A new Amazon data center is set to become the single largest source of environmental pollution in the U.S., according to a New York Times report on August 8. The tech giant — which already operates the most data centers worldwide — is reportedly building a natural gas power plant in Pecos County, Texas, to power its new data center at the same site. According to project permits, the plant would generate up to 7.65 gigawatts of power using 35 natural gas turbines. The new plant — which burns natural gas to generate electricity — has been authorized to release 33 million tons of CO₂ annually, more planet-warming gases than any other power plant in the country, says the NY Times report.

Conversely, Amazon had pledged to achieve net-zero carbon emissions across all its global business operations by 2040. The company made the promise in 2019 when it initiated and co-founded The Climate Pledge — a voluntary coalition of over 700 companies and partners — aimed at addressing its own corporate footprint and rallying global supply chains. However, the company has seen its emissions rise each year for the past several years, something analysts attribute to a spike in data centers to support the AI boom. The company is currently building several additional AI data centers globally, including the one that the new gas plant would power in Texas.

Amazon has acknowledged the impact of its intense AI ambitions on its earlier climate pledges but insisted the company remained committed to them, despite obvious struggles. “The world looks different now than when we co-founded the climate pledge,” said Margaret Callahan, an Amazon spokeswoman. Still, “our commitment hasn’t changed,” she said, echoing similar statements by Microsoft, which is struggling to fulfill its 2030 sustainability promise amid carbon-heavy AI expansion, but insists it remains committed to it.

As detailed in our data center power roadmap, an increasing number of hyperscalers and data center operators are switching from grid connections to dedicated on-site power generation. The “behind-the-meter” moves are being triggered mainly by the long timelines required to set up new power infrastructure to connect new power-hungry data centers to the grid, but also by growing anti-data center sentiments over irreversible hikes in the electricity bills of nearby communities.

While many companies are also pursuing nuclear and renewable energy options — examples being Microsoft’s Three Mile Island nuclear deal and Meta’s agreement to secure up to 1GW of orbital solar energy capacity — gas appears to be the leading preference due to its scalability and speed of availability. The Trump administration has thrown its weight behind such projects for data centers, promoting oil, natural gas, and coal over renewable energy sources.

The community of Gilroy, California, about 30 miles southwest of San Jose, was surprised when an Amazon data center started construction in their town last month. But as many projects like these have been suffering from opposition and delays across the country, the Wall Street Journal reports that this specific site avoided scrutiny by adhering to local zoning rules set 45 years ago.

Amazon’s Gilroy project sits on a 56-acre piece of farmland between a Walmart Supercenter and the Gilroy Premium Outlets. The company and the city didn’t exactly keep the project secret when it started its application in 2020. In fact, there were disagreements between the tech giant and the city government during the process. The publication noted that some Amazon officials were frustrated by slow permitting progress, which was delayed by at least one year. At the same time, the city pushed back on some of the company’s requests, especially if they were no longer up for discussion.

Roger Wehner, Amazon Web Services vice president of economic development, told WSJ that the site had gone through a long approval process, which required public notices and public-comment periods. However, when Gilroy resident Rosa Rodriguez wanted to state her concern about the damage a data center can do to a region suffering from drought, she was told that the comment period had already lapsed in 2024, long before data centers became a hot topic across the country.

Gilroy City Mayor Greg Bozzo said that other industrial projects that had a similar scale to the Amazon data center have previously been approved without resistance.

“It didn’t bother them that a food-distribution center came to Gilroy without their engagement, but now it bothers them that a data center is coming to Gilroy without them having the possibility of engagement,” Bozzo said.

Still, he conceded the people are now more aware about data center developments and added, “We…have an opportunity to change the way that we do business in Gilroy. We’re adapting to the times.”

The tech giant also said that it’s engaging more with the community, with Amazon officials claiming that they met residents directly and even hosted an open house where people can ask questions and leave comments. It also addressed fears that the development would cause a water shortage, which other data centers have already caused, saying the company is constructing a wastewater recovery system to supply its water needs and will even build a pipeline to bring wastewater from the source to its plant.

Bozzo also highlighted the benefits that Amazon will bring to the city, especially increased tax revenue, construction jobs, and a million-dollar donation towards a new fire truck. He also pointed out that the tech giant has been giving grants to non-profit organizations in the city, as well as sponsoring the annual Gilroy Garlic Festival.

But at this point, it’s not the Amazon data center the people of Gilroy are having an issue with. Instead, it’s the fact that a major project that has the potential to have a major impact on the community has been approved without the knowledge of many residents.

Amazon Web Services is cracking down on internal use of EC2 instances among its engineers. In May, the company reportedly met with engineers and told them to reduce CPU waste to ensure AWS has enough CPU capacity to meet customer demand, The Information reports. The message comes as demand for CPUs in the data center has hit a fever pitch, with the traditional eight-to-one or four-to-one ratio of GPUs to CPUs moving closer to parity.

EC2 instances make up a large chunk of the modern internet, and they're used in private deployments, as well. Traditionally, AWS engineers have been able to spin up their own instances for development, leveraging the relatively low CPU utilization required for web infrastructure to use more virtual machines. Now, engineers say they're waiting days to get access when they previously could get access within hours. One engineer told The Information that they've never had to wait this long for an instance, even after several years of working at Amazon.

Amazon deploys several different types of CPUs in EC2 instances, including AMD and Intel options and its relatively new Graviton5 chip. Graviton5 is Amazon's most powerful CPU to date, and it uses an Arm-based architecture along the lines of Nvidia's Vera CPU and Arm's own AGI.

The increased demand for CPU comes on the back of AI agents, a new paradigm in productivity that even companies as large as Amazon are struggling to reckon with. Last month, for instance, a coding agent blew through $1.8 million in token costs at Amazon, surpassing a development budget by 860%.

Much of the AI infrastructure currently in place is designed around inference, a workload that's accelerated by GPUs. With the four-to-one ratio, the CPU served as a way to keep the GPUs fed, and nothing more. However, agentic workloads are much more complex. They often involve tool calls that run on the CPU, as well as more complex orchestration of inference on GPUs. This is what has brought CPUs center stage in the agentic era. Intel, AMD, and others have echoed what we've heard from memory and storage companies over the past several months: the demand is so high for CPUs that most companies will take whatever they can get.

The major players are capitalizing on that demand. AMD just recently unveiled its portfolio of Zen 6 'Venice' CPUs for the data center, marking the first time AMD has launched a new architecture in the data center before the client market in decades. Nvidia has also pivoted its messaging away from accelerators and toward its new Vera CPU, vying to stake its claim in an expanding market of agentic AI infrastructure.

Although Amazon is wrestling with CPU capacity across its internal engineers and external customers, The Information reports that shortages are largely a problem for spot instances. A consultant told the outlet that contracted capacity hasn't experienced any shortages.

Following publication, an Amazon Web Services spokesperson reached out with the following statement:

"Demand for AWS services, including EC2, is incredibly strong and growing. Even with this heavy demand, we continue to satisfy the overwhelming majority of compute needs for both our internal and external customers. We work closely with internal teams to meet their compute needs while ensuring they use EC2 resources as efficiently as possible, such as reclaiming idle instances, right-sizing, and scaling up and down as needs change – just as we’ve always done. These efficiencies help manage capacity for internal and external customers alike, and any suggestions that these long-standing efforts reflect new capacity constraints is simply wrong.

This premise is sensationalized. Frugality is in our DNA since Day 1. We have always encouraged our teams to operate efficiently. We also share best practices for how customers can optimize resources to external customers. This isn’t a new directive, and encouraging efficient use of resources isn’t unique to Amazon."

We pressed Amazon on if engineers had been given deadlines to reduce their compute usage, as The Information originally reported. An AWS spokesperson responded: "This narrative on EC2 is inaccurate. As part of our normal business operations, and backed by our leadership principle of frugality, we are always driving efficiency across our resources to ensure teams are optimizing capacity."

Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have spent more than a trillion dollars on AI infrastructure, including data centers, the chips inside them, and the power needed to run the facilities, since 2023. The Financial Times said that these four big companies have already hit $1.1 trillion in capital expenditure based on their latest earnings reports, and that an additional $745 billion is expected to be added to this figure just this year.

“There is basically no end in sight for the growth in capex,” RBC Capital analyst Rishi Jaluria told the publication. “Investors need these companies to toe the tight line between investing in AI and not compromising the things that have made them successful.” This massive investment has upended several other industries — namely electricity prices and memory and storage chips. The massive power demand that data centers have put on the power grid has forced many U.S. utility companies to spend billions of dollars to upgrade their respective infrastructure, which they then passed on to all consumers, not just the big ones that forced the upgrade.

This, alongside other environmental issues, has caused many Americans to push back against data center projects near their communities. The White House instituted the “ratepayer protection pledge” and made AI hyperscalers, utility operators, data center companies, and individual states promise that they will protect the average consumer from electricity cost increases. But so far, no state has taken a step to codify this pledge into law. Oregon actually enacted the POWER Act, which resulted in a 30% increase in the power bill of users that consumed more than 20MW while slashing the bills of residents by 1.3%, but the state did this in 2025, way before President Donald Trump called the tech giants into the White House and told them to “pay their own way.”

The mountains of cash that these tech giants are pouring into AI are also affecting the memory and storage chip industry. Since these AI hyperscalers have a lot of liquidity from investors, they are willing to pay top dollar for the HBM they need to run their data centers. Because of this, it made sense for Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix to prioritize them over DRAM, especially as they can charge a premium for these chips and there are customers who are willing to pay at those prices. This resulted in a shortage of consumer memory that started in 2025 — while this initially affected PC builders and enthusiasts, it has started to affect other industries that require memory as well, including cars and smartphones. Even Apple, which historically had huge sway over its suppliers, was forced to increase prices because of the shortages.

Aside from skewing other industries, the massive CAPEX the big four are going into is alarming some experts, warning that the promises and contracts they’re making are leading to “hidden debt” not listed in their balance sheets. The amount, worth around $1.65 trillion, is annotated in their quarterly financial statements as future obligations that will only come into play as the related asset or service comes online. The current value is 122% of the actual debt reflected on their balance sheets, which could give investors the wrong impression that they have fewer obligations than they actually have.

While the amount of money that the big four are spending on AI might seem dizzyingly high, we must note that these companies are raking in massive amounts of cash quarterly themselves. Microsoft’s latest quarterly revenue is $90 billion, while Meta made $60 billion in the same period. Alphabet (Google) announced revenue of nearly $120 billion, while Amazon made $200 billion. That is a total of nearly $470 billion for these companies in just the last quarter.

Still, that does not mean that they can just keep on spending on AI. For example, even though Google’s cloud business had a revenue of $11 billion last year, its price dropped after it announced that it spent more than it made last quarter — the first time this happened in the 20 years since it went public. Meta is also planning to rent out its AI compute, apparently following in the footsteps of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, which have growing cloud businesses. However, this announcement caused a drop in its stock price. “They are a bit all over the place,” SLC Management managing director Dec Mullarkey told FT. “For investors it’s no longer growth at any cost; they want to see the spending flowing through to results, like at the Big Three.”

Amazon has several internal reports that show how AI is causing the company to overspend on various projects. The Financial Times reports that the cost overruns reached $1.8 million, and that is just for one project. These mistakes used to be “trivially cheap,” but AI models made them “catastrophically expensive,” especially as token spending drastically increased with the deployment of AI agents.

The biggest blunder, so far, is the $1.8-million bill that came from a failed Claude Sonnet AI deployment, which was supposed to match author details with listings on Amazon, representing an 860% increase over the allocated budget that was only detected some five months after the issue started happening. Other problems that surfaced include a $541,000 additional cost that came from a project building, ironically, a financial auditing tool, and a $134,000 extra expense for a system designed to reduce delivery times in the company’s logistics network.

“As with any new technology, we’re experimenting, learning and improving how we use it, including how we drive cost efficiencies,” Amazon said in an internal presentation, according to FT. “Cherry-picking small, isolated examples where teams are learning from one another and portraying them as business as usual doesn’t reflect how teams across Amazon are using AI.” And even though overspending more than a million dollars on failed AI projects might seem excessive for the average person, the tech giant’s latest quarterly revenue sits at more than $181 billion, meaning these excess AI expenses don’t even account for 0.1% of what it makes in a month.

This is not the first time that AI-related issues have cropped up in Amazon’s workflow. Earlier this year, AWS reported several outages that were driven by AI coding bot blunders, but the company fixed this by limiting the access of AI agents instead of giving them the same permissions as the senior engineers that they’re tied to. It also used to have an internal leaderboard that showed which employees used AI the most, but has since dropped it as spiraling AI costs made them think twice about the policy.

Many tech companies have been pushing their people to use AI, supposedly to increase productivity through tokenmaxxing. However, the Uber CTO said that there is no link between this policy and shipping successful products. And as agents took over and AI providers switched from subscription to per-token models, costs have become so great that companies are using up their annual budgets in a matter of weeks. While this might not be an immediate issue for tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft, it is unsustainable for most other companies out there.

Five U.S. tech giants heavily invested in AI and its related infrastructure reportedly have an estimated $1.65 trillion in hidden debt, with the figures annotated in their quarterly financial statements instead of being listed in their balance sheets. According to Nikkei Asia, this is higher than the $1.35 trillion officially listed, meaning investors could be caught unaware once the hidden figures come to light.

The publication says that Meta has a high off-balance-sheet-to-recorded-debt ratio, with the company owing $420 billion in unlisted debts compared to the $140 billion written on the balance sheet. Oracle purportedly also has a massive $273.3 billion of hidden debt, which is a 2,900% jump from the hidden debt it had from 2022.

This may sound strange, but it’s actually an accepted accounting practice. The “hidden debt” stems from long-term contracts that have been signed but have not come into force yet, which, Nikkei says, is mostly related to the billions of dollars promised to data center operators. The AI race has got many hyperscalers signing contracts and agreements with data center operators, saying that they will pay for the compute they generate once their project goes online.

While any institution promising to pay any amount of money for services or goods delivered is obliged to list them as a liability, the fact that these data centers haven’t started operations means that these agreements are off-the-books at the moment. But when these projects come online, the contracts that the tech giants have signed will come into force, and they’ll have to pay for the compute that these sites will deliver, no matter if there is demand or not.

Nevertheless, these tech companies aren’t just pouring money into future contracts just for the sake of it. Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft reportedly have a cloud service backlog worth $1.45 trillion, meaning these are services yet to be rendered and paid. Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman also told the publication that the investments that the company is getting into are “not speculative.”

While this may seem like a good way to secure capacity — sign customer contracts that guarantee demand and then enter into long-term agreements with data centers to get the compute needed to deliver the services- it opens these tech giants to massive amounts of risk. That’s because if the demand fails to materialize, then they’d be left paying for excess compute without having any customers to sell them to. What’s more alarming is that Nikkei says that these investment expenditures are exceeding their earnings, meaning these big tech companies are increasingly relying on corporate bonds and new shares to fund them.

Even though demand for AI compute is increasing, it’s still a relatively new and unproven technology, with many experts saying that it should benefit more people to avoid a bubble. The cost of using AI for nearly everything, called “tokenmaxxing,” has also caught some companies by surprise, with agentic AI eating up annual AI budgets in a matter of weeks. Because of this, some companies are reducing their use of AI or are switching to more affordable models from China. This uncertainty, paired with the way tech companies “hide” these liabilities, is quite concerning, as they would appear to have less long-term obligations than they actually do.

This isn’t the first time that an industry giant has used similar accounting techniques. The publication cited Enron’s 2001 collapse, which was due to the company hiding its troubled assets through special purpose entities and marking unrealized gains from trading contracts into its current income statements. While the tech giants are not hiding underperforming assets off their balance sheets and committing fraud, they’re still using a similar mechanism to list their upcoming obligations. Although these are technically not debt, they still behave like one, and the way they’re reported is what’s concerning some experts.

There's no denying how good the build quality and construction of Apple's MacBook Pro lineup are. They are what every other high-end laptop manufacturer tries to emulate, which lets Apple charge a very high price for the privilege of owning one. If you're looking for a high-performance laptop for coding, video production, or even some light LLM/AI tasks, then this deal on the 14-inch Apple MacBook Pro with M5 chip for $2,699 is worth a look. B&H Photo has slashed $400 off the $3,099 list price to bring it down to this price, and give you the chance to pick up a powerful laptop with 48GB of memory.

● Check out this deal at B&H Photo

This 14-inch MacBook Pro uses the latest M5 Pro chip, with a 15-core CPU and 16-core GPU with a Neural Accelerator in each core, delivering amazing processing power in a small package. This model sports a hefty 48GB of unified RAM, a 1TB SSD for storage, and a crisp 3024 x 1964-pixel Liquid Retina XDR display (1600 nits peak HDR brightness), with superb battery life (up to 24 hours).

Other features include a 12MP Center Stage camera with Desk View support, an in-house N1 networking chip that combines Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, an SDXC Slot, Thunderbolt 5, and a MagSafe 3 connector.

We had the chance to review the MacBook Pro 14-Inch and found that the M5 chip delivers solid performance gains over its M4 predecessor. The SSD performance has greatly improved, and the rocking speaker system is still a cut above similar laptops from competitors. In our benchmark testing, the MacBook Pro's M5 CPU delivered between a 10 to 20% improvement over the prior generation's M4 chip in CPU performance.

If the price tag of $2,699 and 48GB of RAM are a little too high for your tastes, you can also pick up the same 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Pro chip, but with 24GB of RAM for $2,299, with the same hardware and features as our main deal.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard, or CPU Deals pages.

You can also join the Tom's Hardware deals Discord for up-to-the-minute hardware deals.

This is the first time that I can recall seeing a discount on Logitech's latest gaming mouse. It's a mouse I've been keeping a close eye on, as the launch price has not only stayed extremely stable but is also super expensive for a gaming mouse, making it very off-putting for the majority of gamers. However, if you want one of these high-tech gaming mice, then today at Amazon, you can grab $54 off the Logitech G Pro X2 Superstrike, bringing it to $125.99. The $54 discount is automatically applied when you click through to the checkout. This is the lowest price the mouse has ever been on Amazon.

● Check out this deal at Amazon

The Superstrike’s standout feature is that it blurs the lines between the worlds of gaming keyboards and gaming mice. It's done away with the traditional analog mouse switch, and as a side effect, has removed mouse clicks. With the latest hall-effect tech beneath the left and right mouse buttons, click feedback is now produced by a haptic engine that Logitech calls H.I.T.S. (Haptic Inductive Trigger System). It combines tiny haptic motors with inductive sensors to create a customizable rapid-trigger system that can cut up to 30ms off your response times.

The Logitech G Pro X2 Superstrike packs all the latest and greatest tech in a very familiar chassis. See our review of the Logitech G Pro X2 Superstrike for more details. Keeping the shape and size of previous Superlight mice. The G Pro X2 Superstrike weighs 61 grams and uses magnetic sensors with a haptic trigger system for the left and right mouse buttons. The sensor is the Logitech Hero 2 sensor, with a DPI of up to 44,000, 888 IPS, and 88 g-force acceleration. The wireless dongle supports a very fast, lag-free 8 kHz polling rate for the lowest latency possible. To use the adjustable H.I.T.S system to the full, you must use the Logitech G Hub software to alter and customize any mouse settings to your preference.

This is the cheapest I've ever seen this mouse, and having only been released in February of 2026, the $125.99 asking price for the Logitech G Pro X2 Superstrike makes it much more attractive.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard, or CPU Deals pages.

You can also join the Tom's Hardware deals Discord for up-to-the-minute hardware deals.

The Amazon Eero Max 7 was one of the very first Wi-Fi 7 routers that arrived on our test bench way back in November 2023. At the time, Wi-Fi 7 was still a relatively new standard, and chipset production hadn’t kicked into full gear. As a result, those early systems were incredibly expensive, with the MSRP of the Eero Max 7 3-pack we reviewed at a staggering $1,699. What a difference two and a half years makes — Amazon is now selling the Eero Max 7 4-pack for just $1,149.99, representing a dramatic 50 percent price cut.

It’s not often that we see a 50 percent reduction on a current-generation wireless router, let alone the flagship model. With that said, you do get a lot for your outlay, which we admit is still quite high despite the price cut. The Eero Max 7 is a tri-band Wi-Fi 7 mesh router with a 2x2 2.4 GHz band (688 Mbps), a 4x4 5 GHz band (8,647 Mbps), and a 4x4 6 GHz band (11,530 Mbps). The four satellites communicate via a wireless backhaul, though you can use a wired one for improved performance.

Each node is decently equipped with respect to ports, with two 2.5 GbE ports and two 10 GbE ports, any of which can be used for WAN. However, do note that you won’t find a USB port on either node for adding storage.

To make things as simple as possible for consumers, the Eero family of routers (including the Eero Max 7) features an app-only approach for setup and management. That means you can’t manage the network from a desktop computer and must rely on your smartphone for tinkering with settings. Perhaps that’s for the best, because you also don’t have nearly as many settings to manage as with other wireless routers. For example, the Eero Max 7 only supports Smart Connect and doesn’t let you create custom SSIDs or separate the bands. You also have limited control over Guest accounts.

But for someone who wants to get a network up and running in a few minutes and not have to worry about it again for the next three or four years, the Eero Max 7 is about as “hands off” as you can get with a modern wireless router.

The Eero Max 7 is currently available as an Amazon Prime-exclusive Lightning Deal with 16% units claimed as of this writing.

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Do you or someone you know have a Nintendo Switch 2? What about accessories for your new console? Whether you want to play with others, increase your storage, or add functionality, you may want some extras to deliver the best gameplay experience possible, and now is the best time to score a big deal on them during Prime Day 2026.

• Check out all the Switch 2 accessories deals in Amazon's Prime Day Sale

There are many official, licensed accessories alongside third-party extras available at a wide range of prices. It's Prime Day 2026, so now is an excellent time to hunt for deals and the best prices on Switch 2 peripherals and accessories.

One of the most important extras you'll most likely want to pick up is a microSD Express memory expansion card. The least expensive out now is Nintendo's own (SanDisk) 256GB card, but there are other, faster models available for a pittance more (see below). If you know that's what you want, check out our handy list of the best Prime Day microSD Express card deals for the Switch 2. Just be aware that pricing has absolutely skyrocketed, along with RAM, Storage, and video cards, in the last several months, so don't be shocked. Still, we found the best deals that we could.

Other accessories to consider are screen protectors, carrying cases, and peripherals such as controllers, headsets, and cameras, as listed below.

If you're thinking about, or already using a camera for your Switch 2, most of the styles out there are pretty boring. Most are just a camera on a stick, or may even clip to the device. I found something unique, the officially licensed Piranha Plant Camera! Relive your days of Mario and the feared plant that comes out of the pipes, but on your desk - and for less than the price of the official Nintendo Switch 2 camera-on-a-stick.

We also added another Switch 2 Pro-class controller on top of the official Nintendo Pro controller. 8bitDo's Ultimate 2 bluetooth controller is one of my kids' favorites. For less than the cost of the Nintendo controller, the Ultimate 2 offers TMY joysticks, switchable hall effect/tactile triggers, vibration and motion control. It is a lower resolution (640x480), however. The best part? It's it's on sale right now.

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Also, you can join the Tom's Hardware deals Discord for up-to-the-minute hardware deals.

An extremely unfortunate PC builder is the latest to fall victim to Amazon's prolific returns scams, after the Nvidia RTX 5070 they received from the website turned out to be a DVD re-writer, a mousepad, and the busted logic board from an early 2000's Kenwood AV receiver.

The victim was gifted a brand new MSI Ventus 2X variant of the RTX 5070 from Amazon by a friend at a cost of 605 euros ($700). A few days later, when the package arrived, it weighed the same as the real thing, but it certainly did not have a graphics card inside. Instead, the customer received what appears to be a broken logic board from an old Kenwood AV receiver, a DVD rewriter, and what seems to be a mousepad.

"This was shipped and sold by Amazon," u/luutherr told Tom's Hardware. They also provided us with proof of purchase and confirmed the item was a gift from a friend, making the scam all the more galling. That means someone in the middle is the bad actor. In reality, what most likely happened was a scam-swap, where someone previously bought the item, emptied its real box contents, and filled it back up with junk that weighs the same. They then filed for a return, probably citing personal preference as the reason.

Since the box still carried the same weight and the product wasn't returned because of a defect, it ended up back on sale after passing some basic checks. Someone else buys it, and Amazon or the seller unknowingly sends that person the fake item, completing the circle. Believe it or not, this whole process actually used to be worse before Amazon ended its commingling program last year, which sellers exploited to avoid being traced.

In the end, the same system that delivered OP the wrong product should come in handy for delivering justice. A simple return request should get them their money back, but it will certainly erode the customer's trust in the platform. We would say this is a reminder to always stay vigilant when buying PC hardware with prices that seem lower than usual. But since this was bought from the official MSI store and sold directly by Amazon, it's simply a consequence of deceitful human nature.

Amazon employees Darius Irani, Patrick Schloesser, and Liesl Wigand, who are members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ), say that they’re currently being investigated by their employer for breaking company policy after they testified in favor of the Seattle data center moratorium. According to Bloomberg, the three were called to separate Zoom meetings with an HR staff member after the city passed its one-year AI data center ban, where they were told that the company was investigating concerns about their public comments. Staff say they were intimidated during calls, are being monitored at work, and may face possible termination.

The company said that even though the three were free to discuss their working environment, they’re not allowed to speak as its representatives. “As we looked more closely at how these employees represented themselves, and how their comments were received by others, it became clear that they may have been speaking in their capacity as Amazonians and not as private citizens,” Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan told the publication. “We believe it’s important to apply our policies consistently so, just as we would with anyone else, we’re investigating whether there was a violation of our policies and may or may not take action based on what we find.”

Legal representatives of the three personnel said in a letter to the Seattle Office for Civil Rights (SOCR) that the investigations could lead to discipline, with one of them even saying that they could possibly be terminated. The lawyers argued that they were investigated by the company because of what they said when the Seattle City Council heard public comments on the measure, and said that Irani, Schloesser, and Wigand did not use company time when they made their comments, nor did they make any mention of their employer or shared propriety information.

The SOCR is a local government agency that enforces laws against employment discrimination, among other things, and the three affected employees are asking the agency to look into the situation. They alleged that they were intimidated during the Zoom meetings and complained about being monitored while they were at work. This also isn’t the first time that AECJ-affiliated workers faced an issue with Amazon. The company reportedly fired two people in 2020 who were part of the group’s leadership for putting a spotlight on Amazon warehouse workers’ safety (or lack thereof) during the pandemic.

Amazon says it is just investigating the situation and hasn’t made a decision yet. However, news like this will not do any good for the company and industry in general, especially as they gather bad press because of their AI data center projects. While the company has been trying to put its good side forward, like comparing its water consumption with other hyperscalers to highlight its high water efficiency, it still cannot shake off the perception that it could cause higher electricity costs, reduced water pressure, and noise pollution, among others.

I have plenty of time for a wireless network in my home, but I only use it for devices where latency isn't an issue. It's great for my phone, tablet, and some streaming, but if I want to game or download large files to the network storage, I prefer a wired setup, and there are never enough Ethernet ports available on a standard router from your ISP. With eight extra Ethernet ports, you should be good to go for connecting the majority of your devices. This TP-Link 8-Port Multi-Gigabit 2.5G Ethernet Switch is now just $49.99 after getting a massive 62% ($80) slashed off the $129.99 list price at Amazon in this pre-Prime Day deal.

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The TP-Link 8-Port multi-Gigabit 2.5G Ethernet switch (model: TL-SG108S-M2) is an 8-port switch with fast 2.5 Gbps speeds. Simply connect this device to your router to instantly expand the number of available Ethernet ports at your disposal. The Switch is unmanaged, so there is no configuration of static IP addresses, just plug and play when you connect up your devices. The TP-Link switch will intelligently sense the link speeds of your device and adjust between three speeds (100Mb/1G/2.5G) to give you the optimum network experience.

You can use this 8-port switch to connect to your television, gaming PC, Xbox/PlayStation, WiFi mesh network, NAS, private server, VOIP phone, or even security cameras. Anything you feel would benefit from a more stable wired connection.

You can choose to install the TP-Link TL-SG108S-M2 on the desk, or even wall-mount it up out of the way, to keep any possible cable-clutter off your workspace, and out of sight. The TP-Link TL-SG108S-M2 uses a fanless design to dissipate heat, so there is no noise disturbance, ensuring silent operation. In the box is the switch itself, a power adapter, and some rubber feet if you choose to install it on a desktop.

Saving 62% off the usual retail price makes this switch an exceptional bargain in today's economy. Picking up an 8-port TP-Link TL-SG108S-M2 switch for just $49.99 is a quick win for anyone wanting to upgrade their small home network.

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Data center water use is one of the hot topics right now in the U.S. and is one of the primary reasons why such projects are being blocked across the nation. However, Amazon claimed that it’s improving its water efficiency and that it uses the least amount of water on a per kWh basis among the AI tech giants, including Microsoft, Google, and Meta. Aside from that, it also said that despite using 2.5 billion gallons of water across the world in its data centers, it said that that amount is still a fraction of what other industries in the U.S. are using annually.

Amazon pointed at EPA data from 2017 that said Americans use 9 billion gallons of water daily just for landscape irrigation. This amounts to nearly 3.3 trillion gallons of water every year just for watering plants and gardens and doesn’t even include the irrigation needed for food production. This makes its 2.5-billion-gallon water consumption a literal drop in the bucket, amounting to just 0.075% of water used for keeping gardens green and thriving.

These gardens, however, have a direct benefit in that they could potentially keep ambient temperatures lower (versus an all-cement environment) and add to the aesthetics of the immediate area — the only question is how many people these developments benefit. Moreover, many new data centers in the U.S. are reportedly being built in areas suffering from water issues. While the overall data center water consumption might seem small if you look at the larger picture, we still cannot turn a blind eye to its potential effects on the local community.

For example, a Meta data center has allegedly caused a Georgia town’s deep-well water source to muddy — a sign that the level of the local water table is hitting low levels, allowing mud to be siphoned by the residents’ water pumps. Another site reportedly sucked 29 million gallons of water in 15 months, which caused low water pressures for residents. Reports like these make it harder for other data center projects to secure permits from local governments to start construction, especially as communities fear that these issues could happen in their area, too.

Amazon boasts water efficiency improvements

As the pushback against data centers’ egregious resource consumption has become front-and-center in many permitting fights, Amazon is showing that it’s taking steps to reduce its water consumption and claims that it’s on track to being “water positive” by 2030. It achieved this by implementing innovations in its data centers to reduce water use without reducing performance.

The company says that it mostly uses air cooling for its data centers, which uses up a lot less electricity compared to water cooling. But when ambient temperatures rise, it switches to Direct Evaporative Cooling, with the company spraying water on an absorbent medium, which the company describes as “a sophisticated, giant sponge,” and then runs the hot air through it to reduce temperatures by five to 10 degrees. It says that this is more power efficient than using chillers, reducing power use by about 20% to 25% during the hottest time of the day when power usage by other users is at its highest, too.

It also said that it raised the temperature thresholds in its data centers. While this meant that its servers ran hotter compared to previous years, it didn’t impact on the longevity of their hardware and they were still able to deliver the same amount of computing power as before. Through trial and error, the company discovered that it could keep running its servers using air cooling only, with its water-cooling systems only kicking in once the ambient temperature reaches 85 degrees F (or more than 29 degrees C). This resulted in 50% reduction in water use, says Amazon water specialist Beau Schilz.

Efforts like this are essential for data center operations to become sustainable. After all, despite the pushback against new data center projects, we cannot forever put a moratorium on them as AI’s demand for compute is increasing. But until AI hyperscalers can earn back the trust of the people and prove that they can build infrastructure without increasing costs for everyone else and hoarding the resources that communities need for their survival, then they can only expect opposition to continue.

With World Cup soccer action just around the corner, you may be stoking up EA's FC26 or Sports Interactive's Football Manager 26 on your PC, but do you have a powerful enough graphics card for all the action? Well, the good news is that AMD's top-tier Radeon gaming graphics card is on sale at Amazon. The Gigabyte Gaming OC Radeon RX 9070 XT GPU is only $649. A saving of $90 from its original $739.99 sale price. You can also pick up the same graphics card at the same price in white if you're looking for a GPU for an icy-white build.

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The Gigabyte Gaming OC Radeon RX 9070 XT comes with 64 RDNA 4 compute units, 4096 stream processors, and an out-of-the-box factory overclock. Shipping with an increased boost clock speed of 3,060MHz. The RX 9070 XT is also equipped with 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM on a 256-bit bus, operating at a memory speed of 20 Gbps. Essential memory capacity for playing 1440p gaming at higher settings and not running out of memory for textures and shaders.

In our RX 9070 XT review, we found that this GPU offered a generational improvement over the previous AMD generation of cards and also offers stiff competition to Nvidia's RTX 5070 Ti at a much lower price point.

If you're looking for a stellar 1440p graphics card for gaming with a hefty 16GB of VRAM, then this is the lowest-priced RX 9070 XT GPU model currently available. This particular variant, made by board-partner Gigabyte, launched well above the original touted MSRP, but luckily has been coming down in price. With improvements to drivers and advances in FSR software tech, the RX 9070 XT is a potent alternative to Nvidia's RTX 5070 Ti 16GB GPU, and also, much cheaper.

Some caveats are that the Radeon RX 9070 XT is not as good a performer as Nvidia cards in ray tracing, but for rasterization and pure frame throughput, the playing field is more than level. It's also worth stating the value for the performance ratio. Competitive performance and that all-important 16GB of memory make this card viable for years to come.

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Amazon has unveiled a new data center networking architecture that it claims delivers up to 33% higher throughput while reducing network power consumption by 40%, marking what the company describes as the first large-scale deployment of a flat network based on random graph theory, Wired reports. The company revealed that it had been quietly deploying the design in its data centers since last year, confirming that it has already become the default data center network for most AWS workloads.

The architecture, called Resilient Network Graphs (RNG), replaces the hierarchical networking structures that have dominated cloud data centers for decades with a flatter, quasi-random architecture designed to move data more efficiently between servers. Amazon says the design uses 69% fewer networking devices than traditional architectures and can reduce infrastructure costs by up to 45%, potentially translating into billions of dollars in savings across its global cloud footprint.

The company first deployed RNG in a Dublin data center in 2024 before expanding the architecture into facilities in Germany and Spain. AWS says the design is now being rolled out across most newly built data centers and will form the foundation of future deployments.

Data center and AI capability conversations typically focus on processing and storage. However, networking is one of the most important aspects of capability. Every request sent from your device to a cloud application, database, AI model, or storage service depends on data moving rapidly across thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of servers. As facilities continue to grow, ensuring information reaches the right destination quickly and efficiently has become an increasingly difficult engineering challenge.

For decades, most large-scale data centers have relied on a hierarchical networking structure known as a "fat-tree" topology. In this design, data travels up and down layers of switches and routers arranged in a tree-like hierarchy. While the approach is proven and reliable, it can create bottlenecks and strain available bandwidth. Traffic can become concentrated at specific points in the hierarchy, even when capacity is unused elsewhere in the network. The approach also requires a large number of expensive networking devices.

Researchers have long theorized that a flatter network based on random graph principles could solve many of those issues. Instead of forcing traffic through predefined layers, routers are connected in a highly distributed mesh-like arrangement that creates numerous possible paths between endpoints. In theory, this will improve resilience, increase utilization of available bandwidth, and reduce the likelihood of congestion.

The challenge was making such a network practical. Although random graph networks have been subject to academic research for more than a decade, major obstacles have prevented their successful deployment at hyperscale. Routing traffic efficiently through such a network is considerably more complicated than routing traffic through a predictable hierarchy, and physically connecting millions of fiber-optic links without creating an operational nightmare presents an entirely different challenge.

AWS says it overcame those obstacles with two key innovations: software and custom hardware. The first is a custom routing protocol called Spraypoint, which distributes traffic across large numbers of available paths rather than relying primarily on the shortest path. The second is a passive optical device called ShuffleBox, designed to organize and standardize the immense amount of cabling required to build the network at scale.

According to Amazon, the resulting architecture not only moves data roughly one-third faster than conventional designs but also requires significantly fewer switches and routers. The company says those reductions lower both capital expenditures and operating costs while simultaneously reducing power consumption.

AI models are growing larger and more capable, and so are their user bases. To sustain this growth, hyperscalers have to continue optimizing the entire technology stack. Faster chips remain crucial, but so are advances in cooling, power delivery, storage systems, optical interconnects, and networking. AWS believes RNG is one such advantage. The company rightly considers the achievement of deploying random graph theory at scale, “a breakthrough that will deliver greater reliability and performance for AWS customers, save billions of dollars in hardware, and lower CO2 emissions.”

Get your hands on AMD's flagship Radeon gaming graphics card whilst it's at its lowest-ever price on Amazon. The Gigabyte Gaming OC Radeon RX 9070 XT GPU is only $629 while stocks last in this lightning sale at Amazon. At $29 above the MSRP launch price, but $110.99 below its usual $739.99 sale price, this is an absolute bargain if you're looking for a stellar 1440p gaming graphics card with a comfortable 16GB of essential VRAM. This is the lowest price this Gigabyte-made graphics card has been, according to the price-tracking website Camelcamelcamel.

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The Gigabyte Gaming OC Radeon RX 9070 XT comes with 64 RDNA 4 compute units, 4096 stream processors, and an out-of-the-box factory overclock. Shipping with an increased boost clock speed of 3,060MHz. The RX 9070 XT is also equipped with 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM on a 256-bit bus, operating at a memory speed of 20 Gbps. Essential memory capacity for playing 1440p gaming at higher settings and not running out of memory for textures and shaders.

In our RX 9070 XT review, we found that this GPU offered a generational improvement over the previous generation in the same tier and offers stiff competition to Nvidia's RTX 5070 Ti at a much lower price. See the chart below for a performance comparison.

The Radeon RX 9070 XT may not be as good as the Nvidia competition in pure ray tracing, but for rasterization and pure frame throughput, it's there. Not every game features ray-tracing, and sometimes it just isn't worth taking the performance hit, whatever the make of card, so in that respect, this is a great graphics card, at a currently superb price. But hurry, this Gigabyte Gaming OC Radeon RX 9070 XT deal at $629 isn't going to stick around for long.

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If gaming on a small laptop has always put you off leaving the desktop PC for your gaming, then the gateway laptop for tempting you to switch probably looks like today's deal. The Acer Predator Helios Neo 18 AI is reduced to just $1799 at Walmart and features a huge 18-inch IPS display with a fast 240Hz refresh and 3ms overdrive response time. This model also includes an Intel CPU and RTX 5070 Ti laptop graphics card, so there's plenty of oomph for playing the latest and greatest games. Best of all, the laptop is $400.99 cheaper than it should be.

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This model of the Acer Predator Helios Neo 18 AI features an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor, Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti laptop GPU with 12GB of fast GDDR7 VRAM, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD. The chassis is a mix of metal and plastic, with an abyssal black finish. There are multiple RGB zones all over the laptop, so you can dial it up to 11 if you want to go for the full gamified lightshow.

Also on sale is the slightly beefier version of the same Acer Predator Helios Neo 18 Ai laptop, available from Amazon for $2399.99. This more potent variant sports double the RAM at 32GB and double the storage at 2TB, but does cost significantly more. The original list price of the 32GB Acer Predator Helios Neo 18 Ai was $2699.99.

We haven't had the opportunity to review this model of the Acer Predator Helios Neo 18 AI, so we can't fully compare the laptop to any competition or see its performance benchmarks. These are familiar components, though, so we do have a rough idea of the capabilities. The RTX 5070 Ti will be able to run games smoothly on the 18-inch 2560x1600 WQXGA+ screen, and can also make use of Nvidia's DLSS software to increase framerates for a smoother experience on more taxing titles.

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This ultra-limited time deal at Amazon is letting you grab 50% off the 25-bit Hoto Electric Screwdriver, dropping its price down to a lowly $29. The perfect gift for a friend or colleague, as well as a treat for yourself. You had better act fast, though, as there are just 14 hours left on this deal at the time of publication.

Such a great product that I have a Hoto myself, and I have to admit that I use it all the time, not just for PC building and deconstructing, but also for everyday DIY; I even put an entire garden shed together with this exact model and had no issues at all. Furthermore, the majority of the Tom's Hardware staff have one of these great little gadgets on their desk or in a nearby drawer.

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This compact kit comes with the 25-bit driver set, along with the screwdriver itself. The Hoto NEX O1 Pro 3.6V electric screwdriver is equipped with a 1,500mAh battery that advertises enough power to drive over 1,000 screws from a full charge. I'll have to keep a tally the next time I use mine, but I can attest to it being able to be by my side whilst putting together a full garden shed, and there was a LOT of screws included in that build. I didn't have to charge the driver that day either, plus the convenient size meant I could just pop it in my pocket during pauses in screwing.

The set includes 25 steel screw bits, all rated for 60HRC on the Rockwell scale, with 24 standard bits and 1 extended PH2 bit. All feature various shapes, with Phillips, Torx, flat, hexagon, and Pozidriv head options included. The Hoto NEX O1 Pro itself comes with three separate torque settings, as well as a built-in sensor that will stop driving as soon as you release control. There's also a circular LED light at the top to help you see what you're doing in dark spaces, particularly useful for finding any tiny dropped screws while you work.

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Amazon is the latest hyperscaler where employees have been caught inflating AI token consumption to hit internal usage targets, following similar behavior documented at Meta and Microsoft last month, the Financial Times reports.

The company set targets requiring more than 80% of its developers to use AI tools each week and tracked consumption on internal leaderboards. Some employees told FT they had been using MeshClaw, an in-house agent platform that can initiate code deployments, triage emails, and interact with Slack to maximize their token numbers. Amazon said usage statistics would not factor into performance evaluations, but multiple employees said they believed managers were monitoring the data. One said there was "so much pressure to use these tools," another described how tracking created "perverse incentives."

The practice — dubbed "tokenmaxxing" — has become widespread enough to generate its own vocabulary and leaderboards, but beyond workplace culture, if a meaningful share of AI consumption is performative, how reliable are the demand figures that hundreds of billions in AI infrastructure procurement are being allocated against?

Combined 2026 capex from Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta is tracking between $650 billion and $700 billion, with some Wall Street projections exceeding $1 trillion for 2027, and every hyperscaler has told investors that inference capacity is being absorbed as fast as it can be deployed. Internal developer consumption is obviously part of that absorption, and it sits alongside paying external customers in the usage data that informs the likes of capacity planning, GPU orders, HBM procurement, and power infrastructure.

Tokenmaxxing doesn’t mean the demand is fabricated — enterprise AI adoption is broadening, and inference workloads are scaling into production — but there’s a distinction between adoption and consumption intensity. The former is a durable driver of demand, whereas the latter is gameable, and it’s currently being amplified by the incentive structures that these companies built. The water is further muddied by reports that AI is more expensive than actual workers.

Meta's internal leaderboard lasted days after public exposure, and Amazon recently restricted visibility of team-wide usage statistics. And when measurement shifts, the consumption intensity they incentivized will shift with them.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has highlighted per-engineer token consumption as a key metric, stating he’d be "deeply alarmed" if a $500,000-a-year engineer was not consuming at least $250,000 in tokens. Nvidia's inference growth obviously depends on that consumption being a productive workload that persists and compounds because every inflated token is real GPU time.

Angie Jones, formerly VP of engineering for AI tools at Block, told LeadDev she expected the industry to pivot toward measuring efficient token usage rather than celebrating volume. In a cycle where GPU orders and power commitments are being placed years in advance, the quality of the demand projections behind them matters. The hyperscalers are building for a world where every knowledge worker consumes hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual compute. Whether that consumption proves productive or performative will determine how much of this year's $700 billion generates durable returns.

Amazon’s data centers in Bahrain and the UAE have been hit multiple times by drone and missile strikes from Iran since the U.S. started bombing the country in February 2026. This left the company’s ME-CENTRAL-1 and ME-SOUTH-1 disrupted, with the AWS Health Dashboard indicating that it will take months before they can go back online.

“The Middle East (UAE) Region (ME-CENTRAL-1) has suffered damage as a result of the conflict in the Middle East and is currently unable to reliably support customer applications,” Amazon said in its latest update. “While some workloads continue to function normally, we strongly recommend customers migrate all accessible resources to other Regions and restore inaccessible resources from remote backups as soon as possible. Relevant billing operations are currently suspended while we restore normal operations in this AWS Region. This process is expected to take several months.”

These sites were first hit in early March, a few days after the U.S. started its bombing campaign on Iran. A few weeks after that, AWS Bahrain was hit once more, this time by drone strikes, further disrupting operations. The last reported strike happened in early April, putting several zones into a “hard down” status. Although both sites remain partially operational, it seems that Amazon has refrained from billing customers who used these servers and continues to encourage them to move to other regions and avoid further disruption due to the conflict.

Even if the missile and drone strikes haven’t completely leveled the two data centers, Amazon is still on the hook for months of repairs. Aside from these direct hits, the shockwave and post-explosion fires they caused have compounded the damage to the sensitive equipment used in these sites. The company also reported that fire suppression systems have caused flooding and water damage to various equipment, while cooling systems have suffered from mechanical failures.

There’s currently an uneasy truce in the area, as the two parties are at the negotiating table trying to end the war. However, hostilities could resume at any time, especially as the U.S. and Iran cannot agree on several points, making it risky for Amazon to start repairs right now. But even then, the ongoing chip shortages could make it harder for the company to get the components it needs to get these services up and running again, unless they have backup servers in their inventory ready to be deployed if peace in the region has been achieved.

Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta plan to spend a combined $725 billion on capital expenditure in 2026, a 77% increase over last year's record $410 billion, according to first-quarter earnings reports compiled by the Financial Times.

Google led with 63% cloud revenue growth and an 81% jump in net income to $62.6 billion, while Meta's stock dropped 6% after hours despite a 33% revenue increase, punished by investors for adding $10 billion to its spending forecast and offering no firm timeline on new AI models.

But in the earnings calls, at least two of the four companies explicitly blamed rising memory chip prices for pushing budgets higher, confirming what market data and industry executives have been warning about for months.

Memory costs inside the capex

Microsoft’s CFO, Amy Hood, told investors that rising prices for memory chips and other components accounted for $25 billion of the company's record capex budget. Microsoft set its 2026 spending at $190 billion, far above the $152 billion average analyst forecast. Hood warned that even with the additional investment, Microsoft expects to remain capacity-constrained on GPUs, CPUs, and storage through at least 2026.

Meta cited the same, with the company raising its full-year capex range to $125 billion to $145 billion, up from a prior ceiling of $135 billion. In its earnings release, Meta attributed the increase to "higher component pricing this year, particularly memory," alongside rising costs for land, power, and skilled workers needed to build data centers that now consume 70% of the world's memory output.

The timing of all this is hardly coincidental, with TrendForce having reported DRAM contract prices rising roughly 95% quarter over quarter in Q1 2026, with a further 58% to 63% increase projected for Q2. NAND is following a similar trajectory, with Q2 contract prices expected to climb 70% to 75%. Server DRAM and high-density DDR5 RDIMMs are absorbing the bulk of production capacity, and all NAND output for 2026 is already committed, according to Phison CEO Khein-Seng Pua.

Hood's $25 billion, therefore, helps to put a dollar value on what has previously been an abstract concern: If one company's memory cost inflation alone exceeds the entire annual capex of most semiconductor firms, the pressure on consumer DRAM and NAND supply becomes much easier to quantify.

Google Cloud's contract backlog

Meta and Microsoft aside, Google’s Cloud revenue hit $20 billion in the same quarter, growing 63% year over year, outpacing both Amazon Web Services ($37.6 billion, up $8.3 billion) and Microsoft's Azure-driven cloud segment ($34.7 billion, up $7.9 billion).

Google's cloud contract backlog reached $460 billion, roughly double the $240 billion reported at the end of Q4 2025. Amazon reported $364 billion in its own pipeline, which will expand further after a recent $100 billion computing contract with Anthropic over the next decade. Microsoft's commercial remaining performance obligations hit $625 billion, up 110% year over year.

Cloud boss Thomas Kurian attributed Google's growth to its strategy of building custom AI chips, foundation models, and products in-house, telling the Financial Times that this gives the company a cost and research advantage over competitors that have struggled to develop their own chips and frontier models. Google's 7th-gen Ironwood TPU, which packs 192 GB of HBM3E per chip with 7.37 TB/s bandwidth in pods of up to 9,216 chips, is central to that strategy, and Anthropic has committed to access up to one million of them. Google recently unveiled its 8th-gen TPUs, which are split into two distinct variants for training and inference.

Alphabet raised its capex guidance to between $180 billion and $190 billion, up $5 billion from its previous guidance of $175 billion. CFO Anat Ashkenazi said he expects capex to “significantly increase” in 2027, causing shares to rise by some 7% after hours. It’s worth noting that $37.7 billion of Alphabet’s net income of $62.6 billion came from unrealized gains on non-marketable equity securities, primarily the company's Anthropic stake, according to the earnings release filed with the SEC. Strip that out, and operating performance was still strong, with a 36.1% operating margin, but the total net income number overstates recurring profitability.

Custom silicon and the GPU question

These capex figures reflect more than GPU purchases, because each hyperscaler is now deploying or developing custom accelerators to reduce dependence on Nvidia for inference-based workloads.

Amazon's Trainium3, built on a 3nm process with 144 GB of HBM3E and roughly 4.9 TB/s of bandwidth, is what CEO Andy Jassy described as "nearly fully subscribed" for 2026, and Meta has announced four generations of its MTIA inference chip, all fabbed at TSMC alongside Broadcom, even as it signed GPU deals worth roughly $110 billion combined with AMD and Nvidia. Meanwhile,. Microsoft's Maia 200 is deploying in U.S. Central data centers.

This pattern is likely to extend beyond accelerators as CPU demand for agentic AI workloads drives a parallel supply crunch with CPU lead times currently stretching to six months. Intel has reported billions in unmet Xeon demand, and Arm CEO Rene Haas has stated that agentic workloads require roughly 120 million CPU cores per gigawatt of data center capacity, four times what traditional AI training clusters need. Per Intel CFO David Zinsner, data center CPU-to-GPU ratios have already moved from 1:8 to 1:4, with further convergence expected to reach or go beyond parity.

Despite record spending, all four companies have acknowledged supply constraints that additional capital alone can’t resolve. Nvidia has booked an estimated 800,000 to 850,000 wafers of TSMC's CoWoS advanced packaging capacity for 2026, consuming over half of the total output and leaving AMD, Broadcom, and Google's TPU program competing for the remainder. CoWoS remains oversubscribed through at least mid-2026, and TSMC's U.S. packaging fabs aren’t expected to reach volume until 2028.

Power infrastructure is another bottleneck, with large power transformer lead times extending to roughly 128 weeks, and the IEA estimating that approximately 20% of planned global data center projects could be at risk of grid-related delays. TrendForce recently downgraded its full-year server shipment growth forecast from 20% to 13% because power management ICs and baseboard management controllers needed to assemble complete servers are stretching to 35- to 40-week lead times. Samsung's planned closure of its S7 eight-inch wafer fab in Korea will tighten PMIC supply further.

‘The bear thesis is garbage’

Meta's stock slipped by 6% after-hours following the earnings, erasing roughly $113 billion in market value. That drop reflected both the $10 billion capex increase and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's lack of a firm schedule for releasing improved AI models to follow the recently launched Muse Spark. Dec Mullarkey, managing director of SLC Management, told the FT that investors are concerned about whether Meta's historically capital-light business is becoming far more capital-intensive.

"The bear thesis is garbage," countered Brent Thill, an analyst at Jefferies, arguing that revenue growth across the sector justifies the spending. Zuckerberg offered little to settle the debate. Asked about Meta's AI agent development, he told investors he cared more about quality than deadlines, adding that most AI agents available today are not good enough for everyday users.

Amazon kept its $200 billion capex plan unchanged, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said ending his company's exclusive contract with OpenAI was beneficial, claiming royalty-free access to OpenAI's frontier models and IP through 2032.

Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta collectively plan to spend $725 billion on capex in 2026, up 77% from last year's record $410 billion, according to first-quarter earnings compiled by the Financial Times. Google delivered the strongest results, with cloud revenue jumping 63% year over year to $20 billion, while rising memory chip prices pushed spending forecasts higher at both Microsoft and Meta.

"The AI economy is healthy," Brent Thill, an analyst at Jefferies, told the Financial Times, adding that recent revenue growth justified the enormous capital outlays. "The bear thesis is garbage."

Microsoft set its calendar-year 2026 capex at $190 billion, well above the $152 billion average analyst estimate. The company’s CFO, Amy Hood, attributed $25 billion of that figure to rising memory chip and component costs. She told investors that despite the additional spending, Microsoft expects to remain capacity-constrained through at least 2026 as it works to bring GPU, CPU, and storage infrastructure online faster.

Meta increased its full-year projection by $10 billion to a range topping $145 billion. The company cited higher component pricing, particularly for memory, alongside growing competition for land, power, and skilled workers needed to build data centers. Revenue grew 33% to $56.3 billion.

Dec Mullarkey, managing director of SLC Management, told the Financial Times that investors are growing uneasy with Meta's escalating infrastructure costs, questioning whether a historically lean business is becoming far more capital-hungry. “Investors continue to be concerned about how Zuckerberg’s once capital-light money machine may be morphing into a capital-intensive incinerator,” he said.

Alphabet posted an 81% increase in net income to $62.6 billion on revenue of $110 billion. Google Cloud reached $20 billion in quarterly revenue, growing faster than Amazon Web Services ($37.6 billion total, adding $8.3 billion year over year) and Microsoft's Azure-driven cloud segment ($34.7 billion total, adding $7.9 billion).

The company's cloud contract backlog reached $460 billion, roughly double the $240 billion reported at the end of Q4 2025. Google Cloud boss Thomas Kurian credited the company's strategy of building custom AI chips, foundation models, and products in-house for giving it a cost and research advantage over competitors. Alphabet's capex guidance rose by $5 billion to as much as $190 billion, matching Microsoft. Shares climbed 7% after hours, putting Alphabet on track for a record $4.3 trillion market valuation.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered no firm schedule for releasing improved AI models to follow the recently launched Muse Spark. Asked about the pace of Meta's AI agent development, Zuckerberg told investors: "There's a lot of agents out there that people are building for different things, but there aren't that many that I would want to give to my mother."

Meta signed a multibillion-dollar, multi-year deal with Amazon Web Services last week to deploy tens of millions of Graviton5 CPU cores across AWS data centers, making Meta one of the five largest Graviton customers worldwide. The deal focuses explicitly on CPU-intensive agentic AI workloads, not GPU training, with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy saying in a post accompanying the announcement that agentic AI is “becoming almost as big a CPU story as a GPU story.”

Meta already has GPU and accelerator contracts worth hundreds of billions across Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Google, CoreWeave, and Nebius, and it went to AWS specifically for general-purpose CPUs. Santosh Janardhan, Meta's head of infrastructure, said in the joint announcement that "diversifying our compute sources is a strategic imperative," and that Graviton allows the company to "run the CPU-intensive workloads behind agentic AI with the performance and efficiency we need at our scale."

Graviton5, which AWS unveiled at re: Invent in December, packs 192 Arm Neoverse V3 cores on a 3nm process with roughly 180 MB of L3 cache, a fivefold increase over Graviton4. AWS claims a 25% performance lift over its predecessor and 33% lower inter-core latency. AWS vice president Nafea Bshara confirmed that the contract runs for at least three years and that the majority of capacity will be deployed in the U.S.

The CPU-to-GPU ratio

The meteoric rise of agentic AI is driving notable shifts in CPU-to-GPU ratios. While training LLMs relies on large deployments of GPUs, agentic inference is fundamentally different, involving processes like branching control flow, tool invocation, sandbox execution, validation loops, and orchestration across many concurrent sub-agents. All that work falls on CPUs.

In its recent earnings call, Intel’s CFO David Zinsner said that the ratios of CPUs to GPUs in data centers have already moved from 1:8 to 1:4, adding that as workloads continue migrating towards inference and agentic AI, ratios could converge to 1:1 or even tilt further in favor of CPUs. “As you think about the growth rate now going forward, it’s [CPU demand] going to become a significant part of the AI [total addressable market],” Zinsner said.

Arm has also quantified the rising demand for agentic AI in terms of core counts. At the company’s Arm Everywhere event in March, Arm launched its first in-house silicon product, the 136-core AGI CPU, with Meta as lead partner and customer. Arm CEO Rene Haas told the audience that a typical AI data center today requires around 30 million CPU cores per gigawatt of capacity. With agentic workloads, however, that figure rises to roughly 120 million cores per gigawatt, a fourfold increase driven by agents that run continuously, spawn sub-agents, and generate queries at more than 15 times the rate of human chatbot users.

Meanwhile, AMD CEO Lisa Su said at the Morgan Stanley TMT Conference in March that "we're seeing a significant CPU demand, frankly, as a result of the inference demand picking up." She added that "the CPU portion of the business has actually far exceeded my expectations in terms of demand."

Supply constraints and rising lead times

The surge in CPU demand is running into a supply chain that planned for a GPU-dominated world, leading to server CPU lead times stretching to roughly six months, up from about two weeks before the agentic demand spike.

Intel acknowledged on its Q1 earnings call that unmet Xeon demand "starts with a B," referring to billions of dollars in lost revenue, with CEO Lip-Bu Tan saying that “In recent months, we have seen clear signs that the CPU is reinserting itself as the indispensable foundation of the AI era." Revenue would have been higher had Intel been able to produce more chips, the company said: Q1 data center and AI revenue came in at $5.05 billion, up 22% year-over-year.

Server CPU prices have climbed 10% to 20% since March, with analysts expecting a further 8% to 10% increase in the second half of the year. Intel raised prices in both February and March, with a third increase reportedly planned for May, bringing the cumulative hike to roughly 30% above 2025 levels. AMD’s Lisa Su told the Morgan Stanley audience that AMD's own customers described the demand as something that "was perhaps… under-forecasted," adding: "We are in the process of catching up."

The bottleneck extends well beyond CPUs themselves, however, with TrendForce downgrading its full-year server shipment growth forecast from 20% to 13%, per reporting from The Register, because power management ICs and baseboard management controllers needed to assemble complete servers are stretching to 35- to 40-week lead times.

Foundries are prioritizing higher-margin AI-specific chips, squeezing capacity for the mature-node components that general-purpose servers require. Samsung's planned closure of its S7 eight-inch wafer fab in Korea will tighten PMIC supply further. Even with all the GPUs and HBM in the world, you can’t ship a rack without the host CPUs, PMICs, and BMCs.

Compute diversification

In response to this, Meta is seemingly attempting to spread its CPU procurement across every available source. In addition to the Graviton5 deal, Meta co-developed the Arm AGI CPU announced in March and plans to deploy it alongside its Broadcom-built MTIA inference accelerators, and the company has struck a $100 billion deal with AMD that includes EPYC server CPUs and Instinct GPUs. Nvidia also announced that Meta will deploy standalone Grace CPUs in production, with Vera to follow. Intel and Google separately announced a multi-year Xeon collaboration in early April, further demonstrating how x86 supply is being locked up through long-term agreements across the industry.

Nvidia's decision to launch its 88-core Vera CPU as a standalone product, separate from its GPU systems, reflects the same dynamic, with Jensen Huang saying that he expects Vera to become a multibillion-dollar business at GTC in March. This, in addition to Arm breaking 35 years of pure IP-licensing precedent to ship finished silicon, and Intel redirecting wafer capacity to Xeon, shows that all the major players are either manufacturing or securing long-term supply of CPUs for agentic workloads.

In terms of infrastructure spending, CreditSights projects that the top five hyperscalers will spend roughly $750 billion on capex in 2026, up around 67% year-over-year. Amazon alone has guided to $200 billion, and Meta has set a range of $115 to $135 billion. Most of that is naturally destined for AI, with every gigawatt of agentic capacity requiring four times the CPU cores of traditional AI training clusters.

Meta's Graviton deal is a sign, by the company spending more aggressively on AI infrastructure than almost anyone else, that its own supply can’t deliver enough general-purpose compute to keep pace.

Amazon’s Eero is the latest router manufacturer to gain “Conditional Approval” from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to sell its routers in the United States. Netgear was the first to announce that it received the FCC’s blessing last week to bypass the router ban. Router manufacturers have been working around the clock to submit documentation to the FCC and provide assurances regarding the origin of components used in their products and where they're assembled to comply with an increased focus on national security.

In March, the FCC deemed that manufacturers selling routers produced in a foreign country be added to the "Covered List," as they "pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the security and safety of United States persons.” Moving from the Covered List to Conditional Approval ensures that manufacturers of the best Wi-Fi routers can continue to sell in the United States for a set period.

"As part of this effort, router manufacturers were asked to submit information allowing the government to assess safety risks associated with their devices," the Eero team wrote in a blog post. "We’re pleased to share that the U.S. government has recognized eero as a trusted and secure provider of routers... We remain committed to delivering innovative, reliable products our customers can depend on."

For customers inquiring what this means for the Eero products that they currently own or wish to purchase in the near future, the Eero team continues, "Your experience remains the same. You can continue to use and buy eero products with the certainty that they meet rigorous standards."

According to FCC documentation, the Conditional Approval applies to Eero, Eero Pro, Eero Max, Eero PoE, Eero Outdoor, and Eero Signal. In other words, every product in the Eero/Leo family can be imported and sold without any further interference.

For the Eero products, the Conditional Approval is guaranteed from April 22, 2026, through October 31, 2027, covering the 18-month FCC exemption period. It also covers all previous and current Eero/Amazon Leo products, as well as certifications for new, unreleased products.

Although Eero did not go into any specific details on what documentation it submitted to the FCC, at least one requirement was to provide a “detailed, time-bound plan to establish or expand manufacturing in the United States" and a “description of committed and planned capital expenditures, financing, or other investments dedicated to U.S.-based manufacturing and assembly over the next 1-5 years, including expected timelines and milestones.” Given the substantial capital investment required to build factories in the United States and the need to support a higher-paid American workforce, this part of the plan submitted to the FCC will be the most interesting detail to learn as these discussions proceed.

While Netgear and Eero can breathe a sigh of relief (at least for the next 18 months), TP-Link is still waiting for its Conditional Approval. The company submitted its proposal earlier this week as it attempts to convince the U.S. government that it has divested itself of previously concerning Chinese ownership ties. According to its own internal statistics, TP-Link controls 20% of the U.S. consumer retail router market.

Amazon’s Eero family has grown to include a diverse set of mesh routers and even a wireless outdoor satellite. Now, Amazon is adding a new member: the Eero Signal. It’s a 4G LTE device that provides backup internet for a compatible Eero mesh network. Like all Eero devices, the Signal is easy to set up. Ot is governed completely by the Eero smartphone app, and it does its job with minimal fuss.

At just $99, the Eero Signal is a relatively affordable failsafe if you live in an area with frequent internet outages.

Design of the Eero Signal

The best way to describe the Eero Signal is that it looks like a shrunken Eero Pro 7/Eero Max 7 satellite. It features the same overall shape, with a single status LED at the top of the front fascia, and Eero branding at the center.

The Eero Signal is made from the same materials as the larger Eero satellites. That means the front features shiny white plastic, while the back is white plastic with a slightly textured surface. The materials have a high-quality feel.

The Eero Signal includes a fixed “Y” shaped power cable. The cable exits from the back of the unit and forms one branch of the Y. The second brach ends in a USB-C connector that plugs into the back of an Eero satellite. The “trunk” of the Y ends in a USB-C receptacle, which accepts the USB-C connector from the wall plug. Once everything is connected, a single USB-C wall adapter powers both the Eero satellite and the Signal.

The device is relatively small, measuring 3.09 x 5.76 x 2.80 inches and weighing 0.65 pounds.

Eero Signal Specifications

Setting up and using the Eero app with the Eero Signal

Once the physical connections have been made, the Signal automatically appears in the Eero app. When you enter the Eero app, it will present you with two options to enable the Eero Signal cellular backup service:

• Eero Plus: You get 10GB of backup data per year for $99/year. Six months of service is included for free for new Eero Plus subscribers who opt for an annual plan.
• Eero Plus 100: You get 100GB of backup data per month. During the first year, you pay just $99/year for this tier, but during the second year, the price doubles to $199.99 year.

If you currently subscribe ot Eero Plus monthly, you are not eligible for cellular data backup service with an Eero Signal. If you live in an area that experiences frequent outages, the base Eero Plus plan, which provides 10GB of data per year, seems like a poor value. $199.99/year for 100GB of data per month seems like a far better value and would provide greater peace of mind.

Our Eero Signal review unit was provided with Eero Plus 100 service, giving us access to 100GB of backup data per month.

From the Eero app homepage, there are only two giveaways that an Eero Signal is connected to your mesh system. The first clue is that the main Eero gateway (in this case, an Eero Pro 7) shows green bars indicating the Eero Signal strength. The second clue is under Security & Privacy, where you’ll notice a green light next to Internet Backup.

If you click the Internet menu from the Eero app home page, it will display available connections. In our case, it confirmed my wired internet connection (T-Mobile Fiber) and that the cellular backup was ready. Clicking the Eero Internet Backup option opens a submenu that lets you turn the feature on or off.

Eero Signal Performance

The Eero Signal serves as an internet backup to your current home broadband connection, e.g., cable or fiber. And before the gears start turning in your head about using the Eero Signal with the Eero Plus 100 plan as your primary internet service, I've got some bad news. The Eero Signal cannot be used as your sole source of internet -- it requires that you have an existing ISP delivering service to your Eero mesh router. The Eero Signal serves only as a backup if your primary ISP goes offline.

I tested the Eero Signal’s primary function as a failover if your primary ISP goes offline. To do this, I removed the cable connecting the Eero Pro 7 to my fiber modem. It took about 20 seconds for the lights on the Eero Pro 7 and Eero Signal to change from white to blue, indicating that the latter was now working as an internet backup. I tested internet connectivity across multiple devices connected to the Eero mesh network, and all remained connected without issue.

However, you must remember that the Eero Signal is only a 4G LTE device, not 5G, unlike some popular home cellular internet plans from companies like AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. With that in mind, don’t expect to see speeds that approach what those services can provide when operating in internet backup mode.

I saw SpeedTest download speeds of around 600 Mbps and upload speeds of 60 Mbps when I used T-Mobile 5G Home Internet as my ISP. With my current fiber connection, I achieve symmetrical speeds of around 2 Gbps. However, the Eero Signal could only muster a fraction of that, given its 4G LTE bandwidth limitations.

For comparison, I saw up to around 80 Mbps for downloads and 30 Mbps for uploads using the Eero Signal (the device connected to AT&T’s cellular network). Those are not breakneck speeds by any means, but remember that the Eero Signal is only meant as a backup internet service. So if you need to conduct a video call for work, download some essential files for a work project, or even watch some TV in the background, the Eero Signal should have no problem handling your workload.

Another thing to consider is cellular reception. I live outside of a major metropolitan area (Raleigh, NC), so I have solid uptime for my fiber connection and a strong cellular signal. For people who live in areas where their wired ISP might be unreliable, there’s a strong chance that cellular connectivity will be spotty as well. So while a device like the Eero Signal could work in that situation, your performance may vary greatly.

Bottom Line

The Eero Signal offers a lifeline to people living in areas with frequent internet outages. Of course, it is only compatible with Eero mesh routers, so you’ll already need to be bought into that ecosystem to take advantage of the functionality.

The device is easy to set up, doesn’t require user intervention to activate if your primary ISP goes down, and the upfront hardware cost is just $99. The $99 Eero Plus plan only gives you 10GB of backup data to use for an entire year, so that option doesn’t really seem cost-effective for the target audience of the Eero Signal. However, the $200/year Eero Plus 100 plan gives you 100GB of backup data per month, which seems like a much better option.

It's a tough time for PC builders, with the prices of every PC component affected by either AI, tariffs, or the general state of the economy. It's not fun seeing parts for sale at prices that are sometimes more than double the price you bought them for two years ago, but that's the state of things, whether we like it or not, and we have to do our best to hunt out the best prices and deals on what's available. Unless, of course, you don't mind playing the waiting game and taking a chance that the prices might ever come back down. You could, however, be waiting a very long time.

If you've been on the lookout for a graphics card replacement and are building a fairly mid-budget-oriented build for 1440p gaming, then this Newegg GPU deal might be of help. Hitting the lowest price for this model of card in a while, the PowerColor Reaper Radeon RX 9060 XT with 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM is only $419 when you use the code TRWF386 at checkout, saving $50 off the $469 list price. The same card is also available from Amazon for the same price of $419 if you click on the coupon box, so you can choose your preferred retailer for this deal.

• Grab this deal at Newegg
• Grab this deal at Amazon

The PowerColor Reaper Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB graphics card is a small form factor GPU. Measuring 220 x 120 x 40mm (L x W x H) and taking up 2 slots. A dual-fan design provides cooling, with the Radeon RX 9060 XT producing a GPU clock speed of 2620MHz, with a boost clock speed up to 3230MHz. Combined with its 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM running on a 128-bit memory bus, the Radeon RX 9060 XT is a great choice for gaming at either 1080p or 1440p resolution gaming on high settings.

At 1440p using Ultra graphics settings, the Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB sits in the middle of the pack in our benchmarking charts. It beats out the Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti 8GB GPU, but comes in slightly behind the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB card. Those are impressive results considering the 5060 TI uses faster GDDR7 memory and has a higher price tag of $499.

In the current PC components climate, this is a good deal; however, it's not the cheapest this card has ever been. Checking our GPU price index, I can see the card was, at one time, just $349 - its MSRP launch price. There's a long wait until any new graphics cards arrive on the scene, and we have no idea how the memory shortage is going to affect the design and price of the next generation of GPUs. If you're after a card now, then this RX 9060 XT for $419 is one of the best deals on an AMD GPU for a 1440p gaming PC build that you'll be able to find right now.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard, or CPU Deals pages.

Intel is understood to be in active talks with Google and Amazon to provide advanced chip packaging services for their custom AI processors, according to a WIRED report published today, citing multiple sources. “Multiple sources say that Intel has been in ongoing talks with at least two large customers for its advanced packaging services: Google and Amazon,” claims the report.

The deals, if closed, would represent a major influx of external revenue for Intel Foundry, which CFO Dave Zinsner said at the recent Morgan Stanley TMT conference is "close to closing some deals that are in the billions of dollars per year, in terms of revenue on packaging." Google, Amazon, and Intel all declined to comment on the specific customer relationships.

Intel's advanced packaging portfolio centers on EMIB, a 2.5D technology that embeds small silicon bridges in the package substrate to connect chiplets, and Foveros, its 3D die-stacking process. The next-generation EMIB-T, which adds through-silicon vias to the bridge for improved power delivery and signal integrity, is set to roll out in production fabs this year. EMIB-T supports packages up to 120x180mm and can accommodate more than 38 bridges and over 12 reticle-sized dies.

Intel is scaling capacity across three countries. Its Fab 9 facility in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, received $500 million from the CHIPS Act and has been operational since January 2024.

In Malaysia, the Penang advanced packaging complex is 99% complete and will begin first-phase assembly and testing operations later this year, according to Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, who confirmed the timeline after a briefing with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan in March. Intel has also outsourced EMIB production for the first time to Amkor's Songdo K5 facility in South Korea, with additional sites planned in Portugal and Arizona.

Naga Chandrasekaran, head of Intel Foundry, told WIRED that packaging has become more consequential than the silicon itself for AI computing going forward. “Even more so than the silicon itself, chip packaging is going to transform how this AI revolution comes to fruition over the next decade”, he said.

Zinsner said at the January Q4 2025 earnings call that he had revised his packaging revenue projections over the previous 12 to 18 months from hundreds of millions of dollars to "well north of $1 billion." He added at the Morgan Stanley event that packaging could achieve the same 40% gross margins Intel claims on its core product business.

Those projections contrast sharply with the division's current financials. Intel Foundry posted $4.5 billion in revenue for Q4 2025 with a $2.5 billion operating loss. External foundry revenue for the full year totaled just $307 million, mostly from U.S. government contracts and residual Altera work. The Foundry division lost $10.3 billion on $17.8 billion in revenue for all of 2025, driven largely by the cost of ramping Intel 18A.

Iranian strikes on AWS data centers in Bahrain and Dubai have disrupted services that the company declared multiple zones in the region to have “hard down” status, meaning the affected areas are completely unavailable. According to Big Technology, AWS issued an internal memo stating that operations in the two data centers have been disrupted and that it's working to migrate affected clients' workloads to other regions. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has conducted strikes against AWS sites in the Middle East since the start of the war in early March.

“These two regions continue to be impaired, and services should not expect to be operating with normal levels of redundancy and resiliency,” the internal memo said, according to Big Technology. “We are actively working to free and reserve as much capacity as possible in the region for customers, and services should be scaled to the minimal footprint required to support customer migration.”

The AWS sites in the Middle East each have three compute zones, with both data centers reporting “hard down” and “impaired but functioning” zones. More importantly, the company said in its internal communications, “We do not have a timeline for when DXB and BAH will return to normal operations.”

Amazon isn’t the only tech company that the ongoing conflict between the United States and Iran has directly hit. The Middle Eastern country has threatened to strike Nvidia, Microsoft, and others as early as the second week of March, after the alleged targeting of a Tehran bank that killed several employees. It has reiterated the threat at the start of April and even struck an Oracle data center later that week.

However, while damage to data centers in the Middle East is concerning for the region, the global tech industry has bigger concerns. The regional war has disrupted the flow of oil and its derivatives, especially those that go through the Strait of Hormuz. These include aluminum, helium, and LNG — all of which are crucial in the semiconductor supply chain. And even if the war ends today, the damage to infrastructure could mean it takes months or even years for supplies to return to pre-war levels.

The trade-war between the U.S. and China has forced server makers out of the People's Republic, greatly reducing reliance of American companies on producers from Tianxia. However, China remains the world's largest producer of electrical equipment that is required to build power infrastructure inside and outside of AI data centers. To that end, shortages of power delivery equipment, including devices from China and other countries, are slowing project timelines, Bloomberg reports.

Despite the unprecedented level of investment in AI infrastructure — Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are expected to spend more than $650 billion in 2026 to expand AI capacity — close to half of the planned U.S. data center builds this year are projected to be delayed or canceled, according to Bloomberg. One major reason behind these setbacks is the availability of key electrical components — such as transformers, switchgear, and batteries — that are used both at data center sites and outside of them, as AI companies must expand grid infrastructure to supply enough power to their data centers. Meanwhile, grid infrastructure is also stressed by electric vehicles and electrified heating systems.

Approximately 12 gigawatts (12 GW) of data center capacity is expected to come online in the U.S. in 2026, according to data by market intelligence firm Sightline Climate cited by Bloomberg. Yet only about one-third of that capacity is currently under active construction because of various constraints.

Electrical infrastructure represents less than 10% of total data center cost, but it is as vital as compute hardware. A delay in any single element of the power chain can halt the entire project, which makes transformers, switchgear, and similar devices critical items despite their relatively small share of CapEx.

Due to high demand, lead times for high-power transformers have expanded dramatically in the U.S.: delivery typically took 24 to 30 months before 2020, but waiting periods can stretch to as long as five years today, according to Sightline Climate cited by Bloomberg. For AI data centers, this is a catastrophe as their deployment cycles are under 18 months.

To address shortages, companies are turning to global markets. As a result, Canada, Mexico, and South Korea became the biggest suppliers of high-power transformers for AI data centers to AI data centers. At the same time, imports of high-power transformers from China surged from fewer than 1,500 units in 2022 to more than 8,000 units in 2025 through October, according to Wood Mackenzie data cited by Bloomberg.

The volatility of exports from China does not end with transformers, as the PRC accounts for over 40% of U.S. battery imports, while its share in certain transformer and switchgear categories remains near 30%, according to Bloomberg.

Without resolving constraints in transformers, switchgear, and batteries, even trillions of dollars in AI investment may not translate into actual AI capacity, as deployments will depend on power infrastructure availability, not capital or compute hardware constraints.

Despite a decade of reshoring initiatives, U.S. manufacturing capacity for electrical equipment remains insufficient, which means that AI companies continue to rely on imports even amid tariffs and national security concerns. Meanwhile, tensions between China and the U.S. threaten to further disrupt supply chains, which will raise costs and could delay deployments of advanced AI data centers.

Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said on Thursday that it had hit a data center linked to Oracle in Dubai as part of its war against the U.S. and U.S. technology companies in the region, reports The Times of India. The government of Dubai was quick to deny the report, according to Gulf News. An Amazon facility in Bahrain was also targeted, according to NDTV, which cites the Tasnim news agency.

Several days ago, the IRGC named Oracle among a group of American corporations it accuses of enabling U.S. and Israeli military activity, alongside Apple, Boeing, Cisco, Google, HP, IBM, Meta, and Microsoft. Oracle has cloud and artificial intelligence contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense, and its chairman, Larry Ellison, has longstanding ties with Israel, which were among the factors cited in the accusations. In addition, the IRGC targeted American aluminum and steel industries in Bahrain and the UAE, as well as Rafael arms factories in Israel.

While the officials in the United Arab Emirates have not confirmed any successful hit on infrastructure in Dubai. Bahrain's Ministry of Interior confirmed that an Iranian strike has set 'a facility of a company' on fire. That company is said to be Batelco, the country's largest telecommunications company that hosts infrastructure for Amazon Web Services.

While hitting traditional targets — such as arms factories, industrial plants, and military facilities — causes a lot of costly damage, hitting AI data centers equipped with hardware that is worth billions causes dramatically more financial damage. For example, an Nvidia NVL72 GB300 system can cost as much as $6 million, so a data center hosting 50,000 Blackwell processors houses hardware worth $4.16 billion. This estimate excludes networking, storage, racks, power delivery, cooling, building shell, and deployment, so even if supporting infrastructure adds 50% on top of that (which is a conservative estimate), we are talking about a data center that costs $6.24 billion. A hit on such an object causes more damage than a hit on a traditional target. Furthermore, it potentially causes severe damage to American companies.

Of course, for now, we do not know for sure whether any AI data centers belonging to AWS or Oracle were hit by Iran's IRGC, though the risks for American companies that have AI infrastructure in the Middle East are exceptionally high.

Although authorities in the Middle East claim successful interceptions of Iranian strikes, an investigation by Bellingcat published on Thursday suggests that not all attacks are intercepted, official damage reports may not fully reflect actual impacts, so some incidents are minimized, mischaracterized, or even not publicly acknowledged.

Should you splash out on those upgraded audio cables to take your music listening pleasure up a notch? Probably not - affordable Amazon Basics RCA cables are more than good enough - confirms audio TechTuber Amir from Audio Science Review. This won’t be a surprise to regular readers. However, it is interesting to see Amir’s $7 vs $4,000 cable analysis using scientific audio equipment – as well as drawing from his personal music listening experience.

RCA has been around since 1919

Amir compared the above stereo audio RCA cables. These are mostly used to link Hi-Fi components. Some PC sound cards and breakout boxes will feature them, as will some home video devices. The RCA standard dates back to 1919, so it is over a century old, and audio enthusiasts connecting older analog gear like certain amplifiers, turntables, and legacy components will make most use of these cables. Due to this, RCA will probably be supported for another few decades in its strongest current niches, like Hi-Fi.

Physical comparison

Back to the $7 vs $4,250 RCA comparison and what we have pitted against each other here are the Amazon Basics 2 RCA cables, 4ft in length, that are actually on sale currently at $6.76 (and up to 15ft in length for $8.96). In the other corner, there are the Kimber Kable KS 1036 Select Series Analog Interconnect (Pair), which we can see at Safe and Sound (US) in 1m (3.3ft) length for $4,100.

Amazon promises “crystal clear audio [and] reliable performance [with its] gold plated connectors.” However, the Kimber product aims for premium with its “Black Pearl solid silver conductors drawn in diamond coated dies and insulated with virgin FEP dielectric under the most exacting tolerances which offer the purest transfers of the most demanding highest resolution signals.” It should hardly be a fair fight.

Our host, Amir, noted that the Kimber product gets off to a bad start, with a totally unnecessary flight (Pelican) case. Indeed, it looks very cheap compared with the cable’s prestige target market.

Probably worse for the expensive product is that its locking cable design throws up as many negatives as positives. Basically, locking isn’t a particularly attractive feature here, and could precipitate accidental damage with someone unfamiliar with (or who forgets) the locking mechanism. Making this worse is the observation that inside the connector are “flimsy plastic tabs,” which is an inferior design feature vs traditional RCA cables.

Audio signal analysis

Amir then shifted to scientific audio analysis using Audio Precision analyzer hardware. Is this where the $4,000 cables would at last show their superiority?

Using a constant 4 KHz sine wave transmitted through the cable, a tiny bit of distortion was observed with both cables. There was actually a bit more mains power noise seen with the Kimber cable, but “practically speaking, the two are identical,” Amir said, pondering over this first set of metrics.

Next, we saw the cables exhibit identical response across a very wide frequency range. There was no phase difference seen in the tests. Same with the square wave rise response graph. Even a hugely magnified graph from the Audio Precision analyzer shows that these two cables performed identically.

Last but not least, Amir moved on to comparing jitter spectrum profiles in a bandwidth stress test. It was shown that the Amazon Basics cable shows a slight (picoseconds) increase in jitter. However, our host noted that the cheaper cable was noticeably longer than its boutique rival. And it would cost a lot extra to get one to match the Amazon alternative’s length.

Prestige RCA cables simply unnecessary

The results weren’t unexpected, but from around 13 minutes into the video, Amir explains why no one should be surprised that audiophile RCA cables aren’t worthwhile.

Competent cables like the Amazon model and better have “the lowest noise, lowest distortion, and widest bandwidth of anything in your audio system,” says the audio TechTuber. It isn’t a weak or sensitive part of the signal chain, prone to issues, and audio signals don’t push the ‘capacity’ of RCA cables, so there is little point in investing above a competent standard product like the Amazon Basics.

“Everything else in your system is the bottleneck,” Samir underlines, as far as quality is concerned. He likens the Hi-Fi audio signal chain to two cities connected with a 100-lane freeway (the RCA cables) – traffic problems are in the city, not on the freeway, he says.

To conclude, Amir admits to perceiving differences between cables when enjoying music, but puts the human experience down to feelings, mood, focus, and so on. When actually being clinical about A/B testing – like blind testing, etc - such differences evaporate, suggests the experience of this audio TechTuber.

The last day of Amazon's Big Spring Sale event (March 25 - March 31) is upon us, and this is your last chance to land one of the sale's big deals. There are already many savings to be had on a host of tech items, and we have a good selection listed below.

Trying to find a good deal on PC components in the current economic climate is not an easy task. Problems with scarcity, massive price hikes, and tariffs are just a few of the external issues affecting our favorite tech passions. You've no doubt also been bombarded with information on how the AI crunch rollout of massive data centers is eating up all the available memory capacity for RAM, SSDs, and GPUs, so we will be keeping an eagle eye out for any relevant deals on those products.

We use the experience we've gained through our reviews, extensive benchmarks, and comprehensive historical price analysis to look for the best deals, and these are the biggest and best we could find.

Quick Links

• Amazon Big Spring Sale
• Amazon: The best prebuilt PC deals
• Amazon: Graphics card deals on Nvidia and AMD GPUs
• Amazon: Discounts on SSDs
• Newegg: Check out Newegg's Super Spring Sale
• Best Buy: PC deals save up to $600
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OpenAI keeps cutting deals left and right, one of the latest ones being a massive partnership with Amazon that ought to see a total of $188 billion circle between both companies. Sam Altman may have cut that one a little too close, according to Microsoft, which is reportedly considering releasing the lawyers over an API exclusivity clause.

Sources from the Financial Times (FT) say the key item in this discussion is OpenAI's Frontier multi-agent platform targeted at large enterprises. Broadly speaking, Frontier offers to make it easy for large enterprises to effectively use AI by wiring up multiple agents ("workers") with shared memory and business content.

Microsoft is apparently taking umbrage with the situation, despite its position in the partnership having been repeatedly revised. Redmond was originally OpenAI's sole cloud services provider, but eventually changed to having the right of first refusal over said services, and was further weakened in October 2025.

The PR about that latest agreement states that "API products developed with third parties will be exclusive to Azure. Non-API products may be served on any cloud provider." Under that logic, OpenAI has the freedom to develop and implement new products, but if they offer them as APIs, they have to go through Azure.

Redmond believes that OpenAI's offering access to Frontier via Amazon Web Services (AWS)'s Bedrock platform would be in breach of the agreement. Getting even more technical, the dispute may well come down to the definition of a "stateless" versus "stateful" when applied to AI models.

Even though it appears to remember your information, a standard chatbot is actually stateless — adding a new question requires the bot to re-process the entire conversation again. A storage and orchestration layer to facilitate something like Frontier is arguably a "stateful" implementation, more specifically a "Stateful Runtime Environment."

According to FT's sources, Microsoft thinks that running Frontier on AWS instead of Azure would breach either the spirit or the letter of the contract. This is illustrated by a report that Amazon is pointedly instructing its staff to never say that SRE "enables access" or "calls on" ChatGPT as a backend, instead preferring vaguer terms like "powered by," "enabled by," or "integrates with."

The whole stateless/stateful discussion has reportedly been a hot topic among lawyers from both camps, though FT states that a Microsoft employee referring to the situation isn't mincing words, saying that "we know our contract," and that "we will sue them if they breach it. If Amazon and OpenAI want to take a bet on the creativity of their contractual lawyers, I would back us, not them."

Predictably, OpenAI's position is the opposite, as the firm seemingly believes the Amazon deal is compatible with the Microsoft agreement. FT further reports that Amazon and OpenAI are building an unspecified system meant to work around the contract.

Nevertheless, FT points out that this latest development may cast a pall over OpenAI's upcoming IPO by placing doubts in prospective stockholders' hearts. That would be a nightmare scenario for the company, as the magnitude of its ongoing investments means that the flow of money cannot stop.

If you've been anywhere near a PC in the last 20 years, especially if you've used one for gaming, then SteelSeries is a brand name that you no doubt will have come across. They've been making peripherals for a long time, with their mice, keyboards, and especially headphones being a very popular choice for PC gamers. With Amazon's Spring Deals Days sales event in full swing, we've spotted this money-off deal on SteelSeries' flagship gaming headset, the recently released Arctis Nove Elite, now priced at £559.49. A saving of £40.50 from the original £599.99 launch price. This headset was only released within the last five months, so it's nice to see a discount so early. However, this headset still commands a high price, as it flexes its audiophile-grade Hi-Res audio muscles. If you care not for the quality of your soundscapes, then avoid, as you can get a much cheaper headset for your needs.

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So what's so special about this version of the Arctis Nova? Well, the Arctis Nova Elite has Hi-Res audio certification. This Hi-Res audio gives you ultra-fidelity over a wireless connection for 96kHz/24bit audio. SteelSeries states this as a world first.

The headset looks very pretty, especially in the sage and gold colour scheme, which also happens to be the model that is discounted. Carbon fiber drivers power the sounds with brass surrounds for a "pistonic" motion. The headset also features powerful active noise cancelling (ANC), which can be a blessing for gaming in noisier environments. Plus, the retractable microphone uses AI to remove background noise, along with an additional discreet onboard mic to help keep comms clear during the heat of battle, or while chatting with friends over Discord.

The Arctis Nova Elite comes with the same premium features that you would find on the Nova Pro, including seamless multi-source mixing with OmniPlay to connect and mix up to four sources at once, handy for switching between various audio sources on the fly.

As with other SteelSeries headsets, the Arctis Nova Elite uses a ski-band design for the headband to make the headset feel lighter on your head and not add pressure and discomfort after hours of use. And speaking of use-time, the Nova Elite uses an infinite power system with two batteries for no downtime, always have a battery charging, so you can swap in a freshly charged battery before the headset dies on you.

The flagship SteelSeries Arctis Nova Elite is an audiophile-grade gaming headset for those with a significant disposable income. It's certainly not a cheap or budget headsest and is in the price range of some serious audiophile competition.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard, or CPU Deals pages.

A standout deal spotted in the current Amazon Spring Day Deals sales event is this Acer gaming laptop. The Acer Nitro V 16 AI gaming laptop is just £1,199.99, shaving £300 off the £1499.99 list price. Saving any money is always a good thing, and when you can save a tidy £300, it's even better. Although there's an AI moniker slapped on the product, don't be put off. This is a gaming laptop through and through. From the gamified aesthetics to the choice of hardware, inside the sleek black chassis. Don't be tied to your desktop, and play your games anywhere, thanks to this powerful little gaming machine.

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The Acer Nitro V 16 AI is a powerful gaming laptop equipped with an Nvidia RTX 5070 laptop GPU, accompanied by the AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 processor, able to bring games to life with crisp graphics and fast framerates. If you need a little more juice to hit the 180Hz refresh rates of the WUXGA (1920 x 1200) display, this current-gen Nvidia GPU supports DLSS 4, which enables multi-frame generation. In games that support this feature, you'll be able to boost your frame rates by the GPU inserting AI-generated frames, ensuring smoother gameplay, but there may be some trade-offs in texture and picture definition.

With 32GB of RAM, an RTX 5070, and 1TB SSD, the Acer Nitro V 16 AI is more than equipped to handle most gaming tasks. This is one of the best value-for-money gaming laptops right now, going by pure specifications. Thanks to the AI crunch causing surging memory and storage prices, the cost of gaming laptops is only going to rise in the near future.

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Amazon allegedly called its engineers to a meeting to discuss several recent incidents, with the briefing note saying that these had “high blast radius” and were related to “Gen-AI assisted changes.” According to the Financial Times, one of the contributing factors listed in the meeting notes was the use of generative AI tools “for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established.”

There has been a spate of problems in Amazon’s operations recently, including a six-hour disruption on its main retail website, wherein customers were unable to see details and complete transactions, which the company said is attributed to erroneous code deployment. We’ve also seen reports that Amazon’s AI assistant could be easily jailbroken to answer questions unrelated to shopping, as well as reports of AI coding bot-driven outages with AWS, the company’s cloud service.

“Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently,” Amazon Senior Vice President Dave Treadwell allegedly said in an email, according to the publication. He also said that the meeting will take a “deep dive into some of the issues that got us here as well as some short immediate term initiatives,” and that AI-assisted changes must now be approved by senior engineers before deployment. This meeting is reportedly usually optional, but it seems that Treadwell asked the staff to be in attendance this time.

Amazon hasn’t officially confirmed the cause of all its woes, but the details shared in this meeting seemingly point to the use of AI. “TWiST is our regular weekly operations meeting with a specific group of retail technology leaders and teams where we review operational performance across our store," an Amazon spokesperson told Tom's Hardware. "As part of normal business, the meeting will include a review of the availability of our website and app as we focus on continual improvement.” It also isn’t the first big tech company to take things seriously after many firms took the “move fast and break things” motto literally when it came to generative AI. Microsoft said in late January 2026 that it’s working to fix many of Windows 11's flaws and restore its reputation. This came nine months after CEO Satya Nadella said that AI writes up to 30% of the company’s code, with some projects completely coded by AI.

While generative AI does have its uses, especially in specialized fields like medical research, it still needs observation, and we still cannot rely on its output 100% of the time. Unfortunately, many are overselling the capabilities of this tool, and many CEOs aren’t getting the promised benefits of higher revenues and reduced costs.

If you’re looking for a new laptop, you’ll need to double-check the storage on those listings. A worrying new trend, spotted in recent weeks, shows that third-party sellers of popular laptop brands are marketing their laptops with terabytes of storage, despite only including a measly 128GB of physical storage capacity, with the rest made up of Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage. It's enough for it to be called a "borderline scam" by one angry commentator.

This has been rumbling on for some time, with complaints on Reddit and social media from bemused consumers about the practice. It’s fair to say that marketing a laptop with over eight times the actual storage it has isn’t ideal, but a further fly in the ointment is that the capacity being offered isn’t even permanent.

The problem appears most prevalent on Amazon. A quick search of the retailing behemoth shows several laptops on sale from major brands, including HP and Lenovo, with listings that prominently advertise over 1TB of storage, with the majority made up of Microsoft’s cloud storage offering. This HP laptop, for instance, shows a 'limited-time deal' price of $499.99 for a laptop that supposedly offers 1.1TB of storage, but 1TB of that is from OneDrive cloud storage.

It appears, too, that the practice was even more egregious a few weeks ago, before it gained public attention. A Reddit post in the r/LinusTechTips subreddit showed HP laptops being sold with misleading product headlines. In one of those examples, a HP laptop on sale at Amazon describes 1.2TB of storage, with a mention of its 128GB of physical storage relegated to the second line of the product’s description. That report also confirmed earlier examples of the same issue at Newegg, although those appear to have been removed, at least for now.

At Amazon, however, the issue continues. Multiple examples of laptops with similar headlines, albeit slightly more honest combinations like “1.1TB Storage (1TB OneDrive + 128GB SSD),” remain on sale, including this HP laptop for $499.99. All are being sold by third-party sellers who, in many cases, have established feedback dating back at least a year, with hundreds or thousands of reviews. That laptop, as with many of the other examples I’ve seen, shows only a one-year subscription to Microsoft 365 (which includes OneDrive storage) advertised – that “1.1TB” will start to cost you extra after 12 months.

Practices like this from sellers are certainly not popular. A post on X by Max Weinbach, showcasing another HP laptop on sale, gained nearly 1 million views at the time of publication, with hundreds of reposts and comments, with one user giving it the "borderline scam" description, although there's nothing to suggest that anything illegal is actually taking place here.

It might not be illegal, but it does leave a bad taste in the mouth. Even if you’re reasonably tech savvy, you’ll be expected to look out for the storage ruse from now on. Those who aren’t, who couldn’t tell a OneDrive from an SSD, will be left with a potentially inferior product as a result. While it appears that some of the less descriptive headlines have now changed, there's no indication that the practice is stopping at all.

Let this be a PSA for anyone looking to buy a laptop in the coming weeks and months: don’t trust everything you see, always do your due diligence, and if you’re buying from a third-party seller, make sure to double and triple-check those specs. If it looks too good to be true, well, it might just be.

It's the season for deals, and tomorrow brings Amazon's Spring Deals Days (10th - 16th of March, 2026) sales event to the UK. There are already savings to be had on a host of tech items ahead of the sales' official start. We're focusing solely on the UK in this roundup, scouring Amazon and all the main UK retailers like Currys, Argos, Scan, Overclockers, and more, for the best prices and discounts on a range of tech and tech-related products.

With the big push in AI affecting the prices on a host of our favourite hardware components, such as RAM, GPUs, and SSDs, now is more important than ever to search out the best deals and save some precious money.

We use the experience we've gained through our reviews, extensive benchmarks, and comprehensive historical price analysis to look for the best deals, and these are the biggest and best we could find.

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Two years ago, Amazon announced Rufus, its AI-powered shopping assistant built right into the Amazon app and website. The goal was to let customers not just search for items, but also allow them to talk with an expert who can recommend products and deals naturally. Under the hood, Rufus uses multiple LLMs, and some people have realized it's quite easy to trick the chatbot into forgetting its purpose.

The tweet above shows the author prompting Rufus for a complex modeling question to figure out how to map sensory data into digital data for robotics. It's entirely detached from any shopping query, which is exactly why it's so funny to see Rufus answer it so swiftly. The formula provided is correct, too. There's a chance that terms like "tactile sensors" were flagged as product inquiries by Rufus.

When we tried it ourselves, we were able to get it to talk about architectural differences between x86 and ARM on the first try. Ironically, after asking whether it thinks the AI bubble will burst this year, Rufus started answering but cut off abruptly. Our other efforts were in vain, and it almost felt like the AI was learning to keep the guardrails up more securely in real time as we poked it more and more.

There is conflicting information online as to what exactly Rufus is using underneath — it could be Amazon's in-house frontier model 'Nova,' while the majority says it's Anthropic's Claude, but some argue that it's not smart enough to be running Claude. One Reddit post points towards Rufus being based on Claude Haiku and not Claude Sonnet, saying it's extremely hard to break and not worth the effort to try to "jailbreak."

Regardless of whatever model it's using or switching between, the ease with which its guardrails erode is both fascinating and funny. You could certainly try to continue your work on Rufus if the free tier of Claude has rate-limited you for the day. It also goes to show that integrating AI into every aspect of the internet is perhaps not the best idea because it's just another point in the chain that can potentially break. And not everyone will try harmless prompts to pass the time.

Drone strikes damaged three Amazon Web Services data centers in the UAE and Bahrain on Sunday, March 1, knocking two of the ME-CENTRAL-1 region's three availability zones offline and triggering outages across EC2, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, RDS, and other core services, thereby marking the first confirmed military attack on a hyperscale cloud provider, according to Uptime Institute.

AWS confirmed on its health dashboard that two facilities in the UAE were "directly struck" and that a third site in Bahrain sustained damage from a nearby explosion. The strikes caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery, and, in some cases, triggered fire suppression systems that produced additional water damage, according to the AWS Health Dashboard. Amazon told customers it expects recovery to be prolonged "given the nature of the physical damage involved".

Each AWS region is built around multiple availability zones, which are physically separated data centers, each with independent power, cooling, and networking, designed so that the loss of one zone does not take a region offline. ME-CENTRAL-1 has three availability zones; the strikes took out two of them (mec1-az2 and mec1-az3), leaving the region significantly impaired. The Bahrain region (ME-SOUTH-1) lost one zone (mes1-az2) to a localized power issue. AWS's redundancy model is designed to survive the failure of a single zone, but not a coordinated attack across multiple sites within the same region.

These outages then cascaded into consumer-facing services across the Gulf. Ride-sharing and delivery platform Careem, payments firms Hubpay and Alaan, data management company Snowflake, and several major UAE banks — including Emirates NBD, First Abu Dhabi Bank, and Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank — all reported disruptions. AWS advised customers to activate disaster recovery plans and migrate workloads away from the affected Middle East regions.

Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps stated it targeted the Bahrain facility specifically because AWS hosts U.S. military workloads there; AWS declined to comment on that claim. Sean Gorman, Air Force contractor and CEO of Zephr.xyz, told DefenseScoop on Tuesday that classified government workloads at Impact Level 4 and 5 are held in U.S.-only facilities, but acknowledged that “contractor and non-operational data… may have been impacted,” at the struck sites.

The attacks followed joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran over the last week. AWS urged customers with workloads in the region to migrate to unaffected regions while repairs continue.

Amazon’s data center business in the Middle East has been adversely impacted amid the 2026 Iran Conflict. The AWS Health Dashboard notes there are ongoing issues with multiple services at its data centers in the region. Specifically, the status page reports that service disruptions/impacts are ongoing at AWS Middle East (UAE) Region (ME-CENTRAL-1), and the AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region (ME-SOUTH-1) data centers.

“In the UAE, two of our facilities were directly struck, while in Bahrain, a drone strike in close proximity to one of our facilities caused physical impacts to our infrastructure,” explains the AWS Health Dashboard. And these incidents have precipitated dozens of ‘disrupted,’ ‘degraded,’ and ‘impacted’ services.

As per the quote above, the UAE data center was impacted most severely by the drones. From broader reporting of the conflict, we assume these drone strikes are part of Iran’s response to U.S. Operation Epic Fury and Israeli Operation Roaring Lion strikes on Iranian targets over the weekend. Both the UAE and Bahrain data centers were hit by drones in the early hours of March 1. Whether Iran purposely targeted AWS facilities, we cannot say for certain.

ME-CENTRAL-1 in the UAE

This morning’s update regarding AWS Middle East (UAE) Region (ME-CENTRAL-1) assures customers that “teams continue to make progress on recovery efforts across multiple workstreams.”

While engineers are working to safely restore the full gamut of AWS services, the firm says that it “strongly recommend[s] that customers with workloads running in the Middle East take action now to migrate those workloads to alternate AWS Regions.” It would be wise to enact disaster recovery plans, recover from remote backups stored in other Regions, and update applications to direct traffic away from the UAE, for now, too.

ME-SOUTH-1 in Bahrain

In Bahrain, the most recent update says that engineers “continue to work toward restoring power in the affected Availability Zone (mes1-az2) in the ME-SOUTH-1 Region.” The facility still has no firm time/date for when it expects to restore power and full connectivity, with significant work still required, says AWS.

As with ME-CENTRAL-1, above, AWS is recommending users migrate or replicate their ME-SOUTH-1 Region data to another AWS Region.

These are some of the first ‘tech’ impacts we have seen precipitated by the 2026 Iran Conflict. They surely won’t be the last, with shipping, the costs of raw materials, and energy resources already rapidly inflating due to emerging geopolitical risks and pressures.

Amazon and OpenAI have announced a sweeping multi-year strategic partnership, with Amazon committing $50 billion in investment, AWS securing exclusive third-party distribution rights for OpenAI's enterprise agent platform Frontier, and OpenAI agreeing to consume approximately 2 gigawatts of Amazon's custom Trainium compute capacity, according to a press release.

The investment is part of a $110 billion funding round that values OpenAI at $730 billion pre-money, with Nvidia and SoftBank each contributing $30 billion. The companies will also co-develop custom AI models for Amazon's own products, including Alexa, and jointly build a new stateful agent runtime on Amazon Bedrock.

Split between Trainium 3 and 4

Amazon's $50 billion commitment is structured in two parts: $15 billion upfront, with the remaining $35 billion contingent on conditions that, according to sources cited by The Information, may require OpenAI to complete an IPO or reach an as-yet-undefined "AGI milestone." The deal also expands OpenAI's prior $38 billion AWS compute agreement, struck in November 2025, by an additional $100 billion over eight years.

Meanwhile, the 2 gigawatts of Trainium compute will span both the current Trainium 3 generation and the upcoming Trainium 4, which is expected to ship next year. Amazon launched Trainium3 — a 3nm chip delivering four times the performance of its predecessor at 40% better energy efficiency — at its re:Invent conference in December 2025.

AWS has stated that customers can achieve cost savings of 30 to 40% running training and inference workloads on Trainium compared to equivalent Nvidia GPU configurations. Each Trainium3 UltraServer holds 144 chips, and up to 1 million of them can be linked in a single cluster.

Trainium4, meanwhile, is being designed with support for Nvidia's NVLink Fusion interconnect, which allows Trainium4-based systems to interoperate with Nvidia GPUs within the same server rack. Nvidia's CUDA software stack remains the de facto standard, which nearly all large AI workloads are built on, and migrating away from it means rewriting significant portions of a codebase.

Anthropic, in which Amazon has invested at least $8 billion, already trains its Claude models on Trainium at scale — Project Rainier, Amazon's largest dedicated AI data center, houses more than 500,000 Trainium2 chips running Anthropic workloads exclusively. But Anthropic is financially entangled with Amazon. OpenAI is not, which makes its decision to commit 2 gigawatts to Trainium a notably independent validation of the platform.

Let’s not forget that OpenAI also has a separate deal with Broadcom to develop its own custom ASICs, uses Nvidia GPUs through both Azure and AWS, and has committed to AMD chips — so, again, its willingness to stake 2 gigawatts on Trainium is a weighty decision.

Stateful Runtime Environment

Beyond compute commitments, Amazon and OpenAI have announced that they’re co-developing a so-called “Stateful Runtime Environment” (SRE) built on Amazon Bedrock and expected to launch within the next few months.

Most AI agents run on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures that effectively use a model as an advanced search engine over a set of embedded documents. The issue with this architecture is that the agents can’t retain memory between sessions or carry context across different software tools, and they reset with every new interaction.

SRE, Amazon says, keeps context across calls, retains memory of prior work, integrates with AWS data sources, including S3 storage and IAM identity controls, and allows agents to operate persistently across ongoing projects rather than treating each call as isolated.

Frontier, OpenAI's enterprise agent platform for building and deploying coordinated AI agent teams across business systems, will be distributed exclusively through AWS as its third-party cloud provider, and the SRE on Bedrock is where that infrastructure will sit.

Microsoft-OpenAI partnership ‘strong and central’

Several initial reports following the announcement have framed the deal as AWS displacing Microsoft's position with OpenAI, but that’s not accurate. Azure, per Microsoft, “maintains its exclusive license and access to intellectual property across OpenAI models and products,” with Azure remaining the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI's stateless API calls.

Microsoft also retains the option to participate in the current funding round, with both companies issuing joint statements affirming the partnership remains "strong and central." In terms of the Amazon-OpenAI deal, AWS gains the enterprise agent deployment side, while stateless API traffic stays on Azure.

AWS holds approximately 30% of the global cloud market heading into this announcement, compared to Azure's roughly 20% and Google Cloud's 13%. Despite that market position, Amazon had been widely characterized as trailing in the generative AI race relative to Microsoft's early OpenAI integration and Google's push with Gemini.

Exclusive distribution rights for Frontier, combined with Trainium's cost positioning, fit Amazon's consistent approach to cloud competition, whereby it prioritizes infrastructure scale and cost efficiency over all else. Amazon is now financially backing both of the leading independent frontier AI labs simultaneously — OpenAI and Anthropic — which positions it as infrastructure for the industry, regardless of which organization's models prove most durable commercially.

This comes with significant financial exposure for Amazon, which is spending approximately $200 billion in capital expenditure in 2026, the majority directed at data centers and AI infrastructure. Its stock had fallen about 8% on the year as investors weighed the return timeline on those outlays. Andy Jassy told CNBC today that he expected OpenAI to be "one of the very big winners" over the long term, but added that Amazon “still has a very strong relationship with Anthropic.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company now has more than 900 million weekly active users and more than 50 million consumer subscribers, and described an IPO as its "most likely path" given ongoing capital demands back in October.

The FTC issued subpoenas to Amazon, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic in early 2024 to examine AI partnerships, with particular attention to exclusivity arrangements, and AWS's exclusive rights to distribute Frontier will no doubt give regulators a concrete point of focus. It’s still too early for a legal challenge, but it’s understood that the FTC’s investigation is ongoing, and these new terms could lead to a bite.

However, the $35 billion contingent tranche means a meaningful share of Amazon's headline commitment depends on a trigger — an IPO or AGI breakthrough — that comes with no known or guaranteed timeline. Until one of those conditions is met, the investment stands at $15 billion.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has reportedly suffered from a couple of outages due to misbehaving AI agents. According to the Financial Times, the most recent interruption happened in December last year, when its Koiro AI coding tool decided to erase the environment it was working on, resulting in a 13-hour disruption.

“We’ve already seen at least two production outages,” one senior AWS employee told the publication. “The engineers let the AI resolve an issue without intervention. The outages were small but entirely foreseeable.”

On the other hand, the company reported that the incidents were relatively minor, with the December disruption only affecting a single service in parts of mainland China, and the other one having no effect on customer-facing services. Amazon said to the Financial Times that the involvement of AI tools in these incidents was just a coincidence, and that the same issue would have occurred even with other developer tools or through manual action. “In both instances, this was user error, not AI error,” the company said.

AWS employees report that the company’s AI tools are treated as part and parcel of the person using them; therefore, they receive the same permissions. But because the engineers involved in the two incidents did not require secondary approval, their AI agents just went ahead with their changes that broke the systems. It’s because of this that the company treated the errors as a user access control issue and does not consider it a problem with its AI tool. Nevertheless, the company assured that it has taken steps to avoid this issue in the future and mitigate the risks of an AI agent going rogue and taking down systems with its actions.

Amazon isn’t the only big tech company deploying AI tools in its workflows. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that nearly 30% of its code is written by artificial intelligence, while over 30,000 Nvidia engineers use a specialized version of Cursor AI. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang himself allegedly asked managers not using AI “Are you insane?”

All this use of AI tools meant that new entry-level coding jobs are drying up, with studies revealing a 13% drop in openings over the past three years. This has raised fears that artificial intelligence will decimate white-collar jobs, with industry leaders, CEOs, and educational institutions warning of the impending catastrophe if society does not prepare for it.

Every week, there's a new scam switcheroo story where someone buys one thing and receives something else entirely — often nothing more than just rocks or pasta. We return to Reddit once again with yet another entry in this long-running list. This time, it's a CPU bought from Amazon Warehouse under the pretense of being an open-box item in "like new" condition. What it actually was was a completely different CPU.

As u/Leviathon6425 unceremoniously describes above, they ordered a top-of-the-line Ryzen 9 9900X3D from Bezos' retail behemoth, scoring a nice discount by buying it used. When the parcel arrived, the Redditor noticed something off: the CPU was shining through the cutout in the middle of the box. It read "Copyright 2019 AMD" for a chip that wasn't released until 2025.

That alone would set off any alarms, but the processor's shape started to look suspicious, too. Despite not being clearly visible, one can still make out the squared-off perimeter of the processor inside, which belongs to the AM4 family. AM5 chips have a distinct look, with a notched frame serving as the IHS, visible even from inside the box, as seen in the picture below.

The OP immediately took to the r/pcmasterrace subreddit to confirm their suspicion, and, sure enough, the comments were quick to point out the reality. Judging by the serial numbers printed on the chip, it was a Ryzen 9 3900X — a $499 flagship from its time, but worth only around $150 today. In contrast, the Ryzen 9 9900X3D, which was actually supposed to arrive, is currently priced at $529.99 on Newegg and Amazon.

Incidents like these have become commonplace with Amazon orders due to the retailer's generous returns policy. People often buy the real thing, replace the box's contents with something much less valuable, and return it. Amazon then puts the item under its Warehouse label and sells it to you at a low price, without knowing what's really inside. The second buyer then suffers the scam switcheroo.

There's really no solution to this problem other than not buying from Amazon's open-box market, a sentiment echoed in the comment section. The company doesn't lose enough money issuing double refunds to justify taking any action. Brick-and-mortar stores like Micro Center can serve as a solid antidote to these worries, while dedicated retailers such as Newegg are still around for decent deals.