Skip to main content

AI Steady, Cloud Accelerating Gives Microsoft A Big Datacenter Boost

1 week 6 days ago

Wall Street has been looking for some good news, and Microsoft came through with its financial results for the third quarter of its fiscal 2025 as its cloud business – and to be specific, its non-AI cloud business – grew much more strongly than expected. …

AI Steady, Cloud Accelerating Gives Microsoft A Big Datacenter Boost was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Timothy Prickett Morgan

China Advances Abandoned US Nuclear Technology

1 week 6 days ago
Chinese scientists have achieved a significant nuclear breakthrough by successfully refueling a thorium-based reactor while it remains operational, according to reports from Chinese state media. The experimental 2-megawatt thermal reactor, which came online in June 2024, represents the revival of technology originally developed and abandoned by the United States in the mid-20th century. The milestone was revealed during a closed meeting at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where project leaders shared results demonstrating the reactor's ability to be refueled without shutdown -- a capability conventional uranium reactors lack. Though small compared to MIT's 6-megawatt research reactor, this achievement shows China's accelerating nuclear ambitions. The country has surpassed France in nuclear generation and recently approved 10 new reactors worth over $27 billion in investment. This thorium reactor joins other revived nuclear concepts, including molten-salt cooling systems and high-temperature gas reactors, as developers look to the past for solutions to advance nuclear energy's future.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

msmash

Red, white, and blew it? Trump tariffs may cost America the AI race

1 week 6 days ago
Whole thing gonna be a real PITA for tech sector, says ABI Research

World War Fee  US tariffs - should they go ahead - are likely to result in price bumps for essential components and construction materials in the datacenter industry, and may even cost America its lead in the AI race as investments are paused or canceled.…

Dan Robinson

Google is Putting AI Mode Right in Search

1 week 6 days ago
A "small percentage" of Google's users in the US will begin seeing an AI Mode tab in Google Search "in the coming weeks," the company said Thursday, marking the tool's first deployment outside the company's experimental Labs environment. Unlike traditional search results that display URLs based on user queries, AI Mode generates conversational responses from Google's search index. The feature will appear as a dedicated tab positioned before the standard "All," "Images," and other search filters. The deployment represents Google's direct challenge to LLM-powered search engines like Perplexity and ChatGPT. AI Mode differs from existing AI Overviews in Google Search, which merely insert AI summaries between the search box and web results.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

msmash