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Tech News
Bloomberg reports that Wall Street investors are increasingly worried the AI industry's financial structure is a precarious 'house of cards,' built on massive capital expenditures and debt tied to data center buildouts. Analysts note AI-related spending now accounts for roughly half of US GDP growth, meaning any slowdown could trigger a financial shock comparable to the dot-com crash.
Conservative activists like Molly McCann Sanders of the Eagle Forum are publicly rejecting Trump's pro-data-center stance, citing pollution and land-use fears. Polling from the New York Times shows over 60% of Americans, including nearly half of Republicans, oppose new data center construction, and GOP strategists have warned in internal memos that supporting AI infrastructure could hurt candidates in the midterms.
Data center technicians spend their shifts walking miles of server rows, sniffing for burning smells, and checking equipment for damage—including from birds—as they keep facilities powering the AI build-out running smoothly. The work combines physical inspection routines with constant vigilance for small warning signs that could signal bigger equipment failures.
President Trump posted on Truth Social suggesting AI be rebranded with a term like 'Superior,' 'Extreme,' or 'Supreme Intelligence,' running a poll for followers to choose. He also claimed that growing public concern over AI and data centers is a manufactured Democratic hoax akin to past controversies like Russia investigations and impeachment efforts, vowing not to let opposition to AI succeed.
A group of roughly 10 people vandalized the Montreal offices of Quebec's AI research institute MILA and a nearby AI company this week, smashing windows and spray-painting slogans including "burn the data centers." Montreal police confirmed the coordinated attack and briefly detained a 25-year-old woman found near the scene before releasing her without charges.
The U.S. House approved H.R. 9340, the Ratepayer Protection Act, which amends the 1978 Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act to require state regulators and non-regulated utilities to consider adopting a federal standard within two years. Under the bill, data centers drawing 100 megawatts or more would have to cover the full incremental cost of generation, transmission, or distribution upgrades built to serve them, even if they later cancel their power contracts.
Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger issued Executive Order 22, barring executive branch officials from signing NDAs on data center projects, mandating faster noise regulations, and reviewing backup power operations. The order also launches an AI task force to study risks like job losses and privacy harms, alongside a new state framework aimed at ending automatic zoning approvals and rolling back subsidies for data center developers.
Creative studio Basura teamed up with producer Alan Wilkis's project Big Data to launch 'Adopt a Data Center,' a stuffed toy called Bezzy shaped like a server rack with googly eyes and limbs. Squeezing the plushie plays an actual recording of the piercing hum captured by a neighbor near a Virginia data center, timed to release alongside a new Big Data single.
Crusoe, the AI infrastructure firm behind Oracle's giant Abilene, Texas campus, has closed a $3.9 billion funding round led by Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners and Mubadala, pushing its valuation to roughly $30.9 billion. The company is using the capital to expand into smaller, factory-built facilities called Spark, designed for AI inference rather than massive training clusters.
Anthropic and OpenAI are pursuing smaller data center deals in the 20-30 megawatt range, according to sources familiar with the discussions, even as both companies have already signed massive multi-hundred-megawatt and gigawatt infrastructure agreements. Anthropic has explored such deals in the UK and Nordics, while OpenAI has looked at similar opportunities in the Nordics, with talks also reportedly underway for smaller U.S. deployments. OpenAI confirmed it is building a 'diversified compute portfolio' but declined to discuss specific commercial talks; Anthropic did not comment.
Crusoe, the data center developer behind OpenAI's Abilene, Texas site, closed a $3.9 billion Series F funding round led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital, and Valor Equity Partners, valuing the company at $30.9 billion. The funds will support both large-scale data center builds and Crusoe's new modular 'Spark' AI factories, which can be manufactured off-site and deployed quickly. The company also added three board members, including Redwood Materials CEO JB Straubel and Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert.
Amazon Web Services has confirmed that customer data hosted in its Bahrain and United Arab Emirates data centers was permanently lost following Iranian drone strikes in March. The damage wiped out data across all three availability zones in Bahrain and one of three zones in the UAE, with AWS saying the destruction exceeded what its systems were built to survive. Amazon had already halted billing in the affected regions and spent six months trying to restore services before disclosing the losses.