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The United Kingdom's parliament is sounding the alarm over Palantir. A government committee warned this week that British public services have grown dangerously dependent on the American data analytics firm, calling those contracts, quote, an unacceptable point of weakness. The concern is straightforward: when critical infrastructure runs on a single private vendor, the leverage shifts away from the public.
On a different kind of dependency, a new report from Virgin Media O2 found that roughly thirty-six percent of the time people spend on their phones serves no clear purpose. That is more than a third of your screen time spent in a kind of digital drift. It is a number that puts a hard edge on what most of us already suspect about our own habits.
And in the AI infrastructure conversation, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is pushing back against growing concern over data center resource consumption. He claims the company's new AI Superfactory design will use no more water annually than a neighborhood restaurant. That is a striking claim, and the details behind it will matter enormously as scrutiny of big tech's environmental footprint continues to intensify.
Stay curious, stay critical. Tech Beat out.
