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Qareeb Partners With Pantheon For GCC Bitcoin Mining Expansion
The edge data center provider has teamed with the Bitcoin mining leader in a bid to expand regional mining facilities and strengthen digital infrastructure.
The Middle East’s first edge data center provider, Qareeb, has joined forces with Pantheon, a global leader in Bitcoin mining services, to expand mining operations across the GCC. The two companies have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), laying the groundwork for a strategic collaboration that will also strengthen the region’s digital infrastructure.
Under the agreement, Qareeb will take the lead in securing prime locations for Pantheon’s Bitcoin mining facilities, strategically placing them near Qareeb’s existing and upcoming data center sites. Beyond site acquisition, Qareeb will also handle the construction and operational setup of the facilities, ensuring they are fully equipped and supported with engineering, security, and facility management services.
Annemarie van Zadelhoff, Chief Strategy Officer at Qareeb, highlighted the significance of this partnership: “Partnering with Pantheon represents a significant opportunity for Qareeb. By leveraging our expertise in turnkey project management, site acquisition, permitting, and operations, we are proud to ensure Pantheon’s facilities are fully fitted, operational, and supported by our 24/7 regional team. This partnership reflects our shared commitment to building a future-ready digital infrastructure and setting new standards for innovation and resilience in the region”.
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Nick van Houtrijve, COO and Founder of Pantheon, emphasized the strategic nature of this expansion: “Pantheon’s expansion into the GCC is a strategic milestone as we continue to set new benchmarks for operational efficiency and performance. This partnership with Qareeb enables us to establish robust infrastructure in one of the fastest-growing Bitcoin mining markets globally”.
Finally, Jim Niemeijer, Head of Business Development at Pantheon, added: “With Qareeb’s unparalleled regional expertise and our capabilities, we are confident in delivering value to our investors and clients. Together, we’re creating a blueprint for the future of digital finance”.
The Qareeb and Pantheon collaboration marks a significant step in advancing Bitcoin mining capabilities in the Middle East, and will certainly help GCC countries to position themselves as global Bitcoin and crypto mining hubs.
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Instagram Now Lets You Tune Its Algorithm, But There’s One Big Catch
The new controls promise users “agency” over their feed, but asking to see more from accounts you actually follow returns an error.
Instagram has expanded its algorithm personalization feature to the main feed, letting users specify which topics they want surfaced more or less often in recommendations.
Instagram chief Adam Mosseri framed the change as a matter of user control. “I believe it’s in our best interest as a business to empower people to shape Instagram into something that works for them, and that people should be able to have a meaningful amount of agency over the products they spend so much time in,” he wrote on Threads.
Though it turns out that agency has limits. The controls only accept interest-based topics, such as “rescue dogs” or “parenting humor”. Requesting “posts from people I follow” returns no results, which is obviously a sore point for creators whose posts rarely reach their own audiences. Mosseri conceded the tension: “Who you follow used to be a meaningful tool people had for shaping their own experience, and as recommendations took over the main feed that tool quietly stopped working”.
Also Read: How To Find & Cancel Pending Instagram Requests
Instagram credits large language models for making its algorithms legible enough to personalize, and says it is “actively working on supporting requests for people, different moods or vibes, content types, and more” – potentially leading to a fully “bespoke” version of the app.
