Technology

➚ MOVE FAST: Congregation. Executives from Google, Meta, Anthropic, and other tech companies will meet with Vatican officials this week to discuss AI ethics. Pope Leo XIV has highlighted risks around the technology but the gathering suggests an openness to working with the industry to address them.

➘ BREAK THINGS: Co-workers. Andy Jassy became the latest Silicon Valley executive to publicly warn of the effects of AI on the labor force. In a memo, he told Amazon employees that efficiency gains would reduce the number of corporate workers, and those who “embrace the change” will be well-positioned at the company.

The NAACP is planning to sue Elon Musk’s xAI over environmental concerns related to its Tennessee supercomputer facility, the group said in a letter shared online and sent to xAI Tuesday. The civil rights group said air pollution related to at least 35 combustion turbines at the facility — operating without proper permits — negatively impacts nearby Black communities. Unless the company addresses the issues, the NAACP, represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center, said it will sue under the Clean Air Act.

The proposed lawsuit highlights ongoing rifts between AI companies building data centers and the neighborhoods they operate in. Environmental concerns are a key talking point for community members opposing the construction, but there’s limited data to prove harmful emissions. While not all data centers use these same turbines, a high-profile case could still give credence to the NIMBY movement.

“We cannot afford to normalize this kind of environmental injustice — where billion-dollar companies set up polluting operations in Black neighborhoods without any permits and think they’ll get away with it because the people don’t have the power to fight back,” said NAACP CEO Derrick Johnson.

In a statement per the Associated Press, xAI said, “The temporary power generation units are operating in compliance with all applicable laws,” and the turbines will utilize new technology that reduces emissions. The Colossus data center is already benefiting Memphis by boosting the city’s economy, adding tax revenue, and creating jobs, xAI said.

AMD’s latest advanced chip could peel customers away from industry leader Nvidia and shake up the overall AI landscape.

The unveiling of the MI400, the company’s most advanced model, drew some of the biggest companies to San Jose to heap praise on AMD CEO Lisa Su, who has made fast progress in a field dominated by Nvidia: Massive, industrial-scale compute clusters that can train and run the world’s most powerful AI models.

“When you first started telling me about the specs, I was like, there’s no way. That just sounds totally crazy,” said Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, last week during an AMD conference.

But it isn’t just the chip that excites people like Altman. It’s everything else AMD has done to make it perform better as a cohesive system. Gone are the days when chip companies were judged simply by the number of transistors they could fit on a piece of silicon. Massive increases in compute power today are the product of a wide array of engineering breakthroughs, some that require microscopes to see and others that are better observed from the sky.

It took a while for the market to respond to AMD’s announcements last week, but its stock shot up Monday as analysts processed the implications of the event.

For decades, the tech industry had Moore’s Law, the promise that the number of transistors on a chip would double every couple of years. It was dependable and allowed companies like Apple to plan product road maps years in advance. Today’s compute breakthroughs come more from the ability to connect unfathomably large numbers of chips together — an effort that isn’t governed by any “law.”

This is why AMD is selling its MI400 as a complete system, with all of the data center components pre-built in a single server rack called Helios. Nvidia is also moving in this direction, which means pushing the boundaries of chip architecture and everything that is built around them.

So far, Nvidia and now AMD have shown an ability to innovate in this post-Moore’s Law era. The question, though, is for how long. Companies are packing so much hardware into server racks that they are straining the concrete floors that support them and the energy grids that power them.

Mark Papermaster, AMD’s CTO and a veteran of the chip industry, told Semafor the new challenge does require new brainpower. “We’re changing the whole makeup of the company,” Papermaster said. “If you look at our acquisitions, they’ve been broadening our skill base, largely acquiring new software skills and new system skills to allow us to be more effective and move more quickly.”

CIOs and IT leaders don’t just follow trends  — they drive them. That’s why IT leaders at global organizations subscribe to CIO Upside. Get exclusive insights on the innovations and strategies shaping the future of tech leadership — subscribe for free today.

The amount of time that ByteDance has to divest of TikTok, after President Donald Trump once again extended the deadline to sell it. The app was due to shut down on Thursday unless it got a new owner to address US government security concerns around its Chinese ownership. “President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said. Buyers have been circling but complications around a sale, and whether Beijing would approve it, have held up a deal for months.

AI and defense are becoming increasingly intertwined in the US. OpenAI this week announced a $200 million Pentagon contract that will see the company develop frontier AI capabilities with a range of use cases — from improving how military members get health care to defending against cyber attacks. The project is part of a larger initiative for OpenAI to bring “advanced AI tools to public servants.”

The announcement follows the recruitment of four tech executives into a new US military reserve detachment last week, including two from OpenAI. In a statement, the US Army categorized their swearing-in as “just the start of a bigger mission” to attract more tech talent in a part-time capacity. It’s a seemingly successful attempt to chip away at the tech industry’s long-held taboo around working with the military.

The ChatGPT-maker previously partnered with military tech company Anduril to develop AI for “national security missions,” while rival Anthropic collaborates with another Tolkien-inspired defense firm, Palantir. Developments in defense technologies aren’t limited to the US, though. Israel has reportedly relied on an AI-powered database to identify potential targets in Gaza. Chinese researchers have also used Meta’s Llama in producing an AI model for military use, according to Reuters — and the country’s progress in robotics can mean advanced weaponry (see: automatic rifle-weilding robot dog).

AI photo editing tools and image generators are creating unrealistic expectations for some patients seeking plastic surgery, doctors told Ohio’s Columbus Dispatch. Procedures depend upon a person’s age, bone structure, skin type, and other anatomy — all things surgeons take into account when consulting with patients, but AI doesn’t. “In AI, you can make your anatomy whatever you want,” one doctor said. As a result, medical professionals have increasingly spent their time educating patients about what plastic surgery can and can’t be done, regardless of what AI says.

While plastic surgeons are using AI to help plan procedures, monitor post-operative care, and develop robot-assisted surgeries, they also join a growing group of professionals forced to manage client expectations on real-world limitations. Hair stylists, clothing designers, and cake decorators have all voiced complaints about customers bringing in AI-generated images of designs that can’t realistically be completed. Such consultations could result in wasted time and unsatisfied customers, and in the case of plastic surgery patients, issues with body image and unhealthy comparisons to AI images.

Bluntness comes easily to Sebastian Siemiatkowski, particularly when he’s explaining how artificial intelligence threatens employment in his own business and beyond.

But even though the co-founder and CEO of Klarna had an AI-generated version of himself read his company’s financial update last month, he told Semafor’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson that he doesn’t think AI will replace him any time soon — even if “it is definitely easier to replace the CEO than it is to replace a nurse.”