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Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the Claude assistant, has reportedly signed a three point four billion dollar contract to purchase gas-fired power plants from a Texas energy company. The deal raises serious questions about the environmental cost of the AI boom, and whether the industry's hunger for power is outpacing its green commitments.
On the gaming hardware front, Microsoft has filed a patent describing a system that would let gamers earn money by lending their idle GPU capacity to AI training workloads. It's an intriguing idea — turning the downtime of expensive consumer hardware into a distributed computing network — though patents, of course, don't always become products.
Meanwhile, Sony is exploring a different kind of integration, with a patent that would embed a credit card reader directly into a PlayStation controller. As the company pushes further into digital-only gaming, the move signals an ambition to collapse the distance between playing a game and paying for one, putting the checkout counter literally in your hands.
Those are the stories moving the needle today. Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
