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Nvidia will invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as the AI lab builds data centers requiring 10 gigawatts of power capacity. The 10-gigawatt deployment equals 4 to 5 million GPUs -- the same number Nvidia will ship globally this year. Building one gigawatt of data center capacity costs $50 to $60 billion, including approximately $35 billion for Nvidia chips and systems. The first phase begins in the second half of 2026 using Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin systems. The investment adds Nvidia to OpenAI's investor roster alongside Microsoft, SoftBank, and Thrive Capital at a $500 billion valuation. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described the investment as "additive to everything that's been announced and contracted."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Venture capitalists in clean tech are starting to say out loud what they've suspected for a while: China's dominance has left key sectors in the West uninvestable. A group of eight VCs from Western firms agreed to share with Bloomberg the details of a July road trip across China during which they visited factories, spoke with startup investors, and interviewed founders of companies. They knew China had raced ahead in sectors like batteries and "everything around energy," but seeing how big the gap was firsthand left them wondering how European and North American competitors can even survive, says Talia Rafaeli, a former investment banker at both Goldman Sachs and Barclays who's now a partner at Kompas VC. "Everyone needs to take this kind of trip," she said.

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Subscribing to an online service is often as easy as a click of a button. Is it illegal if it takes a maze of clicks to cancel? That issue is at the heart of a civil trial beginning this week that will scrutinize the tactics Amazon uses to entice consumers to sign up for its signature Prime service -- and to steer them away from leaving. WSJ: The Federal Trade Commission alleges the online giant has duped nearly 40 million customers, in violation of consumer-protection laws. It is seeking civil penalties, refunds to consumers and a court order prohibiting Amazon from using subscription practices that could confuse or deceive customers. The case, which will unfold in a Seattle courtroom, is a top test of the agency's enforcement campaign against allegedly deceptive digital subscription practices. Amazon's Prime membership, the largest paid subscription program in the world with at least 200 million users, has helped the company become an integral part of consumers' shopping habits. The FTC, which sued Amazon in 2023, alleges the company tricked people into signing up for the service without their knowledge or consent, including by obscuring details about billing and the terms of free trials. It says Amazon created a labyrinth to make it hard to cancel, which the company dubbed "Iliad," a reference to Homer's epic about the long, arduous Trojan War. The FTC says Amazon required customers to navigate four webpages and chose from 15 options to cancel a Prime membership. The company streamlined the process in April 2023, ahead of the filing of the criminal complaint. The FTC won an initial pretrial victory last week when a federal judge ruled that Amazon did violate consumer-protection laws by taking Prime members' billing information before disclosing the terms of the membership. But he said jurors still would have to consider whether the customers gave their consent to enroll and whether Amazon provided a simple cancellation mechanism.

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Long-time contributor Ellen Davis steps down after GitHub access shake-up and governance dispute

A decade-long RubyGems maintainer, Ellen Davis (also known as duckinator), has resigned from Ruby Central following what she described as a "hostile takeover" of the open source project.…

Major U.S. corporations are mandating more office time but seeing minimal compliance changes. Companies now require 12% more in-office days than in early 2024, according to Work Forward data tracking 9,000 employers. Yet Americans continue working from home approximately 25% of the time, unchanged from 2023, Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom's monthly survey of 10,000 Americans shows. The New York Times ordered opinion and newsroom staff to four days weekly starting November. Microsoft mandates three days beginning February for Pacific Northwest employees. Paramount and NBCUniversal gave staff ultimatums: commit to five and four days respectively or take buyouts. Amazon faced desk and parking shortages after its full-time mandate, temporarily backpedaling in Houston and New York. Nearly half of senior managers would accept pay cuts to work remotely, a BambooHR survey of 1,500 salaried employees found.

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Ratings agency points out there's a risk of relying on a small number of buyers

Ratings agency Moody's has pointed to the dangers inherent in Oracle's $300 billion agreement with OpenAI - one of the deals contributing to a staggering $455 billion pipeline of obligations for Big Red's cloud infrastructure.…

The US will charge companies $100,000 for each new H-1B visa starting February 2026 under Project Firewall. According to a new analysis, the fee exceeds average H-1B salaries at firms like TCS where engineers earn $105,000 annually. Previous visa costs ranged from $2,000 to $33,000. Indians hold an estimated 70% of H-1B visas. The fee eliminates five to six years of profit per engineer. Typical engineers deployed to American client sites generate $150,000 to $200,000 in annual billings at 10% operating margins, producing $15,000 to $20,000 in yearly profit. J.P. Morgan states the move "prices out the utility of H-1B as a source of labor supply." But it might not be bad for the IT giants. Major Indian IT firms derive only 0.2% to 2.2% of their workforce from H-1B approvals after years of reducing visa dependence, according to India Dispatch. New approvals alone account for under 0.4% of headcount. Morgan Stanley estimates companies could offset 60% of the financial impact through increased offshoring and selective price increases. The net damage to operating profit would stay contained at around 50 basis points or a 3% to 4% hit to earnings spread across the renewal cycle. Companies plan to accelerate geographic arbitrage by routing more work to India, Canada, and Latin America. Firms can maintain their existing visa holder base while letting normal turnover occur over three to six years.

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Thinnest yet still fixable, though not without effort

iFixit has given Apple's slimline new smartphone, the iPhone Air, a thumbs-up for repairability, praising its easy access to key components, despite being the thinnest handset Cupertino has built so far.…

Airport staff revert to manual ops as travellers urged to use self-service check-in where possible

The EU's cybersecurity agency today confirmed that ransonmware is the cause of continued disruption blighting major airports across Europe.…

Protected content in some Blu-ray and DVD applications broken

Microsoft has added another entry to its growing list of problematic updates in the Windows Hall of Shame, this time causing Digital TV and Blu-ray applications to stutter and freeze when playing protected content.…

It's not just glitches at the launch of the Meta Ray-Ban Display smart glasses... The New York Times remains skeptical of its market share: [Meta's] smart glasses remain a niche. As of February, Meta had sold about two million of its $300 Ray-Ban Meta camera glasses since their 2023 debut, and it hopes to sell 10 million annually by the end of 2026, which is a tiny amount for a company this size. In the last decade, Meta has spent over $100 billion on its virtual and augmented reality division, which includes its smart glasses and is not profitable. Last quarter, the division reported a $4.5 billion loss, nearly the same as a year ago. "Meta's Smart Glasses Might Make You Smarter. They'll Certainly Make You More Awkward," joked a recent Wired headline. But the Wall Street Journal does report there's "a growing group of blind users... finding the devices to be more of a life-enhancing tool than a cool accessory." Jonathan Mosen, executive director at the nonprofit National Federation of the Blind said he'd like to see Meta continue to invest in the glasses. "It's giving significant accessibility benefits at a price point people can afford." He has used them a few times to record video of ride-share drivers refusing to give him and his wife a ride because she travels with a guide dog. Denying rides to people with service animals is illegal in many countries, including the U.S. Another concern for blind users is that AI assistants in general are prone to making errors, or so-called hallucinations, which may not be apparent. Aaron Preece, who is blind and editor in chief of American Foundation for the Blind's AccessWorld magazine, said Meta's glasses recently failed to correctly read the number on the door to his home. "I just can't trust it," he said. "It's more of a novelty than something I'd use on a day-to-day basis." When it comes to innovative technology, CNET seems more excited about Meta's display-controlling "neural wristband" accessory. Instead of camera-based hand tracking, these muscle-sensing bands "can register gestural moves like pinches, taps, thumb swipes, and maybe even typing over time..."

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Automaker insists only names and emails exposed, no financials

Car giant Stellantis is admitting that attackers targeted one of its third-party partners, spilling its own customers' details in the process.…

It's one small sip for man...

British boffins say they've discovered a way of taking one of the country's favorite pastimes – having a nice cup of tea – into outer space.…

Darwin would understand microkernels. We need microkernels that understand Darwin.

Opinion The IT industry is not only full of sharks, it has shark nature itself. It must keep moving forward to survive. Not all sharks are obligate ram ventilators, and not all IT changes all the time, but without innovation the sector would curdle and die.…

Project rated at 'Red' risk as it struggles to move off obsolete Oracle tech and cloud transition stalls

The risk rating of the UK's crime intelligence database is being elevated to "Red" by the governments projects' watchdog as the DB struggles to migrate from a legacy Oracle platform.…

Lloyds Data and AI lead doesn't want devs downloading models from the likes of Hugging Face – too risky

Lloyds Banking Group is leaning into 21st century tech - yet trying to do so in a way that the data of its 28 million customers is kept away from untested AI models developers might be tempted to deploy.…

Reddit's content became AI training data last year when Google signed a $60 million-per-year licensing agreement. But now Reddit is "in early talks" about a new deal seeking "deeper integration with Google's AI products," reports Bloomberg (citing executives familiar with the discussions). And Reddit also wants "a deal structure that could allow for dynamic pricing, where the social platform can be paid more" — with both Google and OpenAI — to "adequately reflect how valuable their data has been to these platforms..." Such licensing agreements are becoming more common as AI companies seek legal ways to train their models. OpenAI has also struck a series of partnership agreements with major media publishers such as Axel Springer SE, Time and Conde Nast to use their content in ChatGPT... Reddit remains among the most cited sources across AI platforms, according to analytics company Profound AI. However, Reddit executives have noticed that traffic coming from Google has limited value, as users seeking answers to a specific question often don't convert into becoming active Redditors, the people said. Now, Reddit is engaging with product teams at Google in hopes of finding ways to send more of its users deeper into its ecosystem of community forums, according to the executives. In return, Reddit is looking for ways to provide more high-quality data to its AI partners. Discussions between Reddit and Google have been productive, the people said. "We're midflight in our data licensing deals and still learning, but what we have seen is that Reddit data is highly cited and valued," Reddit Chief Operating Officer Jen Wong said on July 31 during a call with investors. "We'll continue to evaluate as we go."

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Revenge on managers who slow things down is a drink best served with floating fungus

Who, Me? The world of work can sometimes drive IT pros to drink, leaving them more likely to make the sort of mistakes that The Register celebrates each week in Who, Me? It’s our reader-contributed column in which you share stories of making a mess at work, and cleaning up afterwards to the best of your ability.…

The Register looks forward to learning more about a possible Dell hyperscale sovereign social SaaS platform

Dell CEO Michael Dell is part of the consortium that intends to acquire TikTok’s US operations, according to US president Donald Trump.…

‘Cyber-attack’ on ticketing outfit Collins and cable cuts at Dallas ground hundreds of flights

Technology problems hit the commercial aviation industry hard over the weekend, leading to hundreds of cancelled flights and myriad delays on both sides of the Atlantic.…