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Employees are forced to move close to large offices or will be fired without compensation

Bloomberg reports Amazon is ordering employees to move closer to larger office buildings (“Hubs”). These larger buildings are located in cities such as Seattle, Arlington (Virginia) or Washington DC. For some employees this will mean to move across the whole country. Officially this is for enhanced efficiencies and employee happiness, additionally CEO expects efficiency gains by AI advancements. On the other hand Amazon has eliminated 27,000 positions since 2022. "Telling workers to relocate will likely prompt some to quit, which can be a less expensive way to reduce headcount than executing layoffs and paying severance packages." writes Bloomberg.

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Amazon renews deal to buy 1.92 GW nuclear power

The retail and data center giant has renewed a deal to buy nuclear power for its data centers in Pennsylvania. The original contract dates back to last year, but was overturned by regulators when Amazon tried to avoid paying fees to support the public power grid.

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Carbon emission grew 182% from 2020-2023 - Amazon with the largest growth

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The logo of the organization who published the report

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) published a report showing that major cloud providers have massively increased their emissions. Amazon's operational carbon emissions grew the most at 182% in 2023 compared to three years before, followed by Microsoft at 155%, Meta at 145% and Alphabet at 138%. Interestingly, Amazon claims it is running on 100% clean energy. Reuters reported first.

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Local voice processing to be removed from Alexa

An Amazon Alexa voice assistant on a table. It is a round speaker with some buttons.

Amazon announced to remove the capability of its Alexa devices to do local voice recognition from its (your) devices. Now all speech recordings will be sent to the cloud, but at least Amazon won't store them. It has hinted this is because of new “AI” features under the name “Alexa+” in the future. In the past Amazon has passed voice recordings of its customers to the police as evidence, and let workers around the word transcribe recordings to “improve Alexa's performance”.

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