Apollo Delays Young Banker Offers as Rowan Agrees With Dimon
Apollo Global Management told prospective investment-banking candidates that it won't interview or extend offers to the class of 2027 this year, following a backlash from banks over young recruits accepting future-dated offers.
In a letter sent to candidates on Wednesday, Apollo explained its decision by saying it believes graduates should take time early in their careers and deepen their understanding of business. Apollo's Chief Executive Officer Marc Rowan said he agreed with recent criticisms that the process for hiring young recruits had started too early.
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New York Times
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Meta Invests Nearly $15 Billion in Scale AI to Kick-Start Superintelligence Lab
Meta said on Thursday that it planned to invest nearly $15 billion in Scale AI, a start-up that works with data to train artificial intelligence systems, in a deal that Meta hopes will add needed muscle to its disappointing A.I. division. As a condition of the deal, Alexandr Wang, Scale AI's 28-year-old chief executive, plans to join Meta in a top leadership role in the new division, which Meta is calling its Superintelligence lab. Mr. Wang, whom people inside Meta have taken to calling a visionary leader, will also bring a team of employees from Scale AI to work at Meta. The move to invest billions in Scale AI, an amount equal to about 10 percent of Meta's revenue in 2024, would be Meta's first major minority investment in an outside company. It is Meta's second-largest deal, after the $19 billion acquisition of the messaging app WhatsApp about 11 years ago. Meta is scrambling to catch up with A.I. competitors such as Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic, as industry executives jockey for an edge in what they believe will be the most transformative technology in a generation. 'Meta has finalized our strategic partnership and investment in Scale AI,' a spokesperson for Meta said in a statement. 'As part of this, we will deepen the work we do together producing data for A.I. models, and Alexandr Wang will join Meta to work on our superintelligence efforts.' Meta's investment with Scale AI is unusually structured. Meta will take a minority stake in the start-up and receive little control over its direction. The structure was intentional. Executives at Meta and Scale AI were worried about drawing the attention of regulators. Meta is waiting on a federal judge's decision in an antitrust case scrutinizing its earlier acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. The Federal Trade Commission under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was skeptical of big technology acquisitions, and Lina Khan, who led the agency at the time, scrutinized multibillion-dollar investments in A.I. companies. The structure of those deals — which included Amazon's investments in Anthropic and Microsoft's backing of OpenAI — allowed the big companies to form close ties with smaller rivals while dodging regulatory issues. It is unclear if the F.T.C. under its new chairman, Andrew Ferguson, will continue down that path. But Mr. Ferguson has shown few signs of changing course. OpenAI kicked off the A.I. movement in late 2022 with the release of its chatbot ChatGPT, compelling companies like Google and Meta to build similar technologies. Meta found an important niche when it chose to open source its systems, freely sharing the underlying tech with developers and businesses. But its latest system, called LLAMA4, has not matched the technologies produced by its biggest rivals. Among technologists, superintelligence is a futuristic goal of A.I. development. OpenAI, Google and others have said their immediate aim is to build artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., a machine that can do anything the human brain can do. Superintelligence, if it can be developed, would go beyond A.G.I.
Bloomberg
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Meta Announces Scale AI Investment, Recruits CEO to AI Unit
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Geek Wire
18 minutes ago
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As data center demand soars, Amazon expands use of recycled waste water to cool its cloud
Sustainability: News about the rapidly growing climate tech sector and other areas of innovation to protect our planet. SEE MORE Amazon data center in the Portland, Ore., area in 2022. (AWS Photo / Noah Berger) Amazon Web Services is more than halfway to its 2030 goal of being 'water positive' — meaning it replenishes more clean water than it uses. And supporting that effort is a newly announced initiative to expand its use of recycled waste water instead of drinking water to cool 120 of its U.S. data centers by the end of this decade. AWS is wringing more water out of its cloud operations, marking a 40% improvement in its water use efficiency over the past three years. And it's 53% of the way toward becoming water positive, based on 2024 data — up from 41% from the year before. 'We're pretty proud of the fact that our global water use efficiency is really industry leading,' Kevin Miller, vice president of global data center operations for AWS, said in an interview. The water challenge is driven by data centers containing servers that act as the backbone of the internet, powering increasingly popular artificial intelligence tools. The electronics produce intense heat that needs to be wicked away to keep the devices running properly, and cooling them requires a combination of energy and water use. The issue has become increasingly urgent as Amazon and other cloud giants expand their thirsty data center operations worldwide. Bloomberg recently reported that nearly two-thirds of the U.S. data centers that were built or are under development in the past three years are located in water-stressed areas. Amazon alone plans to invest $100 billion in its data centers over a decade, which includes construction of new facilities. Data center operators use a variety of cooling tech that include fans, air that's cooled using evaporated water, air conditioning, and direct liquid cooling. The strategies are a resource balancing act: air conditioning, for example, draws more electricity, but saves water, while cooling with evaporated water is less energy intensive, but sucks up water. Amazon also has clean energy goals to meet, and since 2023 has matched 100% of its electricity consumption with the purchase of an equal amount of power produced by carbon-free sources. PIpes carrying reclaimed water for cooling at an AWS data center. (AWS Photo) Optimizing cooling To keep its servers humming, AWS relies primarily on fans and evaporation-cooled air, depending on the location of the data center, the time of day, the weather and other factors. The moistened, cooled air is ultimately released from the building. 'We're constantly adjusting based on what's really going on throughout the day to keep it in the optimal cooling configuration, minimizing water usage,' Miller said. Since 2019, AWS has used recycled water at some data centers in Virginia, which is a hub for server facilities. The company currently uses reclaimed water at 24 sites, including locations in California and Singapore. The new initiative will expand the practice to Georgia and Mississippi. Miller declined to say how many data centers AWS has in total, saying that 120 sites represents 'a meaningful share' of its operations. The recycled water typically comes from sewage plants and has been treated but is not potable. By 2030, AWS expects to avoid the consumption of more than 530 million gallons of drinking-water through its use of recycled water. 'Amazon is not only preserving precious drinking water supplies for communities but also demonstrating that water reuse is a viable, sustainable solution for water-intensive industries,' said Brian Biesemeyer, interim executive director of the WateReuse Association, in a statement. To reach water positive, AWS is also investing in water storage efforts; the restoration of watersheds and wetlands that naturally replenish supplies; and the construction of water treatment systems. While it's making progress, critics say the tally should also include the significant amounts of water consumed by some of the power plants that provide energy to AWS. Racks of servers inside an AWS data center in 2023. (AWS Photo / Noah Berger) Water innovation AWS is on its sixth data center design and continues exploring ways to curb its water use, Miller said. That includes looking for leaks in pipes running to data centers. It's fine-tuning the material that the air flows through when it picks up the water to optimize the moisture in the air. AWS does dynamic models of the airflow within data centers for improved cooling. Other companies are likewise innovating to reduce water use, including fellow Seattle-area cloud behemoth Microsoft. Microsoft is using recycled water at sites in Washington, California, Texas and Singapore, and has designed a closed-loop cooling system, meaning it will need to be filled with water only once. It plans to deploy this approach in Wisconsin and Arizona next year. The company said it will use nominally more power than evaporation systems. 'The industry is committed to responsible water use,' said Josh Levi, president of the Data Center Coalition, by email. 'Data centers are actively investing in and deploying innovations, such as waterless cooling systems, closed-loop systems, and the use of recycled or reclaimed water.' But Amazon remains out in front when considering water use efficiency (WUE), a measure developed by the nonprofit group The Green Grid to indicate how well the resource is being used relative to a data center's energy consumption. Microsoft's WUE was 0.30 liters of water per kilowatt hour of power for its last fiscal year — which is a notable improvement over past performance. Amazon's WUE is half that amount, hitting 0.15 last year.
