Thursday, December 26, 2024

Electricians are flocking to regions around the US to build data centers, as AI shapes up to be an economy-bending force that creates boom towns (New York Times)

New York Times:
Electricians are flocking to regions around the US to build data centers, as AI shapes up to be an economy-bending force that creates boom towns  —  The rural region is changing fast as electricians from around the country plug the tech industry's new, giant data centers into its ample power supply.



Italian energy giant Eni launches its HPC6 supercomputer, the most powerful outside the US, costing €100M to build and using 14K AMD GPUs, to find oil and gas (Malcolm Moore/Financial Times)

Malcolm Moore / Financial Times:
Italian energy giant Eni launches its HPC6 supercomputer, the most powerful outside the US, costing €100M to build and using 14K AMD GPUs, to find oil and gas  —  Italian energy giant switches on the world's most powerful machine outside the US  —  Italian energy giant Eni is firing …



Alibaba agrees to merge its South Korean operations with E-Mart's Gmarket, creating a 50-50 joint venture; sources say the new company could be valued at ~$4B (Manuel Baigorri/Bloomberg)

Manuel Baigorri / Bloomberg:
Alibaba agrees to merge its South Korean operations with E-Mart's Gmarket, creating a 50-50 joint venture; sources say the new company could be valued at ~$4B  —  - Companies announce JV deal in Korea, confirming earlier report  — Alibaba seeks inroads abroad as growth slows in China



An in-depth analysis of 62 AI queries: ChatGPT search beat Google on content gap analysis and disambiguation queries, but Google was better for most searches (Eric Enge/Search Engine Land)

Eric Enge / Search Engine Land:
An in-depth analysis of 62 AI queries: ChatGPT search beat Google on content gap analysis and disambiguation queries, but Google was better for most searches  —  A detailed analysis of ChatGPT search and Google's performance across 62 queries, with scoring metrics and practical examples.



Wednesday, December 25, 2024

Russia's finance minister says Russian companies have begun using bitcoin and other digital currencies in international payments to counter Western sanctions (Gleb Bryanski/Reuters)

Gleb Bryanski / Reuters:
Russia's finance minister says Russian companies have begun using bitcoin and other digital currencies in international payments to counter Western sanctions  —  Russian companies have begun using bitcoin and other digital currencies in international payments following legislative changes …



A look at the more challenging AI evaluations emerging in response to the rapid progress of models, including FrontierMath, Humanity's Last Exam, and RE-Bench (Tharin Pillay/Time)

Tharin Pillay / Time:
A look at the more challenging AI evaluations emerging in response to the rapid progress of models, including FrontierMath, Humanity's Last Exam, and RE-Bench  —  Despite their expertise, AI developers don't always know what their most advanced systems are capable of—at least, not at first.



Taiwan's FTC blocks Uber's $950M acquisition of Delivery Hero's Foodpanda, arguing it would decrease competition as their combined market share would be 90%+ (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg:
Taiwan's FTC blocks Uber's $950M acquisition of Delivery Hero's Foodpanda, arguing it would decrease competition as their combined market share would be 90%+  —  - Fair Trade Commission concerned deal would limit competition  — Uber had sought Delivery Hero's Foodpanda unit in Taiwan



Benchmarking AMD's MI300X and Nvidia's H100 and H200; in theory, AMD's GPU has advantages in specs and Total Cost of Ownership, but software bugs hold it back (Dylan Patel/SemiAnalysis)

Dylan Patel / SemiAnalysis:
Benchmarking AMD's MI300X and Nvidia's H100 and H200; in theory, AMD's GPU has advantages in specs and Total Cost of Ownership, but software bugs hold it back  —  SemiAnalysis has been on a five-month long quest to settle the reality of MI300X.  In theory, the MI300X should be at a huge advantage …



Tuesday, December 24, 2024

Arizona's Maricopa County is set to have the second largest concentration of US data centers by 2028, as the state races to increase electricity production (Pranshu Verma/Washington Post)

Pranshu Verma / Washington Post:
Arizona's Maricopa County is set to have the second largest concentration of US data centers by 2028, as the state races to increase electricity production  —  As data centers drain America's power grids, a fierce battle is being waged for electricity.  On Navajo Nation land, many are on the losing end.



Tass: the Russian government bans crypto mining in 10 regions from January 1 to March 15, 2031, citing power consumption, after legalizing mining in July 2024 (Sheldon Reback/CoinDesk)

Sheldon Reback / CoinDesk:
Tass: the Russian government bans crypto mining in 10 regions from January 1 to March 15, 2031, citing power consumption, after legalizing mining in July 2024  —  Temporary bans may be imposed in other regions during peak energy demand, Tass reported  —  What to know:



Sources: the EU will conditionally approve US chip design software company Synopsys' $35B Ansys acquisition, the largest tech deal since Broadcom bought VMware (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)

Foo Yun Chee / Reuters:
Sources: the EU will conditionally approve US chip design software company Synopsys' $35B Ansys acquisition, the largest tech deal since Broadcom bought VMware  —  U.S. chip design software company Synopsys (SNPS.O) is set to win conditional EU antitrust approval for its $35 billion buy of Ansys …



The US NLRB rules that Amazon must negotiate with the Amazon Labor Union, which represents ~5K workers at its Staten Island warehouse; Amazon plans to appeal (Greg Bensinger/Reuters)

Greg Bensinger / Reuters : The US NLRB rules that Amazon must negotiate with the Amazon Labor Union, which represents ~5K workers at its ...