Airbnb will stop operations in China, Samsung will spend $360 Billion on chips and biotech, and Nvidia will use liquid cooling to reduce big tech’s energy use.
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That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now, welcome to Hashtag Trending. It’s Wednesday, May 25, and I’m your host, Tom Li.
Airbnb will officially shut down in China at the end of July. However, Chinese customers will still be able to use the service to book rooms overseas. About 150,000 property listings are expected to be purged from Airbnb, according to a report from the New York Times. The alleged reason Airbnb is leaving China is due to both stiff competitions from local businesses and strict COVID-19 lockdowns. However, the main reason could be that Airbnb simply couldn’t compete with apps that offered a variety of services through one portal. For example, the Beijing-based Meituan, is a so-called super-app that does everything from food delivery to movie tickets. Meituan also has a “lodging marketplace” that was rebranded in 2019 to directly take on Airbnb, coining the name Meituan B&B. WeChat and AliPay are two other popular apps in China, providing one-stop shopping for virtually everything without visiting a standalone app like Airbnb.
Source: Gizmodo
Samsung plans to spend about $360 billion by 2026 to shore up businesses from chips to drugs, Bloomberg reported. The company made a statement promising to create 80,000 jobs through 2026, mostly in semiconductors and biopharmaceuticals. Additionally, Samsung and SK Hynix had pledged more than $403 billion dollars of investment in semiconductor research through 2030 under a national blueprint devised by the previous administration of South Korea. In a statement, the group said about 360 trillion won will be spent domestically while the rest will be invested overseas. Samsung Electronics is building an advanced $17 billion chip plant in Texas, as the Biden administration prioritizes supply chain security and greater semiconductor capacity on American soil.
Source: Bloomberg
Nvidia plans on liquid-cooling its data centre graphics cards to reduce energy use while crunching massive amounts of data for training AI models. The company announced it’s introducing a liquid-cooled version of its A100 compute card and says that it will consume 30 per cent less power than the air-cooled version. Nvidia’s also pledging that this isn’t just a one-off, it’s already got more liquid-cooled server cards planned for the future, and it also plans on bringing the tech to other applications like in-car systems that need to keep cool in enclosed spaces, The Verge reported. According to the company, reducing the energy needed to perform complex computations could make a significant impact. Nvidia says data centres use over one percent of the world’s electricity, and 40 per cent of the energy used by data centers all goes to cooling.
Source: The Verge
Smartphones have officially taken over. On Monday, New York City removed its last public payphone. The effort to replace public pay telephones across the city began in 2014 when the mayor at the time solicited proposals to reimagine the offering. Officials selected CityBridge to develop and operate LinkNYC kiosks, which provide services such as free phone calls, Wi-Fi and device charging. The city began removing street payphones in 2015 to replace them with kiosks. There are about 2,000 kiosks across the city. The last public payphone will be displayed at the Museum of the City of New York as part of an exhibit.
Source: CNBC
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash briefings or your Google Home daily briefing. Make sure to sign up for our Daily IT Wire newsletter to get all the news that matters directly in your inbox every day. Also, catch the next episode of Hashtag Tendances, our weekly Hashtag Trending episode in French, which drops every Thursday morning. If you have a suggestion or a tip, drop us a line in the comments or via email. Thank you for listening, I’m Tom Li.