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Circle, the company behind the widely used USDC stablecoin, saw its stock drop sharply after more than one hundred major players — including Coinbase, BlackRock, and Visa — announced backing for a new rival called Open USD. That Coinbase is involved stings particularly, given it has long been one of USDC's most prominent partners.
Shifting to something stranger, Netflix has confirmed it will use an AI-generated voice of the late Gene Wilder in its upcoming Willy Wonka reality competition, set to premiere September twenty-third. The show follows contestants through real-world Wonka-inspired challenges, but it's the synthetic resurrection of Wilder's voice that's already drawing the most uncomfortable attention.
And on the infrastructure side of things, a new report from First Street finds that fifty-four percent of global data center capacity faces serious risk from extreme heat. Rising temperatures are already driving up cooling costs before any physical damage occurs, and analysts warn that future data center projects need to bake climate projections in from the very first blueprint.
That's your Tech Beat for today. Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
