AI Newsletter October 2026

Using AI to Prepare for the Next Pandemic

It's well known by now that AI played an important role in accelerating research during the COVID-19 pandemic, enabling governments and pharmaceutical companies to develop treatments and vaccines in record time. This was largely thanks to the wealth of existing knowledge about other coronaviruses that could be analysed. But what about the next pandemic?

With cuts to the CDC and other US public services, it's encouraging to see NVIDIA preparing for this challenge with researchers from across the world including the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, EMBL-EBI, Google DeepMind, NVIDIA, Seoul National University, Sungkyunkwan University, the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and the University of Glasgow.

Together, they have created a new dataset comprising the 3D structures for the protein complexes of more than 2,800 viruses, openly available to scientists via the AlphaFold Database. The dataset was processed using a special variant of the BioNeMo framework, which NVIDIA is also releasing.

With analysis by the Center for Global Development estimating around a 50% chance of a pandemic as severe as COVID-19 within the next 25 years, it's key to get started now, with around 30% of the protein interactions within the database being completely new.

"When the next pandemic happens, there may be something that comes out of the blue, and we'll be lacking the knowledge we had for COVID. What we're trying to do is stockpile some of that knowledge ahead of time."

Joe Grove, Medical Research Council-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research

Discover how Scan helped research during the COVID-19 pandemic and solved challenges around other healthcare issues.

NVIDIA RTX Spark Laptops Now Available to Pre-Order

NVIDIA transformed the AI development market last year with the release of the DGX Spark workstation, with its stablemate, RTX Spark, now also coming to market.

To recap, RTX Spark is a new SoC, comprising Arm CPU cores and a Blackwell GPU and up to 128GB of unified memory. Unlike the DGX Spark, the RTX Spark has RT cores, so as well as compute and AI applications, it can also be used for visualisation workloads, as well as some light gaming. It also differs in being built for Windows 11, rather than Linux. In terms of AI workloads, RTX Spark is ideal for developing AI models and programming robots.

The first RTX Spark devices are laptops from a variety of brands, including Asus, Microsoft and MSI. Head over to our website to view the list of RTX Spark laptops with different screen size, memory, storage and other options, which are now available to pre-order.

It's Almost Time for NVIDIA GTC Berlin 2026

NVIDIA GTC Berlin 2026 takes place at the iconic Tempodrom from October 20th - 22nd. As a Silver Sponsor of the event, Scan will be there on stand 3068, showcasing how we can help you accelerate every stage of your AI journey, from development and training, through to deployment of advanced AI systems. Visit our stand to explore physical AI solutions from Unitree Robotics and OLO Robotics, alongside a demonstration from Pentatonic of its AI-powered kiosks revolutionising the trade-in and recycling of consumer goods. All this and a chance to see the new NVIDIA RTX Spark laptops in action.

With more than 40 years of innovation and over 20 years of partnership with NVIDIA, Scan is your trusted partner for AI and Robotics, so be sure to come along and chat to us. Register today and whilst you're waiting check out what you may have missed from GTC San Jose 2026 earlier in the year. We look forward to seeing you in Berlin!

NVIDIA Strengthens Agentic AI Security

The last few months have been filled with a deluge of news stories where agentic AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic and others have gone rogue and hacked into third-parties such as Hugging Face and multiple government bodies in Australia. These are just a few of the most high profile examples, but it's a widespread problem that only seems to be gaining momentum.

NVIDIA's initial response to this was announcing the Open Secure AI Alliance, encouraging AI industry leaders to band together and co-operate on AI-related cybersecurity concerns. This appears now to be bearing fruit, with the release of OpenShell, an open source application that traces actions and enforces policies as agents operate on NVIDIA Vera CPUs, as well as being supported by other brands such as Arm and Intel.

OpenShell is complemented by Sentry, an out-of-band watchdog that runs on NVIDIA BlueField DPUs that monitors agent behaviour, quarantining agents that attempt to move outside their boundaries.

These sound like worthy goals, especially now that one of the most egregious hackers, Anthropic, has joined the Open Secure AI Alliance, although there's still no sign of OpenAI joining. We also have to question, given what we know about AI agents, why aren't they tested in air-gapped test environments? Still, it's good to see at least one company being the adult in the room and taking steps to keep agentic AI away from the big red button.

AMD to Acquire World Labs

Hot on the heels of NVIDIA acquiring Hugging Face, the AI-infused corporate spending spree is set to continue with AMD announcing it will buy World Labs for $8.2bn. World Labs builds frontier models that can perceive, generate, reason, and interact with virtual and physical worlds.

World Labs' first application, Marble, generates 3D worlds from prompts such as text, images, 360° panoramas and videos. Once you've finished editing the 3D world you can then export it in a variety of 2D and 3D formats.

Given the value of the acquisition we expect AMD is interested not only in Marble, but also World Labs' physical AI and robotics expertise, even if that hasn't been productised yet.

NetApp to Acquire PEAK:AIO

Industry giant NetApp is planning to acquire the British software-defined storage start-up PEAK:AIO for an undisclosed sum. NetApp claims it will "accelerate NetApp's AI infrastructure roadmap by augmenting metadata services and parallel namespace innovation designed to help AI clouds scale shared storage alongside growing GPU clusters".

"NetApp and PEAK:AIO connected through the shared belief that the AI era demands a fundamentally new approach to data infrastructure. What excites us most about joining NetApp is the opportunity to pair our culture of innovation with the reach, scale, and customer trust of a global leader."

Mark Klarzynski, CTO and Founder, PEAK:AIO

Scan is proud to be a partner of both NetApp and PEAK:AIO, so it's great to see them joining forces to deliver more innovation for AI storage.

NVIDIA Announces 64GB DGX Spark

The compact desktop NVIDIA DGX Spark combines Grace Blackwell compute, unified memory, ConnectX-7 networking and the CUDA-accelerated AI software stack in one system, making the perfect AI development platform. To make it even more attractive to first time AI users, the existing 128GB models will be joined by 64GB variants, aimed at providing an accessible price point in these times of memory price increases. Available later this month from the likes of Asus, Gigabyte and MSI, nothing else will change as the unit retains the GB10 Superchip, DGX OS and its clustering capabilities.

Supporting up to 100 billion parameter models on device, it includes NVIDIA Agent Toolkit, CUDA-X AI libraries and Nemotron open models, while popular runtimes like Ollama, vLLM and PyTorch with CUDA are all supported out of the box. View available DGX Spark models.

NVIDIA Announces Jetson Orin Nano 2

The NVIDIA Jetson Orin family is aimed at accelerating end-to-end development for generative AI, as well as any edge AI, robotics, or space computing applications. NVIDIA is now expanding the family with the Jetson Orin Nano 2, bringing entry-level edge AI to delivery and inspection drones, robots, and vision AI systems.

It promises to deliver almost twice the inference performance of its predecessor in the same form factor and 40W power envelope. Alternatively, it can be configured to consume just 15W, 40% less power than its predecessor at the same level of performance. The new model features 78 TOPS of AI compute, 8GB of memory and an 8-core Arm CPU, a significant leap in AI and video-processing performance. Aimed at developers running the latest LLMs and VLMs optimised for memory-efficient edge inference AI software, Jetson Orin Nano 2 is due for release in the first half of 2027.

Must Attend AI Events

The remaining months of 2026 show no sign of slowing down when it comes to events to learn more from the movers and shakers in AI.

• NVIDIA GTC Berlin - NVIDIA's AI conference showcasing the latest developments in hardware, software and applications (Tempodrom and STATION-Berlin, Berlin | October 21-22)
• Future of AI Summit 2026 - Features prominent industry speakers from global financial institutions focusing on high-level enterprise strategy (Convene 22 Bishopsgate, London | November 4-5)
• AI World Congress 2026 - Bringing together a unique blend of professionals from across the AI ecosystem (Kensington Conference and Events Centre, London | November 25-26)

Look out for Scan at these events and why not prepare by reading our 7-part AI Project Planning Blog that walks you through all the stages of an AI project and helps you choose best practice, avoid pitfalls and achieve maximum ROI. We'll also bring you any news from these shows in our future newsletters.

Upcoming NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute Courses

The NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute offers hands-on training for developers, data scientists, and researchers looking to solve challenging problems with deep learning and accelerated computing. DLI courses are delivered by qualified Scan and NVIDIA instructors who will pass on their knowledge and educate developers on how to get the most in these rapidly evolving fields.

The next round of NVIDIA DLI courses scheduled for 2026 and 2027 are:

• NVIDIA Isaac for Accelerated Robotics - November 9^th
• Building RAG Agents with LLMs - December 7^th
• Building Agentic AI Application with LLMs - January 25^th 2027
• Building AI Agents with Multimodal Models - February 8^th 2027
• NVIDIA Isaac for Accelerated Robotics - March 10^th 2027

Head over to our website for details on each of these DLI courses and reserve your space.