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Foundation Stone Laid for World’s Largest Government Data Center in Riyadh

Officials are seen at Thursday's ceremony. (SPA)
Officials are seen at Thursday's ceremony. (SPA)
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Foundation Stone Laid for World’s Largest Government Data Center in Riyadh

Officials are seen at Thursday's ceremony. (SPA)
Officials are seen at Thursday's ceremony. (SPA)

The foundation stone was laid in Riyadh Thursday for the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA) “Hexagon” Data Center, the world’s largest government data center by megawatt capacity.

Classified as Tier IV and holding the highest data center rating by the global Uptime Institute, the facility will have a total capacity of 480 megawatts and will be built on an area exceeding 30 million square feet in the Saudi capital.

Designed to the highest international standards, the center will provide maximum availability, security, and operational readiness for government data centers. It will meet the growing needs of government entities and support the increasing reliance on electronic services.

The project will contribute to strengthening the national economy and reinforce the Kingdom’s position as a key player in the future of the global digital economy.

A ceremony was held on the occasion, attended by senior officials from various government entities. They were received at the venue by President of SDAIA Dr. Abdullah bin Sharaf Alghamdi and SDAIA officials.

Director of the National Information Center at SDAIA Dr. Issam bin Abdullah Alwagait outlined the project’s details, technical and engineering specifications, and the operational architecture ensuring the highest levels of readiness and availability.

He also reviewed the international accreditations obtained for the center’s solutions and engineering design in line with recognized global standards.

In a press statement, SDAIA President Dr. Abdullah bin Sharaf Alghamdi said the landmark national project comes as part of the continued support of Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince, Prime Minister and Chairman of SDAIA’s Board of Directors.

This support enables the authority, as the Kingdom’s competent body for data, including big data, and artificial intelligence and the national reference for their regulation, development, and use, to contribute to advancing the Kingdom toward leadership among data- and AI-driven economies, he noted.

The Kingdom will continue to strengthen its presence in advanced technologies with the ongoing support of the Crown Prince, he stressed.

SDAIA will pursue pioneering projects that reflect its ambitious path toward building an integrated digital ecosystem, strengthening national enablers in data and artificial intelligence, and developing world-class technical infrastructure that boosts the competitiveness of the national economy and attracts investment. This aligns with Saudi Vision 2030’s objectives of building a sustainable knowledge-based economy and achieving global leadership in advanced technologies.

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Technology

Brazil Demands Safety Controls on Discord After Livestreamed Suicide

The Discord logo is seen in this illustration taken November 7, 2022. (Reuters)
The Discord logo is seen in this illustration taken November 7, 2022. (Reuters)
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Brazil Demands Safety Controls on Discord After Livestreamed Suicide

The Discord logo is seen in this illustration taken November 7, 2022. (Reuters)
The Discord logo is seen in this illustration taken November 7, 2022. (Reuters)

Brazilian authorities are calling on US-based messaging platform Discord, popular among teens, to take action after a suicide case sparked outcry and the first lady called for its shutdown.

Investigators say a 13-year-old girl was encouraged to self-harm and take her own life during a Discord livestream, and five teenagers have been arrested in connection to the death.

The office of the Attorney General of the Union (AGU), a public body that defends the legal interests of the Brazilian state, told AFP on Tuesday it requested and has received a proposal from Discord to "adopt measures aimed at strengthening the safety of its users, particularly children and adolescents."

In a statement sent to AFP, Discord said it was "cooperating with authorities in the investigation into this serious case."

Discord said it had additionally "deactivated, before the teenager's death," a "private server" suspected of being used by "individuals involved in criminal activities encouraging self-harm."

The AGU has demanded concrete measures, like age verification of users.

In Brazil, a law that came into effect earlier this year obliges platforms to link the accounts of users under age 16 to their parents' accounts, and requires platforms to verify user age.

Following the recent death, Rosangela da Silva, wife of left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, called for Discord to be shut down and urged "the judiciary to remove this horrible network from the Internet."

Discord claims more than 90 million active daily users worldwide.

In 2024, the platform X was blocked for 40 days in Brazil, until the social media network owned by the world's richest man Elon Musk complied with the Supreme Court's orders to remove accounts spreading disinformation.

Technology

Google’s Gemini AI Assistant Reaches One Billion Users

The Gemini app icon in this illustration taken June 5, 2026. (Reuters)
The Gemini app icon in this illustration taken June 5, 2026. (Reuters)
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Google’s Gemini AI Assistant Reaches One Billion Users

The Gemini app icon in this illustration taken June 5, 2026. (Reuters)
The Gemini app icon in this illustration taken June 5, 2026. (Reuters)

Google's artificial intelligence assistant Gemini has surpassed one billion monthly users, CEO Sundar Pichai announced Tuesday, a week after a major reorganization of the tech giant's AI division.

"It's our fastest growing product ever," and the 14th product to reach a billion users, Pichai posted on social media.

The milestone, which Google calculated based on how many people use the Gemini app across its ecosystem, gives the search giant a victory amid a major overhaul of its AI division.

Demis Hassabis, who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry, recently stepped back from the day-to-day management of Google DeepMind, the lab that designs the Gemini models. And several leading researchers left as well, including Jeff Dean, a central figure in the group's engineering efforts for nearly three decades.

Its new flagship model, Gemini 3.5 Pro, initially promised for June, still has not been released, while its rivals have launched several models that are considered more powerful, particularly for generating computer code -- currently the most lucrative area in the sector.

In the face of this technological lag, Google's audience remains its main asset as it integrates AI into its ecosystem, from search and Gmail to Google Maps and YouTube.

OpenAI reached one billion users across all its interfaces, led by ChatGPT, the lab announced in July without specifying whether that figure was monthly or weekly users.

The San Francisco-based AI lab sparked the artificial intelligence boom when it launched its free ChatGPT app in November 2022, and thus built its user base from scratch in under four years.

Every audience metric feeds into the valuation that OpenAI hopes to achieve with an eventual IPO, for which it filed a confidential application in June.

In a sign of tightening competition against Gemini, China's DeepSeek, and its San Francisco rival Anthropic, which makes Claude, ChatGPT's market share for AI assistants fell below 50 percent in the first half of the year, according to research firm Sensor Tower, which uses company data to estimate usage.

Technology

China Bets on AI Weather Forecasting as Extreme Weather Intensifies

In this photo released by Xinhua News Agency, a man walks against strong wind and rain as Typhoon Dolphin makes landfall at Dongsha community in Yuhuan, Taizhou, eastern China's Zhejiang Province on Sunday, Aug. 9, 2026. (Xinhua via AP)
In this photo released by Xinhua News Agency, a man walks against strong wind and rain as Typhoon Dolphin makes landfall at Dongsha community in Yuhuan, Taizhou, eastern China's Zhejiang Province on Sunday, Aug. 9, 2026. (Xinhua via AP)
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China Bets on AI Weather Forecasting as Extreme Weather Intensifies

In this photo released by Xinhua News Agency, a man walks against strong wind and rain as Typhoon Dolphin makes landfall at Dongsha community in Yuhuan, Taizhou, eastern China's Zhejiang Province on Sunday, Aug. 9, 2026. (Xinhua via AP)
In this photo released by Xinhua News Agency, a man walks against strong wind and rain as Typhoon Dolphin makes landfall at Dongsha community in Yuhuan, Taizhou, eastern China's Zhejiang Province on Sunday, Aug. 9, 2026. (Xinhua via AP)

As meteorologists tracked Typhoon Dolphin's path toward China in recent days, a new generation of artificial intelligence weather models worked alongside traditional forecasting systems, highlighting China's emergence as a leading player in the race to improve weather prediction.

Chinese-developed systems, including Shanghai AI Laboratory-developed Fengwu, Huawei's Pangu and Fudan University's Fuxi, are among a handful of AI forecasting models that researchers say can generate forecasts much faster than conventional systems while matching or surpassing them on some measures of accuracy.

For decades, weather prediction has relied on numerical models running on supercomputers that simulate atmospheric ‌physics. AI models ‌instead learn patterns from vast archives of historical weather observations and ‌can ⁠produce forecasts in ⁠a fraction of the time.

The technology is increasingly being tested during typhoon season in East Asia, where even small improvements in track forecasts can help authorities better prepare for flooding, organize evacuations and manage potential transport disruptions.

The rise of AI weather forecasting has created a new arena of competition among technology companies, research institutes and meteorological agencies, with China emerging as one of the field's leading players.

Among the best-known AI forecasting systems globally are Google's GraphCast and ⁠GenCast, Nvidia-backed FourCastNet and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts' AI ‌Forecasting System, known as AIFS.

'PEOPLE NEED INFORMATION'

Fengwu attracted ‌attention after developers reported it outperformed GraphCast across roughly 80% of evaluated weather variables and extended ‌skillful global medium-range forecasts beyond 10 days.

"With more extreme weather, people need information to ‌make decisions, both local governments, the national government, also the average person, farmers and fisherman," said Sun Zhi, the CTO of Techwind, the company responsible for Fengwu's industrial applications.

"So we want to help provide better information so people can make decisions."

While AI systems are becoming an increasingly important complement to ‌conventional forecasting because of their speed and lower computing costs, they are unlikely to fully replace traditional weather models in the ⁠near future.

According to ⁠Techwind's Sun, AI models are already capable of predicting the path of typhoons — five days out from Dolphin's landfall Fengwu predicted the time and place it would hit mainland China to within 30 minutes and 30 km (19 miles) — but they still lag conventional weather forecasts in predicting the intensity of a storm and they are still untested predicting major climate developments.

"If we predict a climate change event 18 months in advance, people won't believe it," Sun said.

"They need to know it's reliable. We need to do years of scientific research before people trust us when we say there will be an El Nino event or we say the changing temperature on the sea's surface will affect the breeding cycle of fish."

As the tech forecasters work to make their systems ever more sophisticated, the concurrent use of both methods is likely to continue for some time.