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OpenAI is expecting to spend fifty billion dollars on computing power this year, according to executive testimony in an ongoing court case. To put that in perspective, that is not OpenAI's money — the company is banking on outside investment to cover what amounts to one of the largest infrastructure bets in tech history. Whether the returns ever materialize remains an open question.
Meanwhile, in Europe, Irish regulators have opened an investigation into Meta over what they're calling dark patterns — design choices that may be steering users away from chronological feeds and toward the algorithmic ones that keep people scrolling longer. European law explicitly requires large platforms to offer alternatives, so this is less a question of whether the rules exist and more a question of whether Meta has been quietly ignoring them.
And on a more technical note, Germany's dot-de top-level domain briefly went dark this week, apparently due to a DNSSEC configuration issue. For anyone outside the weeds, that's the security layer that verifies domain names are legitimate. When it breaks, entire national web infrastructure can become unreachable — a reminder that the internet's foundations are more fragile than most people realize.
Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
