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Texas halts new data centers as governor calls for audits

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  Tech companies and developers have been scouring the U.S. for places to build data centers, and they’ve been drawn to Texas’ loose regulations and seemingly abundant power supply. Only Virginia hosts more data centers than Texas. But even Texas can be pushed to the brink. Governor Greg Abbott announced Monday that all new data center projects will need to be audited by both the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) and the state’s grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). The size of ERCOT’s interconnection queue has grown dramatically this year. In January, ERCOT had 233 gigawatts of projects waiting to connect to its grid. In less than six months , that figure had more than doubled. Today, Abbott’s office said ERCOT is tracking 474 gigawatts of new connection requests. About 90% of those are data centers, according to the grid operator. Some of those projects are simply paper proposals at this point. Because queues for grid connections have grown s...
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Nvidia investing $1.5B in SoftBank data center developer behind OpenAI project

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  Nvidia said on Monday that it will invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy, a data center linked to SoftBank and OpenAI. The investment ensures that Nvidia will be the sole supplier of compute infrastructure at OpenAI’s Ports-Pike data center near Cincinnati, Ohio. Nvidia will also provide up to $105 billion in credit to help build the facility, which could scale from an initial 4.25 gigawatts to 8 gigawatts in size, according to documents the company filed with the SEC. SB Energy’s existing investors include SoftBank and OpenAI. SoftBank had previously held $5.8 billion worth of Nvidia stock, which it sold in November to help fund other AI investments. The data center and power developer will build a 9.2 gigawatt natural gas power plant on the site, which is land owned by the U.S. Department of Energy. The site previously enriched uranium for the U.S. nuclear arsenal and for U.S. Navy submarines. The power plant is expected to cost $33 billion . The steep sum reflects the skyrocket...
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Groq raises $350M to fuel its pivot from AI chips to neocloud

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  Startup Groq has raised $350 million as it continues to pivot from an AI chipmaker to a neocloud company that provides powerful GPUs and AI infrastructure services.  The new capital, led by investment firm Disruptive with planned participation from Nvidia, values the company at $3.5 billion. That’s down from the $6.9 billion Groq was valued at last September, just a few months before Nvidia hired the startup’s founder and CEO, Jonathan Ross, and other top talent as part of a $20 billion licensing deal that the company paid out to investors.  A spokesperson for the company told TechCrunch that despite the difference in valuation, the company doesn’t see it as a down round, but rather as establishing a new valuation for the “post-Nvidia-licensing-deal version of Groq.”  Groq was focused on building its own chips, dubbed LPUs (language processing units), to compete with Nvidia on inference — the type of compute needed to run AI workloads in real time. After it lost...
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AI automation startup Relay shuts down, staff joins Google’s Chrome team

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  Relay, an AI-powered workflow automation tool that was launched in 2021 with the goal of becoming the new Zapier , is shutting down, and some of its staff — including its top executive — are joining Google’s Chrome team. Jacob Bank, Relay’s founder and CEO, shared a company announcement Monday that reveals the app will be shutting down access for paying customers on September 14. Free customers would have already lost access as of August 15. The app’s closure was initially announced in July. Bank, who previously spent a little over six years at Google,   revealed that   he would now be rejoining the tech giant as VP of Product for Google Chrome, where he will lead the product and developer relations teams for Chrome, according to his   LinkedIn . “I’ve spent my whole career doing one thing: building tools that help people get more done with AI, without sacrificing their personal creativity or insights,” said Bank in a   post   on X. “And joining the Chr...
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Warp’s new system is an out-of-the-box software factory for AI development

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  Companies are still grappling with exactly how software development should work in the AI area, but one early answer is the so-called software factory. Essentially an agent loop that’s built around the traditional stages of software development, the software factory approach has become a popular way for companies to remake their engineering organizations for the AI era. Now, a system from Warp could make that transition a lot easier. On Tuesday, the AI coding company introduced Warp Factories , a new system designed to make building and operating AI software factories as easy as possible. Operating as an infrastructure layer, Warp Factories gives companies a simple environment for deploying agents and a roadmap for how to use them. To be clear, many companies are already having success with the factory model without any help from Warp. Stripe has been particularly public about its technical progress, developing a “minions” system to automate development within its own codebase. ...
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Why Apple’s camera-equipped AirPods may not be the ‘pervert pods’ consumers fear

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  Camera-equipped AI wearables today have developed a bit of a reputation problem. Devices like Meta’s Ray-Bans raise concerns about people being recorded without their consent. So the idea that Apple is reportedly preparing to release AirPods with cameras in them seems to conflict with the iPhone maker’s desire to position itself as a privacy-focused tech company. But Apple’s now-leaked camera-equipped AirPods may not be as creepy as they first sound. The rumored cameras were reportedly confirmed via video footage found in Apple’s macOS 26.7 RC (short for “release candidate,” or the final test version of the software before it ships publicly). The footage shows a man holding up a book while wearing AirPods and apparently having a conversation with Siri about it. The audio track accompanying the video says: “With Visual Intelligence, your world becomes savable. See something you like? Just ask me to save it for later.” The addition of cameras to the popular wireless earbuds is fu...
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