Telefonica Germany is reportedly moving 1 million 5G customers to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.The deal marks the first time in which an existing mobile operator is switching its main network to a public cloud, Reuters reported Wednesday (May 8).Cloud giants like Amazon and Microsoft have been working to expand into the telecom space and its billions of dollars in potential revenue, although operators have been reluctant to trust their mobile networks to a public cloud, the report said.“I want to see ...

Meta is rolling out a new way for advertisers to create marketing materials. Businesses can now use Meta’s artificial intelligence (AI) tools to create images for advertising campaigns, Meta said in a Tuesday (May 7) blog post. Business owners can feed the AI an image of their products and generate new backgrounds for it. The model also offers image expansion, which resizes the image to fit a range of sizes for different use cases, per the post.Meta also plans to enable businesses to use text prompts to fur ...

Microsoft has reportedly built a generative AI model designed for U.S. intelligence agencies.The development marks a milestone in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector, in that officials at Microsoft say it is a large language model (LLM) that can function entirely separated from the internet, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday (May 7).“This is the first time we’ve ever had an isolated version — when isolated means it’s not connected to the internet — and it’s on a special network that’s only accessible by t ...

American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT) saw global multinational customers increase their business travel during the first quarter.The growth in travel by these companies outpaced that of small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) for the first time since the recovery from the pandemic, the B2B software and services company for travel and expense said Tuesday (May 7) during its quarterly earnings call.During the first quarter, Amex GBT saw its global multinational customers’ transaction growth incr ...

Sixty-three years ago this month, the world’s first supercomputer was born. In May of 1961, IBM introduced its Model 7030, also known as “Stretch.” The gamechanger was its computational processing power and speed. Computers were used mostly for scientific applications at the time, and crunching massive data sets was time consuming and tedious.“Stretch” reduced the processing time of complex data sets from six months to a single day.Three years later, in 1964, IBM introduced its System 360 Mainframe, marking ...

Simon Property Group has seen a “big comeback” in malls, driven in part by domestic tourism.The company, which is a real estate investment trust that owns shopping, dining, entertainment and mixed-use destinations, saw its occupancy rise 1.1% year over year (YoY) and reach 95.5% as of March 31, Simon said in a Monday (May 6) earnings release.It also saw its base minimum rent per square foot rise 3% YoY, reaching $57.53 on March 31, according to the release.“Needless to say, I’m very pleased with our first q ...

Tesla has reportedly laid off employees across several departments over the last three weeks.These job cuts follow the automaker’s announcement three weeks ago that it was laying off 10% of its workforce, Electrek reported Monday (May 6).Workers in software, service and engineering roles have been impacted by the layoffs, according to the report. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that the job cuts are due to the automaker’s hiring inefficiencies in recent years and its restructuring for a new phase of growth, pe ...

As Amazon gains share in hobby retail categories, specialty retailers such as Sam Ash are taking a hit. The music retailer announced Thursday (May 2) that it is closing all its stores.“It is with a heavy heart that we announce that effective May 2nd 2024, all Sam Ash Music Store locations will begin store closing sales,” the company stated. “…Thank you for allowing us to serve musicians like you for 100 years.”The news came nearly two months after reports of the company closing 18 stores, including its New ...

Microsoft is reportedly working on a new, in-house artificial intelligence (AI) model that is “far larger” than the other open source models it has trained.The new model, MAI-1, is expected to have about 500 billion parameters, Seeking Alpha reported Monday (May 6), citing a paywalled article by The Information.It aims to compete with models created by Google, OpenAI (in which Microsoft is an investor), Anthropic and others, according to the report.Reached by PYMNTS, a Microsoft spokesperson declined to com ...

The PNC Financial Services Group and the TCW Group have formalized and expanded their partnership to develop a private credit platform focused on middle market lending.The companies aim to have $2.5 billion in investor equity capital available in the platform’s first year, and expect investment activity to begin in the fall, they said in a Monday (May 6) press release.“We are thrilled to partner with PNC to expand our direct lending capabilities and provide financing to a critical segment of U.S. companies, ...