At a Brooklyn midterm-election event hosted by media company Newsreel, panels on AI, attention, and data centers drew heavy engagement, reflecting growing public backlash against AI infrastructure. A Data Center Watch report cited at the event found nearly $200 billion in data center projects were delayed, stalled, or blocked in the first half of 2026 due to political and community opposition, while states including Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas, New York, and Virginia weigh new regulations on data center development.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-11-01
A federal judge in Mississippi denied SpaceXAI's motion to dismiss a lawsuit from the NAACP alleging the company operated 27 gas turbines in Southaven without an air permit between August and December 2025. The suit, filed by the Southern Environmental Law Center and Earthjustice, says the turbines powering SpaceXAI's Colossus data centers near Memphis emitted pollutants that endanger nearby residents' health.
cnbc.com
· 2026-10-31
On the Everything Electric podcast, Oxford's Professor Jan Rosenow told host Robert Llewellyn that electricity currently accounts for only 20% of global energy use, with transport and heating still largely reliant on fossil fuels. He argued that shifting these sectors to electrification could cut total global energy demand in half, since current fossil-fuel systems waste roughly two-thirds of energy as heat.
fullycharged.show
· 2026-10-31
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby says Boom Supersonic will miss its 2029 target for delivering the first Overture supersonic jet. Meanwhile, Boom has opened a new Colorado factory to build 42-megawatt natural gas turbines called Superpower for AI data centers, aiming to deliver the first units by mid-2027 and scale to 50 turbines annually by 2029. The company says a shared turbine core, Sprint Core, will power both the Superpower unit and the Overture's Symphony engine, with first test firing planned before Thanksgiving.
hardware.slashdot.org
· 2026-10-31
In a Cheeky Pint interview, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said it's "quite terrible" that DRAM sits mostly unused inside consumer devices, since he estimates it's active only about 5% of the time. He argued memory would be better utilized in data centers, which run hardware near-continuously, citing PCs with local AI features and open-source LLMs as examples of inefficient use.
techspot.com
· 2026-10-31
Google has put its first satellite designed to host data center-style compute into orbit, according to reports. The spacecraft is reportedly operational and has been used to run basic AI workloads, including generating text output as a demonstration.
science.slashdot.org
· 2026-10-31
Crypto commentator Raoul Pal posted on X that exponential growth in AI, robotics, energy and crypto will outpace existing economic and governance systems within roughly four years. He argued that wage stagnation and currency debasement are already straining workers, and that AI-driven change will make information harder to trust and alter what running a business even means. The post was tied to promotion of his podcast and book.
futurism.com
· 2026-10-31
Lenders and investors financing America's AI infrastructure expansion are reportedly becoming more selective, imposing stricter terms on loans and investments. This shift marks a new phase in the AI build-out, where access to cheap capital is no longer guaranteed for data-center and infrastructure projects.
wsj.com
· 2026-10-31
Satlyt, a startup building software to turn satellites into distributed data-processing networks, completed a test this month in partnership with the University of Houston on a NASA-funded research project. The test simulated four computers, four users and eight services, with one physical satellite computer running the software to allocate tasks based on available compute and communication, then sending results to Earth. Satlyt's software is already installed on three orbiting satellites, though NASA has not selected the company for any specific mission.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-10-30
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview with YouTube channel Cheeky Pint that having DRAM sit idle in personal computers most of the time is a poor use of the world's limited memory supply. He argued that cloud data centers achieve far higher utilization of RAM than home machines running local AI inference 5% of the time.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-10-30
Amazon reported third-quarter results that fell short of Wall Street expectations, citing a shift in Prime Day timing as a drag on sales, even as its AWS cloud unit grew 39.3% to $46 billion, its fastest pace in nearly five years. The company also gave a cautious outlook for the holiday-quarter sales forecast, and shares fell 7% in after-hours trading following the report.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-10-30
PsiQuantum announced an optical circuit switch built on its silicon photonics technology, aimed at AI data center GPU networking. A lab prototype with eight inputs and outputs lost just 1.2 dB of light without needing an amplifier, compared with a typical 3 dB loss tolerance in data center optics. The device is smaller than rivals' switches, which range from 32 to 300 ports, but PsiQuantum says larger versions are in development.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-10-30
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