Top 10 Ars Technica — Latest — May 12, 2026

May 12, 2026: a day when a video game retailer tried to buy eBay for $56 billion and got slapped down like a bad game review. The top news from major outlets shows a landscape dominated by audacious corporate moves, bleeding-edge AI pressure campaigns, and infrastructure failures that quietly consume millions of gallons. eBay's icy rejection of GameStop's offer—calling it 'neither credible nor attractive'—is the kind of boardroom drama that makes business pages sing. Meanwhile, Amazon employees are 'tokenmaxxing,' gaming internal metrics to cope with relentless AI tool mandates, revealing a workforce pushed to absurdity. Data centers guzzling 30 million gallons of water unnoticed for months underscores how the tech industry's physical footprint keeps swelling beyond oversight. These stories aren't just headlines; they're fault lines where corporate ambition, worker resistance, and environmental cost collide. The data for this list was sourced from top news feeds aggregated on May 12, 2026.