TNB Tech Minute: Amazon Invests Billions in Australian Data Centers - Tech News Briefing

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Victoria Craig : Here's your TNB Tech Minute for Monday, June 16th. I'm Victoria Craig for the Wall Street Journal. Amazon said it will allocate $13 billion to expand its data center infrastructure in Australia as it looks to meet the boom in global demand for AI computing. The tech titan said the investment, which is the biggest publicly-announced investment from a global tech provider, will strengthen the nation's cloud computing and AI capabilities. To support the expansion, amazon said it's also investing in three new solar farms. Elsewhere, Southwest Airlines is adding a new cockpit alert system to help pilots avoid dangerous situations. The system designed by Honeywell delivers verbal warnings and text alarms if a pilot is about to use the wrong runway or takeoff from or land on a taxiway. Those alerts are similar to car warning systems that detect other cars in blind spots or alert a driver if they're about to back into another car. The new system comes after carriers navigated close calls at US airports in recent years. And finally, crypto billionaire, Justin Sun will take his Tron Group public through a reverse merger with a small Nasdaq-listed toy company. SRM Entertainment will be renamed Tron and Sun has been named an advisor to the company. Today's announcement comes after Sun attended a dinner last month with President Trump, a gala thrown for the biggest shareholders of his meme coin. A few months ago, as part of a broader rollback of crypto enforcement under the Trump administration, the SEC asked the court to pause a fraud lawsuit against Sun and three of his companies. He faced charges that accused him of manipulating the market for Tron's TRX Token. Sun has called the lawsuit meritless. For a deeper dive into what's happening in tech, check out Tuesday's Tech News Briefing podcast.

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