SAP's data double-down; Glean stretches out
Today on Product Saturday: SAP strikes a big partnership with Databricks, Glean introduces its agent builder, and the quote of the week.
Today: how international law enforcement agencies took down one of the most notorious ransomware operators, how two communities are dealing with a surge in data-center building, and the latest funding rounds in enterprise tech.
Welcome to Runtime! Today: how international law enforcement agencies took down one of the most notorious ransomware operators, how two communities are dealing with a surge in data-center building, and the latest funding rounds in enterprise tech.
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An international coalition of law enforcement agencies just scored one of the biggest wins in recent memory against the plague of ransomware attacks that has weighed down the world economy.
Dozens of servers belonging to Lockbit, a secretive group that essentially provides ransomware infrastructure as a service, were seized Monday and two people were arrested in Poland and Ukraine. The U.S. Department of Justice also indicted two Russians on charges of participating in the group's efforts, which netted more than $120 million in ransomware payments over the last few years.
Lockbit has wreaked havoc across the planet since 2019.
Law enforcement officials took an understandable victory lap in press conferences Tuesday.
But some cybersecurity experts warned that Lockbit could still be operational and ready to go on the offensive after taking quite a punch from global law enforcement.
One thing Ireland and Oregon have in common — other than depressingly constant rain — is a thriving collection of data centers, thanks to tax breaks and geographic luck. But people in both places are starting to wonder whether allowing data centers to spring up all over their land was such a good idea.
The Guardian published a feature last week on the enormous societal effects spreading out from Ireland's data-center boom, which could demand 70% of the country's electricity if it continues as planned. And the Oregonian reported Saturday that the power authority in Eastern Oregon's Umatilla and Morrow counties, home to AWS's sprawling US West (Oregon) cloud region, is "now the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gasses among all Oregon utilities" despite serving just 16,000 residents.
As companies like Blackstone plunge ahead with data-center construction plans fueled by the AI boom, it seems more likely that after years of welcoming the construction jobs communities are about to become much more skeptical when data centers are proposed in their region. AWS might be able to transition to clean energy to reduce its emissions in Eastern Oregon, but it really feels like more and more people are getting tired of looking at those things.
Lambda raised $320 million in Series C funding that values the GPU cloud provider at $1.5 billion.
Magic AI raised $117 million in Series B funding for its AI coding assistant, which it wants us to call a "coworker" rather than a "Copilot."
Rasa landed $30 million in Series C funding to expand its development platform for enterprises working on building generative AI agents.
Clarity scored $16 million in seed funding to help companies detect deepfake images and videos.
Guardrails AI raised $7.5 million in seed funding to further develop its open-source products, which help companies set rules and policies for internal AI development.
Microsoft said it will invest $2.1 billion over the next two years toward cloud infrastructure in Spain, where it first announced plans to build a cloud region in 2020.
MariaDB was offered a private-equity deal that would value the database company at $37 million, well below its peak private-market valuation of $672 million before a disastrous SPAC IPO in late 2022.
Wyze blamed AWS for an hours-long outage that took down security-camera feeds for its customers.
Rust is too complicated, according to a new survey of developers who want the people tasked with building out one of the fastest-growing programming languages to focus on maintenance before adding new features.
Thanks for reading — see you Thursday!