Amazon has significantly boosted its multibillion-dollar bet on Claude developer Anthropic by investing an additional $5 billion—enabling Anthropic to eventually secure up to 5 gigawatts' worth of AI chips from Amazon to help train and run its popular Claude AI models.

Amazon is already one of Anthropic’s largest investors, having previously invested $8 billion in the AI startup. The latest move brings Amazon’s immediate investment up to $13 billion, and the companies have agreed to the possibility of Amazon committing another $20 billion in the future if the partnership achieves certain commercial milestones, according to Wall Street Journal reporting.

The large cash infusion and prospect of obtaining more computing resources come at a crucial time for Anthropic, given the massive surge in paid subscriptions for Claude-related services early this year. That demand spike and strain on the existing cloud compute infrastructure supporting Claude have contributed to performance issues and even occasional outages for thousands of Claude users.

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As prophesied by more than a few analysts along the years, China's full-hearted embrace of electric vehicles has paid dividends. Starting with also-rans that required joint ventures with Western automakers, Chinese OEMs now make world-leading EVs crammed full of smartphone-like features that we're told are the best thing since sliced bread. I remain skeptical about that for now, but I don't need to be convinced about the advanced state of Chinese EV powertrain technology.

For instance, earlier today, the battery giant CATL unveiled an impressive new lithium-iron phosphate battery at a tech event in China. The third-generation Shenxing battery is CATL's answer to BYD's recently announced Blade Battery 2.0, and like BYD, CATL has focused on improving a couple of big pain points.

One is charging speed. Humans have long been conditioned to expect pumping an energy-dense liquid fuel into a vehicle to be quick. Batteries, meanwhile, can have non-linear charge curves depending on cell chemistry, and they behave differently at different temperatures and starting states of charge. OEMs like Hyundai and Porsche have 800 V nickel manganese cobalt battery packs that can charge from 10 to 80 percent in as little as 18 minutes. But according to a report in CarNewsChina , CATL's Shenxing 3.0 is nearly five times faster.

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AMD is releasing its Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition processor on April 22. The processor will cost $899, though this could go up or down based on supply and demand.

To recap, it's a version of the existing 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X3D (MSRP $699, street price around $660) where both of the processor's 8-core Zen 5 CPU chiplets have 64MB of extra L3 cache stacked beneath them. Normally, one of the chiplets has extra cache and one does not. This gives the CPU a whopping 208MB of cache, a number that is very large. But you don't need a large CPU review to understand the differences between this chip and the regular 9950X3D that we reviewed over a year ago .

In our general-purpose CPU benchmarks, video encoding tests, and gaming tests, the 9950X3D2 is consistently just a smidge faster than the regular 9950X3D. Despite its 200 W default TDP—30 W higher than the regular 9950X3D's 170 W—we also found the 9950X3D2 to consume around the same amount of power while gaming and slightly less power while encoding video. These are nice things. And that AMD has managed to improve performance a little without blowing the power budget is a testament to the work AMD has done to eliminate the downsides of 3D V-Cache since introducing the concept a few years ago.

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After the successful conclusion of the Artemis II mission earlier this month, focus turned to what comes next in NASA's roadmap to return humans to the Moon.

The biggest question concerned the readiness of lunar landers, the complex and essential machines needed to take astronauts down to the lunar surface and back up to orbit. And as Ars reported at the time , both SpaceX and Blue Origin have a significant amount of developmental and testing work left to do before even a prototype lander is ready.

But a secondary question has been the development of spacesuits, which are necessary for astronauts to exit their landers and explore the lunar surface. Less is publicly known about their development.

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Neuroscientists know that there is a link between loneliness and cognitive decline in older adults, although it is still difficult to understand the exact magnitude of the link. A new longitudinal study provides evidence that a proportion of people who feel lonely end up having more memory impairment, though this doesn't necessarily mean that their brains age faster.

The report, published in Aging & Mental Health, shows that older adults with higher levels of loneliness scored lower on tests of immediate and delayed recall. Even so, the rate at which their memory declined over six years was virtually identical to those who were not lonely.

“It suggests that loneliness may play a more prominent role in the initial state of memory than in its progressive decline,” said Luis Carlos Venegas-Sanabria of the School of Medicine and Health Sciences at Universidad del Rosario, who led the research. “The study underscores the importance of addressing loneliness as a significant factor in the context of cognitive performance in older adults.”

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With growing focus on the existential threat quantum computing poses to some of the most crucial and widely used forms of encryption, cryptography engineer Filippo Valsorda wants to make one thing absolutely clear: Contrary to popular mythology that refuses to die, AES 128 is perfectly fine in a post-quantum world.

AES 128 is the most widely used variety of the Advanced Encryption Standard , a block cipher suite formally adopted by NIST in 2001. While the specification allows 192- and 256-bit key sizes, AES 128 was widely considered to be the preferred one because it meets the sweet spot between computational resources required to use it and the security it offers. With no known vulnerabilities in its 30-year history, a brute-force attack is the only known way to break it. With 2 ¹²⁸ or 3.4 x 10 ³⁸ possible key combinations, such an attack would take about 9 billion years using the entire Bitcoin mining resources as of 2026.

It boils down to parallelization

Over the past decade, something interesting happened to all that public confidence. Amateur cryptographers and mathematicians twisted a series of equations known as Grover’s algorithm to declare the death of AES 128 once a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) came into being. They said a CRQC would halve the effective strength to just 2 ⁶⁴ , a small enough supply that—if true—would allow the same Bitcoin mining resources to brute force it in less than a second (the comparison is purely for illustration purposes; a CRQC almost certainly couldn’t run clusters of Bitcoin ASICs and more importantly couldn’t parallelize the workload as the amateurs assume).

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On Monday, the Energy Information Agency released its analysis of the energy trends of 2025, covering the entire globe. It confirms and extends the primary conclusion of a more limited analysis by the International Renewable Energy Agency: 2025 was the first year of solar's dominance. Increased solar production was a key reason the growth of carbon-free energy sources outpaced rising demand.

Coupled with a massive growth in battery storage and relatively stagnant fossil fuel use, the year has led the EIA to declare that "the world has entered the Age of Electricity."

Electrons for everyone

The EIA report covers energy use, including the electrical grid, transportation, home heating, and other forms of consumption. As such, it can track how some of those uses are shifting, as electric vehicles displace some gasoline use and heat pumps replace gas and oil heating. It also saw a more global trend: the demand for electricity grew at twice the rate of overall energy demand. All of these went into the conclusion that we're starting the Age of Electricity.

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The Pentagon has canceled a ground control system for the US military's GPS satellite navigation network after the program's enduring problems "proved insurmountable," the US Space Force announced in a press release Monday.

The Global Positioning System Next-Generation Operational Control System, known by the acronym OCX, was officially canceled by Michael Duffey, the Pentagon's defense acquisition executive, on Friday, April 17, the Space Force said.

The decision to terminate the OCX program ends a 16-year, multibillion-dollar effort to design, test, and deliver a command and control system for the military's constellation of GPS navigation satellites. The program consisted of software to handle new signals from the latest generation of GPS satellites, GPS III, which started launching in 2018, along with two master control stations and modifications to ground monitoring stations around the world.

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Apple CEO Tim Cook will step down from the job effective September 1, 2026. As has long been rumored, Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering John Ternus will become Apple's new CEO.

While Cook will no longer serve as CEO, he will remain with the company in a different capacity as executive chairman.

"As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world," Apple says.

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