Guam weathered its most powerful storm in years without major damage on Thursday after Super Typhoon Mawar unleashed winds of up to 150 mph (240 kph) and torrential rain on the Western Pacific Island.
All but 1,000 of the island’s 52,000 homes and businesses lost power, according to the Guam Power Authority, but government officials reported nothing unusual in hospital emergency rooms, and only moderate damage such as flooding, fallen debris and downed power lines.
“I am so glad we are safe. We have weathered this storm. The worst has gone by,” Governor Lou Leon Guerrero said in a video message.
Still, she warned people to stay home for their own safety until the government declared it was safe.
“It seems that roads are passable, but you should not be on the road,” Guerrero said after touring the island, a US territory that is home to about 170,000 people, including about 10,000 US military personnel.
Before landfall, she had compared the storm to 1962’s Typhoon Karen, which flattened much of the island.
The eye of Super Typhoon Mawar tracked just north of Guam early Thursday, moving northwest at a sluggish 8 mph, delivering rainfall of up to 2 inches (5 cm) per hour overnight, the US National Weather Service (NWS) said.
Images posted on social media showed ominous clouds drifting over beaches, rains lashing buildings and winds bending palm trees.
Wind speeds placed the storm in Category 4, the second-strongest designation on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind scale, and just short of Category 5.
People in Guam take typhoons seriously and typically hunker down in reinforced concrete structures, said Landon Aydlett, the warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Guam.
After the storm passed, Guam’s Office of Civil Defense issued a bulletin warning people that the highest stage of alert remained in effect.
“In addition to the tropical storm force winds, hazardous surf and seas remain. Remain out of the water due to life-threatening conditions,” the bulletin said.
Guam weathers Category 4 super typhoon without major damage
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Guam weathers Category 4 super typhoon without major damage
- All but 1,000 of the island’s 52,000 homes and businesses lost power
- The eye of Super Typhoon Mawar tracked just north of Guam early Thursday
India plans AI ‘data city’ on staggering scale
- ‘The data city is going to come in one ecosystem ... with a 100 kilometer radius’
NEW DELHI: As India races to narrow the artificial intelligence gap with the United States and China, it is planning a vast new “data city” to power digital growth on a staggering scale, the man spearheading the project says.
“The AI revolution is here, no second thoughts about it,” said Nara Lokesh, information technology minister for Andhra Pradesh state, which is positioning the city of Visakhapatnam as a cornerstone of India’s AI push.
“And as a nation ... we have taken a stand that we’ve got to embrace it,” he said ahead of an international AI summit next week in New Delhi.
Lokesh boasts the state has secured investment agreements of $175 billion involving 760 projects, including a $15 billion investment by Google for its largest AI infrastructure hub outside the United States.
And a joint venture between India’s Reliance Industries, Canada’s Brookfield and US firm Digital Realty is investing $11 billion to develop an AI data center in the same city.
Visakhapatnam — home to around two million people and popularly known as “Vizag” — is better known for its cricket ground that hosts international matches than cutting-edge technology.
But the southeastern port city is now being pitched as a landing point for submarine internet cables linking India to Singapore.
“The data city is going to come in one ecosystem ... with a 100 kilometer radius,” Lokesh said. For comparison, Taiwan is roughly 100 kilometers wide.
Lokesh said the plan goes far beyond data connectivity, adding that his state had “received close to 25 percent of all foreign direct investments” to India in 2025.
“It’s not just about the data centers,” he explained while outlining a sweeping vision of change, with Andhra Pradesh offering land at one US cent per acre for major investors.
