All posts tagged: aws

How a boy and his eagle in Mongolia inspired Siyuan Aw’s debut picture book

How a boy and his eagle in Mongolia inspired Siyuan Aw’s debut picture book

Published by Sam Flores

He is also already at work on his next book, incidentally bird-themed as well. Unlike the stark, sparse landscapes of Mongolia, the treatment this time is lush, bold and tropical. Inspired by his travels in the Amazon and the Andes, it will draw on myth, magic and indigenous knowledge, where hornbills serve as plant teachers and spiritual messengers. Incidentally, a pair of them has recently taken to visiting his home, sometimes perching on his canvas. Beyond that, he refuses to say more. “I shan’t break the spell,” he said with a laugh. Reflecting on his journey, Aw said loss has changed the way he moves through the world. “Sometimes growth comes from letting go. From travelling without a map, being open, and allowing ourselves to be part of a bigger narrative.” Our Wings As One is available at Kinokuniya Singapore, Woods in the Books, Littered with Books, Wardah Books, Book Bar, Eliko, and other major and independent bookstores. Source link

What happens when companies become too AI-pilled?

What happens when companies become too AI-pilled?

Published by skeptic

The people deciding that AI can replace your job are also the ones least likely to understand what your job truly involves, according to Box founder Aaron Levie, who pointed to this as an example of “AI psychosis.” Indeed, ClickUp recently cut 22% of its workforce for AI agents, tech layoffs in 2026 are already nearly matching all of 2025, and DuckDuckGo installs are climbing from users who want Google to stop forcing AI into search and just give them links.  Watch as TechCrunch’s Equity podcast hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into what happens when the AI-pilled and the AI-skeptical are both right at the same time, plus three deals worth knowing about and Waymo’s new robotaxi hitting the road.  Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.  Source link

Amazon Thinks the Future of Data Centers Depends on a Technical Problem It Just Solved

Amazon Thinks the Future of Data Centers Depends on a Technical Problem It Just Solved

Published by skeptic

Over time, the tech industry has developed and deployed variations on the fat-tree architecture. But the design has room for improvement. It’s generally reliable, but also rigid, inefficient, and requires complex cabling. As in, actual physical cables. If you’ve ever been in a data center or an office building’s server room, you’ve likely seen nests of colorful cables spilling out of metal racks. Cabling is one of the greatest costs in networking, Rehder says, and Amazon’s global data centers are currently connected with 20 million kilometers of fiber optic cables. That’s roughly the distance it would take to travel from Earth to the moon and back 25 times. In 2012, as the demand for cloud computing services was exploding, a group of researchers at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, including Godfrey, introduced a concept known as Jellyfish. Fixed network designs in use at the time were struggling to meet growing demand, so the researchers proposed a “high-capacity network interconnect which, by adopting a random graph topology, yields itself naturally to incremental expansion.” They believed this random …

In more good news for Amazon, Snowflake signs B deal with AWS for AI CPU chips

In more good news for Amazon, Snowflake signs $6B deal with AWS for AI CPU chips

Published by skeptic

Cloud data storage giant Snowflake has signed a new $6 billion five-year agreement with Amazon Web Services, the companies announced on Wednesday. Snowflake has always run on AWS, though obviously, these days, it is also available on Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. For comparison on just how big this deal is for these companies, Snowflake has sold $7 billion worth of its services via AWS Marketplace total since it was founded in 2012, AWS says. So this new contract is close to all the money it has ever brought in from that cloud. It can do that because Snowflake’s customers are accelerating their spending on AWS as of late, Snowflake says, doubling in 2025 to $2 billion for that calendar year alone. What’s driving the growth is, naturally, AI. Snowflake has been offering its AI building tool, Cortex AI, for a couple of years now. It’s a tool that makes sense: Snowflake is where much of an enterprise’s data lives. The AI tool can provide features like a text interface for database queries (just ask, …

AWS nabs white hot gen AI media creation startup fal, becoming its preferred cloud provider

AWS nabs white hot gen AI media creation startup fal, becoming its preferred cloud provider

Published by skeptic

Generative AI’s rapid transition from text-based chatbots to high-fidelity media—spanning images, video, spatial 3D, and audio—has exposed a glaring bottleneck in the modern tech stack: infrastructure. Rendering pixels in real-time requires a staggering amount of compute, and developers are increasingly struggling to manage fragmented GPU clusters just to keep their applications online. Enter fal, a generative media creation platform that has quietly become the connective tissue for 2.5 million developers across the globe, offering literally hundreds of leading AI image, video, and audio creation and editing models — from proprietary ones like OpenAI’s ChatGPT-Images-2.0 and Google’s Nano Banana Pro 2 to open source rivals — all through its unified interface and APIs. Today, the San Francisco-based startup, recently valued at a massive $4.5 billion following a $300 million Series D round led by Sequoia Capital, announced it has selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its preferred cloud provider. While the financial terms of the deal weren’t made public, the move signals a maturation in the generative media space, shifting the focus from simply building foundational …

Amazon reveals the cause of the May 2026 AWS outage

Amazon reveals the cause of the May 2026 AWS outage

Published by skeptic

Late in the week, an Amazon Web Services outage affected a range of websites. In the wake of that outage, which lasted from Thursday into Friday, Amazon has revealed what happened. In an update on the official AWS status website, Amazon revealed that the outage was caused by a “thermal event resulting in a loss of power” at a single data center in northern Virginia. In other words, some tech overheated. This prompted Amazon to shift traffic away from that data center’s “Availability Zone” during the late afternoon on Thursday. By early afternoon on Friday, Amazon had managed to restore its cooling systems, which kick-started the process of getting everything back online. Mashable Light Speed SEE ALSO: Amazon Web Services outage enters second day. Here’s what we know. “Our main effort during the event mitigation strategy was to bring back our cooling systems capacity. By May 8 1:50 PM, we were able to stabilize cooling system capacity to pre-event levels, which helped us to restore the majority of the impaired EC2 instances and EBS volumes,” Amazon said. …

Pentagon inks deals with Nvidia, Microsoft, and AWS to deploy AI on classified networks

Pentagon inks deals with Nvidia, Microsoft, and AWS to deploy AI on classified networks

Published by skeptic

After landing agreements with Google, SpaceX, and OpenAI, the U.S. Defense Department said on Friday that it has signed deals with Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Reflection AI that allow it to deploy their AI tech and models on its classified networks for “lawful operational use.” “These agreements accelerate the transformation toward establishing the United States military as an AI-first fighting force and will strengthen our warfighters’ ability to maintain decision superiority across all domains of warfare,” the statement reads. The deals come as the U.S. Department of Defense has accelerated its diversification of AI vendors in the wake of its controversial dispute with Anthropic over usage terms of its AI models. The Pentagon wanted unrestricted use of Anthropic’s AI tools, but the AI lab insisted on guardrails to prevent Anthropic’s tech from being used for domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. The two are fighting it out in court at the moment, though Anthropic in March won an injunction against the Pentagon’s move to brand the company a “supply-chain risk.” “The Department will …

Amazon’s cloud business is surging — and so is its capital spending

Amazon’s cloud business is surging — and so is its capital spending

Published by skeptic

Amazon was one of several tech giants that on Wednesday beat Wall Street’s first-quarter earnings expectations, offering more financial evidence that the AI boom continues to reward companies that supply the picks and shovels. Amazon’s cloud business is the latest example. Amazon Web Services, buoyed by its role in fueling the AI boom, saw its net sales increase 28% year-over-year, climbing to $37.6 billion, the company said Wednesday. It was the fastest growth rate for AWS in 15 quarters, Amazon president and CEO Andy Jassy said during the company’s earnings call. Jassy attributed AWS’ success to its role in providing compute to the AI industry. “It’s very unusual for business to grow this fast on a base this large. The last time we saw growth at this clip, AWS was roughly half the size,” Jassy said. “We’ve never seen a technology grow as rapidly as AI. Amazon is already a leader, and companies continue to choose AWS for AI.” Jassy compared the business unit’s growth to the aughts. “To put our growth in perspective, three …

Amazon Drops After AWS Growth Misses Whisper Estimates As Capex Soars

Amazon Drops After AWS Growth Misses Whisper Estimates As Capex Soars

Published by Jenni Sidey

In our preview of Amazon’s earnings, we summarized sentiment as “Bullish, But Concerns Remain” with JPM noting that client “conversations were heavily AWS-skewed with investor focus on degree of acceleration and cloud $ re-capture driven by core workloads, AI, & new partnerships. Still, some concerns remain on broader AI positioning/strategy, Trainium traction, & gap to Azure/Google Cloud growth. Strong Stores execution expected, with N. America margin expansion. But higher fuel costs raise questions on consumer demand & operating margins.” They also warned that if everyone expects big AWS growth and has the same thesis, what breaks it out? And then let’s not forget what broke AMZN a quarter ago when the stock slumped after the company guided a whopping 50% increase in full year capex to $200BN (vs est of $146.1BN). Would it do a similar capex boost this time? With that in mind, here is what the company reported for Q1 moments ago: EPS $2.82, beating exp. 2.63, a solid beat after missing last quarter: Revenue was stronger across the board (except a modest miss …

AWS Quick’s personal knowledge graph is making orchestration decisions most control planes can’t see

AWS Quick’s personal knowledge graph is making orchestration decisions most control planes can’t see

Published by skeptic

Enterprise AI teams running centralized orchestration stacks now have a new variable to account for: AWS Quick, which expanded this week to a desktop-native agent that builds a persistent personal knowledge graph and executes actions across local files and SaaS tools — outside the visibility of most control planes. Unlike chat-based copilots that reset with each session, Quick now maintains a continuously updated knowledge graph built from the user’s local files, calendar, email and connected SaaS apps. It uses it to proactively trigger actions without waiting to be asked. AWS launched Quick in October last year as an alternative to AI workflow and productivity platforms coming from Google, OpenAI and Anthropic. It was a way for enterprise employees to access insights from connected applications, an agent builder, deep research, and workflow automation. Now, it’s grown beyond a simple AI assistant and acts more as a proactive workflow agent with a stateful, real-time knowledge graph of the user. It integrates with third-party apps like Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Zoom, Salesforce and Slack — and now local …