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Amazon is quietly expanding its Alexa Plus ambitions beyond the United States, sending invitations to customers in India to test the upgraded assistant with Hindi language support. It's an early signal that Amazon sees its AI-powered Alexa not as a domestic product, but as a global platform play worth watching closely.
Shifting now to Hollywood, Google is putting seventy-five million dollars into A24, the studio behind Ex Machina, as part of a new research initiative exploring AI tools for filmmaking. It's a pairing that carries some irony — one of cinema's most celebrated films about the dangers of artificial intelligence is now partnering with one of AI's biggest builders to reshape how movies get made.
And on the infrastructure side of the AI story, new research from First Street finds that seventy-nine percent of the world's data center capacity sits in areas exposed to climate hazards — flooding, wildfire, extreme heat. The cruel twist is that rising temperatures drive greater cooling demand, which drives greater energy use, which drives more heat. It's a feedback loop the industry has no easy answer to.
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