OpenAI is poised to help develop a staggering 5-gigawatt data center campus in Abu Dhabi, positioning the company as a primary anchor tenant in what could become one of the world's largest AI infrastructure projects, according to a new Bloomberg report. The facility would reportedly span an astonishing 10 square miles and consume power equivalent to five nuclear reactors, dwarfing any existing AI infrastructure announced by OpenAI or its competitors. (OpenAI has not yet returned TechCrunch's request for comment, but to put that into perspective, that's bigger than Monaco.) The UAE project, developed in partnership with G42 ' an Abu Dhabi-based tech conglomerate ' is part of OpenAI's ambitious Stargate project, a joint venture announced in January that could see OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle build massive data centers around the globe stocked with powerful computer chips to support AI development. While OpenAI's first Stargate campus in the U.S. ' already under development in Abilene, Texas ' is expected to reach 1.2 gigawatts, this Middle Eastern counterpart would more than quadruple that capacity....

Epic Games is escalating its efforts to pressure Apple to allow its game Fortnite into its App Store, with a new court filing asking Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers to require that Apple 'accept any compliant version of Fortnite onto the U.S. storefront of the App Store.' The Fortnite publisher scored a major victory last month when Judge Rogers ruled that Apple was in 'willful violation' of an injunction on anti-competitive pricing ' a ruling that seemed to pave the way for Fortnite to return to the App Store, and more broadly, for developers to offer alternative payment options in their apps. However, Apple said it will appeal the ruling, and on Friday, Epic said Friday the company is blocking Fortnite from both its U.S. App Store and preventing it from being released on the Epic Games store in Europe: 'Now, sadly, Fortnite on iOS will be offline worldwide until Apple unblocks it.' Apple disputed this characterization, specifically the suggestion that it was blocking Fortnite outside the United States. Instead, the company said it asked Epic Sweden to 'resubmit the app update without including the U.S. storefront of the App Store so as not to impact Fortnite in other geographies.'...

That tidbit comes towards the end of a longer Bloomberg profile of Nadella, with a focus on Microsoft's AI strategy and its complicated relationship with OpenAI. To illustrate how much he uses the company's Copilot AI assistant in his daily life, Nadella said that instead of listening to podcasts, he now uploads the transcripts to Copilot, then talks to Copilot about the content during his drive to the office. In addition, Nadella ' who jokingly described his job as 'email typist' ' said he relies on at least 10 custom agents developed in Copilot Studio to summarize emails and messages, prepare for meetings, and perform other tasks around the office. AI already seems to be transforming Microsoft in more substantial ways, with programers reportedly the hardest hit in the company's recent layoffs, shortly after Nadella declared that 30% of the company's code was written by AI....

'MIT Sloan was my first and only choice,' says MIT graduate student David Brown. After receiving his BS in chemical engineering at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Brown spent eight years as a helicopter pilot in the U.S. Army, serving as a platoon leader and troop commander. Now in the final year of his MBA, Brown has co-founded a climate tech company ' Helix Carbon ' with Ariel Furst, an MIT assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, and Evan Haas MBA '24, SM '24. Their goal: erase the carbon footprint of tough-to-decarbonize industries like ironmaking, polyurethanes, and olefins by generating competitively-priced, carbon-neutral fuels directly from waste carbon dioxide (CO2). It's an ambitious project; they're looking to scale the company large enough to have a gigaton per year impact on CO2 emissions. They have lab space off campus, and after graduation, Brown will be taking a full-time job as chief operating officer. 'What I loved about the Army was that I felt every day that the work I was doing was important or impactful in some way. I wanted that to continue, and felt the best way to have the greatest possible positive impact was to use my operational skills learned from the military to help close the gap between the lab and impact in the market.'...