Technology

US data center operator TECfusions has penned an AI infrastructure commitment deal with TensorWave described as “one of the largest” capacity agreements ever made for AI compute.

The deal will see TensorWave lease 1GW of AI capacity from TECfusions’ data center portfolio, with the deployment expected to begin in early 2025.

As part of the agreement, Tecfusion said it will leverage its on-site power generation capabilities to provide reliable services aimed specifically at AI-intensive applications.

"Watershed moment"

In a statement confirming the move, Shawn Novak, Chief Revenue Officer of TECfusions, described the collaboration as a “watershed moment in the AI infrastructure landscape.”

"TECfusions' Clarksville data center, already home to one of the world's largest GPU clusters, is a testament to TECfusions' industry-leading infrastructure for the most demanding AI applications and showcases our capability to handle TensorWave's extensive capacity requirements,” he added.

The collaboration will also help drive regional data center energy stability, according to the firm, as well as sustainable growth.

TECfusions said the strategy aims to both provide reliable power for AI workloads, which are energy-intensive, but also drive long-term reductions in energy costs.

Data center energy consumption has skyrocketed in recent years since the advent of generative AI, with the power-hungry technology placing significant strain on data center infrastructure amidst surging enterprise AI adoption rates.

Darrick Horton, CEO of TensorWave, said the agreement will provide “unparalleled energy independence” and drive the scalability of TensorWave’s AI infrastructure initiatives.

"As a company that specializes in providing AMD Instinct Series GPUs (MI300X and MI325x), TECfusions' rapid deployment model is a game-changer for us,” he said.

“Their ability to bring massive AI-ready capacity online in months rather than years significantly accelerates our time to market to support our customers. This partnership is crucial for maintaining our competitive edge in the fast-paced AI sector."

Moving forward, TECfusions will conduct a phased capacity deployment and a “significant portion” of the 1GW power capacity will be made available by early 2025. According to TensorWave, this phased approach coincides with anticipated demand for the year ahead.

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Back during CES 2023, Cooler Master unveiled a gorgeous – and unbelievably expensive – gaming PC that’s shaped like a shark. But now, if you’d rather buy just the case without all the components and innards, the manufacturer is happy to oblige.

The original Shark X PC was priced at nearly $7,000 and equipped with an Intel Core i7-14700F processor, an Nvidia Geforce RTX 4070 Ti Super graphics card, 64GB DDR5 RAM, and 2TB of M.2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe storage. But while the case itself is $2,700 less than the full PC, it’s only available in Japan in the Yodobashi Akiba store right now for an eyewatering 658,000 yen, or around $4,300.

While this is certainly an expensive PC or even case to own, it’s definitely eye-catching and makes for a stunning centerpiece in one’s living room. It would be a rare centerpiece as well since most gamers would be rightfully priced out of nabbing one for themselves. And if you only want the case, you still have to import it from Japan since there haven’t been any talks of a global release.

Cooler Master is the kind of the beautiful yet impractical

This isn’t Cooler Master’s only foray into the wacky and unique world of PC cases. In 2023, it revealed Sneaker X, which was a gaming PC shaped like a sneaker. It can accommodate components like ITX form factor motherboards, SFX PSUs, 3-slot GPUs, and up to 64GB of RAM while also equipped with liquid cooling.

During Computex 2024, Cooler Master had an interesting gaming PC with an RGB turntable displaying an action figure – a figure of X-Men's Wolverine to be precise. Of course, this display is a bit impractical since the turntable replaces one of the bottom air intake fans, meaning that the PC will be running slightly hotter. But the price of beauty is always a little steep, right?

At the very least, these designs are extremely entertaining and certainly buck the trend of the boring and dreaded ‘gamer aesthetic’ that plagues many of the best gaming PCs on the market. I understand the need for practicality as the performance demands of high-end gaming can be tough, but it would be nice to get more variety in the case color at least.

Regardless, I look forward to seeing what cool and impractical designs Cooler Master introduces next during CES 2025 and beyond. Or maybe we’ll even see something like the ​​ Motion 1 again, which was a chair that uses haptic technology to swing you around while you game. Kind of like those chairs you see in 4D cinemas, but in your living room for some reason.

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Save 40% on Ring's Doorbell cam at Woot and keep eyes on your home or business at all times.

“I'm training people to survive a civil war, to get out of the way, to stay home, stay off the grid," says Oath Keeper Jim Arroyo, in an interview two days before the US presidential election.

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Google Research is showing off a new way to use AI to read handwriting that might radically change how machines convert what you put on paper into digital letters. The InkSight system transforms photos of handwritten words into digital text by leveraging AI without the need for any devices as intermediaries.

The idea is to replace the sometimes fallible optical character recognition (OCR) with AI that can emulate how humans actually learn to read, specifically by rewriting existing text to learn what whole words look like and mean. Doing so required the researchers to tutor the AI in both recognizing and mimicking handwriting by humans.

"Digital note-taking is gaining popularity, offering a durable, editable, and easily indexable way of storing notes in the vectorized form, known as digital ink. However, a substantial gap remains between this way of note-taking and traditional pen-and-paper note-taking, a practice still favored by a vast majority," the researchers explain in their paper. "Our approach combines reading and writing priors, allowing training a model in the absence of large amounts of paired samples, which are difficult to obtain. To our knowledge, this is the first work that effectively derenders handwritten text in arbitrary photos with diverse visual characteristics and backgrounds."

InkSight is more than just an alternative technique. It makes for more accurate results in circumstances that aren't ideal. For instance, if the photo is taken in dim light, has partially obscured text, or is on a confusing background when examined with OCR. The researchers found that humans could read 87% of the InkSight-made tracings of text. Two-thirds were good enough that people couldn't tell them from actual handwriting; you can see below how it looks when InkSight works.

(Image credit: Google) Penned by AI

If you like writing things by hand, InkSight has some potential benefits. Imagine writing by hand in a paper notebook, then showing the notes to your camera to instantly make them searchable and organize them in context with previous notes on physical pages. If you're like me and have particularly messy handwriting, InkSight could help turn your chicken scratch into typewritten text that is still accurate to what you scribble.

On a bigger scale, this could be a crucial tool for deciphering and converting handwritten text from across the centuries into digital form. Even when the text is in a language without much of a digital presence, InkSight could help preserve handwriting to help build up training sources for those languages.

Google isn't the only place where AI tools to decipher handwriting are underway. For example, Amazon's new Kindle Scribe upgrades the e-reader's ability to transform handwritten notes into legible text. There's also Goodnotes, a digital notetaking app that can read handwriting, and recently debuted handwriting editing tools using its Goodnotes Smart Ink technology to turn handwriting into typed text. The added tools let you edit handwritten notes as if they were typed, including aligning notes, copying and pasting, and reflowing the text to make it more logical.

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One of the most popular password managers out there, LastPass, is warning its customers not to fall for the latest scam campaign aimed directly at them.

In a blog post, the company explained scammers are targeting users via the Chrome Web Store. In the reviews section for LastPass’ Chrome add-on, the scammers are adding new content that directs the visitors to fake customer support.

Therefore, when victims who are having issues with the add-on visit the page, they might think that other users are helping them reach customer support directly. In reality, dialing the number shared there starts a conversation with the fraudsters, who will try to navigate the victims to a malicious website, and download malware.

Fake customer support

"Individuals calling this fake support number will be greeted by an individual asking what product they are having issues with and then a series of questions regarding whether they are attempting to access LastPass via a computer or a mobile device and what operating system they are using," explained LastPass.

"They will then be directed to the site dghelp[.]top while the threat actor remains on the line and attempts to get the potential victim to engage with the site, exposing their data."

Investigating further, BleepingComputer found the campaign’s goal is to get people to download ConnectWise ScreenConnect, a piece of remote support and access software that grants the attackers full access to the target computer. The publication also found that the phone number associated with this campaign was used in other similar campaigns, where crooks impersonated Amazon, Adobe, Facebook, YouTube TV, and many, many others. In other words, this is a well-organized team that has been impersonating major corporations and defrauding people for a while now.

As usual, the best way to defend against these attacks is to use common sense and double-check every piece of information found online.

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Seagate and BAE Systems have tested the first high-capacity data storage solution designed for use in space.

The hardened SSD was evaluated aboard the International Space Station as part of a mission aimed at improving data storage for Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites, addressing challenges such as heat dissipation, unpressurized environments, and the absence of conventional cooling.

This technology could ultimately expand CDNs and support AI-driven applications in space. By adding storage to satellite infrastructures, AI inferencing and real-time analysis could reach previously inaccessible regions, providing last-mile connectivity where fiber or cell networks are absent.

Drives in space

Seagate’s “Space Drive” was part of a broader payload by BAE Systems which included Linux-based software for real-time data processing.

This software enables containerized applications that can be updated in orbit, adapting to the evolving demands of space-based systems.

Additionally, the payload contained a radio frequency sounder and dual-band short-wavelength infrared (SWIR) camera for enhancing atmospheric measurement capabilities, hurricane modeling, and weather forecasting.

“Our team was able to assemble, integrate, and test this payload in just eight months,” Steve Smith, vice president of engineering, science and analysis for BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems told Aerospace Manufacturing.

The 2TB Seagate SSD with PCIe Gen3 x4 connectivity, which you can see in the “Terrestrial Demo Unit” photo below, and which Seagate plans to sell in 2025, has been specially designed to withstand the harsh conditions of space. Delivered to the ISS via a NASA resupply mission and assembled by the astronauts onboard, the device using the Seagate SSDs achieved impressive speeds of over 2Gbps.

Set for one year, the mission will conclude with the payload’s return to Earth for analysis. Engineers from BAE Systems and Seagate will examine the effects of space exposure on the SSD's performance and durability and use this data to refine future designs, advancing resilient storage solutions for space-based applications.

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• Paint 3D won’t be available from the Microsoft Store after today
• Microsoft warned us the app was on the way out a few months ago
• If you install it, you can keep Paint 3D, but it won’t be patched up

Windows 11 (and 10) users should be aware that it’s the final day for one of the optional apps for Microsoft’s operating system, namely Paint 3D.

We should clarify that this is the ‘3D’ spin on Paint, not the vanilla Microsoft Paint app which remains a core part of Windows 11 to this day (and is still being actively developed).

The scrapping of Paint 3D isn’t a surprise, mind, as we’ve had ample warning about the impending demise of the application.

To recap the tale of Paint 3D, you may recall it first graced Windows 10 as a new stock app in 2016, not long after the OS launched, as part of the first update. (This was the ‘Creators Update’ back when Microsoft had a plan to run themed feature updates for Windows 10, an idea that rapidly ran out of steam and evaporated into nothingness).

However, Paint 3D never really got off the ground (we’ll come back to why in a moment), and was removed from the collection of stock apps installed with Windows by default in 2021.

Since then, you could still grab Paint 3D from the Microsoft Store if you wanted the app, but now the final curtain is being drawn. After today, it will no longer be available to download as an option from the store (a fact that Microsoft warned us about via a pop-up back in August 2024).

So, if you want Paint 3D, grab it now, before today is over – and be aware that this is the final nail in the coffin for the venerable app.

Who cares about Paint 3D anyway?

(Image credit: Ollyy / Shutterstock)

Well, it’s a fair question. Indeed, you may have forgotten about Paint 3D completely. It wasn’t a big hit with the Windows 10 audience in general – or indeed Windows 11, though it had been dropped by that time – hence the reason for it getting the elbow.

Paint 3D tried something different in offering the functionality for creating 3D models, as the name suggests, so you could for example use it to turn a photo into a 3D model.

Also, as Ghacks – which reminded us about today’s deadline – points out, it was built to be more touch-friendly than vanilla Paint (with larger icons and sliders that make it easier to use with your fingers).

There was a niche audience that appreciated Paint 3D, certainly, but it was just that, a pretty small number of fans – so Microsoft didn’t push forward with any real drive to further develop the app as a result.

We should note that if you’ve installed Paint 3D, it won’t go anywhere, or be removed from your PC. But if you don’t have it, this is your last chance to get the app.

Bear in mind, though, that Microsoft won’t be doing any work with the client going forward, so if vulnerabilities pop up for example, they’ll remain unpatched. (In theory anyway, though if something particularly huge and gaping opened up exploit-wise, the software giant might take action). In short, you can continue using Paint 3D at your own risk, should you wish to do so.

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