Daily Tech & GNSS News Digest - February 23, 2026

Markets rattled as President Trump announced a 15% global tariff rate in response to Friday’s Supreme Court ruling, triggering an 800-point Dow selloff. The AI “scare trade” intensified with Anthropic’s enterprise automation tools continuing to spook software and consulting stocks. Meanwhile, GNSS resilience took center stage as fourteen Baltic and North Sea nations declared zero tolerance for Russian signal jamming, signaling a major shift in maritime enforcement.

Tech News

Markets Tumble as Trump Raises Global Tariffs to 15%

The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 822 points (1.7%) to close at 48,804 as investors digested President Trump’s defiant response to Friday’s Supreme Court ruling. The S&P 500 fell 1% while the Nasdaq Composite dropped 1.1%, erasing gains that followed the landmark judicial decision.

Trump announced Saturday that the US will lift the baseline tariff rate on imports to 15%, effective immediately, using alternative legal authority under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. US Customs and Border Protection confirmed it will halt all IEEPA-based tariff collections as of 12:01 a.m. EST Tuesday, but the new trade act tariffs will take their place.

The tech industry faces particular exposure to tariff uncertainty. Jason Oxman, president of the Information Technology Industry Council, warned that current and proposed tariff policies “threaten $75-100 billion in additional AI infrastructure costs over five years”—equivalent to 15-20 fewer hyperscale data centers. Bloomberg’s Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow explored whether this uncertainty could derail America’s $3 trillion AI buildout in Monday’s Bloomberg Technology broadcast.

Anthropic AI Tools Continue to Rattle Software Stocks

The “AI scare trade” resumed Monday as Anthropic’s enterprise automation capabilities continued weighing on software and consulting stocks. IBM shares sank 13%, with Accenture and Cognizant Technology also falling as analysts warned that AI is “increasingly a net negative for the equity market.”

Anthropic’s Claude Cowork platform, launched in January with 11 enterprise plugins covering sales, finance, marketing, and legal workflows, has sparked over $285 billion in cumulative market cap losses across software and financial services since February 3. Goldman Sachs has been working with embedded Anthropic engineers for six months to develop autonomous agents for accounting, trade transactions, and client vetting.

The recent Claude Opus 4.6 update expanded the context window from 200,000 to one million tokens, making the AI better suited for complex office and coding work. Anthropic and Infosys announced a collaboration on February 17 to deliver enterprise AI solutions across telecommunications, financial services, and manufacturing using Claude Code and Infosys Topaz.

Nvidia Earnings in Focus as AI Chip Demand Persists

All eyes turn to Nvidia this week as the AI chip giant prepares to report fiscal Q4 2026 results. Wall Street expects quarterly revenue of $65.87 billion, representing roughly 67.5% annual growth, with earnings per share of $1.53—up 72% year-over-year.

Despite tariff concerns, major hyperscalers continue locking in Nvidia supply. Meta has secured a multi-year agreement for millions of AI chips across current and next-generation systems, including CPUs and GPUs for training and inference. The deal underscores continued willingness to secure long-term compute capacity even as companies simultaneously develop in-house silicon.

The AI inference market is heating up as a competitive battleground. AMD recently acquired the Untether AI engineering team, while Intel is reportedly pursuing SambaNova in a consolidation wave driven by demands for lower latency and power consumption in inference workloads.

Additional Headlines

Apple March 4 Event Confirmed: Apple will hold a “special experience” across New York, London, and Shanghai with at least five products expected including a $599 low-cost MacBook, iPhone 17e with A19 chip, and updated iPad Air models.
SK Hynix Expands AI Memory Production: The South Korean chipmaker announced plans to increase capacity for AI memory chips, identifying memory bandwidth as a critical bottleneck for data center AI systems.
EU “Made in Europe” Plan Delayed: The European Commission postponed its industrial initiative by one week due to disagreements over local-content thresholds, with data centers and AI infrastructure now “deeply entangled” with targeted industrial inputs.
Yondr Secures $532M Green Financing: Data center developer Yondr Group closed $532 million in green asset-backed securities for UK campus refinancing, demonstrating capital market sophistication for infrastructure expansion.

GNSS News

Baltic and North Sea Nations Declare Zero Tolerance for GNSS Jamming

Fourteen coastal nations issued a joint declaration signaling a major shift in maritime law enforcement against GNSS interference. Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom specifically identified “Russia’s regular disruption of GNSS signals in the region” as a safety threat requiring immediate action.

The declaration employs unusually mandatory language, stating signatories “require that all vessels exercising freedom of navigation strictly comply with applicable international law.” This represents a departure from historical practice where vessels in innocent passage were rarely challenged. The timing coincided with the UK Royal Institute of Navigation releasing a major report documenting how signal interference harms maritime operations.

Beyond GNSS jamming, the declaration addresses AIS spoofing and “shadow fleets” used to circumvent international sanctions. The strategic leverage is significant: all traffic to Russian ports in Kaliningrad and St. Petersburg must transit these waters. Signatories also called for developing “alternative terrestrial radionavigation systems” as GNSS backups, with northern European nations advancing projects including terrestrial timing systems in Finland, Sweden, Norway, and the UK, plus planned eLoran networks between the UK and France.

Urban GNSS Testing Shows 4x Accuracy Improvements

GPS World published research on GNSS testing in challenging urban environments across Germany and Japan, with Focal Point Positioning demonstrating significant accuracy gains using S-GNSS Auto software on STMicroelectronics’ Teseo receivers.

In Frankfurt, glass facades and narrow streets created severe multipath interference, while Tokyo’s Shinjuku district—described as “one of the world’s toughest GNSS environments”—presented towering buildings, multilevel road networks, and reflective surfaces. The enhanced system achieved “accuracy improvement of up to 4x” compared to conventional receivers, maintaining lane-level accuracy where standard systems produced positions drifting through buildings.

The research emphasized that automotive safety depends less on peak accuracy under ideal conditions and more on reliability when signals are distorted—critical as the industry transitions toward Level 3 autonomy. Meanwhile, SpaceX detailed Starlink’s PNT capabilities to the FCC, claiming nanosecond-level timing accuracy and meter-level positioning from its 10,000+ satellite LEO constellation without requiring new spectrum allocations.

Key Takeaways

Tariff Uncertainty Threatens AI Buildout: The Supreme Court ruling provided brief market relief, but Trump’s 15% counter-tariffs and potential $75-100 billion in additional infrastructure costs cloud the outlook for America’s AI data center expansion.
Enterprise AI Disruption Accelerating: Anthropic’s Claude Cowork platform and Goldman Sachs partnership signal that AI agents are moving from concept to deployment in finance, consulting, and enterprise software—with stock valuations adjusting accordingly.
GNSS Resilience Gains Geopolitical Urgency: The Baltic declaration marks a rare unified Western response to Russian signal warfare, while urban testing advances and LEO alternatives like Starlink and Xona mature to address GPS vulnerabilities.