NerdNews

Alphabet is acquiring Intersect Power, a clean energy developer, for $4.75 billion to expand its power-generation capacity and bypass energy grid bottlenecks, particularly for its data centers that power AI models.

OpenAI sent 80 times as many child exploitation incident reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children during the first half of 2025 as it did during a similar time period in 2024. The company attributes the increase to investments in moderation and the introduction of new product features.

Microsoft aims to replace its entire C and C++ codebase with Rust, a memory-safe language, by 2030. The company is hiring a Principal Software Engineer to work on the migration, which will utilize AI and algorithms to rewrite Microsoft's largest codebases. This move is expected to improve software security and reduce technical debt.

ChatGPT is rolling out a 'Year in Review' feature, which provides users with a personalized summary of their conversations, including stats and an AI-generated image. The feature is available to users in the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, and can be accessed on the ChatGPT app or by prompting the chatbot to 'show my year in review'. The summary includes a rundown of the themes most prevalent in the user's chats, a description of their chat style, and which day they sent the most messages to the chatbot.

ServiceNow has agreed to buy cybersecurity company Armis in a $7.75 billion deal, aiming to incorporate a real-time security intelligence feed into its products and expand its security revenue. The acquisition will allow customers to see vulnerabilities, prioritize risks, and close them with automated workflows.

A power outage in San Francisco left several of Waymo's autonomous vehicles stuck at intersections. The company suspended its ride-hailing services in response. The incident may have revealed a fault with the Waymo Driver system, which relies on traffic lights and signs to navigate.

The article discusses the top 5 tech and politics trends of 2025, including the rise of AI, data centers, and the Department of Government Efficiency. It also touches on the Jeffrey Epstein saga and the impact of technology on society.

The article discusses the evolution of a backend streaming application, from a fragile monolithic architecture to a resilient multi-region system. It highlights the importance of serverless and managed services, event-driven patterns, cell-based isolation, and intelligent caching. The author shares their experience of transforming the architecture with a team of two developers, starting with no AWS expertise, and achieving data consistency, automatic scaling, and reduced blast radius.

Waymo released a postmortem on its San Francisco blackout meltdown, explaining how its self-driving cars handled dark traffic signals and the challenges that arose. The company's 'Waymo Driver' software is designed to treat dark signals as four-way stops, but a concentrated spike in confirmation requests led to response delays and congestion. Waymo directed its fleet to pull over and park, avoiding further disruption, but social media posts made the situation appear worse than it was. The postmortem does not mention plans to introduce remote drivers, instead focusing on integrating more information about outages and updating emergency preparedness.

Due to high RAM prices, PC builders like Maingear are introducing 'bring your own' RAM programs, where customers can source their own memory or ship their old RAM to the company for testing and installation. This shift is a result of the rising demand for RAM from AI infrastructure, tighter allocation from manufacturers, and constrained availability, leading to price spikes and inconsistent retail inventory.

Airbus is preparing to migrate its mission-critical workloads to a digitally sovereign European cloud, driven by the need for access to new software and concerns over data sovereignty. The company estimates an 80% chance of finding a suitable provider, with a contract worth over €50 million to be awarded in the next few months.

ServiceNow agreed to acquire cybersecurity startup Armis for $7.75 billion in cash. Armis provides security software for critical infrastructure and has reached $340 million in annual recurring revenue with 50% year-over-year growth.

Amazon's AI assistant Alexa+ is expanding its capabilities with new integrations with Angi, Expedia, Square, and Yelp, allowing users to book hotels, get quotes for home services, and schedule appointments, among other things.

Lemon Slice, a digital avatar generation company, has raised $10.5 million in seed funding from Matrix Partners and Y Combinator. The company is working on a diffusion model that can create digital avatars from a single image, allowing for interactive video chats. The model can work on a single GPU and livestream videos at 20 frames per second.

AWS has announced support for Nutanix's AHV hypervisor in its Storage Gateway, allowing users to connect their hypervisors to AWS's Simple Storage Service (S3). This move is seen as a strategic play by AWS to drive demand for its services and tap into the growing market of VMware alternatives. Nutanix, a key challenger to VMware, has been expanding its storage options and this integration is expected to boost its growth.

Virgin Atlantic has deployed an AI travel agent, Concierge, on its website. The agent, developed by Tomoro and OpenAI, can handle travel planning, booking, and support requests. It uses natural language processing and can understand spoken or typed input. The goal is to provide a more personalized and efficient travel planning experience for customers.

China's regulators have slowed the rollout of self-driving cars after a fatal crash, approving only limited testing of advanced self-driving vehicles. The country had ambitions to mass-produce fully self-driving cars, but manufacturers will now have to sell vehicles with downgraded software instead.

The rise of AI-generated images and videos has made it difficult to distinguish between real and fake content online, with even experts struggling to identify authentic material. This has significant implications for social media, news, and society as a whole.

In 2025, companies cut about 1.1 million jobs, but only 55,000 layoffs were directly attributed to AI, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Many companies, including tech firms, used AI as a scapegoat for layoffs, when in reality, the decisions were driven by economic conditions and restructuring.

A top DOJ official, Todd Blanche, shut down enforcement against crypto companies while holding over $150,000 in crypto investments, violating federal conflicts of interest law and his ethics agreement. Blanche's actions have raised concerns about the Trump administration's ties to the crypto industry and its potential impact on regulation.