Data Center News Roundup: ChatGPT, Amazon, and the FAA

With data center news moving faster than ever, we want to make it easy for data center professionals to cut through the noise and find the most important stories of the week.

The Data Center Knowledge News Roundup brings you the latest news and developments across the data center industry — from investments and mergers to security threats and industry trends.

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Amazon Activity in Oregon

Amazon announced a new partnership with Umatilla Electric Cooperative (UEC) to support Amazon’s goal of powering operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025. As part of the deal, UEC will allow AWS to choose the energy supplies — including renewables — that power Amazon’s Eastern Oregon data centers.

Amazon recently faced criticism for allegedly helping to “quietly quash” an Oregon climate bill targeting high energy users that would have regulated the tech giant’s data centers. Despite Amazon’s “Climate Pledge” to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, critics, including Oregon state representative Pam Marsh, argue that the company’s behind-the-scenes activities are inconsistent with these public sustainability commitments. As reported in the Bezos-owned Washington Post, “last year, [Amazon’s] carbon emissions increased at a higher rate than it ever previously reported.”

A New ‘Spray Cooling’ in Data Centers

In the ongoing quest for a more sustainable data center, researchers at NTU Singapore have developed a new spray cooling technique that uses a mist of non-conductive fluids to help regulate temperatures in data centers, improving their energy efficiency and decreasing their carbon footprint by up to 26%.

ChatGPT Poses a Threat to Google

Will ChatGPT become the new go-to virtual assistant? OpenAI's latest upgrade to ChatGPT, with a new plugin system, is turning the AI text generator into a Google Search competitor.

Businesses — including data centers — can now plug ChatGPT into their systems to search proprietary datasets and write and execute code. As a result, the AI chatbot has the potential to become the web's switchboard, luring users away from traditional search engines with more accurate and personalized search results.

Meanwhile, after a poorly executed Bard rollout, Google is trying to keep up with developments to the optical circuit switches in its machine learning training supercomputer.

Months After Major Outage, FAA Inks Deal With Verizon

Remember the FAA outage in January that delayed over 7,000 flights and left thousands of fliers stranded in airports across the United States? Now, months later, the FAA has inked a deal worth up to $2.4 billion (over 15 years) with Verizon Communications to upgrade its outdated tech systems and communication infrastructure.

Virgin Media Outage x 2

On Tuesday — on the heels of announcing price hikes for its customers — Virgin Media suffered not one but two outages, leaving thousands of users without internet services. While the cause of the outages remains unknown, a Cloudflare blog post suggested a BGP failure or “problems with core network infrastructure” as the culprit.

Other Great Reads on DCK This Week

Why You Can't Power Your Data Center Only With Renewables – But Should Try Anyway. From weather dependence and a larger physical footprint to storage demands and costly investments, there are significant limitations to powering data centers exclusively with renewables. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try! Christopher Tozzi makes the case for the critical role of renewable energy investments in data center sustainability.

Secure Cloud Environments on a Budget: Focus on the Essentials. As companies continue to cut budgets, data center managers and data center cybersecurity teams can gain more return on their cybersecurity investments by prioritizing spending based on risk, carefully eliminating redundancies, and focusing on core issues.

What to Do if You Get Laid Off: Tips for Tech Pros. From the great minds at ITPro Today, Nathan Eddy looks at the steps every tech pro should take to prepare for potential industry layoffs.

That’s all for this week. Which of these stories is most important to you? Let us know in the comments below!