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.
An Entrepreneur contributor argues that founders often mistake low customer acquisition cost for campaign success, when in fact a cheap first sale doesn't guarantee a customer understood the offer or will stick around. Metrics like CAC typically ignore refunds, support burden, discounts and fees, which can make seemingly efficient campaigns unprofitable over time. The piece recommends grouping customers by campaign and calculating true post-sale value before scaling ad spend.
A study examined how assigning different weights to training sequences affects loss reduction in language models of varying sizes, using both proprietary and open-weight models. It found that the relationship between sequence weight and learning is not linear across scale: small models learn general patterns regardless of weighting, medium-scale models learn patterns roughly proportional to their assigned weights, and large models again learn broadly regardless of weighting.
GlobalFoundries and Marvell Technology have extended their manufacturing partnership, with GlobalFoundries boosting silicon germanium (SiGe) production capacity at its Burlington, Vermont facility. The multi-year deal targets components used in pluggable optical transceivers, near-packaged optics, and co-packaged optics, technologies that data centers need to move data faster than copper wiring allows.
Seagate Technology's 2026 Data Infrastructure Readiness Report, based on a survey of 2,712 enterprise IT decision-makers across seven countries, found that 99% expect AI to increase storage needs over the next three years, with nearly a third anticipating growth exceeding 50%. Yet only 38% of organizations feel their infrastructure can actually keep pace with that demand.
At a Fast Company-moderated discussion, executives from cannabis brand Cann, telehealth provider Folx Health, and biotech firm Daré Bioscience described how they built profitable companies in sectors long considered taboo—cannabis, gender-affirming care, and sexual wellness. The panelists, including Cann cofounder Jake Bullock, Folx CEO Liana Guzmán, and Daré CEO Sabrina Martucci Johnson, discussed operating amid funding gaps, regulatory hurdles, and public backlash.
CloudX built and released cloudx-io/setup-go, a drop-in replacement for GitHub's official actions/setup-go, after finding that the official action caused parallel jobs to interfere with each other and repeatedly pull stale cache data. In backtests on CloudX's monorepo running lint, test, and build jobs in parallel, the new action eliminated an estimated 86% of unnecessary work performed by the default setup, cutting test job runtimes by 69%.
Scientists synthesized thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) block copolymers using atom transfer radical polymerization, first removing bromo end groups through hydrogenation and then building crosslinkable electroluminescent photoresists (ELPRs) from these polymers as macroinitiators. By adjusting the ratio of crosslinkable monomer to macroinitiator, the team controlled crosslinker density in the final light-emitting polymer material.
An executive coach describes working with a leadership team that expanded into four international markets rapidly, hitting strong growth numbers on paper. Despite the metrics, regional teams felt disconnected, decisions stalled over unclear authority, and the company's core culture felt abstract to staff working outside headquarters. The underlying issue was that leaders had exported their domestic playbook wholesale rather than adapting how they led as the company grew globally.
A contributor column advises business owners to list the ten recurring tasks a proposed hire would actually perform and sort them into judgment, relationship, repetition and coordination categories before approving a new position. The piece argues that hiring is often a default response to growth, even when the real bottleneck is a broken workflow rather than a lack of people. It cites Census Bureau data showing only about 17-20% of businesses use AI, with Sales, Strategy and IT as top adopting functions where automation could resolve repetitive work.
TSMC has disclosed technical specifications for its upcoming A14 manufacturing process, highlighting SRAM cells smaller than 0.017 square micrometers, the tightest density achieved yet. The company says the node will deliver 10-15% faster performance, 25-30% lower power consumption, and roughly 20% higher chip density compared to its current N2 technology, with mass production targeted for 2028.
A franchising expert writes that many service businesses stall once they outgrow the founder's personal oversight, because critical decisions and client know-how remain undocumented and dependent on the owner's presence. The piece argues that scaling requires converting that informal judgment into explicit decision rights and repeatable processes that employees can follow without the founder's direct involvement.
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