Microsoft

Jan. 20 (ZFJ) — Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are investing in nuclear energy as the race to develop artificial intelligence technologies heats up. AI technologies, which are currently rapidly gaining traction, demand significant computational power to train and operate. Data centers house the hardware for them and are consuming increasingly more energy. According to a December 2024 report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy research facility, total American data center electricity usage increased from 58 TWh in 2014 to 176 TWh in 2023.

NEW YORK, Dec. 31 (ZFJ) — The New York Times filed a federal copyright infringement lawsuit on Dec. 27 against Microsoft and OpenAI for using its news articles unauthorized to train generative artificial intelligence models. The Times says it initiated negotiations with Microsoft and OpenAI in April 2023, but no licensing agreement, like in the case of The Associated Press, was reached, leading to the lawsuit. “Defendants insist that their conduct is protected as ‘fair use’ because their unlicensed use of copyrighted content to train GenAI models serves a new ‘transformative’ purpose,” wrote The Times in its civil complaint.