Latest Azure publications

Half of the $1bn Microsoft invested into OpenAI last year came in the form of Azure credits, according to a profile on the group published in MIT Technology Review.

In July, when Microsoft announced the mammoth investment into the AI research lab, which is dedicated to the safe and ethical creation of artificial general intelligence, Redmond said it would become the group’s “exclusive” provider of cloud computing services.

It’s a lucrative market, is cloud computing. Something you’re reminded of every quarter when the tech world’s finest flash their quarterly earnings reports. 

Last quarter, more records came tumbling down. This time, the combined might of the cloud kingpins saw to it that the market posted the highest quarterly cloud infrastructure spending increase in its brief but explosive history.

AMD posted strong quarterly earnings last week, with the chipmaker netting $2.13 billion in revenue, a 49.9 percent increase from the previous year.

Wall Street’s eyes were on AMD following rival Intel’s solid quarterly earnings, helped by its buoyant data centre division. 

“Everyone is being heavily surveilled and profiled,” warns Dr Johnny Ryan, Chief Policy Officer at Brave, a new privacy-focused web browser. “Information about what you’re reading, watching and listening to online is being broadcast out to hundreds of thousands of companies; this happens hundreds of billions of times a day, everywhere.” It is, in Ryan’s words, “the biggest date breach that we’ve ever experienced.”

Although awareness of tech companies’ data gathering has grown in recent years – especially with the 2018 introduction of GDPR – many consumers still struggle to know what’s happening with their data and who they can trust with it. Ryan – who will deliver a keynote at the Cloud Expo Europe Main Stage this March – says Brave is the answer to this problem.

“Unlike many other organisations, Oxfam can’t predict when the next disaster will happen and when we need to ramp up or deploy new systems” says Nick Mitrovic, CTO of the charity. Technology staff at charities, government bodies, international organisations and some private sector firms know this scenario all too well. When disaster strikes, a co-ordinated response is needed fast. “At any given time, on average, our teams are responding to more than 20 emergencies worldwide.”