to the company's release notes, an overwhelming majority (723) of the vulnerabilities addressed related to Windows, with Office coming in at second place with 111 of its own vulnerabilities being addressed.

While it's clear that the number of vulnerabilities is going up year-over-year, it's likely that the company was also simply able to find more of them that would otherwise have slipped through the net thanks to AI-assisted discovery tools.

This is Microsoft's biggest Patch Tuesday ever

Speaking about the September 2026 Patch Tuesday in a blog post, Dustin Childs explains that this could be the start of the "new normal." Childs goes on to reveal that Microsoft has patched 2,760 CVEs this year to date – more than double any other year that precedes it.

Childs' figures show that the company patched 1,139 CVEs in the whole of 2025, and a much lower 492 a decade ago in 2016. According to the post, 114 of the vulnerabilities patched in this latest update were 'Critical' – more than one in 10.

In its own notes, Microsoft described CVE-2026-85880 and CVE-2026-81963 as especially notable because they're both being actively exploited, hence the push to get them fixed and for customers to install the update.

Elsewhere in the industry, Microsoft isn't the only company addressing a higher volume of bugs. Childs also highlighted high activity from Adobe, while a number of browser developers including Google, Mozilla, Brave and Microsoft itself have doubled the release cycle to two weeks in order to get fixes into customer hands more quickly.

Besides fixing exploitable bugs, Microsoft also used the opportunity to issue fixes to known issues – including fixing Teams and Outlook crashes on Arm64 PCs – as well as to upgrade Copilot+ AI components.

• Qualcomm to help build custom silicon and optical networking for AWS data centers
• Amazon will acquire 25 million Qualcomm shares, worth over $4 billion
• AWS data centers are more efficient than the industry average, but behind Google's

Qualcomm and Amazon have announced what they have describing as a "multi-generational product collaboration," in which Qualcomm will help build future AI data center infrastructure for AWS.

Because this isn't a one-off project, instead of announcing a single component, the companies are likely to work together across multiple generations of infrastructure spanning both custom inference silicon and high-speed optical connectivity.

Together, the two companies are expected to combine their expertise in AI infrastructure and data centers to improve performance, power efficiency and cost efficiency for a future where data centers exist in even higher volumes.

AWS and Qualcomm to work together on future data centers

The project spans two key areas – custom AI silicon and networking hardware. On the silicon front, Qualcomm will help produce custom AWS silicon with a major focus on inference, giving the chipmaker a potentially big entry into the data center semiconductor market – one that Nvidia has seen major success in.

As for networking, Qualcomm will be behind high-performance optical connectivity for AWS data centers, covering connections of up to 1.6T initially but plans to scale.

With data centers under intense pressure from all angles to boost efficiency and reduce resources consumption, operators are being forced to make progress in all areas, and reducing losses between components with efficient networking is often overlooked compared with outright chip efficiency.

"As AI demand accelerates, data center infrastructure will require advances in both computing and connectivity to deliver greater performance with more efficiency,” Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon summarized.

In Amazon's 2025 sustainability report, it declared a global average PUE of 1.14, which was nearly 9% better than the public cloud industry average of 1.25. Still, Google says it managed a fleet-wide average of 1.09, so Amazon's work with Qualcomm could be key to it overtaking Google.

"By working together on customized silicon and advanced connectivity, we’re delivering more performant, efficient, and cost-effective infrastructure for our customers," AWS VP Prasad Kalyanaraman added.

As part of the deal, Qualcomm has issued warrants for Amazon to acquire around $4.03 billion in stock, per a SEC filing – the equivalent of 25 million shares priced at $161.26. Qualcomm is currently trading at $174.09, up nearly 5% in five days.

• Google is investing over $15 billion into Finland over two years
• Nuclear energy, wind power and battery storage are top of mind
• The company is also improving local forests, adding new saunas

Google has announced plans to invest around $15.1 billion into Finland's AI and digital infrastructure over the course of the next two years, making it its largest single investment in Europe to date.

The company said the extra capacity is needed to meet growing local demand for services like Gemini, Maps and YouTube, but instead of just growing its data centers, Google is also allocating money for grid upgrades, clean energy projects, battery storage and more.

The country's cool climate and low-carbon electricity are especially attractive for hyperscalers as they try to improve the efficiency of data centers against a backdrop of heightened public and regulatory scrutiny.

Google is investing heavily in its Finnish data centers

The Hamina campus, which it's been running for around 15 years, is especially notable because it uses both seawater-based cooling to minimize its water consumption impact, as well as an offsite heat-recovery scheme to redirect waste heat into local properties.

Local communities in Hamina, Kajaani, Muhos, and Vaala are set to receive a combined $36 million in funding to support upskilling and education, while as many as 37,000 jobs are expected to become available throughout the 2027-2028 construction phase.

On the energy front, Google has signed a 22-year power-purchase agreement to support the extension of the Loviisa nuclear plant and has drawn up plans to add new onshore wind capacity and a new 94MW battery facility to bridge the gap between renewable energy availability.

Google Global Infrastructure VP Bikash Koley also stressed the company's other community and environment investments, including native forest and wetland regeneration, accessible recreational trails, public saunas and fishing piers.

For Finland in particular, Google claimed to have invested around $4 billion in Hamina and related infrastructure alone since acquiring the site, a former paper mill, in 2009.

• Chrome will get new updates every two weeks to minimize real-world attacks
• Smaller, incremental changes should also make it easier to track any issues
• Other major browsers are also shifting to two-weekly release cycles

Google has confirmed that Chrome has officially moved from a four-week Stable release cycle to a two-week one, with effect from September 8 2026 with the launch of Chrome 153.

Besides adding new features, the main objective is for Google to give us performance and security fixes more promptly in an era of increased complexity and heightened vulnerabilities.

And it's exactly those security concerns that pushed Google to want to double Chrome's update frequency in the first lace, with the company now having to deal with a higher volume of patches than ever before.

Chrome will get updates every two weeks

Together with a higher volume of attacks in general, Google has also benefitted from AI-powered vulnerability discovery tools, giving developers more work to do than before. "With automated AI discovery tools and community bug reports generating higher patch volume, shorter release cycles make managing security fixes significantly simpler," the company wrote.

Crucially, the faster cycle reduces the time between a fix landing in Chrome's public codebase and it actually reaching end users, making it less likely for a bug to be exploited in the wild.

Chrome has been adhering to a four-week cycle since 2021, but the world is a very different place in the space of just half a decade.

With the higher pace of releases, Google also anticipates a smaller scope of changes, which could actually be a good thing because it could be easier for developers to identify what went wrong in the event of any issues.

Desktop, Android and iOS versions of Chrome will all be impacted by the change, with Chrome 154 already slated for a September 22 release.

More broadly, Google says Chrome isn't the only browser getting more frequent updates. Microsoft, Mozilla and Brave are also making similar changes, and they're all undergoing those changes right now.