Tootfinder

Sources: Anthropic agreed to a $10B deal for computing capacity in Norway from Nvidia-backed AI cloud startup Volta; Volta says the deal runs for six years (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-04/anthro…

Computing’s sustainability research examines AI-native clouds CoreWeave and Nscale. Both are young companies; both have a crypto-mining heritage; and both are very shy about publishing sustainability data.
https://www.

The AI cloud boom: who’s counting the cost?
From Google's newly invented carbon metric to two key AI clouds that publish no environmental data at all, the Computing annual sustainability audit goes under ...

Amazon Web Services (AWS), said customers using its EC2 Capacity Blocks for Machine Learning service will face hourly price increases of around 20% from July.
https://www.computing.co.uk/news/2026/aws-

AWS raises AI cloud compute prices again as memory shortage deepens
Amazon has increased the price of renting some of its most sought-after AI cloud computing services.

Sources: Meta is developing plans for a cloud infrastructure business that will sell access to AI computing power and models, to compete with AWS and Azure (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-01/meta-is-bu…

Meta is developing plans to launch a cloud infrastructure business that would allow companies to rent AI computing power and access its AI models.
https://www.computing.co.uk/news/2026/ai/m

Good to see this kind of reporting in Canada!
"A new report calls the market for cloud computing in Canada "broken" and warns that domestic alternatives to U.S. tech giants could still leave Canadians trapped in "maplewashed dependencies" unless providers are required to be compatible”
#DigitalSovereignty #Canada #CanPoli #CdnPoli #Cloud

Mark Zuckerberg tells shareholders that a Meta cloud computing business is "definitely on the table" if it overspends on data centers and has excess capacity (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/27/mark-zuckerberg-s…

Mark Zuckerberg says a Meta cloud computing business 'definitely on the table'
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his company could enter the cloud computing market if it overspends on data centers and has excess capacity.

«Warum Cloud-Lock-in zum Sicherheitsrisiko wird—Digitale Souveränität braucht einen Exit-Plan:
Mit dem Wechsel hin zu Open-Source-Strukturen hat Schleswig-Holstein Anfang des Jahres ein deutliches Signal gesetzt. Die Abhängigkeit von großen Technologiekonzernen ist kein Naturgesetz.»
Viele verantwortliche Leute glauben wenn sie die Tools aufzuzählen, dass dies ein Plan sei. Es ist komplexer & benötigt Zeit.
💻

Digitale Souveränität braucht einen Exit-Plan
Der Wechsel zu Open-Source-Strukturen in Schleswig-Holstein zeigt, dass Digitale Souveränität einen klaren Exit-Plan benötigt.

Vision Pro bei Grauer-Star-Operation: Mehr Durchblick für Chirurgen
In New York haben Augenchirurgen gezeigt, wie Apples Spatial-Computing-Gerät im Profieinsatz verwendet wird. Sogar Ferneinsatz ist möglich.

Vision Pro bei Grauer-Star-Operation: Mehr Durchblick für Chirurgen
In New York haben Augenchirurgen gezeigt, wie Apples Spatial-Computing-Gerät im Profieinsatz verwendet wird. Sogar Ferneinsatz ist möglich.

RunPod, which rents access to non-Nvidia servers, raised $100M led by Summit Partners at a $1B valuation, a source says up from $100M after its seed in 2024 (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/cl

Cloud Startup Runpod Raises $100 Million, Says It Turned Down Buyout Offers
By some accounts, the compute crunch of 2026 has become even more dire than the chip crunch of 2023, which saw even venture capital firms becoming quasi-cloud providers temporarily. That’s good news for a subclass of firms that popped up to rent out computing power and help developers run ...

“Ultimately, AI systems will shape the future of scholarly communication.” So, resistance is futile? I agree, “the question is whether ACM and the computing community will actively help shape that future in a responsible and mission-aligned manner,” but bowing to the wishes of irresponsible, profit-oriented corporations does NOT “help shape that future in a responsible and mission-aligned manner.”
STOP IT!❞
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“Ultimately, AI systems will shape the future of scholarly communication.” So, resistance is futile? I agree, “the question is whether ACM and the computing community will actively help shape that future in a responsible and mission-aligned manner,” but bowing to the wishes of irresponsible, profit-oriented corporations does NOT “help shape that future in a responsible and mission-aligned manner.”
STOP IT!❞
□

Sigma, which sells a cloud-native analytics platform that sits on top of data warehouses, raised an $80M Series E led by Princeville Capital at a $3B valuation (Cristian Dina/The Next Web)
https://thenextweb.com/news/sigma-computing-series-e-80-million-3-b…

Finally, none of the current AI systems are compatible with the principles formulated in the ACM Code. They rely on stolen data, and they cause significant environmental and social harm. These systems and their creators blatantly violate Section 1.5 of the Code: “Respect the work required to produce new ideas, inventions, creative works, and computing artifacts.”
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Finally, none of the current AI systems are compatible with the principles formulated in the ACM Code. They rely on stolen data, and they cause significant environmental and social harm. These systems and their creators blatantly violate Section 1.5 of the Code: “Respect the work required to produce new ideas, inventions, creative works, and computing artifacts.”
⇢

Arm EVP Mohamed Awad says its chip architecture now accounts for 50% of the hyperscale cloud computing market, as AI demand transforms the data center industry (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/editor-s-picks

SoftBank chipmaker Arm hits 50% share in top AI data centers: exec
AI boom drives demand for company's architecture as it also moves into physical chips

Open-weight AI models, many developed by Chinese companies, are quickly expanding their role in enterprise AI systems, according to new research.
https://www.computing.co.uk…

Chinese open-weight AI models gaining ground as enterprise adoption accelerates, report
Open-weight AI models, many developed by Chinese companies, are quickly expanding their role in enterprise AI systems, according to new data from cloud platform Vercel.

Neoclouds market themselves in terms of sustainability, sovereignty, energy innovation and efficiency.
The reality is rather different.
https://www.computing.co.uk/research/2026/

The sustainability mirage at the heart of neocloud
Article three in our AI cloud sustainability research series examines the neocloud challengers which present a more values-driven message than their hyperscale competitors. Do the ...

Hive stock jumps 10% in premarket trading after announcing a $220M, three-year GPU cloud contract with Bell Canada and Cohere, as it pivots from bitcoin mining (James Van Straten/CoinDesk)
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/06/1

Hive gains 10% after securing Canada sovereign AI contract with Bell Canada
GPU cloud contract with Bell and Cohere strengthens HIVE's shift from bitcoin mining to high performance AI computing.

The European Commission has presented the European Technological Sovereignty Package, which aims to boost European performance in semiconductors, AI, cloud and open source.
https://www.computing.co.uk/news/2026…

EU looks to go it alone as it proposes shutting out US tech providers
The European Commission wants to strengthen the region’s capacity in key areas of tech while cutting reliance on external providers.

Sources: internal competition among Google staff and researchers for TPUs intensified as it prioritizes cloud customers and flagship AI products over research (Julia Love/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026…

Points as Tori: Fast Pointwise Signed Distance for Point Clouds
Nicole Feng, Ioannis Gkioulekas, Keenan Crane
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16946 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.16946 https://arxiv.org/html/2607.16946
arXiv:2607.16946v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We describe a method for computing signed distance to point clouds that allows fast pointwise evaluation at arbitrary spatial resolution. As input, our method takes a point cloud with normals; as output, it provides an analytical parameterization that allows queries of signed distance to the approximate underlying surface at arbitrary points - simultaneously providing reconstruction and distance. Our key idea is to reconstruct shapes by locally fitting point clouds with tori, which have closed-form signed distance functions. Tori are fitted in a feed-forward manner, using a pre-trained network to output per-point curvature and shift parameters. Importantly, our method does not require costly global optimization or spatial discretization, and is easily parallelizable. Underlying our method is a new theory that unifies signed distance with the classic reconstruction methods of winding numbers and Poisson surface reconstruction. We use our method to compute signed distance to point clouds arising from photogrammetry, meshes, 3D Gaussians, and neural implicits. Our method allows point clouds to be used directly in applications, without explicit surface reconstruction: as examples, we take offsets of point clouds, apply morphological and Boolean operations, and directly visualize offset surfaces using sphere tracing.
toXiv_bot_toot

Akamai says it struck a seven-year cloud computing deal with a "leading frontier model provider"; sources: the deal was with Anthropic and is worth $1.8B (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05…

Sources: Dave Brown, former SVP of AWS Compute, AI, and Platform, will join Meta in the coming weeks, where he will work on the company's data center build-out (Anissa Gardizy/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.ws…

Google Cloud says its SpaceX compute deal is a "short-term" agreement "to ensure we have bridge capacity to meet surging customer demand" for Gemini Enterprise (Kate Conger/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/202…

SpaceX Has $30 Billion Deal to Provide Google With A.I. Computing Power
Elon Musk’s rocket company said Google would pay it $920 million a month, as it prepared for its initial public offering.

PrismML says it ran a 27B-parameter Qwen 3.6 model on an iPhone 17 Pro, bigger than any prior on-device model; sources: Apple held talks with PrismML about it (Aaron Tilley/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/kh

Khosla-Backed Startup Claims Breakthrough With Largest-Ever AI Model on an iPhone
Apple is on a quest to shrink powerful AI models to run on iPhones, which could cut down on cloud computing costs and enhance user privacy. But a small startup that emerged from stealth mode earlier this year says it recently got an AI model running on an iPhone bigger than any previous mobile ...

Filing: Google has agreed to pay SpaceX $920M a month for access to Nvidia chips as part of a cloud-services deal that runs through mid-2029 (Lynn Doan/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-05/google-buyi…