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Hut 8 is giving the AI infrastructure sector a shot of confidence today after securing a nine point eight billion dollar long-term data center lease. The deal sparked a broad rebound in compute stocks, which had been sliding as investors grew skeptical about whether real demand could justify the wave of new capacity being built across the industry.
Meanwhile, the European Union has handed AliExpress its largest ever fine under the Digital Services Act — five hundred and fifty million euros — following a two-year investigation into the platform's failure to prevent illegal products from reaching consumers. It's a signal that regulators are no longer treating these frameworks as paper tigers, and other platforms are almost certainly taking note.
And on a quieter but consequential front, a new study out of French and Italian universities is raising serious questions about what AI is doing to our ability to think critically. Researchers found that only three percent of participants who had access to AI were willing to say they simply did not know something — a willingness to sit with uncertainty that, as one researcher put it, is fundamental to how humans reason.
That's your Tech Beat for today. Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
