Amazon follows Microsoft in dropping NDAs from data center talks. Amazon said it will no longer use nondisclosure agreements while negotiating with local governments over data centers, burying the announcement in a blog post making the case that data centers benefit communities. Microsoft made a similar announcement earlier this year. The move is a direct answer to the secrecy criticism now formalized in the Senate’s “Power and Profits” report, though moratoriums in San Francisco, New York and elsewhere suggest the opposition runs deeper than transparency.
Apple picks up the Huxe team in a reverse acqui-hire. Apple disclosed in a European Commission filing that it has agreed to hire team members from personalized audio startup Huxe and take a non-exclusive license to its intellectual property. Huxe, founded by developers who built the AI podcast features in NotebookLM, shut down in May; Apple notified the Commission of the deal on June 9. The filing says nothing about who accepted offers or Apple’s plans, but the timing, a day after Spotify unveiled AI podcast generation, points at the Podcasts app.
A five-building campus is proposed in Metter, Georgia. A developer has filed with the Georgia Department of Community Affairs to build a data center campus on 470 acres near the Metter-Candler Airport, about 180 miles southeast of Atlanta, with five buildings of up to 250,000 square feet each in phases through 2033. The site would include two on-site substations and closed-loop cooling to limit water use. Candler County officials voted unanimously earlier this month against a data center moratorium.
Two crypto miners reshuffle. Fortitude Mining Holdings named a former Hut 8 executive as CEO, and Hyperscale Data said it plans to carve its bitcoin mining business into a Patriot BTC subsidiary. The moves are small, but they are part of the industry’s broader pivot as mining capacity competes with AI workloads for power and sites.
AI could make human hacking crews obsolete. The Register argues that AI agents capable of autonomous intrusion and lateral movement, demonstrated in lab settings against industrial targets, threaten the human hacking crew model exemplified by groups like Shiny Hunters, compressing what took teams of specialists into agent-driven operations. Paired with the Booz Allen OT findings, it points at an offense-defense race in which the offense is automating faster.
EE Times: security is now a sign-off item. EE Times reports that security has joined timing, power and area as a first-class sign-off criterion in chip design flows, reflecting both regulatory pressure and the cost of hardware vulnerabilities discovered after tapeout. For semiconductor investors, it is another reason the security IP and verification-tool markets keep growing into the AI cycle.