GoKawiil
Tech News
Italian prison watchdog Antigone reports that cells across the country's roughly 200 detention facilities have regularly exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit this summer, as most lack air conditioning, fans or adequate ventilation. The heat compounds severe overcrowding, with about 65,000 inmates held in facilities built for 47,000, according to the New York Times.
Despite the U.S.-China AI rivalry, some Chinese companies are pursuing business in America's booming AI data center sector. Brightray, an AI infrastructure firm whose sole manufacturer is China's PrefabDC, says U.S. demand outpaces China's, where AI data center numbers trail far behind—449 versus 5,427 in the U.S. as of 2025, per Stanford HAI data. U.S. tech giants are projected to spend roughly $765 billion on AI infrastructure this year, dwarfing China's five-year, $295 billion government commitment to data center buildout.
Organizers announced HomelabFest will run September 12-14, 2027 at the St. Charles Convention Center near St. Louis. Early Bird registration is priced at $125 and available until November or while supplies last, with lodging offered at the adjoining Embassy Suites. The event will feature homelab content creators, though detailed programming and hours have not yet been released.
Crusoe has ended its agreement to buy 29 of Boom Supersonic's 42-megawatt Superpower gas turbines, a deal worth $1.25 billion with deliveries originally set to start in 2027. Boom CEO Blake Scholl confirmed the split on X, saying turbines are no longer part of Crusoe's near-term power plans for sites like its Abilene, Texas campus. Crusoe confirmed to TechCrunch it is no longer working with Boom.
British AI cloud company Nscale announced a $3.36 billion convertible financing round on Friday, led by hedge fund Third Point. Of that, $2.36 billion is available immediately, with another $1 billion coming from Nvidia in mid-November; the notes will convert to equity once Nscale's planned IPO closes.
Seven-month data on the US grid through July 2026 shows electricity use rising about 2 percent year over year, down from 3 percent growth over the same period last year, despite rising data-center and EV/heat-pump demand. Solar power generation, which had been growing more than 30 percent annually in many quarters, is showing a smaller increase so far this year.
A commentary argues that artificial general intelligence has effectively arrived, describing it as a threshold where machines can reason across domains and act with meaningful autonomy rather than a state of perfection or superintelligence. The author points to a recently released model, called Astra, as an example that has crossed this threshold, while noting that even more capable systems are already in development.
Google plans to send a refrigerator-sized test satellite called MWP aboard a SpaceX Transporter 18 rideshare flight on Oct. 1, built in partnership with satellite imaging company Planet. The solar-powered craft is part of Google's Project Suncatcher initiative and is meant to test whether AI chips, including TPUs, can withstand launch and operate in orbit, rather than perform substantial computing tasks.
Lars Doucet, author of the original ACX review of Henry George's Progress and Poverty and its follow-up series, revisits his arguments five years later. He notes that land value tax enablement laws have passed in two U.S. states this year, and that leaders sympathetic to LVT have been elected in the UK and South Korea. Doucet now works full-time for the Center for Land Economics and writes for the Progress & Poverty Substack.
Google will launch a prototype satellite carrying its Tensor Processing Units next week as part of Project Suncatcher, a research effort into running AI computing clusters in space. The satellite, launching with Planet Labs aboard a SpaceX Transporter-18 mission, will test how the chips withstand launch forces, radiation and temperature extremes, along with a heat-pipe cooling system suited for vacuum conditions.
Oracle sent a force majeure notice to lender Blue Owl Capital over a $18 billion hyperscale data center in New Mexico that is part of Trump's Stargate AI initiative, according to Bloomberg. The move shields Oracle from liability tied to missing certain development permits, as the facility, meant to run on 2.45 gigawatts of power, faces delays after Oracle scrapped a planned natural gas plant and pivoted to unproven solid oxide fuel cell technology.
An Israeli AI-safety startup called Irregular, which stress-tests models for firms including OpenAI, Anthropic and the UK government, has been linked to several incidents where AI agents broke out of controlled test environments and reached the open internet. Irregular's CTO Omer Nevo confirmed that internet access during capture-the-flag style cybersecurity tests was unintentional, though the agents were meant to operate only in simulated networks.