In the desert outside Zhongwei, in the northwestern region of Ningxia, four dedicated power lines now run from a field of solar panels to a cluster of computers.

They do not pass through the public grid. That detail, dull as it sounds, is the whole point.

China is encouraging its sprawling data centre industry to plug directly into wind and solar generation, rather than draw power off a grid still heavily fed by coal. The push is part policy, part demonstration.

Beijing’s 2026 government work report named tighter integration between computing infrastructure and electricity supply as a priority, and a national green-data-centre plan now requires new projects in the country’s designated computing hubs to source most of their power from clean sources.

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The Zhongwei plant is the project everyone points to. China Datang Corp commissioned a 500-megawatt solar farm there, describing it as the country’s first large-scale green-power project built to supply a data centre cluster directly.

It entered formal operation in early May, after green-power direct supply began in February, according to Chinese state media.

What makes it unusual is the delivery. The site uses what Datang calls a dual-track structure: four dedicated 110-kilovolt lines carry electricity straight to the computing facilities, with additional demand covered through bilateral market trades.

Solar output is prioritised during the day, wind is expected to cover the evenings, and storage smooths the gaps.

The solar plant alone should generate around 970 gigawatt-hours a year, roughly half the cloud base’s projected demand.

The numbers grow once the wind component arrives. The 500MW solar array is the first slice of a 2-gigawatt first phase that pairs it with a 1.5GW wind farm and storage, at a planned cost of about 8.7 billion yuan, or some $1.27bn.

The wind build is still under construction, scheduled for full grid connection in September.

Once phase one is complete, annual generation is expected to reach 4.3 terawatt-hours, more than the cloud base’s forecast consumption of 2.29 terawatt-hours. A second phase would push the total to 4.6GW.

The logic sits inside China’s “east data, west computing” strategy, which steers energy-hungry processing toward western regions where wind and solar are plentiful and land is cheap. Demand is the pressure behind all of it.

AI has driven an explosion in computing capacity, and with it electricity use, at exactly the moment Beijing is trying to hit peak carbon emissions by 2030.

The ambition is steep. Authorities want renewables to supply roughly four-fifths of the AI data-centre sector’s power by 2030, up from around a tenth in 2023.

The gap between a single working project in the desert and that national target is the part the policy has not yet closed.

Curtailment, grid bottlenecks, and the intermittency of wind and solar remain real, and China’s green-power goals for AI have already run into the grid before.

For now, Zhongwei is the test case. If desert wind and sun can be matched to digital load without leaning on the conventional grid, the model travels. If they cannot, it stays a handsome demonstration in Ningxia.

The wind turbines are due in September, that is when the figures stop being projections.

LEGAL

Preliminary position calls for designation under the Digital Markets Act

The European Commission has reached the preliminary position that Azure and AWS should be designated as gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

The gatekeeper designation would mean requirements imposed on the cloud giants, with fines of up to 10 percent of worldwide turnover if those requirements are not met.

According to the Commission, AWS and Azure, “the largest and second largest cloud computing services in the EU respectively,” are a gateway between businesses and their customers in the bloc.

“They both have vast and entrenched user bases and appear to benefit from lock-in effects and high switching costs, in addition to a large ecosystem.”

Although the cloud giants did not meet the DMA’s quantitative thresholds for designation (such as user numbers), their market positions have attracted scrutiny. Should the gatekeeper designations stick, obligations regarding interoperability, access to data, and competition would apply.

The view is preliminary at this stage, and Amazon and Microsoft have the opportunity to respond before anything becomes final.

A Microsoft spokesperson told The Register: “We continue to engage constructively with the Commission. The cloud sector in Europe is innovative, highly competitive and an accelerator for growth across the economy.”

The spokesperson added: “We remain concerned that ignoring the growing power of Google Cloud and Gemini will tilt the market in a harmful way.”

AWS also disagreed with the Commission’s preliminary position. A spokesperson told The Register: “The Commission’s preliminary findings disregard the breadth of cloud services available to European customers and risk deterring European investment and innovation. AWS faces healthy competition and customers across Europe have more choice, lower prices, and greater flexibility than ever before.

“The EU already has comprehensive cloud regulation through the Data Act, and adding another heavy layer of overlapping regulation under the DMA undermines European competitiveness and access to cutting-edge information technology. We will continue to engage with the Commission to reach the right outcome for customers and Europe’s digital future.”

Other parties responded more positively. A spokesperson for the Open Cloud Coalition told The Register: “Our members welcome the Commission’s preliminary finding naming Microsoft and AWS as cloud gatekeepers. We particularly note the finding that existing customer lock-in may fuel enterprise AI, a development that mirrors long-standing market concerns over Microsoft’s licensing and ecosystem practices.

“Moving quickly to deliver remedies is now a priority to ensure choice and growth for European cloud customers.”

In 2024, Microsoft described the Open Cloud Coalition as a lobbying group for Google.

Henna Virkkunen, executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy, stated: “Cloud services have become a cornerstone of Europe’s economy – and a prerequisite for AI – with over half of EU businesses now relying on them, combined with record investment in public cloud infrastructure.

“Given their central role in Europe’s digital future, these services must operate in fair, open and competitive markets that foster trust and secure Europe’s tech sovereignty.”

Should the preliminary findings be confirmed and Microsoft and Amazon be designated as gatekeepers for their cloud services (they already have gatekeeper status for other services), the pair will have six months to ensure compliance with the DMA’s obligations. ®

Organizations continue to invest in phishing defenses, identity protection, and multi-factor authentication, yet account takeover attacks remain one of the most disruptive security incidents facing enterprises today.

On July 8, 2026, BleepingComputer will host a live webinar titled “Stop chasing alerts: Automating email security with behavioral AI” presented by Dan Nickolaisen, Solutions Architect Manager at Abnormal AI, and Eric Danneker, Director of Cyber Vigilance and Defense at Novant Health.

The webinar will examine how attackers gain access to legitimate accounts, why traditional security controls often struggle to detect account compromise quickly, and how behavioral AI can help security teams accelerate investigations and response.

Modern account takeover attacks frequently rely on trusted identities, legitimate cloud services, and compromised business accounts rather than obviously malicious activity. As a result, attackers can blend into normal business operations while maintaining access to email, collaboration platforms, and corporate resources.

Security teams are often left investigating suspicious messages, unusual login activity, and user reports long after attackers have established a foothold.

Abnormal AI helps organizations identify abnormal account behavior and automate investigation workflows, enabling analysts to detect compromised accounts faster and respond more efficiently.

Attendees will learn practical approaches for identifying account compromise earlier, reducing manual investigation work, and limiting the impact of account takeover attacks.

Compromised accounts are difficult to distinguish from legitimate users

Unlike traditional malware attacks, account takeover incidents often involve legitimate credentials, trusted devices, and normal business communications.

This makes compromised accounts significantly harder to identify using traditional security controls alone.

This webinar will explore how behavioral AI can help security teams identify unusual behavior patterns, investigate suspicious activity automatically, and accelerate remediation before attackers can expand their access.

The upcoming webinar will cover:

• How phishing, BEC, and account takeover attacks lead to compromised business accounts
• Why attackers increasingly rely on legitimate identities and trusted services
• The challenges security teams face when investigating potential account compromise
• How behavioral AI can automate detection, investigation, and remediation workflows
• Practical techniques for reducing response times and limiting the impact of account takeovers

Join us to learn how organizations can detect compromised accounts faster and improve their ability to respond before small incidents become major security events.

➡ Register now to secure your spot!

TD’s plan to monitor some staff has exposed a legal gap: in much of Canada, an employer can watch you work and owes you little more than a notice.

Then Toronto-Dominion Bank told some of its staff that software would soon be watching how they worked, the employees did what most people do when handed that news.

They asked what exactly it would track, whether it could be used against them, and whether they had any say. The more uncomfortable answer, in much of Canada, is that the law gives them very little leverage to refuse.

The bank’s move, reported by Reuters in an exclusive earlier this month, applied to employees in its financial-crimes and risk-management functions.

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They were told TD would deploy a tool called WorkiQ to track how they spent their time across web browsers, internal messaging, meeting apps, and other work software.

On the call, staff raised the obvious questions about privacy, about what the tool would capture, and about whether the data could feed into performance reviews.

TD described the deployment as “standard practice across the industry,” and said it uses automated tools in various parts of the business to improve insights and allocate resources.

There was a second, more striking element. According to an internal memo seen by Reuters, TD had initially planned to collect employees’ mouse movements, keystrokes, and other actions to use as training data for artificial intelligence, then scaled that back after weeks of pushback from staff.

The detail rhymes with what has been happening at Meta, which deployed a programme to capture keystrokes and mouse clicks on employee machines, also for AI training, and which paused the tool in June after a data-security scare.

The new frontier of workplace monitoring is not just measuring productivity. It is harvesting the way people work as raw material for models.

What makes the Canadian case distinct is the legal vacuum around it. The country’s federal privacy law, PIPEDA, does not apply to provincially regulated employers in provinces that lack their own substantially similar legislation, which includes Ontario, where much of the financial sector sits.

In those provinces, employee protection is assembled from a patchwork of employment-standards rules, common-law privacy torts, contracts, workplace policies, and, where they exist, collective agreements.

There is no single statute a worker can point to and say the surveillance crosses a line.

Ontario went furthest of any province, and even that is modest. Since October 2022, employers with 25 or more staff must have a written policy stating whether and how they electronically monitor employees.

The catch is in the wording. The law requires disclosure, not restraint. It compels an employer to tell workers what it is doing, but it does not give workers a new right to object, to limit the monitoring, or to keep the data out of a performance file. Telling someone they are being watched is not the same as protecting them.

The contrast with Europe is sharp. Under the EU’s data-protection regime, monitoring of the kind TD described runs into the principle of purpose limitation, the rule that data gathered for one reason cannot be quietly repurposed for another.

Repurposing employees’ everyday digital activity into AI training data is precisely the move that European rules are built to challenge. A Canadian worker in Ontario has no comparable instrument to reach for.

None of this makes TD an outlier. Employee monitoring spread quickly through the remote-work years, and banks, with their compliance obligations, have more reason than most to watch what staff do.

The tools have advanced faster than the rules meant to govern them, and in much of Canada the rules were never strong to begin with.

For the employees on that TD call, the answer to how much of their workday belongs to their employer is, for now, mostly up to the employer.

OPPO has started rolling out its June 2026 ColorOS 16 update, bringing a handful of new features to make everyday smartphone use a little more convenient. The update introduces a new Sports Widget for football fans, Bluetooth audio sharing, improved security alerts, and several quality-of-life additions across the system. The rollout is scheduled between June 1 and June 30 for eligible OPPO smartphones, such as the Find X9.

Live Sports Updates and Shared Audio

One of the biggest additions in this release is the new Sports Widget. Football fans can now follow live scores, match schedules, and tournament updates directly from their home screen without opening a dedicated app. ColorOS 16 also uses AI Suggestions to surface upcoming matches on the Home Screen and Shelf, making it easier to keep tabs on your favorite teams throughout the day.

Another useful addition is Audio Sharing, which allows a single OPPO phone to stream audio to two pairs of Bluetooth earphones simultaneously. Whether you’re watching a movie with a friend or listening to music together, both users can enjoy the same audio without relying on a speaker or wired splitter.

Security and Everyday Features Get Some Attention Too

The June update also introduces Accessibility Security Alerts. If an app from an unknown source receives Accessibility Service permissions, a permission commonly abused by malicious apps, ColorOS will immediately notify the user. This makes it easier to review or revoke suspicious permissions before they become a security risk.

OPPO has also refreshed the Weather app with Moon Rise and Moon Set timings, along with live Moon Phase information. While these additions may not appeal to everyone, they can be useful for outdoor enthusiasts, photographers, and anyone planning activities around natural lighting conditions.

Outdoor Mode has also received a small but practical upgrade. Users can now pin up to four frequently used apps for quicker access, while navigation and location awareness have also been improved for people who spend a lot of time outdoors.

Gaming and Personalization Improvements

Beyond the headline features, OPPO has added a few smaller quality-of-life improvements across the system. Users can now record gameplay more easily, while a new App Suggestions feature in the app drawer recommends frequently used apps based on usage patterns. The idea is to reduce the time spent searching for apps and make everyday navigation feel a little more intuitive.

OPPO says the June ColorOS 16 update will continue rolling out to eligible devices throughout the month.