OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged in a Time interview that public sentiment has turned sharply against AI and the data centers powering it. Communities nationwide are protesting roughly $130 billion in data center construction, citing strained water supplies, rising living costs and pollution, forming a bipartisan opposition movement. Altman also revealed he's faced personal threats, including a molotov cocktail thrown at his home and a shooting, linked to anti-AI safety activism.
SB Energy, a SoftBank-owned data-center developer, offered OpenAI a discount valued at $5.5 billion as part of an agreement to build data-center capacity together. The concession strengthens the financial relationship between SB Energy and OpenAI as they work to develop new infrastructure projects.
Elon Musk announced on X that SpaceX will begin manufacturing turbine blades and vanes internally to increase production of natural gas turbine generators used to power AI data centers. The move addresses a supply bottleneck as data center operators increasingly rely on portable gas turbines to bypass slow grid connections, with blade casting alone typically taking 60 to 90 weeks per batch. Musk said SpaceX and Tesla are also each targeting 100GW/year of solar capacity, but gas turbines remain necessary to bridge power needs in the near term.
Facing grassroots opposition that has already jeopardized roughly $130 billion in planned data center projects this year, tech executives are shifting their public messaging from AI-doomsday warnings to more optimistic narratives. Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian and venture capitalist Matt Higgins have both publicly acknowledged the need for a new communications strategy, while Meta's Mark Zuckerberg published a lengthy essay touting AI's potential to improve daily life.
Meta is testing robots from vendors like Kinova, ABB, and Watney Robotics to perform physical data center tasks such as power-cycling servers, swapping network cables, and restarting machines. Internal workers say one arm alone could eventually take over up to 80% of certain job duties if trials succeed. The initiative has not been previously disclosed.
Building trade unions, including Steamfitters UA Local 602, are mobilizing to pressure politicians who oppose new data center construction, with leadership warning members they will withhold political support from officials seen as hostile to the industry. An internal memo obtained by the Wall Street Journal frames the fight as an 'existential moment' for the union, given how much work data centers generate in the Maryland-DC-Virginia corridor known as data center alley.
Startups like Prenuvo and Neko Health are selling elective full-body MRI diagnostics to wealthy clients, with prices ranging from $2,500 to $4,000 per scan promising detection of hundreds of conditions. This luxury health trend is expanding even as a growing share of Americans, now 36 percent according to a KFF survey, report skipping doctor visits due to cost.
Following its latest earnings report, Nvidia is showing investors that its competitive moat isn't limited to GPU chips, where rivals like Amazon and Google are building in-house alternatives. The company's Vera Rubin architecture bundles GPUs with CPUs, inference accelerators, storage and networking racks, positioning Nvidia as the orchestrator of entire gigawatt-scale AI data centers rather than just a chip supplier.
A wave of surveys and protests shows growing American distrust of major tech companies, driven by anxiety over AI-related job losses, sprawling data center construction, and the addictive design of social media platforms. This week Meta agreed to pay up to $17 billion to settle claims tied to its apps' harmful effects, adding fuel to public frustration that coincides with high inflation and falling consumer confidence.
Residents and advocacy group Stand.earth allege that the DataOne data center in Vineland, New Jersey — tied to a $19.4 billion Nebius-Microsoft GPU deal — has been running dozens of unpermitted gas turbines and building an unpermitted 1.5-million-gallon LNG storage tank near two schools. Locals say they only learned the site was a data center after the Microsoft deal became public, and complaints about nighttime noise and air pollution led to a delayed town hall in January 2026, months after construction began.
A report examines whether components and equipment sourced from Chinese manufacturers are quietly underpinning the rapid expansion of American data centers driving the AI buildout. The claim centers on supply chain dependencies that persist even as US-China tech tensions escalate publicly.
An investigation by Floodlight and The Guardian used thermal drone imagery to find at least 45 of 62 massive gas-powered generators running simultaneously at the DataOne facility in Vineland, New Jersey, with no permits for any of them. The site, which supplies Microsoft with AI computing power through a $17 billion deal with Nebius, sits about a mile from two schools and has already drawn noise complaints and a lawsuit from residents.
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