Crusoe, the data center developer behind OpenAI's Abilene, Texas site, closed a $3.9 billion Series F funding round led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital, and Valor Equity Partners, valuing the company at $30.9 billion. The funds will support both large-scale data center builds and Crusoe's new modular 'Spark' AI factories, which can be manufactured off-site and deployed quickly. The company also added three board members, including Redwood Materials CEO JB Straubel and Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-09-17
Apple appeared before a UK court seeking to overturn secrecy rules that bar it from confirming whether the government has ordered access to encrypted iCloud data. The case follows reports that Britain had secretly demanded a backdoor into encrypted iCloud content, a demand Apple responded to by pulling Advanced Data Protection for new UK users rather than weakening encryption globally. After the U.S. government pushed back, Britain narrowed its original worldwide request but later issued a fresh notice aimed specifically at UK-based Apple users.
9to5mac.com
· 2026-09-17
Executives from media and retail sectors discussed the growing gap between the volume of consumer data companies collect and their ability to extract meaningful understanding from it. The conversation focused on identifying emerging cultural shifts early, distinguishing genuine signals from noise, and defining where human judgment still matters alongside AI-generated analysis.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-09-17
Amazon Web Services has confirmed that customer data hosted in its Bahrain and United Arab Emirates regions was permanently lost following Iranian drone strikes on data centers six months ago. AWS said one of three UAE availability zones and all three Bahrain zones suffered damage beyond what its backup systems could withstand, and it remains unable to restore access to some resources.
slashdot.org
· 2026-09-17
The United Nations unveiled the UN System Data Commons, a new platform built on Google's open-source Data Commons technology that lets people query UN statistics using plain-language questions and supports the Model Context Protocol so AI systems can pull data directly. It replaces the older UNData portal, which relied on manual browsing rather than conversational search. The announcement came alongside a UNICEF study showing leading chatbots answered development-data questions correctly only about 21% of the time.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-09-17
Amazon Web Services has confirmed that customer data hosted in its Bahrain and United Arab Emirates data centers was permanently lost following Iranian drone strikes in March. The damage wiped out data across all three availability zones in Bahrain and one of three zones in the UAE, with AWS saying the destruction exceeded what its systems were built to survive. Amazon had already halted billing in the affected regions and spent six months trying to restore services before disclosing the losses.
wired.com
· 2026-09-17
Speaking at a UK summit alongside King Charles III, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicted the company would sell twice as many chips in the coming year compared to this year. This follows Nvidia's recent guidance of roughly 70% revenue growth for its fiscal year ending January 2028, reaching about $673 billion, a figure that already pushed analyst estimates higher.
cnbc.com
· 2026-09-17
An Entrepreneur commentary argues that the backlash over Google's Gemini AI producing biased outputs was wrongly dismissed as a mere technical glitch. The author contends that because AI models learn from human-generated data, they inherit the assumptions and blind spots of that data, and scaling such systems only amplifies those flaws. The piece stresses that any business deploying AI tools—regardless of whether it built the model—inherits this bias risk.
entrepreneur.com
· 2026-09-17
A hacker collective called stegan0gram physically removed a Flock Safety roadside camera, extracted its stored data, and recovered an on-device encryption key meant to protect it. They shared the material with 404 Media and Distributed Denial of Secrets, which passed it to WIRED for joint analysis showing the camera logged roughly 50,200 vehicles and 1.6 million images over about 21 days.
yro.slashdot.org
· 2026-09-17
Amazon Web Services disclosed on September 15 that drone strikes attributed to Iran destroyed data center infrastructure in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain so severely that customer data and resources could not be recovered. AWS said the damage crossed multiple availability zones, exceeding the redundancy built into its regional and multi-zone systems, following earlier strikes in March and April that had already caused structural, power and fire-related damage.
futurism.com
· 2026-09-17
New York Governor Kathy Hochul's administration released a Community Investment Framework advising local governments on negotiating with data center developers. The guide recommends towns demand roughly $1 million per megawatt of power demand in community investment, alongside plans covering long-term maintenance, site abandonment, and phased funding timelines.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-17
A group called stegan0gram removed a Flock roadside camera and dissected its Android storage, finding an encryption key inside the 'media' partition that unlocked another partition holding all recorded files. That data included about 1.6 million images and 27,321 short video clips gathered over 21 days, capturing roughly 50,200 vehicles and 11 people.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-17
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