Micron reveals AI companies are spending billions to lock up its memory years in advance by Karthik Mudaliar The demand for more memory is far from over, and Micron is turning the AI-driven memory shortage into a much more predictable business. The company has revealed that it has signed 16 strategic supply agreements backed by roughly $22 billion in customer deposits and other financial commitments. The contracts cover DRAM and NAND deliveries over several years, with some running through 2030. With the AI boom, demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) has grown so quickly that large customers are now prepared to help finance future production in exchange for a guaranteed supply. According to Micron’s latest financial results, the company received commitments worth about $22 billion across its new agreements. Around $18 billion is expected to arrive as cash deposits, while the rest will come through other financial arrangements. Micron says the agreements could generate approximately $100 billion in future contracted obligations. They cover around 20% of its expected DRAM shipments and one-third of its NAND shipments during their respective terms. It should be noted that although AI infrastructure is the main force behind the current shortage, not all 16 agreements with Micron involve AI companies. Micron said the customers also include consumer electronics and automotive businesses, two sectors that increasingly compete with data centers for the same manufacturing capacity. HBM is consuming an increasing share of that supply. Unlike conventional desktop or server RAM, HBM stacks multiple memory dies vertically and places them close to an AI accelerator. This gives GPUs and other AI chips access to data at much higher speeds, but it also requires more complicated manufacturing and packaging. Micron says its 12-layer HBM4 memory is now shipping in high volume for a lead customer, with samples also supplied to other companies. The chipmaker has already generated more than $1 billion in HBM4 revenue and says the product is ramping twice as quickly as its earlier HBM3E generation. Samsung has similarly warned that the memory shortage could continue into 2027 and beyond. Consumer memory companies have also had to address sharp increases in DDR5 pricing, suggesting the effects are already reaching beyond the data center. For consumers, that could mean the AI memory crunch lasts longer than expected, even as manufacturers invest heavily in new production.

XnConvert 1.112 by Razvan Serea  XnConvert is a cross-platform batch image-converter and resizer with a powerful and ease of use experience. All common picture and graphics formats are supported (i.e. JPG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, Camera RAW, JPEG2000, WebP, OpenEXR) as well as supporting over 500 other image formats. Also available within the batch operations include rotating, adding of watermarks, adding of text along with many image-adjustment features such as brightness, shadows and more. Among the features included are: Batch adding of files and folders Support for drag and drop of files Batch rotating, cropping, resizing and more Adding of photo masks Preserving or removing image metadata in conversions Multipage image file support (i.e animated GIF, APNG, TIFF) Command line integration via NConvert Filters - such as 'Blur', 'Gaussian Blur', 'Emboss', "Sharpen' and much more Effects - such as 'Old camera' and much more Download: XnConvert 64-bit | Standalone | ~30.0 MB (Freeware) Download: XnConvert 32-bit | Standalone Links: XnConvert Website | Screenshot | Release Announcement Get alerted to all of our Software updates on Twitter at @NeowinSoftware

Microsoft updates Visual Studio Code with chat cost tracking and multi-agent chats by Paul Hill Microsoft has just launched Visual Studio Code 1.126, its latest weekly release. This time, the company has focused on letting you see the total cost of chat sessions to spot expensive conversations; enabling multiple chats per session that run side-by-side in one agent host Copilot session; and letting you browse new folders safely in restricted mode. We have now reached the stage where free AI in IDEs is coming to an end. To help you keep track of your costs, VS Code now lets you see the entire cost of a chat session, rather than just individual turns. This should give you more transparency about which sessions consume the most credits, so you can better manage your usage over time and spend less. For those of you using the Agents window, you know it is possible to run and manage multiple agent sessions at once. In this update, a Copilot session started from an agent host can hold several chats at once. Explaining how this feature works, Microsoft writes: Finally, from this update forward, Microsoft will remove the pop-up when opening an untrusted folder. When you open a new folder now, it will automatically open in Restricted Mode. You will see a banner that lets you manage the trust level of the folder. Microsoft has made this change so that it’s easier to start inspecting code without giving it trust right away. If you have VS Code, you can check for updates within the app now to get this new version. Otherwise, you can download it from the Visual Studio Code website.

Anthropic accuses Alibaba of using 25,000 fake accounts to copy Claude's capabilities by Karthik Mudaliar Anthropic has accused Alibaba of using nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts to extract capabilities from Claude on a huge scale. According to a report from Reuters, Anthropic told US lawmakers that operators linked to Alibaba and the company’s Qwen AI team generated 28.8 million exchanges with Claude between April 22 and June 5, 2026. That is a lot of Claude conversations, but Anthropic says this was not ordinary chatbot use. The company believes the accounts were part of a coordinated effort to collect answers that could help train or improve rival AI systems. The alleged campaign reportedly focused on some of Claude’s most valuable skills, including software development, multi-step reasoning, and agentic tasks. In practical terms, that means getting an AI model to plan and complete work across several stages rather than simply answering a single question. This is called 'distillation,' where AI companies use outputs from a larger model to train a smaller and cheaper one. The smaller model learns to imitate useful parts of the more capable system without needing the same amount of computing power. The distillation process isn't automatically suspicious, but the problem comes when one company gathers another provider's outputs without permission and at an industrial scale. Also, this does not mean Alibaba obtained Claude’s source code, model weights, or original training data. Instead, Anthropic claims the accounts repeatedly asked Claude carefully designed questions and collected the answers. Those answers could then be used as training material for another model. Anthropic has made similar accusations against DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax earlier this year. As Neowin previously reported, Anthropic said those three companies collectively generated more than 16 million Claude exchanges through roughly 24,000 accounts. Anthropic says the new campaign produced almost twice as many exchanges in a matter of weeks. Anthropic reportedly told lawmakers that the campaign could help Chinese AI developers approach the capabilities of its Mythos Preview model. Mythos is focused on advanced cybersecurity work, including finding and exploiting complex software vulnerabilities. via Reuters | Photo via DepositPhotos.com