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Cyrus Beschloss, CEO of data marketplace Verb, said at CNBC's Trading the Midterms event that many people who publicly oppose AI and data center construction continue to use tools like ChatGPT. He argued that if forced to choose between shutting down data centers entirely or losing access to such AI tools, many critics would find the decision far harder than their public stance suggests.
A study published in JAMA found that mandatory testosterone screening ordered by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth could flag up to a quarter of active-duty Army members as having low testosterone, even though the true prevalence of the condition is likely far lower. Researchers from Pennington Biomedical Research Center and the US Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine analyzed blood samples from 479 male soldiers across five Army installations, collected between August 2024 and January 2026.
NorthPoint Development's planned Amazon Web Services data center campus, dubbed 'Project Hazelnut,' includes an offer of $10,000 in direct cash to every resident of Hazle Township, Pennsylvania. Despite the payout, residents are organizing against both the data center and the associated transmission lines needed to power it, according to PennLive reporting.
Micro Center has changed the listing status of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090 to 'Not Carried,' a classification indicating the retailer does not plan to restock the card, rather than a temporary out-of-stock label. Custom RTX 5090 models from partners like Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte remain listed on the site but are sold out at all physical stores, with the sole exception of a $11,000 Asus ROG 20th Anniversary bundle. The change follows recent rumors that Nvidia has halted production of the card.
Nvidia and Cisco have jointly unveiled Ultra-Dense Small Form Factor Pluggable (USFP), a new optical transceiver standard supporting 400Gb/s per lane, the first interface to do so. Cisco says the module is designed to eventually reach total transfer rates of 12.8Tb/s, offering four times the bandwidth of existing 200Gb/s optics and 1.3x better power efficiency. Initial USFP transceivers will have 16 full-duplex lanes and work with both switches and Nvidia's SuperNIC adapters, which move data between GPUs using the RoCE protocol.
With DDR5 memory, NVMe SSDs and GPUs all seeing sharp price increases online, Micro Center's roughly 30 U.S. brick-and-mortar locations are reportedly offering better value through bundled component deals than major online retailers like Newegg, Amazon and Best Buy. The report notes an Nvidia RTX 5090 currently sells for $6,549.99 from a third-party Amazon seller, far above its $1,999.99 launch MSRP.
Cloudflare's analysis found that after Ukrainian strikes on Yandex data centers cut Yandex Search and Yandex.Cloud traffic to 10-15% of normal levels, malicious bot activity largely migrated to other hosting providers such as Radist and Selectel rather than disappearing. Gambling-sector bot traffic rose slightly overall (167.7 million to 170.1 million requests, +1.4%), and Russian-origin social media bot activity fell only marginally, by 0.6% to 5.7% depending on the metric.
A YouGov/Economist survey found that among voters living within a mile of an AI data center, support for Democratic candidates rose from 54% to 61% between May and October. Nationally over the same period, the Democratic voting share rose more modestly, from 53% to 55%.
Dell Technologies stock fell 11% on Wednesday, pulling down Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Oracle, Super Micro and NetApp amid worries that enterprise AI spending won't match the scale of the ongoing data center buildout. Barclays analysts cut ratings on Dell, HPE and NetApp from buy to hold, saying they see no 'meaningful AI inflection' in enterprise demand and attributing recent revenue gains largely to a global memory shortage rather than AI adoption.
TimeTeller, a German startup led by CEO Angela Relógio, is now selling a direct-to-consumer saliva test kit that measures a person's circadian rhythm. Relógio, a physicist and former oncology researcher, says the company began taking direct orders due to demand from longevity clinics seeking data to personalize sleep, nutrition and activity advice. She stresses the consumer kit does not yet determine optimal timing for cancer treatments, which requires separate clinical research.
Ambrosia Energy CEO Ben Longmier announced at TechCrunch Disrupt that the company has begun construction on a 10 gigawatt-hour battery factory near Austin, Texas, spanning 150,000 square feet. The plant is meant to support roughly 300 megawatts of power-plant capacity annually and is expected to reach full production within two to three years. Ambrosia is also starting its first commercial power plant in West Texas this year, pairing 300 MW of solar with 660 MWh of batteries to deliver 30 MW of continuous power.
According to the Financial Times, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, SMBC and MUFG are exploring significant risk-transfer deals to shift portions of AI data center debt off their balance sheets, after racing to underwrite such loans for projects tied to Oracle and Meta. One case cited by Bloomberg involves $38 billion in construction debt for an Oracle-leased data center project in Texas and Wisconsin, which a bank group including JPMorgan and MUFG has spent over six months trying to distribute, with some lenders now selling pieces at a discount to non-bank buyers.