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Ripple Funds UC Berkeley's New Crypto Research Center
Crypto Trends

Ripple Funds UC Berkeley’s New Crypto Research Center

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  • Expanding partnership 
  • Main research goals 

Enterprise blockchain firm Ripple has allocated $1.3 million to fund a new Center for Digital Assets (CDA) within the engineering school of the University of California, Berkeley.

Notably, the funding has been provided in Ripple’s own Ripple USD (RLUSD) stablecoin. 

Expanding partnership 

Ripple’s support for UC Berkeley is not new. The San Francisco-headquartered company has been providing financial assistance for one of California’s top universities since 2018 as part of its University Blockchain Research Initiative (UBRI).

Earlier, however, the company was mainly focused on sponsoring research and student programs, but it is now bringing its support to a whole new level with the new center. 

Notably, Ripple’s engineers will be working directly with CDA, meaning that this can be viewed as a strategic R&D partnership.

Main research goals 

The center’s research will involve advancing the development of blockchain-based assets of the likes of NFTs, creating digital “twins” of physical assets, and coming up with new practical applications of blockchian technology. For instance, blockchain could lead to more efficient inventory management. 



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An image of an experimental cooling solution developed by Microsoft, that uses microfluidics to get coolant directly into the processor's silicon.
Product Reviews

Microsoft is resorting to laser etching AI-designed cooling channels directly into data center chips to tame their massive heat

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Introducing microfluidic cooling: a breakthrough in chip cooling technology – YouTube

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If you think the power consumption of today’s gaming graphics cards is bad, it’s nothing compared to how energy the massive processors in AI and data systems use. All that power ends up as heat, resulting in chip cooling being a serious challenge. Microsoft reckons it has a great solution, though, and it’s all about getting water into the processors themselves.

The most complex direct-die, liquid cooling loops you’ll see in a gaming PC all involve using a chamber that mounts on top of the CPU. At no point does the coolant ever touch the chip directly. In a recently published blog, Microsoft explains how it has developed a system that does precisely that.

By etching the surface of the processor die with an intricate pattern of tiny channels, water can then be pumped directly into the silicon itself, albeit to a very shallow depth.


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The keyword to describe this is microfluidics, a technology that’s been around for many decades, and if the history of consumer tech is anything to go by, it’ll be a phrase plastered across every CPU cooler within a couple of years (though not actually do anything).

This might all just seem like Microsoft is cutting a few grooves into the chip and having water to flow through it, but it’s far more complicated than that. For a start, the channels themselves are no wider than a human hair, and they’re not just simple lines either. Microsoft employed the services of Swiss firm Corintis, which used AI to determine the best pattern for maximum heat transfer.

(Image credit: Microsoft)

The end result is a network of microchannels that genuinely look organic, though at first glance, you’d be forgiven for thinking the complex patterns were just manufacturing defects. It certainly looks super cool (pun very much intended).

Microsoft claims the tech is up to three times more effective at removing heat from a massive AI GPU than a traditional cold plate (aka waterblock), citing a 65% reduction in the maximum temperature rise of the silicon.

Since all the coolant transfer apparatus doesn’t need to be right on top of the microchannels, the system can also be applied to stacked chips, with each one etched before mounting. This way, each die within the stack is cooled individually, meaning they can operate closer to their maximum specifications than with a normal cold plate.

Take AMD’s X3D processors, for example. These all have one stacked chip underneath the heatsink: a Core Complex Die (CCD) bonded to a 3D V-Cache die. Each one acts as a thermal barrier to the other, though the CCD does generate much more heat than the cache die. If these could be both cooled via microfluidics, you’d be able to operate them both at higher clock speeds.

Of course, such complex tech isn’t cheap to develop or implement, and the likelihood of it ever appearing at the consumer level is very slim. But I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody takes an RTX 5090, rips off the heatsink, and swaps it for a homebrewed microfluidic cooler.

There again, if ramping up power consumption is the only way AMD, Intel, and Nvidia can keep improving chip performance, perhaps we might see etched processors and direct-die cooling being standard fare in our gaming PCs. After all, it wasn’t that long ago when heatpipes and vapour chambers were phrases never to be uttered by a PC component manufacturer, but now they’re in coolers of every kind.

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Louisiana Hands Meta a Tax Break and Power for Its Biggest Data Center
Product Reviews

Louisiana Hands Meta a Tax Break and Power for Its Biggest Data Center

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The agreement sets out hiring timelines that the company must also hit to receive these tax incentives: Meta can receive the highest property tax exemption as long as it hires the equivalent of 300 “full-time” jobs by 2030, 450 by 2032, 475 by 2033 and 500 by December 31, 2034.

Louisiana’s agreements ask for more than some other states’ tax subsidies. According to Good Jobs First, nearly half of state tax subsidies for data centers don’t require any new jobs to be created. But Miller has concerns that the tax breaks were not necessary at all to entice a company as large as Meta. “While everyone likes to avoid taxes, they’re not going to hire people in Richland [Parish] just because they’re going to get a tax break,” Miller says.

Louisiana had already amended a tax rebate to create an exemption for data centers in 2024 to entice Meta; in its latest iteration, it says data centers can receive a full sales tax exemption for equipment purchases in the state as long as they hire 50 full-time jobs and invest at least $200 million by July 1, 2029. A separate contract viewed by WIRED affirms that this applies to the Richland Parish data center, in addition to the PILOT agreement.

Good Jobs First says that at least 10 states have subsidies for data centers that are worth more than $100 million each, and “have suffered estimated losses of $100 million each in tax revenue for data centers,” according to its data. In total, these states forgo more than $3 billion in taxes annually for data centers. Texas revised the cost of its data center subsidy in 2025 from $130 million to $1 billion. In 2024, a pause on data center subsidies was passed in Georgia but vetoed by governor Brian Kemp.

The Franklin Farms site in Holly Ridge, the area of Richland Parish where Meta’s data center is being built, was purchased by Louisiana specifically for economic development projects. In its ground lease with Meta, Louisiana offered the 1,400-acre plot to the company for $12 million, which the lease says was the cost to the state of acquiring and maintaining the land. The lease also says Meta’s $732,000 a year “rent” is “credit toward the Base Purchase Price,” meaning the company will have paid for the property by a little over 16 years into its 30-year lease.

The price for the potential sale would be slightly higher if Meta does not reach minimum hiring and investment thresholds: As an example, the lease says if Meta only spends $4 billion in the state instead of $5 billion, the property would end up costing it $19 million. Louisiana Economic Development reserves the right to reclaim the property if Meta doesn’t invest at least $3.75 billion and hire the equivalent of 225 “full-time” jobs by 2028. When asked if Meta plans to purchase the property, Clayton said, “We’ll keep you updated on our future plans for this site.”

Meta’s presence has already caused land values to jump. A nearby tract of 4,000 acres of land in Holly Ridge is for sale for $160 million, or $40,000 per acre—more than 4.5 times the price paid by Louisiana for the data center’s site.

But there’s also a concern that Meta could delay or abandon the data center project. The PILOT agreement its subsidiary signed with the state says the company’s timeline will depend on “numerous factors outside of the control of the lessee, such as market orientation and demand, competition, availability of qualified laborers to construct and/or weather conditions.”

“My general fear is that too many data centers are being built,” Miller says. “That means some of the data centers are just going to be abandoned by the owners.”

She says in the scenario that Big Tech cuts back investments in data centers, Meta would not even be able to find another buyer. “Essentially, the state will be stuck with this warehouse full of computers,” Miller says.

Update: 9/22/2025, 12:50 PM EDT: Wired has clarified the subhead to reflect how critics perceive the data center.



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Chris Tilly
Esports

Find Your Friends review: Female relations take center stage in unsettling survival horror

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Find Your Friends is a survival horror that pits female hedonism against toxic masculinity, before exploding in violent scenes that ask complicated questions of its characters, and the audience.

The feature debut of writer-director Izabel Pakzad, Find Your Friends is like a mash-up of indie darlings Spring Breakers and How to Have Sex, that transforms into a combo of horror classics Deliverance and Revenge.

And while it doesn’t quite reach the dizzy heights of those influences, the movie nevertheless tackles some heavy themes, to do with peer pressure, personal responsibility, and messy female friendship.

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It also features an exciting young cast, playing characters that are more real and three-dimensional than the female folk usually found in this kind of fare.

What is Find Your Friends about?

Welcome to Italy

Find Your Friends revolves around a group of girlfriends vacationing together, and determined to have as much fun as is legally possible, while also sometimes indulging in the illegal.

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Proceedings commence at a yacht party, where the group is dancing, flirting, drinking, discussing dicks, smoking weed, and snorting coke. Making these early scenes feel like an episode of Girls Gone Wild.

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Amber (the superb Helena Howard) isn’t having as good a time as her friends however, as her ex has shown up with a new woman. So she goes extra hard, then somewhat dazed and confused, finds herself below deck with a guy who won’t take no for an answer.

That assault fundamentally – and understandably – changes Amber for the rest of the movie, for while she doesn’t initially tell her friends what has happened, she nevertheless blames them for leaving her alone with such a predator. While she’s also clearly suffering PTSD from the assault.

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For those reasons, the friendship group – which includes modern-day scream queen Bella Thorne – starts to subtly fracture, but they nevertheless plough on with the party, heading to the desert for an EDM gig where more drink and drugs are consumed, and a creepy trio of guys spoil their vibe.

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Amber senses danger, and when her gang doesn’t feel the same, storms off on her own. Which is when Amber’s holiday goes from bad to worse, and Find Your Friends shifts from dark drama to tense survival horror.

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Toxic men and toxic friends

Though while the threat that she – and eventually the rest of the group – is forced to confront turns terrifying, it’s also pretty predictable, and something horror fans have seen in countless similar films.

But what elevates Pazkard’s script is that it isn’t really concerned with awful men doing terrible things, as that’s almost a given in this world. Rather it focuses on decisions our protagonists make that put them in those dangerous situations, then how they react when the trouble starts.

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Because when Amber finally speaks her truth, there’s a disturbing lack of concern, empathy, or support from her nearest and dearest, which is maybe understandable based on her erratic behavior, but also deeply upsetting when we know the pain that she’s in. 

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It’s uncomfortable and upsetting to watch, but also not much of a surprise, as our heroes are girls who are loud, rude, and vulgar, which makes them quite a boring hang. But based on this evidence, they’re simply a product of their environment, surrounded by frat culture and guys who are trying to get them drunk, and high, and into bed.

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So while Find Your Friends works as a perfectly functional horror movie when the survival stuff starts, it’s arguably more interesting before the horror kicks in.

Is Find Your Friends good?

From minute one, Find Your Friends is an assault on the senses, with hand-held style camerawork putting us in the midst of the girls’ hedonistic ways.

Montages of them dancing to electro and talking about sex get a bit repetitive, but they’re in service to a story about what the world expects of these women, versus what they expect of each other and themselves.

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All of which leads to an uncompromising examination of female group dynamics, followed by a more straightforward battle of the sexes.

Find Your Friends score: 3/5

When it’s not leaning into well-worn survival horror tropes, Find Your Friends is a thought-provoking directorial debut from Isabel Pakzad, about how society treats young women, as well as the complicated ways in which they treat each other.

Find Your Friends was reviewed at Fantastic Fest, while the film’s release date is TBD. For more scary stuff, check out our list of the best horror movies ever.

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Product Reviews

NVIDIA throws Intel a $5 billion lifeline to build PC and data center CPUs

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NVIDIA has today announced it will invest $5 billion in Intel as part of a new collaboration between the two companies. In a statement, NVIDIA said it would work with its ailing rival to “jointly develop multiple generations of custom data center and PC products.”

The partnership will focus on marrying NVIDIA’s class-leading GPU and AI chips with Intel’s ailing x86 CPUs. That includes Intel building “NVIDIA-custom x86 CPUs” for integration with the latter company’s AI products.

PC users, meanwhile, should expect to see Intel building and / or selling x86 chips that integrate NVIDIA’s RTX GPU chiplets. It’s not clear if this means the end of Intel’s in-house graphics silicon or if these products will focus on broadening access to NVIDIA’s high-end GPU technology.

The statement includes personal remarks from both NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, who says the deal “tightly couples” Intel’s x86 CPUs with NVIDIA’s AI technology. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, meanwhile, says the deal will combine its CPU know-how, its “process technology, manufacturing and advanced packaging capabilities” with NVIDIA’s.

The partnership is interesting for a wide variety of reasons, including the fact few companies have opted to go with Intel’s foundry business to actually build chips. And that the momentum in the chip space has been pointed away from Intel for several years after several high-profile stumbles.

This breaking news story is developing, please refresh for more information.



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Fee flow in Curve pools used in Yield Basis (CRV Governance Forum)
NFT Gaming

MoneyGram Makes Stablecoins Front and Center of Its Next-Generation App

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MoneyGram, the ubiquitous send and receive cash network for retail customers, has made U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins and blockchain settlement rails the digital backbone of its revamped mobile app, the company said on Wednesday.

Customers in the Latin American country of Colombia, where MoneyGram has an extensive retail network of over 6,000 locations, will be the first to use the new app to receive and store stablecoin payments, with plans to expand to additional markets in the near future.

Colombia is the ideal launch market, says MoneyGram CEO Anthony Soohoo. It’s a major inbound remittance corridor where families receive more than 22 times the money they send abroad, and where the Colombian peso has lost over 40% of its value over the past four years.

When it comes to the advancement of stablecoins, Soohoo compares this to other killer apps such as the humble spreadsheet, which drove adoption in the early PC era, or what the browser did for the Internet, or GPS and mobile phones.

“Stablecoins really are the killer app for crypto and I think we’re just at the dawn of all the possibilities,” Soohoo said in an interview. “Our customers are able to hold and store a currency that is stable and allows for real time settlement. And with the GENIUS Act passed in the US, we now have a framework in terms of how it’s going to be regulated and how we can work with it.”

Under the hood, the new MoneyGram app is powered by Circle’s USDC stablecoin and Stellar, the fast and cheap blockchain, as well as Crossmint, a wallet infrastructure and stablecoin payments platform.

Stepping back, MoneyGram has close to half a million locations where customers can pick up cash or send money, Soohoo said. As a remittance provider, it services over 20,000 corridors around the world. MoneyGram also happens to be the largest cash on and off ramp for crypto, Soohoo added.

“When you talk about global payments there are a lot of companies that may have a presence and a strong brand in one market but when you leave the U.S., or the U.K., for example, no one knows about them,” Soohoo said. “We’ve been around for many years now and our brand is truly global.”



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Regulatory Certainty for Crypto Front and Center on SEC's Agenda
NFT Gaming

Regulatory Certainty for Crypto Front and Center on SEC’s Agenda

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  • “Project Crypto” 
  • Beyond crypto 

According to U.S. Securities and Exchange Chair Paul Atkins, the highly influential regulatory agency will be prioritizing clarity around cryptocurrency regulation.

Under Chair Atkins, the regulator has dropped the controversial “regulation by enforcement” approach that was widely used by former SEC boss Gary Gensler. 

The SEC will address such issues as cryptocurrency offerings and sales, custody rules, as well as trading. 

At the same time, Atkins has stressed that the SEC will have no tolerance for fraud or misconduct. 

“Project Crypto” 

The most recent outline of the SEC’s rulemaking agenda comes after the agency announced its “Project Crypto” initiative back in July. It is meant to create a more welcoming environment for crypto with modern rules. 

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The initiative will focus on such particular issues as classifying cryptocurrency tokens, updating custody rules, embracing decentralized finance, and cross-agency collaboration, among other important priorities. 

Beyond crypto 

Apart from crypto, the agency will also focus on making compliance less burdensome while also democratizing assets to private markets. 

The current rules have to be updated in order to reach a higher level of efficiency. 

The SEC is currently working on scrapping the rules introduced during Genesler’s term that do not align with the vision of the current administration. 



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Jensen Huang, wearing a leather jacket, in front of a screen.
Gaming Gear

Nvidia CEO Says More Advanced AI Models Will Keep Chip, Data Center Growth Going

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AI bubble? What AI bubble? If you ask Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, we’re in a “new industrial revolution.” 

Huang’s company, of course, makes chips and computer hardware, the “picks and shovels” of the AI gold rush, and it’s become the world’s largest business by capitalizing on AI’s growth, bubble or not. Speaking on Wednesday during an earnings call as his company reported revenue of $46.7 billion in the past quarter, he indicated no sign that the incredible growth of the generative artificial intelligence industry will slow.

“I think the next several years, surely through the decade, we see really significant growth opportunities ahead,” Huang said.

Compare that with recent comments from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who said he believes investors right now are “overexcited about AI.” (Altman also acknowledged that he still believes AI is “the most important thing to happen in a very long time.”)

Huang said his company has “very, very significant forecasts” of demand for more of the chips and computers that run AI, indicating the rush for more data centers is not stopping soon. He speculated that AI infrastructure spending could hit $3 trillion to $4 trillion by the end of the decade. (The gross domestic product of the US is around $30 trillion.)

That means a lot of data centers, which take up a lot of land and use a great deal of water and energy. These AI factories have gotten bigger and bigger in recent years, with significant impacts on the communities around them and a greater strain on the US electric grid. And the growth of different generative AI tools that require even more energy could make that demand even greater.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source on Chrome.

More powerful and demanding models

One prompt on a chatbot doesn’t always mean one prompt anymore. A source of increased demand for computational power is that newer AI models that employ “reasoning” techniques are using a lot more power for one question. “It’s called long thinking, and the longer it thinks, oftentimes it produces better answers,” Huang said.

This technique allows an AI model to research on different websites, try a question multiple times to get better answers and put disparate information together into one response. 

Some AI companies offer reasoning as a separate model or as a choice labeled something like “deep thinking.” OpenAI worked it right into its GPT-5 release, with a routing program deciding whether it was handled by a lighter, straightforward model or a more intensive reasoning model.

But a reasoning model can require 100 times the computing power or more than what a traditional large language model response would take, Huang said. These models, along with agentic systems that can perform tasks and robotics models that can handle visualization and operate in the physical world, are keeping demand for chips, energy and data center land on the rise. 

“With each generation, demand only grows,” Huang said.



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