2024 may be zooming by, but IT Brew has you covered—here’s our ongoing roundup of three of the most interesting tech news stories from around the world in the last month.
Under the sea
Damage to undersea fiber-optic cables by attacks in the Red Sea have illustrated the vulnerability of international data traffic—and a project to bypass critical choke points by laying cable through the Northwest Passage is taking shape.
Politico EU reported the approximately €1 billion (or around $1.08 billion) Far North Fiber project, which will span about 9,000 miles and directly connect Alaska, Ireland, Japan, and Norway, is on track for a 2027 rollout date. The route is largely possible due to climate change, as parts of the route used to be blocked or at risk from sea ice that is now thawing.
“We are at this sweet spot where it’s now accessible and allows us a time window when we can get the cable safely installed,” Ik Icard, chief strategy officer for Far North Digital, the company working on the project, told Politico. He added the vessels that will install the cable still have “the protection of that ice cover for a significant part of the year” against disruption from sabotage or other factors like wayward anchors.
However, that ice cover from ships also makes it more difficult to repair any damage. Alan Mauldin, research director at the TeleGeography consultancy, told Politico the route is three to four times more expensive than Atlantic or Pacific routes and may not be able to recoup investment by increasing prices.
China goes homebrew
The Chinese government is phasing out CPUs produced by AMD and Intel in favor of homegrown equivalents—denting a market where the two companies respectively score 15% and 27% of their sales, the Financial Times reported.
The guidance also targets Microsoft Windows and “foreign-made database software.” It directs government agencies and state-owned enterprises (a titanic slice of the Chinese economy) to switch to domestic options, the Financial Times wrote. Analysts with Zheshang Securities further estimated a $91 billion budget will be necessary to pull off the switch by the target date of 2027.
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China’s primary agency for evaluating IT cybersecurity has issued a list of 18 approved alternate chips, which include models from Huawei and Phytium. CNBC reported sales for China’s top 10 equipment manufacturers rose nearly 40% in the first half of 2023 in response to import sanctions, citing CINNO Research data.
“We are replacing old computers that have foreign chips,” Lao Zhangcheng, an official purchasing PCs for the Shaoxing municipal transport agency, told the Financial Times. “After this purchase, basically everyone in the office will have a domestic computer. The old computers we have left with Windows systems can still be used under certain situations.”
India drops AI approval guidelines
India’s Ministry of Electronics and IT has dropped an advisory that urged “significant” tech firms to seek government approval before launching or deploying new AI products in the country.
Deputy IT minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar had characterized the nonbinding advisory, issued in early March, as a prelude to future legislation. The guidance had specified firms should screen for “possible and inherent fallibility or unreliability” in new AI models, as well as ensure they did not discriminate or affect elections.
Following a slew of criticism from high-profile figures in tech, TechCrunch reported, the ministry shared an updated set of guidelines that merely asks firms to include warning labels alongside potentially defective AI models. That resets the status quo closer to mid-2023, when the ministry said AI was a “significant and strategic” sector it had no plans to regulate.