AI Radar for Business — Saturday, July 18, 2026
· CompaniesAutomation
The day of the "biggest AI launch of the year" ended in delay: Gemini 3.5 Pro failed to arrive due to coding performance. Meanwhile, 29 countries founded China's global AI organization in Shanghai, Spain activated AI factories with free access for SMEs, and NotebookLM became Gemini Notebook. Practical reading for your business in four news items.
Yesterday's radar pointed to July 17th as the biggest AI day of the year; it ended in delay: Gemini 3.5 Pro did not arrive, and Google has postponed it indefinitely due to its coding performance. Meanwhile, China gathered 29 countries in Shanghai to found its global AI organization, and Spain activated AI factories with free access for SMEs. Power is being rearranged on three boards at once: the model, geopolitics, and the public window.
The "biggest launch of the year" didn't happen: Google postpones Gemini 3.5 Pro indefinitely due to coding performance
Bloomberg confirms that Google has delayed Gemini 3.5 Pro, promised for June and which leaks suggested would launch this July 17th: retraining with new data to improve its programming capabilities yielded "disappointing results" and there is no new date. Meanwhile, Google is testing an improved Flash model with partners and commits to keeping its models "highly cost-profitable." For your company: if your automation plan depended on the 2-million-token context or any other leaked specification, here is the lesson — you don't plan based on rumors; design with the models available today and with an architecture that allows switching models when the next real leap arrives, which is exactly what we argued yesterday with the Apple case. Source
China founds the "UN of AI" in Shanghai: 29 countries sign and Xi courts the Global South
At the Shanghai World AI Conference, with Xi Jinping on the stage for the first time, 29 countries — including Russia, Pakistan, and Kazakhstan — signed the creation of the World AI Cooperation Organization (WAICO), headquartered in Shanghai; Xi promised 5,000 AI training spots for developing countries within five years and called for AI not to be "a solo by a single country, but a symphony of global cooperation," in direct response to US chip restrictions. Huawei showcased its Atlas 950 computing system. For your company: AI is consolidating into two blocks, and the Chinese block competes on price with open models like DeepSeek or Qwen — the same Qwen on which Apple will launch its AI in China. These are increasingly viable alternatives to lower costs, but if you work with European customer data, evaluate where they are executed and under what regulations before adopting them: the bill is not the only criterion. Source
Spain activates AI factories with free access for SMEs and puts 250 million into the European gigafactory
The III Public-Private Roundtable on the state of AI in Spain, promoted by AI-Network with the General Directorate of AI of the Ministry for Digital Transformation, finalized the deployment: AI factories managed by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the Galician CESGA with free access for SMEs, workshops throughout Spain via sectoral nodes, public procurement of innovation for European AI solutions, and a 250 million euro Spanish contribution to the European AI gigafactory, totaling about 5 billion. For your company: if you are a Spanish SME, this is subsidized computing and technical support to pilot AI without paying for infrastructure — locate the sectoral node for your industry and sign up for their workshops; the cost of "testing seriously" has just dropped to nearly zero. Source
NotebookLM is now Gemini Notebook and its code execution analysis moves down to the Pro plan
Google renamed NotebookLM as Gemini Notebook — 30 million users and more than 600,000 organizations — and announced that the "3.5 + Antigravity" improvement, which executes code in a secure cloud environment for complex data analysis, will arrive in the AI Pro plan in the coming weeks after debuting in Ultra; notebooks will also appear in the search engine's AI Mode. For your company: if you use it as an internal knowledge base, there is nothing to migrate, it's the same product; the useful update is that data analysis with executable code no longer requires the expensive plan — and the usual advice: before uploading sensitive documentation to a notebook that now lives in more places within the Google ecosystem, check what data is going in. Source
What to watch tomorrow?
The Shanghai conference continues all weekend with more than 300 product launches announced, Gemini 3.5 Pro remains officially without a date, and the digital Omnibus of the AI Act remains pending in the Official Journal of the EU — it must be published before August 2nd, and when it happens, you will read its final schedule here.