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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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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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