Amazon unveiled a program called Built Together, committing over $1 billion over five years to communities hosting its data centers. AWS CEO Matt Garman said the funds will target education and job training, energy affordability and water solutions, and flexible local priorities, with residents deciding how money is spent. Amazon says it has already arranged free associate's degree access with community colleges for up to 300,000 students and plans to fund trade certifications for up to 100,000 workers annually.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-10-03
Amazon announced it will donate more than $1 billion over five years to communities near its data centers, letting residents direct funds toward education, job training, energy affordability and water initiatives. AWS CEO Matt Garman also pledged the company won't raise local power bills or deplete water supplies, claiming 75 percent of projects already meet a 2030 'water positive' goal. Garman argued that opposition to data centers risks letting China overtake the US in AI development.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-10-02
Amazon and Synopsys announced a multi-year agreement worth more than a billion dollars to deepen collaboration on AI chip design. Amazon will license Synopsys' IP and expand use of its electronic design automation software, while Synopsys will optimize its tools for Amazon's Trainium and Graviton chips and adopt AWS cloud and Bedrock services for its own development.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-10-02
Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman published a lengthy blog post urging Americans to support AI data center construction, warning that blocking projects could harm US economic and national security interests. Garman cited more than 100 data center moratoriums under consideration nationwide and announced a 'Data Center Commitment' including job creation pledges, protections against local electricity rate hikes, and over $1 billion in community investment. Amazon also said it has stopped using nondisclosure agreements with government agencies after a lawmaker's inquiry into such deals.
theverge.com
· 2026-10-02
An Entrepreneur contributor recounts visiting a global retailer whose new AI customer-service recommendation engine looked successful on paper, with faster response times and more accurate suggestions. But observing representatives directly revealed they juggled four screens and manually copied data between disconnected tools, causing many to ignore the AI's recommendations entirely.
entrepreneur.com
· 2026-09-28
Emails from 2024 obtained by Fast Company reveal that officials at the SEC and FBI scrambled to understand changes Amazon made to its cloud services terms and conditions. The correspondence shows federal staff trying to determine whether the updated terms would let Amazon use government data stored on its cloud to train artificial intelligence models.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-09-28
Fakecloud is a new tool that provides a local AWS-like environment for testing applications without needing real cloud infrastructure. It works with standard AWS SDKs, CLI, and infrastructure-as-code tools, letting developers run their actual production code against emulated services, inspect emails, messages, and invocations afterward, and trigger asynchronous AWS-style behavior on demand.
fakecloud.dev
· 2026-09-26
Hacking group ShinyHunters says it stole terabytes of sensitive data on FBI employees and job applicants, exploiting a zero-day flaw in Oracle's PeopleSoft software to breach Amazon Web Services' GovCloud. A sample reviewed by Reuters and 404 Media reportedly includes names, addresses, birthdates and Social Security numbers for about 5,000 employees, and the group also claimed responsibility for briefly hijacking the FBI's website. The FBI confirmed it is investigating a claimed compromise of the FBIJobs.gov portal and possible exposure of employee personal information.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-23
The ShinyHunters extortion group told BleepingComputer it exploited a new remote-code-execution flaw in Oracle PeopleSoft to access FBI systems and move into FBI-managed AWS GovCloud infrastructure, claiming theft of 2-3TB of data including employee, applicant, HR and Medlink records. The group shared a screenshot showing the FBI Jobs site defaced with its logo and a message asserting sensitive PII/PHI had been stolen, and said the FBI quickly took the affected systems offline.
bleepingcomputer.com
· 2026-09-22
Amazon Web Services is giving select customers early access to a video-generation AI model built by The Biological Computing Company, which derives its algorithms from patterns observed in rat brain cells. The startup records how biological neural tissue processes visual information and then designs software that mimics those processes, aiming to make existing generative video models more efficient. Both companies expect a broader rollout to AWS enterprise customers to follow this limited preview.
wired.com
· 2026-09-22
A Google Threat Intelligence Group analyst named Larsen ran a covert operation to observe the hacker collective TeamPCP, gaining access to a server where the group stored stolen credentials from numerous victim companies. Google used this visibility to rapidly notify cloud providers like AWS and Microsoft to revoke compromised access tokens before the hackers could exploit them for extortion, rather than trying to contact each victim individually.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-09-20
Amazon has acknowledged that its Bahrain AWS Region (me-south-1) suffered irreversible damage from Iranian missile and drone strikes during the US-Iran conflict, rendering hosted data and resources permanently inaccessible. The company also reported ongoing operational issues at its UAE region, where one availability zone was destroyed and two others are still being assessed for recovery.
techspot.com
· 2026-09-17
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