TOPIC: NOKIA
AI infrastructure under pressure: Outages, power demands and the race for resilience
1st November 2025The past few weeks brought a clear message from across the AI landscape: adoption is racing ahead, while the underlying infrastructure is working hard to keep up. A pair of major cloud outages in October offered a stark stress test, exposing just how deeply AI has become woven into daily services.
At the same time, there were significant shifts in hardware strategy, a wave of new tools for developers and creators and a changing playbook for how information is found online. There is progress on resilience and efficiency, yet the system is still bending under demand. Understanding where it held, where it creaked and where it is being reinforced sets the scene for what comes next.
Infrastructure Stress and Outages
The outages dominated early discussion. An AWS incident that lasted around 15 hours and disrupted more than a thousand services was followed nine days later by a global Azure failure. Each cascaded across systems that depend on them, illustrating how AI now amplifies the consequences of platform problems.
This was less about a single point of failure and more about the growing blast radius when connected services falter. The effect on productivity was visible too: a separate 10-hour ChatGPT downtime showed how fast outages of core AI tools now translate into lost work time.
Power Demand and Grid Strain
Behind the headlines sits a larger story about electricity, grids and planning. Data centres accounted for roughly 4% of US electricity use in 2024, about 183 TWh and the International Energy Agency projects around 945 TWh by 2030, with AI as a principal driver.
The averages conceal stark local effects. Wholesale prices near dense clusters have spiked by as much as 267% at times, household bills are rising by about $16–$18 per month in affected areas and capacity prices in the PJM market jumped from $28.92 per megawatt to $329.17. The US grid faces an upgrade bill of about $720 billion by 2030, yet permitting and build timelines are long, creating a bottleneck just as demand accelerates.
Technical Grid Issues
Technical realities on the grid add another layer of challenge. Fast load swings from AI clusters, harmonic distortions and degraded power quality are no longer theoretical concerns. A Virginia incident in which 60 data centres disconnected simultaneously did not trigger a collapse but did reveal the fragility introduced by concentrated high-performance compute.
Security and New Failure Modes
Security risks are evolving in parallel. Agentic systems that can plan, reason and call tools open new failure modes. AI-enabled spear phishing appears to be 350% more effective than traditional attempts and could be 50 times more profitable, a worrying backdrop when outages already have a clear link to lost productivity.
Security considerations now reach into the tools people use to access AI as well. New AI browsers attract attention, and with that comes scrutiny. OpenAI's Atlas and Perplexity's Comet launched with promising features, yet researchers flagged critical issues.
Comet is vulnerable to "CometJacking", a malicious URL hijack that enables data theft, while Atlas suffered a cross-site request forgery weakness that allowed persistent code injection into ChatGPT memory. Both products have been noted for assertive data collection.
Caution and good hygiene are prudent until the fixes and policies settle. It is a reminder that the convenience of integrating models directly into browsing comes with a new attack surface.
Efficiency and Mitigation Strategies
Industry responses are gathering pace. Efficiency remains the first lever. Hyperscalers now report power usage effectiveness around 1.08 to 1.09, compared with more typical figures of 1.5 to 1.6. Direct chip cooling can cut energy needs by up to 40%.
Grid-interactive operations and more work at the edge offer ways to smooth demand and reduce concentration risk, while new power partnerships hint at longer-term change. Microsoft's agreement with Constellation on nuclear power is one example of how compute providers are thinking beyond incremental efficiency gains.
An emerging pattern is becoming visible through these efforts. Proactive regional planning and rapid efficiency improvements could allow computational output to grow by an order of magnitude, while power use merely doubles. More distributed architectures are being explored to reduce the hazard of over-concentration.
A realistic outlook sets data centres at around 3% of global electricity use by 2030, which is notable but still smaller than anticipated growth from electric vehicles or air conditioning. If the $720 billion in grid investment materialises, it could add around 120 GW of capacity by 2030, as much as half of which would be absorbed by data centres. The resilience gap is real, but it appears to be narrowing, provided the sector moves quickly to apply lessons from each failure.
Regional and Policy Responses
Regional policies are starting to encourage resilience too. Oregon's POWER Act asks operators to contribute to grid robustness, Singapore's tight focus on efficiency has delivered around a 30% power reduction even as capacity expands and a moratorium in Dublin has pushed growth into more distributed build-outs. On the U.S. federal government side, the Department of Homeland Security updated frameworks after a 2024 watchdog warning, with AI risk programmes now in place for 15 of the 16 critical infrastructure sectors.
Hardware Competition and Strategy
Competition is sharpening. Anthropic deepened its partnership with Google Cloud to train on TPUs, a move that challenges Nvidia's dominance and signals a broader rebalancing in AI hardware. Nvidia's chief executive has acknowledged TPUs as robust competition.
Another fresh entry came from Extropic, which unveiled thermodynamic sampling units, a probabilistic chip design that claims up to 10,000-fold lower energy use than GPUs for AI workloads. Development kits are shipping and a Z-1 chip is planned for next year, yet as with any radical architecture, proof at scale will take time.
Nvidia, meanwhile, presented an ambitious outlook, targeting $500 billion in chip revenue by 2026 through its Blackwell and Rubin lines. The US Department of Energy plans seven supercomputers comprising more than 100,000 Blackwell GPUs and the company announced partnerships spanning pharmaceuticals, industrials and consumer platforms.
A $1 billion investment in Nokia hints at the importance of AI-centric networks. New open-source models and datasets accompanied the announcements, and the company's share price surged to a record.
Corporate Restructuring
Corporate strategy and hardware choices also entered a new phase. OpenAI completed its restructuring into a public benefit corporation, with a rebranded OpenAI Foundation holding around $130 billion in equity and allocating $25 billion to health and AI resilience. Microsoft's stake now sits at about 27% and is worth roughly $135 billion, with technology rights retained through 2032. Both parties have scope to work with other partners. OpenAI committed around $250 billion to Azure yet retains the ability to use other compute providers. An independent panel will verify claims of artificial general intelligence, an unusual governance step that will be watched closely.
Search and Discovery Evolution
Away from infrastructure, the way audiences find and trust information is shifting. Search is moving from the old aim of ranking for clicks to answer engine optimisation, where the goal is to be quoted by systems such as ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity.
The numbers explain why. Google handled more than five trillion queries in 2024, while generative platforms now process around 37.5 million prompt-like searches per day. Google's AI Overviews, which surface summary answers above organic results, have reshaped click behaviour.
Independent analyses report top-ranking pages seeing click-through rates fall by roughly a third where Overviews appear, with some keywords faring worse, and a Pew study finds overall clicks on such results dropping from 15% to 8%. Zero-click searches rose from around 56% to 69% between May 2024 and May 2025.
Chegg's non-subscriber traffic fell by 49% in this period, part of an ongoing dispute with Google. Google counters that total engagement in covered queries has risen by about 10%. Whichever way that one reads the data, the direction is clear: visibility is less about rank position and more about being cited by a summarising engine.
In practice, that means structuring content, so a model can parse, trust and attribute it. Clear Q&A-style sections with direct answers, followed by context and cited evidence, help models extract usable statements. Schema markup for FAQs and how-to content improves machine readability.
Measuring success also changes. Traditional analytics rarely show when an LLM quotes a source, so teams are turning to tools that track citations in AI outputs and tying those to conversion quality, branded search volume and more in-depth engagement with pricing or documentation. It is not a replacement for SEO so much as a layer that reinforces it in an AI-first environment.
Developer Tools and Agentic Workflows
On the tools front, developers saw an acceleration in agent-centred workflows. Cursor launched its first in-house coding model, Composer, which aims for near-frontier quality while generating code around four times faster, often in under 30 seconds.
The broader Cursor 2.0 update added multi-agent capabilities, with as many as eight assistants able to work in parallel, alongside browsing, a test browser and voice controls. The direction of travel is away from single-shot completions and towards orchestration and review. Tutorials are following suit, demonstrating how to scaffold tasks such as a Next.js to-do application using planning files, parallel agent tasks and quick integration, with voice prompts in the loop.
Open-source and enterprise ecosystems continue to expand. GitHub introduced Agent HQ for coordinating coding agents, Google released Pomelli to generate marketing campaigns and IBM's Granite 4.0 Nano models brought larger on-device options in the 350 million to 1.5 billion parameter range.
FlowithOS reported strong scores on agentic web tasks, while Mozilla announced an open speech dataset initiative, and Kilo Code, Hailuo 2.3 and other projects broadened choice across coding and video. Grammarly rebranded as Superhuman, adding "Superhuman Go" agents to speed up writing tasks.
Creative Tools and Partnerships
Creative workflows are evolving quickly, too. Adobe used its MAX event to add AI assistants to Photoshop and Express, previewed an agent called Project Moonlight, and upgraded Firefly with conversational "Prompt to Edit" controls, custom image models and new video features including soundtracks and voiceovers. Partnerships mean Gemini, Veo and Imagen will sit inside Adobe tools, and Premiere's editing capabilities now extend to YouTube Shorts.
Figma acquired Weavy and rebranded it as Figma Weave for richer creative collaboration, and Canva unveiled its own foundation "Design Model" alongside a Creative Operating System meant to produce fully editable, AI-generated designs. New Canva features take in a revised video suite, forms, data connectors, email design, a 3D generator and an ad creation and performance tool called Grow, while Affinity is relaunching as a free, integrated professional app. Other entrants are trying to blend model strengths: one agent was trailed with Sora 2 clip stitching, Veo 3.1 visuals and multimodel blending for faster design output.
Music rights and AI found a new footing. Universal Music Group settled a lawsuit with Udio, the AI music generator, and the two will form a joint venture to launch a licensed platform in 2026. Artists who opt in will be paid both for training models on their catalogues and for remixes. Udio disabled song downloads following the deal, which annoyed some users, and UMG also announced a "responsible AI" alliance with Stability AI to build tools for artists. These arrangements suggest a path towards sanctioned use of style and catalogue, with compensation built in from the start.
Research and Introspection
Research and science updates added depth. Anthropic reported that its Claude system shows limited introspection, detecting planted concepts only about 20% of the time, separating injected "thoughts" from text and modulating its internal focus. That highlights both the promise and limits of transparency techniques, and the potential for models to conceal or fail to surface certain internal states.
UC Berkeley researchers demonstrated an AI-driven load balancing algorithm with around 30% efficiency improvements, a result that could ripple through cloud performance. IBM ran quantum algorithms on AMD FPGAs, pointing to progress in hybrid quantum-classical systems.
OpenAI launched an AI-integrated web browser positioned as a challenger to incumbents, Perplexity released a natural-language patents search and OpenAI's Aardvark, a GPT-5-based security agent, entered private beta.
Anthropic opened a Tokyo office and signed a cooperation pact with Japan's AI Safety Institute. Tether released QVAC Genesis I, a large open STEM dataset of more than one million data points and a local workbench app aimed at making development more private and less dependent on big platforms.
Age Restrictions and Policy
Meanwhile, policy considerations are reaching consumer platforms. Character AI will restrict users under 18 from open-ended chatbot conversations from late November, replacing them with creative tools and adding behaviour-based age detection, a response to pressure and proposals such as the GUARD Act.
Takeaways
Put together, the picture is one of rapid interdependence and swift correction. The infrastructure is not breaking, but it is being stretched, and recent failures have usefully mapped the weak points. If the sector continues to learn quickly from its own missteps, the resilience gap will continue to narrow, and the next round of outages will be less disruptive than the last.
Investment is flowing into grids and cooling, policy is nudging towards resilience, and compute providers are hedging hardware bets by searching for efficiency and supply assurance. On the application layer, agents are becoming a primary interface for work, creative tools are converging around editability and control, and discovery is shifting towards being quoted by machines rather than clicked by humans.
Security lapses at the interface are a reminder that novelty often arrives before maturity. The most likely path from here is uneven but forward: data centre power may rise, yet efficiency and distribution can blunt the impact; answer engines may compress clicks, yet they can send higher intent visitors to clear, well-structured sources; hardware competition may fragment the stack, yet it can also reduce concentration risk.
A new phone
4th February 2012After a few years with a straightforward Nokia 1661 and a PAYG Blackberry 8520, I decided to go and upgrade from the former to an HTC Wildfire S. So far, the new phone has been good to me with only a few drawbacks. Other than working out how to insert a SIM card, the phone has been easy to use with just a few nuances to learn, such as finger pinch zooming and dealing with an onscreen keyboard as opposed to a real one.
The touchscreen and 3G connectivity are major upgrades from my Blackberry, making web browsing much faster, especially on the larger screen. Checking Google Reader and emails on the go is quicker, with the screen responding well most of the time. It does get dirty, so using a screen protector or regularly cleaning with a lens cloth is advisable. As it happens, I'm still adjusting to the onscreen keyboard, which remains the one area where the Blackberry remains superior. Rotating the phone sideways helps by enlarging the keys, reducing typing errors even for my average-sized fingers. Switching between alphabetic, numeric, and punctuation keyboards still takes some getting used to.
Otherwise, the user interface is bright and pleasing to the eye, with the typical presentation of both a clock and current weather on there. Handily, the screen is locked easily too with a press of the button at the top right of the phone. That will put a stop to inadvertent phone calls, emailing, web browsing and other things, so it is to be commended. To unlock the screen, all that's needed is to swipe the lock bar to the bottom. Any alerts are viewed similarly with holding down your finger on the top bar presenting an extension that can be pulled all the way down to see what's there.
The Android Marketplace icon on the home screen lets me easily add apps with automatic updates, though this requires monitoring data usage on your phone plan. The WordPress app works better than on my Blackberry, but UberSocial's retweeting function is worse on Android. It displays all account feeds on one screen and requires swiping for actions like replying or retweeting, which I find awkward. I might try an alternative app. I've downloaded several others, including CrossCountry Trains' app (which is good, despite failing to find Macclesfield-Edale Sunday trains) and LinkedIn (which works well). You can move apps to the microSD card to save internal storage space, though I don't plan to install many.
The Wildfire performs well at its core function: making and receiving calls. It imported contacts from my SIM card, though Bluetooth transfer from an old phone is also possible. Call sound quality is clear and loud. The side rocker button adjusts speaker volume during calls and ringtone volume otherwise. By default, the phone vibrates and rings simultaneously for incoming calls, which I may change later. The same applies to notification sounds for text messages, emails, and tweets.
Battery life is this phone's main weakness. It needs charging every night, unlike my previous phones. The bright, responsive screen likely causes this drain. Many users report similar issues online, with some experiencing even worse battery performance. While there are tips for extending battery life, they involve disabling key features like 3G or data connectivity, which defeats the purpose of having a smartphone. Thus, I'm considering buying a spare battery, as I did for my Pentax DSLR. Some users recommend higher-capacity replacement batteries, though this seems riskier.
All in all, first impressions of the HTC Wildfire are good ones. Over time, I should find out more about the ins and outs of the gadget. After all, it is a mini-computer with its own operating system and other software. Since I continue to learn more and more about PC's every day, the same should be the case here too.
Changing the earpiece volume on a Nokia 1661
15th November 2010Since the Nokia 1661 is an entry-level phone, you'd have thought that they'd have made it obvious how to change the earpiece volume on the thing. However, it turns out to be something for which you do need to consult its manual, and it's not as user-friendly as it could be either. Seemingly, the earpiece volume only can be adjusted while you're already on a phone call: you need to use the scroll key (push in left and right sides as needed) that could be right up against your face at the time!
My way around this is to phone the speaking clock (123 in the U.K.) and adjust the earpiece while that call is in progress. Then, you're set for future conversations with real people. Well, anything's better than not being able to hear the other person due to background noise, and my Nokia 1661 came with its volume set rather too low for me if I recall correctly. While I can appreciate the need to look after your hearing, you do need to have coherent phone conversations too.
A new phone
7th August 2009
For someone with a more than passing interest in technology, it may come as a surprise to you to learn that mobile telephony isn't one of my strong points at all. That's all the more marked when you cast your eye back over the developments in mobile telephone technology recently. Admittedly, until I subscribed to RSS feeds from the likes of TechRadar, the computing side of the area didn't pass my way very much at all. That act has alerted me to the now unmissable fact that mobile phones have become portable small computers, regardless of whether it is an offering from Apple or not. After the last few years, no one can say that things haven't got fascinating.
In contrast to all the excitement, I only got my first phone in 2000 and stuck with it since, and that was despite its scuffs and scratches along with its battery life troubles. Part of the reason for this is a certain blindness induced by having the thing on a monthly contract. As that is not sufficient to hide away the option of buying a phone on its own, then there's the whole pay-as-you-go arena too. The level of choice is such that packages such as those mentioned gain more prominence and potentially stop things in their tracks, but I surmounted the perceived obstacles to buy a Nokia 1661 online from the Carphone Warehouse and collect it from the nearest store. The new replacement for my old Motorola is nothing flashy. While other phones may have nice stuff like an on-board camera or web access, I went down the route of sticking with basic functionality, albeit in a modern package with a colour screen. Still, for around £35, I got something that adds niceties like an alarm clock and a radio to the more bread and butter operations like making and taking phone calls and text messaging. Though pay-as-you-go may have got me the phone for less, I didn't need a new phone number since I planned to slot in my old SIM card anyway; incidentally, the latter operation was a doddle once I got my brain into gear.
Now that I have replaced my mobile handset like I would for my land-line phone, I am left wondering why I dallied over the task for as long as I have. It may be that the combination of massive choice and a myriad of packages that didn't appeal to me stalled things. With an increased awareness of the technology and options like buying a SIM card on its own, I can buy with a little more confidence now. Though those fancier phones may tempt, I'll be treating them as a nice to have rather than essential purchases. Saying all of this, the old handset isn't going into the bin just yet, though. While it may be worn and worthless, its tri-band capabilities (I cannot vouch for the Nokia on this front) may make it a useful back-up for international travel. The upgrade has given me added confidence for trying again when needs must, but there is no rush and that probability of my developing an enthusiasm for fancy handsets is no higher.