Google's AI infrastructure chief told employees the company must double its AI serving capacity every six months in order to meet demand. In a presentation earlier this month, Amin Vahdat, a vice president at Google Cloud, gave a presentation titled "AI Infrastructure." It included a slide on "AI compute demand" that said: "Now we must double every 6 months.... the next 1000x in 4-5 years." CNBC reports: The presentation was delivered a week after Alphabet reported better-than-expected third-quarter results and raised its capital expenditures forecast for the second time this year, to a range of $91 billion to $93 billion, followed by a "significant increase" in 2026. Hyperscaler peers Microsoft, Amazon and Meta also boosted their capex guidance, and the four companies now expect to collectively spend more than $380 billion this year.

Google's "job is of course to build this infrastructure but it's not to outspend the competition, necessarily," Vahdat said. "We're going to spend a lot," he said, adding that the real goal is to provide infrastructure that is far "more reliable, more performant and more scalable than what's available anywhere else." In addition to infrastructure build-outs, Vahdat said Google bolsters capacity with more efficient models and through its custom silicon. Last week, Google announced the public launch of its seventh generation Tensor Processing Unit called Ironwood, which the company says is nearly 30 times more power efficient than its first Cloud TPU from 2018.

Vahdat said the company has a big advantage with DeepMind, which has research on what AI models can look like in future years. Google needs to "be able to deliver 1,000 times more capability, compute, storage networking for essentially the same cost and increasingly, the same power, the same energy level," Vahdat said. "It won't be easy but through collaboration and co-design, we're going to get there."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US crackdown on chip exports to China has continued with the arrests of four people accused of a conspiracy to illegally export Nvidia chips. Two US citizens and two nationals of the People's Republic of China (PRC), all of whom live in the US, were charged in an indictment (PDF) unsealed on Wednesday in US District Court for the Middle District of Florida. The indictment alleges a scheme to send Nvidia "GPUs to China by falsifying paperwork, creating fake contracts, and misleading US authorities," John Eisenberg, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's National Security Division, said in a press release yesterday.

The four arrestees are Hon Ning Ho (aka Mathew Ho), a US citizen who was born in Hong Kong and lives in Tampa, Florida; Brian Curtis Raymond, a US citizen who lives in Huntsville, Alabama; Cham Li (aka Tony Li), a PRC national who lives in San Leandro, California; and Jing Chen (aka Harry Chen), a PRC national who lives in Tampa on an F-1 non-immigrant student visa. The suspects face a raft of charges for conspiracy to violate the Export Control Reform Act of 2018, smuggling, and money laundering. They could serve many decades in prison if convicted and given the maximum sentences and forfeit their financial gains. The indictment says that Chinese companies paid the conspirators nearly $3.9 million. One of the suspects was briefly the CTO of Corvex, a Virginia-based AI cloud computing company that is planning to go public. Corvex told CNBC yesterday that it "had no part in the activities cited in the Department of Justice's indictment," and that "the person in question is not an employee of Corvex. Previously a consultant to the company, he was transitioning into an employee role but that offer has been rescinded."

British soldiers are using computer games such as Call of Duty to sharpen their "war-fighting readiness," an Army chief has said. From a report: General Sir Tom Copinger-Symes, the deputy commander of Cyber and Specialist Operations Command, said the war in Ukraine, where remote-operated drones have become crucial on the battlefield, proved the worth of having soldiers skilled in video gaming.

The Ministry of Defence on Friday announced the launch of the International Defence Esports Games (IDEG), a video gaming tournament that will pit the best of Britain's "future cyber warriors" against military teams from 40 other countries.

The Japanese government said that the world's biggest nuclear plant would restart operations. Semafor: The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa site closed in 2012, as Japan -- which previously generated 30% of its electricity from nuclear power -- shuttered most of its fleet in the wake of the Fukushima meltdown. But like much of the world, it is looking once again to nuclear power for reliable, low-carbon energy, especially in the face of high gas and oil prices following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It has restarted 14 out of 54 plants and announced plans for a first new reactor since the disaster.

Google confirmed in a statement Friday that hackers have stolen the Salesforce-stored data of more than 200 companies in a large-scale supply chain hack. TechCrunch reports: On Thursday, Salesforce disclosed a breach of "certain customers' Salesforce data" -- without naming affected companies -- that was stolen via apps published by Gainsight, which provides a customer support platform to other companies.

In a statement, Austin Larsen, the principal threat analyst of Google Threat Intelligence Group, said that the company "is aware of more than 200 potentially affected Salesforce instances." After Salesforce announced the breach, the notorious and somewhat-nebulous hacking group known as Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters, which includes the ShinyHunters gang, claimed responsibility for the hacks in a Telegram channel, which TechCrunch has seen.

Microsoft has acknowledged in a support article that major Windows 11 core features including the Start Menu, Taskbar, File Explorer and System Settings break after applying monthly cumulative updates released on or after July 2025.

The problems stem from XAML component issues that affect updates beginning with July's Patch Tuesday release (KB5062553). The failures occur during first-time user logins after cumulative updates are applied and on non-persistent OS installations like virtual desktop infrastructure setups. Microsoft lists Explorer.exe crashes, shellhost.exe crashes, StartMenuExperienceHost failures and System Settings that silently refuse to launch among the symptoms. The company provided PowerShell commands and batch scripts as temporary workarounds that re-register the affected packages. Both Windows 11 versions 24H2 and 25H2 share the same codebase and are affected. Microsoft said it is working on a fix but did not provide a timeline.

Thunderbird Pro has moved its Thundermail email service into production testing as the open-source email client's subscription bundle of additional services prepares for an Early Bird beta launch at $9 per month that will include email hosting, encrypted file sharing through Send, and scheduling via Appointment.

Internal team members are now testing Thundermail accounts and the new Thunderbird Pro add-on automatically adds Thundermail accounts for users who sign up through it. The project migrated its data hosting from the Americas to Germany and the EU.

Appointment received a major visual redesign being applied across all three services while Send completed an external security review and moved from its standalone add-on into the unified Thunderbird Pro add-on. The new website at tb.pro is live for signups and account management.

Adam Marshall spent more than a decade developing Kingdoms of the Dump while working as a custodian at a school in suburban Philadelphia, cleaning floors and hauling trash bags from 3 PM to 11 PM before coming home to work on his turn-based role-playing game until 5 or 6 AM. The game, which Bloomberg has called "one of the year's most charming RPGs," came out on Tuesday after Marshall and his childhood friend Matt Loiseau -- also a janitor -- built it using RPG Maker alongside a small team of hobbyists who mostly worked for free.

The pair launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2019 that raised $76,560, but the pandemic disrupted their plans and forced them to lose contractors and rethink their approach. Marshall maintained this schedule for five years straight before quitting his custodial job last year to finish the game full-time. Kingdoms of the Dump has sold about 7,000 copies since its release. The game stars a walking trashcan named Dustin Binsley who adventures through landfills and sewers in a world made entirely of garbage.

AI nutrition tracking features in popular fitness apps are producing wildly inaccurate calorie and macro counts despite promises to simplify food logging through automated photo analysis. The Verge tested AI-powered nutrition tools in Ladder, Oura Advisor, January and MyFitnessPal. Ladder's AI estimated the outlet's carefully measured 355-calorie breakfast at 780 calories and got the macro breakdown wrong even after the reviewer manually edited entries to include exact brands and amounts.

Oura Advisor routinely mistook matcha protein shakes for green smoothies. January misidentified barbecue sauce as teriyaki sauce and failed to detect mushrooms in a chicken dish. None of the apps could identify healthier ingredient swaps or accurately log ethnic foods. Oura classified a mix of edamame, quinoa and brown rice as mashed potatoes and white rice. Ladder logged dal makhani curry as chicken soup. The AI features require extensive manual corrections that negate any time savings from automated logging, the publication concluded in its scathing review.

Amazon's 14,000-plus layoffs announced last month touched almost every piece of the company's sprawling business, from cloud computing and devices to advertising, retail and grocery stores. But one job category bore the brunt of cuts more than others: engineers. CNBC: Documents filed in New York, California, New Jersey and Amazon's home state of Washington showed that nearly 40% of the more than 4,700 job cuts in those states were engineering roles. The data was reported by Amazon in Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or WARN, filings to state agencies. The figures represent a segment of the total layoffs announced in October. Not all data was immediately available because of differences in state WARN reporting requirements.

Meta is venturing into the complex world of electricity trading, betting it can accelerate the construction of new US power plants that are vital to its AI ambitions. From a report: The foray into power trading comes after Meta heard from investors and plant developers that too few power buyers were willing to make the early, long-term commitments required to spur investment, according to Urvi Parekh, the company's head of global energy. Trading electricity will give the company the flexibility to enter more of those longer contracts.

Plant developers "want to know that the consumers of power are willing to put skin in the game," Parekh said in an interview. "Without Meta taking a more active voice in the need to expand the amount of power that's on the system, it's not happening as quickly as we would like."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is upgrading its Advanced Paste tool in PowerToys for Windows 11, allowing you to use an on-device AI model to power some of its features. With the 0.96 update, you can route requests through Microsoft's Foundry Local tool or the open-source Ollama, both of which run AI models on your device's neural processing unit (NPU) instead of connecting to the cloud.

That means you won't need to purchase API credits to perform certain actions, like having AI translate or summarize the text copied to your clipboard. Plus, you can keep your data on your device.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told colleagues last month that Google's recent progress in AI could "create some temporary economic headwinds for our company," though he added that OpenAI would emerge ahead, The Information reports [non-paywalled source]. From the report: After OpenAI researchers heard that Google had created a new AI that appears to have leapfrogged OpenAI's in the way it was developed, Altman said in the memo that "we know we have some work to do but we are catching up fast." Still, he cautioned employees that "I expect the vibes out there to be rough for a bit."

An anonymous reader shares a report: "In the 2024-2025 school year, homeschooling continued to grow across the United States, increasing at an average rate of 5.4%," Angela Watson of the Johns Hopkins University School of Education's Homeschool Hub wrote earlier this month. "This is nearly three times the pre-pandemic homeschooling growth rate of around 2%." She added that more than a third of the states from which data is available report their highest homeschooling numbers ever, even exceeding the peaks reached when many public and private schools were closed during the pandemic.

After COVID-19 public health measures were suspended, there was a brief drop in homeschooling as parents and families returned to old habits. That didn't last long. Homeschooling began surging again in the 2023-2024 school year, with that growth continuing last year. Based on numbers from 22 states (not all states have released data, and many don't track homeschoolers), four report declines in the ranks of homeschooled children -- Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, and Tennessee -- while the others report growth from around 1 percent (Florida and Louisiana) to as high as 21.5 percent (South Carolina).

The latest figures likely underestimate growth in homeschooling since not all DIY families abide by registration requirements where they exist, and because families who use the portable funding available through increasingly popular Education Savings Accounts to pay for homeschooling costs are not counted as homeschoolers in several states, Florida included. As a result, adds Watson, "we consider these counts as the minimum number of homeschooled students in each state."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Some Dell and HP laptop owners have been befuddled by their machines' inability to play HEVC/H.265 content in web browsers, despite their machines' processors having integrated decoding support. Laptops with sixth-generation Intel Core and later processors have built-in hardware support for HEVC decoding and encoding. AMD has made laptop chips supporting the codec since 2015. However, both Dell and HP have disabled this feature on some of their popular business notebooks.

HP discloses this in the data sheets for its affected laptops, which include the HP ProBook 460 G11 [PDF], ProBook 465 G11 [PDF], and EliteBook 665 G11 [PDF]. "Hardware acceleration for CODEC H.265/HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) is disabled on this platform," the note reads. Despite this notice, it can still be jarring to see a modern laptop's web browser eternally load videos that play easily in media players. HP and Dell didn't explain why the companies disabled HEVC hardware decoding on their laptops' processors.

A statement from an HP spokesperson said: "In 2024, HP disabled the HEVC (H.265) codec hardware on select devices, including the 600 Series G11, 400 Series G11, and 200 Series G9 products. Customers requiring the ability to encode or decode HEVC content on one of the impacted models can utilize licensed third-party software solutions that include HEVC support. Check with your preferred video player for HEVC software support."

Dell's media relations team shared a similar statement: "HEVC video playback is available on Dell's premium systems and in select standard models equipped with hardware or software, such as integrated 4K displays, discrete graphics cards, Dolby Vision, or Cyberlink BluRay software. On other standard and base systems, HEVC playback is not included, but users can access HEVC content by purchasing an affordable third-party app from the Microsoft Store. For the best experience with high-resolution content, customers are encouraged to select systems designed for 4K or high-performance needs."