East West Bancorp Plans Expansion, Not Branch Closings

On Tuesday, OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX announced plans to form Stargate, a new company that will invest $500 billion in AI computing infrastructure across the United States over four years. The announcement came during a White House meeting with President Donald Trump, who called it the "largest AI infrastructure project in history." The goal is to kickstart building more data centers to expand computing capacity for current and future AI projects, including OpenAI's goal of "AGI," which the company defines as a highly autonomous AI system that "outperforms humans at most economically valuable work." "This infrastructure will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world," wrote OpenAI in a press statement.

We’re only three weeks into 2025, and it’s already shaping up to be the year of Internet of Things-driven DDoSes. Reports are rolling in of threat actors infecting thousands of home and office routers, web cameras, and other Internet-connected devices. Here is a sampling of research released since the first of the year. Lax security, ample bandwidth A post on Tuesday from content-delivery network Cloudflare reported on a recent distributed denial-of-service attack that delivered 5.6 terabits per second of junk traffic—a new record for the largest DDoS ever reported.

The self-declared "pro-crypto president" Donald Trump pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht on Tuesday. Ulbricht, 40, was about 10 years into his life sentence for helming an online black market where drug dealers, money launderers, and traffickers used bitcoins to mask more than $214 million in illicit trades. (Ars thoroughly documented the Silk Road saga here.) Trump had pledged at the Libertarian National Convention to set Ulbricht free while on the campaign trail, agreeing with supporters who believe that Ulbricht's long sentence was a harsh example of government overreach.

Google is making a fresh investment of more than $1 billion into OpenAI rival Anthropic, boosting its position in the start-up as Silicon Valley titans rush to develop cutting-edge artificial intelligence systems. The Alphabet-owned search behemoth had already committed about $2 billion to Anthropic and was now increasing its stake in the group, according to four people with knowledge of the situation. Anthropic, best known for its Claude family of AI models, is one of the leading start-ups in the new wave of generative AI companies building tools to generate text, images, and code in response to user prompts.

It's Brendon McCullum's first white-ball series as England coach.

After literal years of speculation and leaks, it was nice to get an actual glimpse of the Switch 2 hardware (and its increased size) last week. But even with the console officially "revealed," there's still a wide range of important unknown Switch 2 details that Nintendo has yet to address. As we wait for the company to dribble out additional information in the coming weeks and months, we thought we'd take a quick look at the biggest outstanding questions and concerns we still have about Nintendo's next gaming platform, along with some analysis of what we know, what we can guess, and what we expect on each score. Launch date? The teaser trailer's promise of a "2025" Switch 2 release technically covers any launch date between "tomorrow" and December 31.