AWS stops billing Middle East cloud customers as repairs to war damage drag on.

This week, we discuss a wild message, a new anthology, and a visit to a museum.

Access Now, the group that organizes RightsCon, says Zambian officials asked it to exclude Taiwanese participants if it wanted the event to proceed as planned.

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From data center capacity to enterprise governance, the systems surrounding AI are struggling to keep pace with demand.

What people actually look for when hiring juniors that stand out. The post How to Get Hired in the AI Era appeared first on Towards Data Science.

Different hunting patterns seem to dictate different distributions of metal.

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It could take months for the supply of the Mac Mini and Mac Studio to catch up with demand. Cheng Xin/Getty Images The Mac Mini was in high demand during the March quarter. Apple has had trouble keeping versions of the Mac Mini in stock in recent weeks. CEO Tim Cook attributed Mac Mini demand to its ability to run agentic AI tools effectively. Apple is playing catch-up with surging demand for its Mac Mini, which has gotten an unexpected boost from AI. CEO Tim Cook said on Thursday's March earnings call that the Mac Mini and Mac Studio, two of its desktop computer models, are both "amazing platforms for AI and agentic tools." "The customer recognition of that is happening faster than what we had predicted," Cook said. "And so we saw higher-than-expected demand." He said the company is facing supply constraints on both models heading into the June quarter, and that it "may take several months to reach supply-demand balance." In the March quarter, Mac revenue rose 6% year over year to $8.4 billion, despite supply constraints. Cook told analysts that Apple would have "less flexibility" in the Mac supply chain, coming off a period with record new customers. The new budget MacBook Neo also contributed to the slew of new Mac customers. As Apple moves to close the supply-demand gap, the company said it plans to bring Mac Mini production to the US later this year as part of its $600 billion commitment to investing in American manufacturing. Apple's US website and some third-party retailers have sold out of the $599 base model of the Mac Mini in recent weeks, and Apple has estimated shipping delays on higher-memory configurations. On eBay, some pre-owned models were listed for $200 above retail price in April. The uptick in Mac Mini sales is due in part to its "ability to run advanced models locally in ways that simply weren't possible before," Cook said. This year, tech enthusiasts have been all about OpenClaw, a rapidly evolving, open-source AI tool that can run locally on a computer, fueling demand for higher-memory devices. The Mac Mini is filling that role. Read the original article on Business Insider

The deals come as the DOD has doubled down on diversifying its exposure to AI vendors in the wake of its controversial dispute with Anthropic over usage terms of its AI models.

Cybersecurity was already under strain before AI entered the stack. Now, as AI expands the attack surface and adds new complexity, the limits of legacy approaches are becoming harder to ignore. This session from MIT Technology Review’s EmTech AI conference explores why security must be rethought with AI at its core, not layered on after…

The recent move by Anaconda to acquire Outerbounds is aimed directly at a gap between experimentation and production, where workflows often fail to run consistently across environments. Instead of replacing […] The post What Anaconda’s Outerbounds Deal Says About Where AI Breaks appeared first on BigDATAwire.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Ed Mulholland/Zuffa LLC Rising component prices are driving Big Tech's AI spending surge. Microsoft and Meta's capital expenditure hikes largely result from higher component prices. That suggests Big Tech companies haven't massively expanded their buildout plans lately. Big Tech's AI spending is surging, though not necessarily because companies are building significantly more capacity. This week, industry executives pointed to the same underlying issue: sharply rising component costs, especially for memory chips, are inflating capital expenditures spent on data centers and other equipment. "We are increasing our infrastructure capex forecast for this year. Most of that is due to higher component costs, particularly memory pricing," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told analysts on Wednesday. Microsoft echoed that trend, with CFO Amy Hood saying that roughly $25 billion of its projected $190 billion in 2026 capex is tied to higher component prices. Amazon didn't raise its capex forecast at all this week. Even then, CEO Andy Jassy said memory costs have "skyrocketed," and the company is trying to keep these costs under control. Memory prices are soaring as AI demand strains supply. Research firm TrendForce expects DRAM prices to jump as much as 63% in the second quarter of 2026, while NAND flash prices could surge 75%. NAND and DRAM are different semiconductor technologies used to hold data. That's reshaping how investors should interpret Big Tech's spending boom. Take a theoretical example: If you buy 100 AI components for $1,000 each, that's $100,000 in capex. If the cost of each component goes up 25%, they now cost $1,250 each. Your capex is now $125,000, even though you're adding zero extra capacity. When stripping out this pricing impact, Big Tech companies may not have boosted their AI buildout plans much at all this week. Take a look at this table from BNP Paribas. Microsoft's capex plans exceeded Wall Street estimates by $32 billion. That seems big, until you consider $25 billion of that increase comes from higher prices, not a more ambitious buildout. Meta upped its capex forecast by $10 billion. Higher memory prices could account for most, or all, of that increase. CompanyNew GuideStreet ConsensusSurprise (%)Old Guide Microsoft$190B$158B+20%- Amazon$200B$197B+1%$200B Google$185B$181B+2%$180B Meta$135B$123B+10%$125B TOTAL CAPEX$710B$659B+8%- RBC Capital analysts spotted this phenomenon in early February. Back then, they estimated that higher memory prices could account for about 45% of the total capex increase by top cloud providers this year. The result is a more nuanced picture of the AI arms race. While investment remains strong, the headline numbers may overstate the pace of expansion. Instead, Big Tech is increasingly paying a premium to secure scarce components, highlighting memory pricing as a key bottleneck in the industry's next phase of growth. Sign up for BI's Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com. Read the original article on Business Insider

On May 21st, the Innodata GenAI Summit convenes in London for a single day of rigorous, practitioner-led exchange on the challenges defining frontier AI in 2026. Here is what the agenda covers, who is in the room, and why it's a must for AI professionals...

New results suggest Mythos' cyber threat isn't "a breakthrough specific to one model."

Companies are taking control of their own data to tailor AI for their needs. The challenge lies in balancing ownership with the safe, trusted flow of high‑quality data needed to power reliable insights. This conversation from MIT Technology Review’s EmTech AI conference examines how AI factories unlock new levels of scale, sustainability, and governance—positioning data…

We'll soon get to see the brand's first EV; first, a more honed V12 four-seater.

A group of hacktivists have claimed responsibility for a distributed denial-of-service attack, which has affected several Ubuntu and Canonical websites, and prevented users from updating the Linux-based operating system.

A data quality case study from English local elections on categorical normalisation, metric validation, and why raw labels should never define analytical groups. The post Churn Without Fragmentation: How a Party-Label Bug Reversed My Headline Finding appeared first on Towards Data Science.

Two new projects, including one from a Pulitzer-winning reporter, claim they’ve solved the mystery of Bitcoin’s creator. So why does the hunt continue?