Tackling a housing crisis partly enabled by tech. Alphabet Inc.’s Google said it would commit $1 billion to boost housing construction in the San Francisco Bay Area, a region that has led the nation in home prices for the past two decades, the WSJ reports. Google will also create a $250 million fund for loans and other types of financing.
Industry takes note. In January, a group of Bay Area companies and philanthropists including Facebook Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg raised $260 million to help build at least 8,000 homes in the region. A separate fund seeded by LinkedIn, the Cisco Foundation and other tech philanthropists has raised $62 million. In the Seattle area, Microsoft Corp. in January pledged $500 million to support affordable housing. Amazon.com Inc. said it would put $3 million toward affordable-housing initiatives in Arlington, Va., the site of its planned new headquarters.
Amazon rents more jets to expand next-day delivery. The company said Tuesday that it would rent 15 Boeing Co. 737-800 jets converted to carry cargo, the WSJ reports. This is in addition to five it is already leasing, and a fleet of 40 larger planes it uses to ship packages around the U.S. Amazon expects to have a rented fleet of about 70 planes by 2021.
Top 10 supercomputer list unchanged. In Top500's annual list of best performing supercomputers, Summit at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and Sierra at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California continue to hold the top two spots, delivering 148.6 and 94.6 petaflops respectively. Following the U.S. machines, both IBM Corp.-built, is the 93.0 petaflop Sunway TaihuLight, installed at China's National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi.
Meetings missed, civilization continues. Google calendar experienced a global outage Tuesday, Reuters reports.
Apple considers China move. The company is asking suppliers to price out the cost of moving some of their production capacity outside of China, says Reuters, quoting a report from Nikkei Asian Review. Last week Foxconn Technology Group said it is ready to shift production if necessary.
Internet in Ethiopia restored after week-long shutdown. The restrictions may have been enacted to prevent cheating by high school students sitting for final exams, CNN reports.
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