Taalas of Toronto, a two year-old startup, has raised $219 million to make customised chips to run any AI model. The company claims its approach can speed up inference performance …

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The Governor of the State of New York, Kathy Hochul, has withdrawn a proposal which would have allowed Waymo to apply to run robotaxis in New York State (though not …

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Starting today, public certificates issued from AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) have a maximum validity period of 198 days, compared to previous validity period of 395 days. With this change, ACM-issued public certificates will be compliant with new Certification Authority Browser (CA/Browser) Forum mandate that certificates be no longer than 200 days starting 15th March 2026.

No action is required from the customers to receive this change. All new and renewed public certificates will by default have a validity of 198 days. Existing certificates with 395 days validity continue to be valid and can be used until they renew or expire. All other certificate functionality remains in place. ACM will still continue to auto renew the certificates before expiry. The certificates are now renewed 45 days before expiry. Existing 398 day validity certificates will renew 60 days before expiry and will renew with 198 days validity period.

We have reduced the pricing for ACM’s exportable public certificates in line with the shorter validity period. 198-day exportable public certificate will now cost $7/Fully Qualified domain name (down from $15) and $79/ wildcard name (down from $149). Please refer to ACM’s pricing page for more details. For more information about ACM, visit the ACM documentation .

Starting today, Amazon EC2 M8i-flex instances are now available in Asia Pacific (Malaysia, Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt) and Canada (Central) regions. These instances are powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors, available only on AWS, delivering the highest performance and fastest memory bandwidth among comparable Intel processors in the cloud. The M8i-flex instances offer up to 15% better price-performance, and 2.5x more memory bandwidth compared to previous generation Intel-based instances. They deliver up to 20% better performance than M7i-flex instances, with even higher gains for specific workloads. The M8i-flex instances are up to 30% faster for PostgreSQL databases, up to 60% faster for NGINX web applications, and up to 40% faster for AI deep learning recommendation models compared to M7i-flex instances.

M8i-flex instances are the easiest way to get price performance benefits for a majority of general-purpose workloads like web and application servers, microservices, small and medium data stores, virtual desktops, and enterprise applications. They offer the most common sizes, from large to 16xlarge, and are a great first choice for applications that don’t fully utilize all compute resources.

To get started, sign in to the AWS Management Console . For more information about the M8i-flex instances visit the AWS News blog .

Amazon MQ now supports ActiveMQ minor version 5.19, which introduces several improvements and fixes compared to the previous version of ActiveMQ supported by Amazon MQ. Amazon MQ manages the patch version upgrades for your brokers. All brokers on ActiveMQ version 5.19 will be automatically upgraded to the next compatible and secure patch version in your scheduled maintenance window.

If you are utilizing prior versions of ActiveMQ, such as 5.18, we strongly recommend you to upgrade to ActiveMQ 5.19. You can easily perform this upgrade with just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. To learn more about upgrading, consult the ActiveMQ Version Management section in the Amazon MQ Developer Guide. To learn more about the changes in ActiveMQ 5.19, see the Amazon MQ release notes . This version is available across all AWS Regions where Amazon MQ is available.

Today we are announcing the release of Aurora DSQL Connectors for Go (pgx), Python (asyncpg), and Node.js (WebSocket for Postgres.js) that simplify IAM authentication for customers using standard PostgreSQL drivers to connect to Aurora DSQL clusters. These connectors act as transparent authentication layers that automatically handle IAM token generation, eliminating the need to write token generation code or manually supply IAM tokens. Tokens are automatically generated for each connection, ensuring valid tokens are always used while maintaining full compatibility with existing PostgreSQL driver features. The Postgres.js connector additionally supports WebSocket protocol, enabling customers to connect to DSQL clusters in environments where TCP connections are not available.

These connectors streamline authentication and eliminate security risks associated with traditional user-generated passwords. All three connectors support custom IAM credential providers, giving customers flexibility in how they manage their AWS credentials.

To get started, visit the Connectors for Aurora DSQL documentation page. For code examples, visit our Github page for pgx for Go , asyncpg for Python , and Websocket for Postgres.js . Get started with Aurora DSQL for free with the AWS Free Tier . To learn more about Aurora DSQL, visit the webpage .

Starting today, Amazon EC2 G7e instances accelerated by NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs are now available in  Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region. G7e instances offer up to 2.3x inference performance compared to G6e.

Customers can use G7e instances to deploy large language models (LLMs), agentic AI models, multimodal generative AI models, and physical AI models. G7e instances offer the highest performance for spatial computing workloads as well as workloads that require both graphics and AI processing capabilities. G7e instances feature up to 8 NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs, with 96 GB of memory per GPU, and 5th Generation Intel Xeon processors. They support up to 192 virtual CPUs (vCPUs) and up to 1600 Gbps of networking bandwidth. G7e instances support NVIDIA GPUDirect Peer to Peer (P2P) that boosts performance for multi-GPU workloads. Multi-GPU G7e instances also support NVIDIA GPUDirect Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) with EFA in EC2 UltraClusters, reducing latency for small-scale multi-node workloads.

You can use G7e instances for Amazon EC2 in the following AWS Regions: US West (Oregon), US East (N. Virginia, Ohio) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo). You can purchase G7e instances as On-Demand Instances, Spot Instances, or as part of Savings Plans.

To get started, visit the AWS Management Console , AWS Command Line Interface  (CLI), and AWS SDKs. To learn more, visit G7e instances .

You can now deploy AWS IAM Identity Center in 38 AWS Regions, including Asia Pacific (New Zealand).

IAM Identity Center is the recommended service for managing workforce access to AWS applications. It enables you to connect your existing source of workforce identities to AWS once and offer your users single sign on experience across AWS. It powers the personalized experiences offered by AWS applications, such as Amazon Q, and the ability to define and audit user-aware access to data in AWS services, such as Amazon Redshift. It can also help you manage access to multiple AWS accounts from a central place. IAM Identity Center is available at no additional cost in these AWS Regions .

To learn more about IAM Identity Center, visit the product detail page . To get started, see the IAM Identity Center user guide .

The share of wealth owned by the 1% of richest people in the US hit a record of 31.7% in Q3., according to figures  published in late January by the …

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