Starcloud founders Philip Johnston, Adi Oltean, and Ezra Feilden, along with program manager Garret Jameson, have unveiled Fermi Explorer, a nonprofit aiming to send a 1-kilogram spacecraft toward Alpha Centauri using existing space technology. The mission, budgeted at roughly $15 million and targeting a 2029 launch, would take about 80,000 years to reach the star and would be the sixth object to leave our solar system after Voyager and its peers.
Build American AI, a new group tied to the super PAC Leading the Future, plans a multimillion-dollar ad campaign in Kansas, Ohio, and Wisconsin to build public support for local data centers. Leading the Future was seeded with over $50 million from investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz and OpenAI president Greg Brockman, and has mainly spent that money backing pro-AI candidates and opposing those skeptical of the technology.
President Trump used a Truth Social post to criticize local communities resisting new AI data center construction, saying such opposition would leave them 'backwards and poor' compared to areas that welcome the projects. The remarks follow a National Republican Senatorial Committee memo flagging voter backlash over data centers as a political risk ahead of the midterms, particularly in Ohio's tight Senate race.
President Trump posted on Truth Social criticizing the growing local opposition to AI data center construction across the U.S., arguing that communities rejecting these projects are choosing poverty and stagnation over prosperity. He also claimed that China benefits from the anti-data-center sentiment spreading through American towns and cities.
President Trump argued that communities blocking data center construction risk falling into economic decline, framing local resistance as a threat to competitiveness. His remarks come as polling shows most Americans are wary of having such facilities built near their homes.
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.
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.
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