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Law enforcement this week turned the tables on LockBit, one of the most notorious ransomware gangs, locking the hackers out of their own servers and locking up at least two of their members. Operation Cronos, the coordinated international effort to bring down the gang, is already reaping benefits for some of the victims locked out of their own IT systems.

The UK's National Crime Agency, FBI and Europol have obtained over 1,000 decryption keys and are in the process of contacting companies to help them recover encrypted data.

Read on to learn more about this story and the week's most important technology news impacting business.

A 2014 water leak in a Mumbai apartment complex was the unlikely catalyst for the development of AI-powered software, robotics, and IoT technology that today monitors over 400 million gallons (1.5B liters) of urban wastewater spills and enables the treatment and reuse of 200+ million gallons (800M liters) of water daily across seven countries, including the U.S. The same technology is detecting water-borne diseases, as an indicator of drinking water contamination caused by untreated wastewater, everywhere from Singapore to San Francisco, helping to safeguard the health of over 17.5 million people.
Fluid Analytics was named the winner of the Zero Water Waste 2024 competition for its work in helping global freshwater conservation at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos. The company is a part of the Forum’s UpLink program, an initiative launched in partnership with Deloitte and Salesforce focused on building an innovation ecosystem that supports early-stage start-ups to scale by connecting them to resources, experts, and funding.

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Aily Labs has developed a mobile-first AI decision intelligence app to help corporates become AI-enabled companies at scale. The aim is to help employees make smarter on-the-spot decisions. The Munich-based startup's client portfolio includes global pharma and biotech companies and it is currently expanding to include fast-moving consumer goods and services businesses.

Sara Bisbe, Aily Labs Chief AI Tech Officer, will take part in a fireside chat moderated by The Innovator’s Editor-in-Chief at 4YFN, a conference focusing on startup innovation taking place during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona February 26 to 29.

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Current valuation of chip maker Nvidia, which dominates the market for GPUs, or graphics processing units. These chips are the key to training the large language models that underpin generative AI.

Nvidia’s valuation has nearly doubled since the start of the year, turning it into one of the world’s most valuable public companies. "Accelerated computing and generative AI have hit the tipping point,” Jensen Huang, Nvidia's co-founder and chief executive said in a news release. “Demand is surging worldwide across companies, industries and nations.”

Much of the current demand for GenAI chips is coming from enterprise software companies either directly for those building on-premise processing, or indirectly via Cloud companies that provide the software companies with GenAI processing services, according to Deloitte's Global Semiconductor Industry Outlook 2024. These companies may plan on including GenAI features and services inside their existing or new software offerings and hope to charge for those features. Deloitte predicts this will provide a $10 billion revenue uplift in enterprise software revenues by the end of 2024. Should corporates be unwilling to pay a premium for GenAI services, or even be slow about doing so, the software companies could abruptly reduce their orders for GenAI processing.