A Data & Society report, based on 18 months of ethnographic interviews with 44 Pennsylvanians, examines why communities are resisting new data center construction despite state officials touting billions in AI infrastructure investment. The researchers found residents grappling with contradictions between promises of economic growth and concerns over energy, land use, and broader AI risks, rather than being swayed by disinformation campaigns.
Anthropic and OpenAI are pursuing agreements for existing, smaller data center facilities with roughly 20-30 MW of capacity in the UK, Nordic countries and the US, according to a CNBC report citing sources familiar with the talks. This comes even as both companies have already committed tens of billions of dollars toward massive gigawatt-scale AI infrastructure projects, including Anthropic's $45 billion Nscale deal and OpenAI's expanding Stargate commitments.
American AI developers have alerted US authorities that foreign actors, likely from China and Russia, are using distillation techniques to replicate the capabilities of Western frontier models at much lower cost. These attacks reportedly involve buying logs of conversations from legitimate accounts to extract training data, making the practice difficult to fully stop despite lab collaboration efforts started earlier in 2026. China has denied the accusations and warned it will impose 'countermeasures' if the US uses this issue to justify restricting Chinese AI development.
Arm Holdings CEO Rene Haas told CNBC's Jim Cramer that his confidence in reaching $2 billion in revenue for the company's new AGI CPU has increased since the July earnings call. Arm first flagged $2 billion in demand visibility in May, double its earlier $1 billion estimate, but had held off raising guidance while working to secure sufficient manufacturing capacity.
Researchers used pseudotyped lentiviral particles to analyze how single mutations in the RSV F protein impact the effectiveness of existing neutralizing antibodies. The study highlights ongoing viral evolution under immune pressure and provides data to guide future antibody development. No infectious viruses were created during the experiments, ensuring biosafety compliance.
Processes originally created to solve a specific business problem can outlive their usefulness, becoming bottlenecks rather than safeguards. Leaders frequently continue enforcing these procedures long after the original risk has faded, mistaking the fact that a process once worked for proof it remains necessary today.
Autodesk has introduced a new AI-powered tool designed to help teams navigate and manage the complex 3D models used throughout building projects. The assistant aims to reduce errors that occur when architects, engineers, contractors, and consultants collaborate on the same detailed digital model, catching issues like misaligned structural elements before they become costly problems.
A researcher used AI to scan thousands of digitized construction trade journal issues dating back to the 1850s, tracking every historical attempt to automate building tasks. The analysis found that successful automation clusters into two categories: off-site factory processes like steel fabrication and precast concrete, and on-site tasks simple enough to be performed by a machine repeating the same motion along a fixed path. Nearly everything outside these two categories failed to gain lasting adoption.
Homebuilders facing a shortage of roughly 1.2 million homes and hundreds of thousands of unfilled construction jobs are turning to robotics, but the real progress is coming from targeted tools like error-checking systems, trade-coordination software, and factory-built modules rather than humanoid robots on job sites. NAHB data shows residential construction productivity has grown just 16% since 1993, far behind the broader economy's 50%-plus gains, while labor shortages cost builders about $11 billion annually and add two months to build times.
Verdant, an economic think tank pushing for stricter data center regulation, says techUK's widely cited job creation figures are inflated. It estimates existing UK data centers support about 4,400 direct jobs versus techUK's 24,300, and projects only 10,400 permanent jobs by 2035 for planned sites versus techUK's forecast of 40,200.
Researchers introduced GPN-Star, a phylogeny-informed genomic language model that outperforms established tools like PhastCons and PhyloP in identifying functional constraint and deleterious variants across the human genome. The model showed especially strong results for distal enhancers, a class of regulatory DNA that has been notoriously hard to analyze, and it learned meaningful patterns linking enhancers, transcription factor binding sites, and their co-evolution without needing labeled training data.
Andrew Lakeman, a former Old School RuneScape developer at Jagex, was sentenced after a years-long investigation found he abused his internal access to steal players' virtual gold and items starting around 2018. He converted roughly £300,000 of stolen in-game currency, along with other funds, into about £364,829 in cryptocurrency before Cambridgeshire police caught him following an internal trap set by Jagex.
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