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It’s a huge problem for AI.

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The United States (like Europe, China and the giants of the Middle East) are in the midst of a real estate race: that of data centers. Nobody wants to be left behind AI race and, for that, they need gigantic enclosures in which to train it. The big problem is that these facilities They consume a lot of energyand there China seems to have the upper hand facing a United States that does not have the best face. In fact, it is estimated that half of its data centers scheduled for 2026 will be delayed not canceled. And it is something they cannot allow. It’s not a money problem. Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Google are going to pool more than $650 billion this year to build artificial intelligence infrastructure. To put it in context, It’s more than the Apollo program cost. that took us to the Moon for the first time or to the great railway expansion of the 19th century. It is private capital that is doing the trick, but although the State does not pay the main bill, it facilitates operations and influences the pace and deployment of massive data centers through regulatory decisions, permitting and energy planning. And the latter is vital. The tyranny of 24/7. My partner Alba coined that term a few days ago to describe the current situation in which companies focused on AI find themselves. AI is intended to help us optimize our electricity consumption by the 2030s, but right now it is only achieving one thing: collapsing the traditional grid. This technology needs a lot of energy and, furthermore, constant, which is causing collapses in the network. The estimate is that the energy consumption of these data centers will increase by 175% between now and 2030. And not only consumption: Google’s emissions have increased by 48% in the last five years and Microsoft’s by another 31%. They were two of the most committed companies with ‘net zero’ by 2050. The other bottleneck. With this in mind, and knowing that the industry is devouring resources such as NAND memories To feed the AMD and NVIDIA platforms used by hyperscalers, we must talk about the other bottleneck in the sector: the energy. On the one hand, there are the plants themselves and we already know that companies have plans for private nuclear plants, gas is booming and coal is used in peaks of demand. On the other hand, there is the equipment that is installed in the data centers themselves. We are talking about transformers, switches, dissipation equipment and batteries. Panasonic is one of the largest manufacturers of batteries for racks of data centers. They are “packages” of batteries that are inserted between the equipment so that, in the event of a blackout or maximum demand, they provide specific energy support. A few days ago they commented that its annual production had already been soldbut the problem is that orders keep coming. Bad forecasts. And there is that bottleneck that we mentioned. As they point out in Bloombergthere are analyzes that already suggest that half of the data centers planned for the United States throughout 2026 will be delayed or canceled. It will be a blow to an industry that cannot stop because there is a lot of money at stake (and even more so the year Anthropic and OpenAI want to become public companies) and where they compete against a China that does not seem to take its foot off the accelerator. The solution is to electrify the grid using renewables, but the problem is that these solutions can provide constant energy, but they are not the best to provide a lot of energy during peak periods. workouts. Large batteries would be needed and, with the parallel rise of electric cars, there are none. The Wood Mackenzie analyst group points out that the United States “does not have enough capacity to stand on its own, so its companies are forced to go to the export market.” Geopolitical paradox. And therein lies the problem. The United States and China are immersed in a technological war, but also a commercial one. This makes it difficult for American companies to buy what they need from the Chinese industry, which is what leads the way in batteries and solar panels. Jensen Huang -CEO of NVIDIA- already commented a few months ago that the international conflict was fine, but that there was no need to be short-sighted and they had to take advantage of what China has to offer. The reality is that data centers are estimated to consume up to 12 GW of energy in 2026 in the United States alone, more than ten million American homes need. And, although the electrical infrastructure represents less 10% of the total cost of a data center, it is impossible for the facility to start operating without it. Now, The US has room for maneuveranother thing is that they activate the levers. Images | campact, Florian Hirzinger (edited) In Xataka | A user has been powering his house with 1,000 laptop batteries and solar panels for ten years. Others are already trying to copy the idea

The Tax Agency does not want you to use ChatGPT for Income. The problem is that their alternatives are worse

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The general director of the Tax Agency, Soledad Fernández, has opened the Income 2025 campaign with a clear message: do not use ChatGPT to make your declaration. “With how much the Tax Agency team has dedicated themselves to providing the best help and assistance tools, I wouldn’t risk doing it with ChatGPT,” he said. The warning has a certain meaning. The language models They can hallucinate, they do not have access to your real tax data, and asking them to manage your return involves passing them personal and financial information that ends up stored on private servers. The risk of error (and sanction) is real. That said, there are more nuances. Why is it important. The Treasury notice comes at a time when millions of Spaniards are looking for any shortcut to avoid one of the most tedious procedures of the year. If the official answer is “trust our tools”, the logical question is: are those tools really up to the task? Between the lines. What the Treasury does not say is that the underlying problem is not ChatGPT: it is that the Spanish tax system is opaque enough that using an AI seems like a reasonable solution. If millions of citizens are tempted to delegate their declaration to a chatbot, it is because something has failed before. The complexity of personal income tax (with its regional deductions, its cases of ascendants and descendants, its special regimes) is not an accident of design. It’s the design. The current situation. Treasury has presented improvements in Web Rental for this campaign: more access to data capture windows, greater interaction between sections and better information on subsidies. It has also improved its app. And it maintains the traditional channels: The plan “We call you“starts on May 6 (appointment from April 29). In-person attention in offices, from June 1. They are real advances, but gradual. Renta Web continues to be a platform that requires prior knowledge to navigate with ease. The Treasury virtual assistant resolves generic doubts, but not specific cases. Yes, but. The alternative that remains for those who do not master taxation is to pay a manager. A service that has a cost that not everyone can afford, and that turns a right (understanding and managing your own declaration) into something that must be outsourced. It’s the equivalent of IKEA selling its furniture without instructions and then complaining that people look up videos on YouTube to assemble it. The big question. The Tax Agency also assures that it does not use AI in the processing of files or in extensive control, and that its risk analysis systems “cannot be considered AI in the strict sense.” Although it leaves the door open for its future use. The question they do not answer is another: if AI is good enough for the Treasury to study it internally, why can’t it be part of a solution that helps the taxpayer from within the system, with their own data and with legal guarantees? In Xataka | Draft Income Tax 2025: how to enter and present your 2026 declaration online with the Tax Agency website Featured image | Xataka

Artemis II has a toilet that evacuates the astronauts’ urine into space. The problem is that it has frozen

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The Orion capsule toilet It is being one of the most commented topics of Artemis II. It is no wonder, since it greatly facilitates the life of the astronauts who are on their way to the Moon. However, if it continues to generate conversation after the launch, it is no longer because of the novelty, but rather because of the incidents it is causing. The last of them has been so important that it has even forced some special maneuvers to be carried out with Orion. Background. Until now, no spacecraft had anything resembling a bathroom for astronauts. Yes, there are options in long-stay facilities, such as the International Space Station. However, there was no way to evacuate during space travel. The astronauts of the Apollo missions, for example, had to use something similar to a condom for urine and a kind of diaper with a hole for toilet paper in case they wanted to do major water. Luckily, the Artemis II astronauts They have a more advanced system. There is no room for so much urine. The Orion toilet uses a type of hose attached to a funnel that, through suction, draws urine into a tank. Thus, the problems of microgravity are solved. On the other hand, this tank has direct contact with the exterior of the ship, in such a way that the urine, once it is full, is released directly into space. urine slushie. Since the journey of the Artemis II astronauts began There have been some problems with the capsule bathbut almost all of them have been solved. Unfortunately, there is another one that is being more difficult to solve. And the low temperatures outside are freezing the urine, so it cannot leave the tank. Maneuver changes. Faced with this problem, it was decided to maneuver the capsule in such a way that the tank and pipes were exposed to the Sun for as long as possible. Thus, the urine should thaw and be released without problems. It wasn’t enough. Unfortunately, although this measure seemed to be useful at first, sun exposure is not enough to have liquid urine at all times. It spends a lot of time frozen, so for now, astronauts are having to put their urine in bags and store them, exactly the same as with feces. With the latter it was already established that they would be stored and taken back to Earth, but with urine the simplest thing would have been to let it flow through space. But for now it’s not an option, so these bags will have to take up some extra space on the ship. Ultimately it is good news. According to statements by the deputy director of the Orion program for NASA, Debbie Korth, collected by Ars Technicathe performance of the capsule in general is being remarkably good. The good development of all the ship’s systems has pleasantly surprised the engineers. Therefore, the fact that the biggest headache for the ship’s crew is that their urine freezes is still good news. It would be much worse if some vital system failed. In that case, no one would notice the capsule bathroom. That everyone is paying attention to him is also a triumph. Image | NASA | freepik In Xataka | The Artemis II astronauts will carry out experiments in what will be their own study models

Chile has the lithium necessary to save the world from fossil fuels. The problem is that you are extracting it blindly

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The world desperately needs to move away from fossil fuels. To achieve this, electric vehicles and large renewable energy plants require a vital component for their batteries: lithium. This global emergency has set its eyes on one of the most inhospitable and fragile places on the planet, the Atacama Desert in Chile, which is home to about 25% of the world’s reserves of this mineral. But this “salvation” has a dark side. As deep research reveals published by MongabayChile is accelerating the blind exploitation of its salt flats. Under the institutional promise that this mineral will be the “new salary of Chile”—as It was defined by former president Gabriel Boric by promising wealth with strict environmental respect—the reality in the territory is diametrically opposite. The productive desire is crushing the socio-environmental knowledge that is required to avoid destroying the same nature that, ironically, the world is trying to save. The pact that seals the future. To capitalize on this demand, the Chilean State launched the National Lithium Strategy (ENL)seeking to consolidate the country as the undisputed leader of this market. In this context, an unprecedented mining agreement was forged. According to The Confusionthe state mining company Codelco and the private giant SQM sealed a historic pact to extract lithium in the Salar de Atacama until 2060 under a new joint venture: NovaAndino Lithium. With the aim of avoiding the local resistance that usually paralyzes these megaprojects, the agreement included an unprecedented governance model. This scheme promises the Atacama indigenous communities (the Lickanantay people) million dollars annually in profitsseats at dialogue tables and power of environmental oversight. A model that the industry celebrates as the standard for future “green mining”, but which in the territory has lit a fuse with unsuspected consequences. The disproportion of 33 to 1. Promises of environmental balance crumble when looking at the fiscal wallet. The figures are devastating: for every peso that the Chilean State invests to protect the fragile ecosystems of the salt flats, it allocates 33 to promoting productivity and mining technology. Through the Production Promotion Corporation (CORFO), the State has injected more than 166 million dollars in technological development for the industry. In dramatic contrast, the scientific investment to understand the impact of lithium on water, microorganisms and threatened species – such as Andean flamingos – is barely close to 5 million dollars. Yovisibility territorial. Added to this institutional blindness is territorial invisibility. As the media explains South Slope when documenting the scientific project LiOness Ringthe public eye has become obsessed with evaporation pools, ignoring the off-sites: the areas outside the salt flats. Transportation routes, port terminals and transit communities silently absorb equal or worse impacts under “the excuse of green development,” researchers warn. For the National History Prize winner, Lautaro Núñez, cited by the same media, the key is being lost in the debate: “The salt flats are Chile’s heritage.” Thirst in the desert. As millions flow into technology, the ecosystem depletes. Extracting lithium requires pumping and evaporating enormous amounts of ancient water. As detailed The Confusioncurrent operations consume up to 12,500 liters of industrial water for every ton of lithium, causing the salt flat to sink up to two centimeters per year. Faced with this threat, the injection of money has caused the greatest historical fracture of the Lickanantay people. The communities went from blocking routes in January 2024 to fighting each other for the millionaire loot, which could reach up to 150 million dollars annually for the region, according to data from the Chilean government. Social fracture. Rudecindo Espíndola, local farmer cited by The Confusionassures that participating in this agreement is a form of “participation justice” because, after 12,000 years of inhabiting the territory, they will finally have physical access to the plants to supervise the mining companies. However, others see the destruction of their social fabric. Sergio Cubillos, president of the Peine community, recognize the same publication that “the fact that today communities receive money is what has led to this division.” Sonia Ramos, a respected 83-year-old healer, is even more blunt. in his interview with Climate Home News: “We are land and water (…) but today there is fragmentation. Everything has become unbalanced.” For her, the mining megapact does not bring progress, but “death, the total destruction of the Salar.” So what’s going to happen? Seeking to justify its expansion until 2060, NovaAndino has promised to stop using fresh water and reinject at least 30% of the brine into the subsoil through new extraction technologies. However, this promise is being viewed with great skepticism. As microbiologist Cristina Dorador warnsthese reinjection technologies are not proven on a large scale and could alter the chemical composition of the desert. Continuing pumping until 2060, he says, could be the “coup de grace” for this vital ecosystem. The State as a facilitator, not as a protector. Politically, the course seems unchanged. The recently inaugurated far-right president, José Antonio Kast, has already promised to respect the contracts signed by the previous administration. The machinery will continue to operate. In statements to MongabayHernán Cáceres, director of the National Institute of Lithium and Salt Flats (INLiSa), justified the low state budget in environmental areas by arguing that this money is actually an “enabling expense.” That is, the State finances ecological studies and dialogue tables not necessarily to stop the impact, but to “pave the way” for mining companies, reducing the risks of social conflict and guaranteeing that companies can operate without resistance from indigenous peoples. Blindfold. While technological investments advance at record speed, legal protection, such as the recent creation of the Network of Protected Salt Flats, moves at a slow pace, trapped in bureaucracy and lack of funds. The history of lithium in Chile encapsulates the great contradiction of our time. In the quest to clean the air in the metropolises of the northern hemisphere, one of the oldest and most biodiverse corners of the global south is being squeezed and fractured. As the research concludes, the country today faces a monumental challenge: … Read more

The big problem with nuclear energy has always been its waste. Russia can now recycle them up to five times

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A nuclear reactor operating for 60 years using a closed system of three circulating fuel loads, subjected to cleaning processes and specific recharges in each cycle. What until recently seemed like an unattainable technical utopia for the energy industry is the reality that Russia’s latest technological breakthrough points to. The historic Achilles heel of nuclear fission—radioactive waste—is about to take a radical turn to become an almost inexhaustible resource. The magnitude of the test. The press release of Atom Media explains that Unit 1 of the Balakovo nuclear power plant (operated by Rosatom’s energy division) has just made history. They have successfully removed the last three lead test assemblies from an innovative fuel dubbed REMIX. These groups have completed three operating cycles of 18 months each. We are talking about 54 months performing at maximum capacity in a Russian commercial reactor type VVER-1000, thus exhausting its standard useful life. This puts the finishing touch to a demanding pilot program which started at the end of 2021 when the first six experimental rods were introduced into the reactor core. The resounding success. The most impressive thing about this milestone is not just that the fuel works, but where it works. Unlike other experiments designed for new generation fast reactors, REMIX fuel can be used in light water thermal reactors already operating massively around the planet. And without the need to modify its design or add costly security measures. The rehearsal went flawlessly. Yuri Ryzhkov, deputy chief engineer of the Balakovo power plant, detailed: “After each cycle, the fuel rods and structural elements were inspected using the television camera of the refueling machine. No deviations were detected during operation; neutron, physical and service characteristics remained within the design limits.” The science behind REMIX. But what exactly is this material? REMIX comes from Regenerated Mixture (Regenerated Mixture). Instead of using the usual natural enriched uranium, Russian scientists have created a matrix pellet that mixes regenerated uranium and plutonium (both recovered from already spent and reprocessed nuclear fuel), seasoned with some fresh enriched uranium. The technical key to the process is in the proportion: it maintains a very low level of plutonium, up to 1.5%. Thanks to this exact formulation, its neutron spectrum is practically identical to that of standard fuel. For practical purposes, the reactor core behaves the same and does not even “notice” the difference. The cleaning process. It is the circular economy taken to the atomic extreme. The magazine World Nuclear Newyes explains that this recycling cycle can be repeated up to five times. With each pass, the industry reprocesses the material to separate the useful uranium and plutonium from the fission products, which constitute the true radioactive waste. This useless waste is extracted and vitrified (encapsulated in glass) to be permanently and safely buried in geological deposits, while the useful fuel mixture is reintroduced into the reactor. The vision of the balanced cycle. Now it’s time for the laboratory and certification phase, where the irradiated material, now resting in cooling pools, will travel to the Atomic Reactor Research Institute in Dimitrovgrad for exhaustive analysis. Alexander Ugryumov, Vice President of R&D at TVEL (Rosatom’s fuel subsidiary), He announced that after these studies They will be able to bring the product to the market. The next evolutionary step will be to test mixtures with depleted uranium and up to 5% plutonium. All this is part of what Rosatom has called the “Balanced Nuclear Fuel Cycle” (NFC). The goal is to drastically reduce the volume and danger of radioactive waste, solving the historic problem of long-term storage for future generations and guaranteeing a truly sustainable production system. An impact on a global scale. Although the technical success is undeniable and the operational milestone in a commercial reactor is demonstrated, the mass adoption of this technology on a global level will largely depend on the commercialization costs and the economic viability of large-scale reprocessing; factors that the industry must demonstrate after the current qualification phase. However, if Rosatom manages to market REMIX at competitive prices, the global energy situation could take an unprecedented turn. We are not talking about a niche experiment. The data provided by Atom Media illustrate this magnitude: TVEL currently supplies fuel to more than 70 power reactors in 15 countries. Today, one in six reactors in the world operates with its technology. Moving from a linear “use and bury” industry to a closed loop where nuclear resources have multiple lives would not only dramatically expand the planet’s energy reserves, but could forever redefine the ecological viability of nuclear energy. Image | atom Xataka | The US has to make a crucial decision in Iran: exit without destroying its nuclear capabilities or a terrestrial “armaggedon”

The first “autonomous” car in history dates back to 1958 and had a peculiar problem: it smelled like fish

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Nowadays, and with few exceptions such as Cybertruckautomobile design is moved by very clear trends. However, in the 1950s and in the midst of the space age, the sky was the limit. Some examples are the amazing General Motors Firebird Ihe Zündapp Janus that you don’t know if it comes or goes or the refrigerator with wheels called BMW Isetta. At that time was born the Golden Sahara IIa car truly ahead of its time. It was so far ahead that it brought driving assistance and full connectivity (of what there was). It is, in short, the grandfather of today’s smart car. A crazy repair idea. If I say George Barris you may not know who I’m talking about, but if I reveal that he is the creator of the Batmobile things change. Well, back in 1953 the car designer had a car accident with his Lincoln Capri: crashed into a hay truck and as a result, the top of the vehicle was destroyed. Probably many of us would have taken the car to the workshop or scrapyard based on the mechanic’s bill, but Barris invested a whopping $5,000 and what was left of his battered Capri (which had a 200 horsepower V8 engine) was built into the Golden Sahara. Be careful, to give you an idea of ​​the inverted grassland: in the 50s the luxurious Cadillac Eldorado It cost $7,750.. Clean slate in the form of an ultra-futuristic car. Equipment from another era. At a time when FM radio was an extra, Barris himself tells its most differential design elements: hand-molded steel panels, vertical design headlights installed in fenders and bullet-type bumpers, fins integrated into the fenders, lounge-type seat with bar furniture on the sides, a removable bubble dome for the roof. Kontinent Media …and paint of with sardines The streamlined design was finished with a two-tone 24-karat gold finish (hence its name) instead of the classic chrome and a paint that shone like a diamond. Barris was looking for a finish never seen before, so he came up with a natural way to achieve a pearlescent touch before that type of paint became popular: with fish scales. As explained the designer in an interview with Jonnie King for his “Hall of Fame Legends” series: “So Shirley and I went to the fishmonger, and I remember that the fish looked very pearly. I had the fishmongers turn all the sardines so that their bellies could be seen until I found the one with the gold. We took it, removed the scales, put it in a jar, took it to the store and mixed it with a natural cellulose clearcoat and toner lacquers. Then I gave it a base of matte white and I sprayed it on top, and it turned out a spectacular pearly gold. The only problem was that it was very difficult to smell because it smelled like fish.” An even more extravagant Golden Sahara II. In 1954 the first Golden Sahara was born and from ’56 to ’58 Barris teamed up with Jim Street and Bob Metz to give it a twist until they found the Golden Sahara II. For this second generation, Goodyear added Translucent and luminous tires to replace the conventional white band tires of the time. It is just the tip of the iceberg of a car that is surprising both on the outside and (especially) on the inside. But Metz also gave it a good facelift and modified the windshield, hood and roof of the vehicle, he put quad headlights and rear fins. And it went from having a radio and steering wheel to truly futuristic technology: with panels on the upper part of the dashboard where it housed a television, tape recorder and even a refrigerator for its bar. It is said that the total cost of the Sahara exceeded $75,000 of the time. Under the hood: ahead of its time. Jim Rote’s electronics It was what made the difference compared to the cars of that era and brought it closer to ours. The steering wheel gave way to a fighter-style central joystick and implemented voice control for tasks such as opening the doors or starting the engine. Likewise, it integrated proximity sensors in two antennas on the front bumper, so that it could brake autonomously. What happened to him. In his days of wine and roses he went to fairs like the Petersen Motorama (his debut), he appeared in ‘cinderfella‘ (1960) with Jerry Lewis, Ed Winn and Judith Anderson and also in the competition ‘I’ve got a secret‘, in 1962. But in the 60s it disappeared from the front page and was relegated to ostracism for half a century, until it returned in style and restored in the Geneva Motor Show of 2019 from the hand of Goodyear. In Xataka | Make your old stickerless car a historic vehicle. A shortcut to circulate through Madrid without fines that does not always work In Xataka | The Bugatti Veyron was a unique car. And we say “was” because Bugatti has decided to betray him with nostalgia Cover | Matti Blume

Houston, we have a problem with Outlook. Microsoft spends millions on AI, but Artemis II does not escape the failures of its email

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On April 2, we experienced a historic event for humanity: the mission Artemis II It successfully took off towards the moon after more than 50 years without orbiting near the Earth’s satellite. Although the takeoff was a success, the path to get here was not without problems: it already had to delay the first date launch and also the second. Even on the official day there were problems. In the previous hours it was necessary check an anomaly in a temperature sensor of a battery abort system and also appeared another incident in the flight termination system (the safety mechanism that makes it possible to destroy the rocket if it deviates from its trajectory and becomes a threat). When the Orion spacecraft was flying almost 150,000 kilometers from Earth according to FortuneCommander Reid Wiseman encountered a mundane problem faced by any mortal with a computer and Microsoft email: an Outlook crash. The incident. The launch of Artemis II could be followed live and in that live, approximately 13 hours and 15 minutes after the broadcast began there is a fragment where the problem appears: “I see that I have two Microsoft Outlook accounts, and neither one works. If you could connect remotely and check Optimus and those two Outlook accounts, that would be great.” At first, Wiseman had issues related to the Optimus software, but then he pointed out a more trivial concern: There were two instances of Outlook running on his personal computing device. As a curiosity, the live stream to follow the takeoff still available on YouTube. Why it is important. The Artemis II mission is historic and the stream has left for posterity its first hours of flight and this anecdote that constitutes what is probably the first Microsoft technical support ticket generated from space. Beyond the joke, the episode shows that today’s space exploration and its cutting-edge technology coexist with commercial productivity software and its common failures. When an agency standardizes its entire infrastructure on a single technological ecosystem, the problems of that ecosystem also become problems of the mission. Tap to go to the post There is a support ticket from the Moon. As with any standard corporate ticket, the user first reported the incident, the technical team took over remotely, and finally closed the case. Houston accepted the request for remote access to the commander’s device, identified in records as PCD 1, and about an hour later, Outlook was back up and running. After 14 hours and 20 minutes of broadcast, someone from mission control communication said: “We managed to open Outlook. It will appear as “offline”, as expected”, as pick up Tom’s Hardware. Why they use Outlook in space. That there is Microsoft software on board is not something casual or improvised: Microsoft is a strategic partner of NASA that provides everything from productivity software to cloud data infrastructure and artificial intelligence (NASA Earth Copilot), hardware and mixed reality and Minburn Technology Group is your partner for software support and maintenance. In fact and according to NASAthe personal devices of the astronauts on the Orion spacecraft are Microsoft Surface Pro and the software they run is Commercial Off-The-Shelf, That is, standard commercial software for everyday tasks like talking to your family or managing your photos and videos. Another thing is the spacecraft and main flight systems: these are powered by specialized radiation-resistant hardware and specialized software with rigorous maintenance. The bathroom was also broken. The Outlook failure was not the only technical problem in the first hours of the flight, as can be seen in the broadcast. About two hours after launch, a malfunction light came on in the ship’s waste management system: the urine extractor fan had jammed. This component is responsible for sucking urine into a collector, avoiding the uncomfortable and unhygienic effects of microgravity. NASA confirmed shortly after the toilet problem had been solved. In Xataka | NASA had been refusing to allow its astronauts to carry iPhones for decades. For Artemis II you have made a historic decision In Xataka | The Artemis II astronauts will carry out experiments in what will be their own study models Cover | POT and Ed Hardie

You can live without paying Google for more storage. The problem is not space, but Gmail

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I know firsthand that the offers that Google launches for your One plan cheaper are attractive. Paying a couple of euros a month so that the company does not bother you with warnings that you have little storage left is perfectly valid and you immediately get 100 GB so you can use it however you want. However, although it may not seem like a big deal, it ends up being a small “phantom expense” that we can easily avoid if we change our spending habits a little. cloud storage. In the vast majority of cases, the main culprit that causes us to have consumed almost all of the 15 GB that Google makes available to us for free is email. And the good thing is that they exist ways to almost immediately empty our inbox and have that free storage back. Below these lines we indicate some recommendations that will help you. 10 GOOGLE APPS THAT COULD HAVE SUCCESSFUL The problem is in your inbox If you check what takes up the most space in your Google account, it is quite likely that you will be surprised: Gmail is usually the biggest storage hog. Other times, it is also Google Photos that gives the most trouble with this, but in the case of Gmail, emails with attachments accumulate for years, and most of them are perfectly expendable: automatic notifications, old invoices, newsletters that you never read, etc. If your work depends to a certain extent on being very aware of the email, as happens to me, you find thousands of emails of press releases, presentations and, in short, material that arrives, takes up space and you don’t open it again. The good thing is that Google gives you very specific tools to locate those emails that we do not need and delete them in bulk. Between that and some tips to filter your inbox, you will be able to empty a very important part of the free storage that Google gives you in a simple way. The starting point: Google’s storage manager Before you get to work with Gmail, there’s one place worth going first: Google’s storage manager, accessible directly from this website. You can also get to it by clicking on the storage tab in Drive and clicking on “Free up space”, an option included in the Drive, Photos or Gmail app. This page shows how much space you have occupied and offers two key sections: one with personalized suggestions to free up space (such as deleting spam emails, large files or heavy attachments, indicating how much can be gained in each case) and another with shortcuts to the specific management of Drive, Gmail and Google Photos. It’s a good way to get a general idea of ​​the picture before acting: at a glance you can see which service is consuming the most and where to start cleaning. How to find and delete what matters most in Gmail If you’ve noticed that Gmail is taking up quite a bit of your cloud storage, the next step is to take action. After having deleted the emails that the Google One system itself suggested in the previous step, you can continue on your own using advanced filters that Gmail offers you, going for the heaviest emails first. To do this you can start by writing in the Gmail search engine ‘larger:15MB‘ (without the quotes) and so you will see all the emails that exceed that size. You can adjust the number depending on what you want to find: larger:5MB, larger:10MBor whatever value you prefer. It is a quick way to identify the messages that take up the most space with minimal effort. It is one thing to identify them, and quite another to know if they are really important to you or not. Going one by one is a bit of a hassle, but for example it helps me a lot to know if the email is from a long time ago or not. That’s why I also use date filters. This way, if what you want is to go also old, the command before:YYYY/MM/DD shows messages sent or received before a certain date. You can even combine both commands to locate old and heavy emails at the same time. Another very practical option is to search directly by attachments. Wearing has:attachment larger:10M All emails with attachments larger than 10 MB appear in the search bar. If you want to tune more, filename:.pdf larger:5M specifically locates emails with PDF attachments that weigh more than that amount, and older_than:2y has:attachment Filter out those that have attachments and have been in your tray for more than two years. Attached files (photos, PDFs, videos, documents) are usually responsible for the storage filling up much faster than expected. Search your keywords Beyond the commands that Gmail offers you, you can also use searches that serve you personally. In my case, for example, when I have a long list of press releases that I have already read, I simply type ‘ndp’ or ‘press release’ in the search engine and I will easily have a whole long list of press releases waiting to be deleted. Then you just need to pull the trigger. Once you have identified all the emails you want to delete, click on the selection square in the upper left corner to mark them all, click on ‘Select all conversations that match this search‘ so you can mark them all and not just the first 50, and then pull the trigger. If you know exactly what you DON’T want to delete, you can move it to its own label or mark it as featured before mass deleting the rest. That way you don’t risk losing anything important. Don’t forget to empty the trash When you have identified and deleted all the emails, you will have to pay a visit to the trash. And the emails that you have deleted do not disappear immediately: they are sent to the trash, where stay for 30 … Read more

China says it has built its largest data center. And confirms that your problem is precisely in the chips

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China has just turned on its new technological pride in Shenzhen: an AI cluster with 14,000 petaflops built entirely with Huawei Ascend 910C chips. the city has presented it as the first scale computing center with 10,000 cards with completely national technology. It is an undeniable milestone, but if we give it context, an alarm signal and a dose of reality. Why is it important. The Shenzhen cluster, with all its rhetoric of technological sovereignty, represents about 1% of the capacity of the largest US data center in operation today. In other words: China has built, with great institutional effort, what OpenAI already had available to train GPT-4 in 2022. The gap is not a question of ambition (China has it) or capital (it also has it) or energy (of course, he also has it). It’s a chip issue. What are they capable of manufacturing and in what volume today. Between the lines. The Shenzhen government statement highlights energy efficiency metrics and occupancy rates of 92%. It’s really good data. But the selection of indicators (the cherry picking) says a lot so it is omitted: there are no direct comparisons with the clusters of NVIDIA H100 that colonize the data centers of Microsoft, Google or Amazon. Posting only what you have is also a way of not publishing what you lack. The context. At this point no one doubts that China does not lack electricity, not even engineersnor money to build large-scale AI infrastructure. What is still missing, despite the advances, are the chips. Export restrictions imposed by Trump They have cut off access to advanced semiconductors from NVIDIA and TSMCand that has forced China to accelerate its own ecosystem. Huawei has responded with the Ascend 910Ca capable chip but that still has performance limitations and, above all, volume production. If wafers were not in short supply, this data center would be a hundred times larger. Yes, but. Can China close that four-year gap before it gets even bigger? The answer depends almost entirely on how much its domestic semiconductor industry manages to scale, and whether or not Western sanctions manage to stifle that process. At the moment, in Shenzhen they are celebrating an achievement as undeniable as it turns out that in the eyes of Silicon Valley they are still in 2022. Featured image | Huawei In Xataka | Memory prices have started to fall in some markets. There is still a long way to go to close the AI ​​crisis

Microsoft’s problem is not having lost a quarter of its value in three months. It’s just that he’s been wrong for a long time.

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It seems like not so long ago when many celebrated Microsoft’s commitment to Azure. The decision of Satya Nadella Focusing on cloud computing soon began to translate into good financial results, propelling the Redmond company to achieve record revenue figures. But there was something more relevant in that movement: the realization that it could generate enormous benefits beyond Windows. That strategy, started in 2014ended up marking a before and after that became especially visible in 2019, when the firm reached for the first time a market capitalization of one trillion dollars. However, not even the most long-term oriented strategists, like Nadella, are free from errors. Microsoft has been chaining questionable decisions for some time that have ended up having a direct impact on its quarterly results. Specifically, the company has lost almost a quarter of its value in just three months. To put it in context, we are talking about its largest quarterly drop since the 2008 financial crisis. A decline of this magnitude, logically, does not go unnoticed. From cloud leadership to a strategy under pressure If we want to understand why the story has gone wrong, we have to start with the most obvious: the market has reacted harshly and, above all, selectively. In the first quarter of 2026, Microsoft lost about 23% of its stock market value, according to CNBCwhile the Nasdaq lost around 7%. It is not a minor movement, among other things because we are talking about a drop of a magnitude that has not been seen in almost two decades. This gap compared to the rest of the sector begins to point out problems that go beyond the general context. For a time, the commitment to OpenAI was seen as one of Microsoft’s great strategic successes, and it is not difficult to understand why. The company has invested around 13 billion dollarss to integrate this technology into Azure and into products like Copilot, which allowed it to place itself in a very advantageous position in the race of the artificial intelligence. However, with the passage of time we have also begun to see the other side of that decision: a very high technological dependence and a growing pressure to justify that deployment. As the months have passed, that close relationship has also quietly begun to change. Although Azure remains a key partner for OpenAI, the company led by Sam Altman has started to open your infrastructure to other actors to sustain the growth of its models, which increasingly require more computing capacity and energy. This does not break the alliance, but it does change its meaning, because Microsoft no longer concentrates with the same clarity all the strategic advantage that it had achieved in the first phases of the agreement. If we go down to the field of the product, where all these bets should materialize, the case of Copilot is especially illustrative. Microsoft has tried to make this assistant the axis of its new value propositionintegrating it into Microsoft 365 and a good part of its ecosystem, but the adoption It is not going at the expected pace. According to The Information, almost no one uses Copilot. What we have seen is that bringing artificial intelligence to the daily life of companies is more complex than it seemed on paper. Added to all this is a tension that is not always seen, but is very present in the backroom of this race: that of how to distribute resources in an environment of growing demand. Microsoft is investing massively in infrastructure to sustain the rise of AI, but at the same time it has to decide how it allocates that capacity between Azure and its own services. In January, CFO Amy Hood came to point out that Azure’s growth in the December quarter would have been even greater if the company had allocated more chips to the cloud instead of distributing some of that capacity among services like Copilot. Attrition is not limited to artificial intelligence, and that should also be taken into account. Also this year we have seen notable drops in income and in various areas of the Xbox ecosystemin a context also marked by previous price increases in Game Pass and on the consoles. It may seem like a minor front next to Azure or Microsoft 365, but it helps complete the picture of a company that has been opening too many flanks at the same time. What we have seen is that even in areas where it had a consolidated position, Microsoft is finding it more difficult to keep pace. Put all these pieces together, and what begins to emerge is an increasingly evident disconnect between Microsoft’s operational strength and the way the market is valuing its strategy. The company remains the fourth most valuable on the planetcontinues to grow, with revenue up close to 17% year-on-year in its last reported quarter and with Azure advancing 39% in the December quarter, but that strength is not translating to its price or valuation. Images | Xataka with Nano Banana 2 In Xataka | The ghost of IBM: Satya Nadella’s great challenge is to prevent Microsoft from becoming a technological fossil

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