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Tech NewsAppleApple’s Already Starting Work on 6G Before 6G Is Even a Thing
Apple’s first 5G phones arrived mere months ago, but the company is already exploring the future of cellular connectivity. A newly published job listing for a wireless research systems engineer teased the company’s ambitions for 6G cellular technology. That listing, earlier reported by Bloomberg, says the position “will be at the center of a cutting-edge … Continued
By Catie Keck -
Tech NewsMicrosoftMicrosoft’s Underwater Data Center Rises From the Seafloor a Grimy Success
Microsoft’s underwater Northern Isles data center has risen again from the ocean depth, the company announced on Monday, and it is remarkably intact other than being covered in sea scum. The data center—which Microsoft sunk under 117 feet of water off the coast of Scotland’s Orkney Islands in 2018—resembles a large, airtight fuel tank. After … Continued
By Tom McKay -
Tech NewsGadgetsIntel Says It Made the ‘World’s Densest’ SSD By Cramming 32-Terabytes Into the Shape of a Ruler
You probably haven’t touched a 12-inch ruler since your grade school days, but think back to how that makeshift sword felt in your hand; that’s roughly the same size as a new solid state drive from Intel that stacks 64 memory cells atop each other to create a dense 3D grid packing 32-terabytes of storage. … Continued
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Tech NewsNews
Can a Loud Noise Really Bring Down a Data Center?
This week, a Nasdaq Nordic stock exchange data center in Finland was taken down by its fire suppression system. But these systems don’t use water to quench the flames, so how can they knock out a bunch of hard drives? The answer, most likely, is loud noise. It wouldn’t be the first time this happened. … Continued
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Tech News
Data Centers of the Future Could Be Towering Skyscrapers
Data centers are usually vast, cavernous warehouse-like spaces rammed full of computers and cooling systems. But a pair of Italian architects has imagined a sustainable alternative that would meld server farms with skyscrapers. Marco Merletti and Valeria Mercuri have sketched out a vision for what they call the Data Tower. And if the name doesn’t … Continued
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Tech NewsMicrosoftMicrosoft Wants to Build Data Centers Underwater
“50% of us live near the coast,” Microsoft says. “Why doesn’t our data?” Building huge data centers underwater might sound bizarrely Jules Vernesian, but it’s exactly something Microsoft’s testing. The plan’s called Project Natick, and its website states its purpose: “to understand the benefits and difficulties in deploying subsea data centers worldwide.” Why build data … Continued
By Bryan Lufkin -
Tech NewsHere’s How Much Energy We Waste On Cat GIFs and Twitterbooks
Are you sitting comfortably? Good, because you’re about to get a good old-fashioned dose of guilt. The folks at SciShow have put together a video examining how much energy we waste on running the internet, and yup, the number is embarrassingly large. As the video explains, loading videos of people falling off rooftops (and, y’know, … Continued
By Chris Mills -
Tech NewsApple
Apple Just Spent an Incredible Amount of Money on Solar Power
$848 million. That’s the amount of cash Apple is spending on what Bloomberg calls “the biggest commercial solar deal EVER.” That may seem like a crap ton of money to us, it’s still less than a percent of the $178 billion in cash Apple—aka the 55th richest country in the world—has on hand right now. … Continued
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Tech NewsFacebookHow Facebook Is Hacking Together a Better Data Center
Data centers are boring. They have to be; these are spaces of control, consistency, security. You wouldn’t expect to find much creativity inside the plain facades of these highly-regulated structures—much less hacked-together experiments involving robotic Blu-ray storage systems and thousands of Mac Minis. But inside these seemingly boring buildings there’s an industry booming with change … Continued
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Tech NewsFacebook
Facebook’s Wind-Powered Data Center Is Now Processing Your Posts
Facebook’s first data center powered solely by renewable energy is now in operation in Altoona, Iowa. The center was expected to open in 2015, so it’s ahead of schedule. Facebook’s enormous data centers are the humming, remote engines that make the company’s services possible. They don’t take up much space in the public eye, but … Continued
By Kate Knibbs -
Tech NewsAmazon
Amazon’s Using the Heat From Its Data Centers To Warm Its New HQ
Downtown Seattle is being slowly consumed by Amazon-funded infrastructure, thanks to the expansion of its corporate headquarters—glass domes, bike lanes, streetcar improvements. Now the company has figured out an innovative way to heat their new buildings by using the energy generated by their data centers across the street. The process—called hydronic heat—works by transferring the … Continued
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Tech News
Why This Company Wants To Build Data Centers Next To Gas Storage Sites
The problem with data centers is excess heat. The problem with liquified natural gas terminals is excess cold. In a perfect world, one problem would neatly cancel out the other—which is exactly the world imagined by Massachusetts-based TeraCool. Coupling data with liquified gas could make a lot of energy sense. You’re already familiar data centers, … Continued
By Sarah Zhang -
Tech NewsInside the Giant Data Center Hidden In the Middle of Manhattan
Between 1928 and 1932, two Art Deco skyscrapers were built in Lower Manhattan to house the telecommunications infrastructure for Western Union and AT&T. Almost 100 years later, the towers are still fulfilling their original intentions as data centers for Telx, an internet services company. The new film Urban Giants goes inside these towers, located at … Continued
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Tech NewsFacebook
Building the Part of Facebook No One Ever Sees
Ever since we humans gave up the nomadic life and started building homes, architecture had one goal: To make life better for humans. But now, a new architecture is taking shape in remote, frozen corners of the world. And it’s not designed for humans. It’s for machines. In this case, for the remote machines that … Continued
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Tech News
How Much It Costs the NSA to Store an Entire Country’s Phone Calls
On Monday, we learned that the NSA is recording every single phone call in the Bahamas and storing the data for a month. This news arrives just six weeks after we learned that the NSA was recording every single phone call, text, and email in Iraq. In fact, the spy agency is engaged in similar … Continued
