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The RAM Crunch Could Kill Products and Even Entire Companies, Memory Exec Admits

Slashdot.org - 1 hour 57 min ago
Phison CEO Pua Khein-Seng, whose company is one of the leading makers of controller chips for SSDs and other flash memory devices, admitted in a televised interview that the ongoing global RAM shortage could force companies to cut back their product lines in the second half of 2026 -- and that some may not survive at all if they cannot secure enough memory. The interview, conducted in Chinese by Ningguan Chen of Taiwanese broadcaster Next TV, drew an important distinction: it was the interviewer who raised the possibility of shutdowns and product discontinuations, and Khein-Seng largely agreed rather than volunteering the prediction himself. The shortage stems from AI data centers consuming the vast majority of the world's memory supply, a buildout that has sent RAM prices up by three to six times over the past several months. Only three companies control 93% of the global DRAM market, and all three have chosen to prioritize profits over rapid capacity expansion. Even Nvidia may skip shipping a gaming GPU for the first time in 30 years, and Apple could struggle to secure enough chips. Khein-Seng also expects consumers will increasingly repair broken products rather than replace them.

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Amazon Dethrones Walmart as World's Biggest Company by Sales

Slashdot.org - 2 hours 14 min ago
An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon has officially dethroned Walmart as the biggest global company by revenue, a milestone attesting to the massive scale the e-commerce and cloud-computing giant has achieved since its humble beginnings in 1994 as an online bookseller in Jeff Bezos' Seattle-area garage. Walmart, which had been the largest company by revenue for more than a decade, on Thursday reported sales of $713.2 billion for the 12 months ending Jan. 31. Amazon, which operates on a fiscal year ending in December, earlier this month reported 2025 sales of $717 billion. Bezos carefully studied Walmart founder Sam Walton, embracing many of his business strategies while building his company. Over the past decade, Amazon's revenue has increased at almost 10 times the pace of Walmart's, fueled by a shift in consumer spending from stores to websites and its rapidly growing cloud-computing business, Amazon Web Services.

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Practical AI skills for everyonePractical AI skills for everyoneFounder, Grow with Google

GoogleBlog - 3 hours 22 min ago
Get Google certified in the practical AI skills employers value most. Includes 3 months of Google AI Pro.Get Google certified in the practical AI skills employers value most. Includes 3 months of Google AI Pro.
Categories: Technology

New Meridian tool puts MMM insights directly in marketers' hands.New Meridian tool puts MMM insights directly in marketers' hands.Senior Director

GoogleBlog - 3 hours 22 min ago
Scenario Planner makes MMM insights accessible to marketers. The no-code UI helps teams turn complex data into actionable plans.
Categories: Technology

A $10 Plastic Speaker is the Most Durable Revenue Line in Indian Digital Payments

Slashdot.org - 3 hours 22 min ago
India's digital payment platforms process trillions of dollars a year through UPI, the government-built real-time payments rail that handles more than 90% of all payment transactions in the country, but one of their largest net revenue line items is not a payment product at all: it's a cheap plastic speaker that sits on a shopkeeper's counter and reads out incoming payments aloud. The roughly 23 million soundboxes deployed across India earn about $220 million a year in rental fees, more than every explicitly UPI-linked revenue line in the ecosystem combined, according to estimates from Bernstein. Each device costs $7-12 to manufacture and earns its platform $7-10 a year in rent. A story adds: PhonePe processes about 48% of all UPI transactions in India. Its net payment processing revenue in H1 FY26 was about $83 million. Its device revenue was about $34 million. Running nearly half of India's real-time payment infrastructure earns PhonePe only 2.4 times what it makes from renting speakers to shopkeepers.

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EV Sales Boom As Ethiopia Bans Fossil-Fuel Car Imports

Slashdot.org - 4 hours 22 min ago
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Post: In 2024, the Ethiopian government banned the import of fossil fuel-powered vehicles and slashed tariffs on their electric equivalents. It was a policy driven less by the country's climate ambitions and more by fiscal pressures. For years, subsidizing gasoline for consumers has been a major drag on Ethiopia's budget, costing the state billions of dollars over the past decade. The country defaulted on its sovereign bonds in 2023 after rising interest rates drove up the costs of servicing its debts, and it received a $3.4 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund the following year. In the two years since the ban on internal combustion engine vehicles, EV adoption has grown from less than 1% to nearly 6% of all of the vehicles on the road in the country -- according to the government's own figures -- some way above the global average of 4%. "The Ethiopia story is fascinating," said Colin McKerracher, head of clean transport at BloombergNEF. "What you're seeing in places that don't make a lot of vehicles of any type, they're saying: 'Well, look, if I'm going to import the cars anyway, then I'd rather import less oil. We may as well import the one that cleans up local air quality and is cheaper to buy.'" For decades, Ethiopia's high import tariffs on vehicles put new car ownership out of the reach of most of the country's population. Per capita gross domestic product is only about $1,000, and even by the standards of low-income countries, it has among the lowest car ownership rates. At 13 vehicles per 1,000 people, it's a fraction of the African average of 73. With few cars manufactured in the country, the vast majority are imported, and most are bought used. The government's import policy has upended the market. In parallel, tariffs for EVs were dropped to 15% for completed cars, 5% for parts and semi-assembled vehicles, and zero for "fully knocked down" -- vehicles shipped in parts and assembled locally. That has made new EVs cost-competitive with old gasoline cars.

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Claims That AI Can Help Fix Climate Dismissed As Greenwashing

Slashdot.org - 7 hours 22 min ago
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Tech companies are conflating traditional artificial intelligence with generative AI when claiming the energy-hungry technology could help avert climate breakdown, according to a report. Most claims that AI can help avert climate breakdown refer to machine learning and not the energy-hungry chatbots and image generation tools driving the sector's explosive growth of gas-guzzling datacenters, the analysis of 154 statements found. The research, commissioned by nonprofits including Beyond Fossil Fuels and Climate Action Against Disinformation, did not find a single example where popular tools such as Google's Gemini or Microsoft's Copilot were leading to a "material, verifiable, and substantial" reduction in planet-heating emissions. Ketan Joshi, an energy analyst and author of the report, said the industry's tactics were "diversionary" and relied on tried and tested methods that amount to "greenwashing." He likened it to fossil fuel companies advertising their modest investments in solar panels and overstating the potential of carbon capture. "These technologies only avoid a minuscule fraction of emissions relative to the massive emissions of their core business," said Joshi. "Big tech took that approach and upgraded and expanded it." [...] Joshi said the discourse around AI's climate benefits needed to be "brought back to reality." "The false coupling of a big problem and a small solution serves as a distraction from the very preventable harms being done through unrestricted datacenter expansion," he said.

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