Techstrong News Recap – January 24, 2023

Hi again, everyone here at the headlines for January 24th. First up AWS is revealed plans to invest $35 billion dollars in the construction and expansion of data centers in Virginia as partner agreement with the state government. AWS has stated that this expansion which is set to be completed by 2040 will provide a thousand new jobs.

The agreement still needs to the approval of the legislature but has received report from major leaders in this General Assembly. Zooming out Northern Virginia has become a preferred location for data centers in recent years with these centers becoming increasingly common. This being said data centers have become a contentious subject as well as residents in these areas are raising concerns over both noise pollution and their environmental impact.

Supporters of the agreement on the other hand argue that the data centers provide jobs and revenue to local governments that they would otherwise be without. So regardless how this all plays out. It'll be interesting to see the future as the number of data centers is only expected to rise in the upcoming years.

Next Microsoft has announced an extension of its partnership with openai the AI startup behind chat GTP with a large multi-year investment. Microsoft has stated that it plans to increase its investments in the development and deployment of specialized supercomputing systems to accelerate AI research and deploy AI systems across its consumer and Enterprise Products as well as creating new categories of digital experiences. Openai on the other hand plans to use the funding to continuous research and develop safer more useful and more powerful AI.

Additionally open AI has stated that Microsoft Azure Cloud platform will continue to be the exclusive cloud provider. of openai this partnership comes as company such as Google as working feverishly to develop AI products since the chat gtp's launch. In other news the University of Texas and Texas A&M University have joined a growing number of public universities in the United States that have banned tiktok on their campuses by blocking access on campus Wi-Fi networks.

This decision to ban the social media app follows similar actions by other public universities across several States including, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida and, Georgia. The campus tiktok bans were triggered by an executive orders issued by state Governors recently. Despite being popular in the United States tiktok is currently facing intense scrutiny from the federal and state governments over concerns about the app's ability to collect user data.

Additionally byte dance has been criticized for its lack of transparency about how data flows between us and China operations. As of now the bands may not have greatly impacted tiktok's popularity, but they do raise questions about the app's future in the United States. Next up the music streaming service Spotify has announced that it will be cutting 6% of its Global Workforce which amounts to approximately 600 employees.

Spotify stated that the company had over invested before its Revenue growth and that the current trajectory was not sustainable. The layoffs come as the company faces a difficult economic environment and the changeup of several sea level executives. This move follows similar layoffs announced by other companies such as Microsoft and Google last week and showing that how even the music industry can be affected by the current economic environment.

On Security Boulevard, we have an article looking at how the SCC is expected to finalize its proposal for requiring organizations to attest to its cybersecurity ability at a board level. This expected change in the SEC cybersecurity requirements is meant to shift some of the accountability to boards as well as bolster security best practices. com.

We have an article looking at a report showing a rise in platform engineering. In puppets 2023 state of the devops report 94% agreed that platform engineering is helping their organizations. com.

Finally on container Journal we have an article looking at how to run serverless containers using AWS eks with fargate. This article gives a comprehensive demo on how far gate can be used with eks to run kubernetes applications more easily. com.

And that's today's text wrong news recap.