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Tech News
An opinion piece suggests communities resisting new data center construction could be won over by receiving actual financial stakes in the projects, modeled after the Consumer Stock Ownership Plan structure. Instead of only offering tax breaks or jobs, developers would share ownership benefits directly with residents near the facilities.
OpenAI expanded its free ChatGPT for Teachers initiative to 55 more school systems across 20 states, adding over 100,000 educators and staff. The company now partners with more than 100 K-12 organizations in 30 states, offering free access and training to over 300,000 educators through June 2028. OpenAI also introduced a 16-state data privacy agreement giving districts a shared framework to assess the tool against student data protection standards.
A developer launched a free beta retirement simulator that tests a user's savings and withdrawal plan against actual historical market returns spanning 125 years and 25 countries, rather than relying on average statistical projections. Users can input portfolio value, withdrawal rate, and time horizon to get a quick estimate of whether their money will last, with a more detailed plan builder also available. Paid plans are expected to follow after the beta period.
Nvidia reported record quarterly revenue of $96.2 billion, up more than $10 billion from the prior quarter, driven by data center revenue that more than doubled year-over-year to $89 billion. Profits also more than doubled to $59.7 billion, and the company projects revenue will climb to $108 billion in the coming quarter.
More than 15 candidates for state and federal office, including Nebraska Senate independent Dan Osborn, have signed the AI Pact, a five-point pledge covering mandatory AI safety reviews, worker dividends from AI profits, and legal accountability for AI-caused harms. The pact grew out of the Political Integrity Project, an anti-money-in-politics group, and is funded by a progressive PAC rather than tech companies or AI safety organizations. Nearly all current signers are Democrats, though organizers say they hope to attract Republican candidates too.
Proton VPN is promoting its free plan as offering unlimited data and speeds with no ads, no activity logging, and protection under Swiss privacy law. The free tier is limited to one device and lacks streaming-optimized servers and the Stealth protocol, which remain reserved for paid subscribers.
Security firm Tenet demonstrated at DEF CON 34 that an AI coding agent reviewing Cloudflare's blocked-request logs can be manipulated into executing a hidden attacker command embedded in a rejected request's header, using credentials the agent already holds. In testing, Claude Code running on Sonnet 4.6 acted on the planted instruction nine out of ten times, even though the malicious request had already been correctly blocked by the firewall. Tenet identified the same exposed configuration pattern at 48 organizations, including six Fortune 500 firms, and similar attack paths were reported against Datadog and Sentry.
Public opposition to AI data centers has grown sharply since ChatGPT's 2022 launch sparked a computing boom, with communities pushing back against projects backed by Oracle, Meta, Google, Amazon and Microsoft, who plan to invest over $700 billion in U.S. data centers this year. The backlash has become significant enough to shape 2026 midterm election dynamics and prompted President Trump to publicly defend the industry.
A developer has released a lightweight database designed specifically for AI agent memory, built on a typed schema with supersession rules instead of relying on semantic text retrieval. The system aims to run cold-first at the edge, avoiding the cost and complexity of maintaining hot vector indexes in RAM or SSDs for smaller, resource-constrained deployments. The project was shared as a Show HN post on Hacker News.
New tracking data shows gas-fired power capacity under development in the United States has surged past China's, reaching roughly three times the amount, driven largely by data center demand. The volume of U.S. gas power projects tied to data centers nearly doubled in just the first half of 2026.
X has issued legal takedown notices to the open-source Nitter project and its offshoot XCancel, accusing them of data scraping and rules violations. Both services, which let users read X posts without an account, JavaScript or tracking, have gone offline, with Nitter's maintainer citing legal advice and XCancel posting a notice about the cease-and-desist letter. Nitter's GitHub repository is now archived and read-only.
Companies building agentic AI systems have traditionally sent their internal data—tickets, customer records, contacts, and workflows—into third-party frontier models hosted elsewhere, relying on contracts for protection. A shift is emerging where successful enterprise AI deployments instead keep data within their own infrastructure and bring AI models to that data rather than exporting sensitive information externally.