GoKawiil
Tech News
Insurers and reinsurers are exploring catastrophe bonds to help cover the massive, geographically concentrated value of hyperscale data centers, many of which sit in hurricane- and flood-prone regions. Industry experts told CNBC that while no dedicated data center cat bond has yet been issued, activity is building one step upstream through reinsurance vehicles like quota shares and sidecars as firms work out pricing and capacity.
A conference talk and blog post argue that Pandas pushes users toward costly distributed systems like Spark or Snowflake long before their data actually requires that complexity. The author says most workloads that hit the 'Pandas cliff' around tens of gigabytes can instead be handled efficiently on a single machine using newer tools such as Polars and DuckDB, up to roughly the 100GB mark. Citing an Amazon Redshift fleet study, the piece suggests genuinely 'Big Data' scale is far rarer than commonly assumed.
Mecka AI, a startup that pays people to record themselves performing everyday tasks to generate motion data for training humanoid robots, is close to finalizing a new funding round led by Sequoia Capital valuing the company at roughly $500 million. The deal comes just three months after Mecka raised $60 million in a round led by Framework Ventures, though the exact size of the new round remains unknown and terms could still change.
Sony Music and Warner have filed a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic, alleging the AI company scraped and used their song catalogs without permission to train its models. This follows a similar suit from Universal Music Group in January, meaning all three major music publishers are now pursuing legal action against Anthropic.
Meta piloted a Model Capability Initiative that would have captured employees' keystrokes and mouse movements to help train its AI models. Workers pushed back quickly, circulating an internal petition, and the program was ultimately shelved after concerns about privacy and a reported data breach.
Senator Ron Wyden and Congressman Warren Davidson sent a letter to Britain's Investigatory Powers Tribunal demanding it stop concealing details of Apple's dispute with the UK government over encrypted iCloud data. The case began when the Home Office ordered Apple to build backdoor access to encrypted backups worldwide, prompting Apple to pull its Advanced Data Protection feature for UK users; the tribunal later dismissed Apple's challenge after the UK narrowed its demand to British users only.
Florida has filed a lawsuit against Netflix, alleging the streaming company misled subscribers about its privacy practices while secretly gathering detailed data on users' devices, locations and viewing habits. The suit contends this tracking extended to children and families who were unaware of the extent of the surveillance.
A group of parents and children in Illinois and California filed a proposed class-action lawsuit in Chicago federal court, claiming Meta harvested their Facebook and Instagram photos without consent to build NameTag, an unreleased face-recognition feature for its smart glasses, and to train generative AI models like Emu and Muse Image. The suit alleges these actions violated state biometric and privacy laws in Illinois and California.
Oracle has requested proposals for 2 gigawatts of renewable energy in New Mexico as it faces local protests and legal challenges over the $165 billion Project Jupiter data center it's building with OpenAI in Santa Teresa. The facility, part of the Stargate AI infrastructure initiative, will still run on natural gas-powered fuel cells rather than direct renewable power, and analysts note the renewable investment is a 'synthetic' match rather than a direct power source for the site.
The EPA is proposing to eliminate a federal rule requiring states to notify the public and accept comments before approving air-pollution permits for industrial facilities, including data centers and the power plants built to supply them. A separate EPA proposal from last month would also allow developers to begin construction before permits are finalized. These changes come as data centers expand rapidly across the rural South, disproportionately affecting Black communities.
Nscale, a UK-based AI data center company, has named Fidji Simo, who recently departed OpenAI's No. 2 role, to its board of directors. She joins other prominent tech figures including Sheryl Sandberg, Susan Decker and Nick Clegg as the company prepares for a possible public listing this fall.
Florida's Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles confirmed the ShinyHunters extortion group breached its DAVID driver database on September 4, 2026, after the gang claimed to have stolen over 200,000 driver records. FLHSMV said the intruder used login credentials from a single Plant City Police Department account that had been improperly saved on the employee's personal device, contradicting ShinyHunters' claim that it exploited a password-reset flaw across multiple accounts.