Digital Realty has filed permits to redevelop a downtown Seattle building into a six-story data center, lab and retail project, as the City Council moves toward a one-year moratorium on new data centers.

A team inside Microsoft has been quietly building a platform for devices that run AI agents instead of apps, based on Android instead of Windows. The first two concept devices, a desktop hub and a wearable badge, are headed to pilots with some big-name businesses.

As major news outlets cut off the Wayback Machine, journalists and advocacy groups are rallying to protect the Internet Archive’s vast collection of web pages.

This month, USA Today published an excellent report that revealed how US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement delayed disclosing key information about the impacts of its detainment policies. The authors used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to compile and analyze detention statistics from ICE and track how the agency had changed under the Trump administration. The story is one of countless examples of how the Wayback Machine, which crawls and preserves web pages, has helped preserve information for the public good. It was also, Wayback Machine director Mark Graham says, “a little ironic.”

USA Today Co., the publishing conglomerate formerly known as Gannett that runs both its namesake paper and over 200 additional media outlets, bars the Wayback Machine from archiving its work. “They're able to pull together their story research because the Wayback Machine exists. At the same time, they're blocking access,” Graham says.

WASHINGTON, June 5, 2026 — Another state is set to hold an additional bidding round for locations where tentative broadband grant winners back out before signing contracts under a $42.45 billion broadband expansion program.

The Texas Broadband Development Office said four of its tentative grant winners rescinded their awards, leaving 31,000 homes and businesses without a planned broadband connection. That’s about 13 percent of the state’s BEAD locations.

The state was optimistic it would finalize a still-pending contract with Amazon, which refused its Nebraska award.

It may sound like yet another rollout of a dystopian surveillance state network of facial recognition cameras — but the New York Department of Transportation’s latest initiative has a far more tame goal in mind: tracking modes of transport to improve street design.

According to the Gothamist, the New York Department of Transportation has added 100 roadside sensors across the city in order to pick up data on vehicle, bike, and pedestrian traffic.

THE HOUSE IS taking steps to join the Senate in a crusade for stronger data privacy in Massachusetts. While giving more “teeth” to consumers by letting them take large data collectors to court, the bill the House passed unanimously on Thursday would also allow some sensitive data to be sold if the consumer agrees.

In its redraft of a bill approved by the Senate eight months ago, House lawmakers signed off on frameworks to limit collection and sale of private data, ensure consumers have a right to know about what data is being collected, opt-out of some data collection, and have their data deleted on request.

“Without exaggeration, we are living through the largest unregulated extraction of information in the history of civilization,” said Rep. Tricia Farley-Bouvier, of Pittsfield, on the House floor.

Starcloud, (formerly Lumen Orbit) a startup building solar-powered data centers that operate in space, announced $170 million in new funding Monday, vaulting it to unicorn status with a $1.1 billion valuation. The Redmond, Wash.-based company is now the fastest in Y Combinator history to hit that milestone, reaching the billion-dollar mark just 17 months after its accelerator demo day.

The meteoric rise follows a period of heavy skepticism.

Philip Johnston, Starcloud’s CEO and co-founder, said the company was “fairly roundly pilloried” in its early days. “If you go back to some of the comments on X when we announced, people said it was impossible and we couldn’t do it.”

Starcloud is engineering satellites equipped with solar panels, radiation shielding to protect the electronics from the harsh environment of outer space, communication devices, and a cooling system adapted from International Space Station technology to manage the heat generated by high-performance computing.

Former DOGE members and Elon Musk allies are backing a startup aimed at using AI to apply "learnings” from DOGE to the private sector.

Former members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have launched a startup to, they say, bring “DOGE for the private sector.” Their holding company, called Special, has backing from billionaire Marc Andreessen’s venture capital firm a16z and several other former DOGE members.

In a post on a16z’s Substack, Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox, who led DOGE’s efforts at several government agencies, write that their startup will build “an operating system to transform critical American industries with AI,” and claim that “Main Street,” like the federal government, is inefficient. The plan, according to Fox and Cavanaugh, is to “vertically integrate,” buying up businesses in critical sectors and running them using Special’s operating system.

The AI industry is riding a tsunami of investment, but we're seeing signs of a real and growing backlash — even in tech world.

You've heard of AI vibe coding, one dictionary's phrase of the year for 2025. As of this week, 2026 is shaping up to be the year of the AI vibe shift.

You wouldn't know the shift existed from the tech world's top pronouncements of late; it is, after all, always sunny in Silicon Valley. Microsoft's Build conference, like Google I/O in May, featured tons of techies talking about tokens, the metric by which AI prompts and answers are measured (a token, weirdly, is about three-quarters of a word on average).

Both conferences also centered claims about frontier AI that are dubious to say the least. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis at Google I/O: "Artificial General Intelligence is just a few years away... we are standing in the foothills of the Singularity." Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman: "scaling laws are holding... we are building towards what we call Humanist Superintelligence."

Wall Street was still buying it, but investors were wavering. The ultimate AI bellwether, Nvidia stock, tumbled for a few days, rallied after CEO Jensen Huang insisted AI agents will run everything, everywhere in the future (presumably once they've stopped deleting databases), then got pummeled again on Friday.

Still, for now, Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX continue to chase trillion-dollar IPOs, the latter based in large part on the untested concept of AI data centers in space.

As it turns out, telling the world’s workers to prepare for a dystopia rife with poverty and alienation isn’t the smartest way to market your exciting new tech.

As data centers are shut down by angry mobs and AI surveillance cameras are ripped from their poles, the world’s tech billionaires and CEOs are waking up to the reality that the masses are, broadly speaking, not on board with their plan to automate the world with AI. It isn’t necessarily that working people want to stay shackled to the wage-based employment system, but that folks need those jobs to have any hope of eating, seeing a doctor, and sleeping with a roof over their heads.

The world's tech billionaires are starting to moderate their rhetoric on AI automation, but that doesn't mean it's all in good faith.

Instead of the tone-deaf hype we once heard about AI’s potential, these rich and powerful figures are now moderating their messaging, calling for policy measures to help workers weather the AI storm — or perhaps head off a violent revolt led by the many who lost their jobs.

OpenAI reported $5.7 billion in first-quarter revenue, leading Anthropic by $1 billion. However, Anthropic projects its second-quarter revenue to double to $11 billion with a $600 million profit.

The town of Beloit is the fifth Wisconsin community with an NDA for a possible data center.

At a Jan. 28 public forum on Wisconsin data centers, Port Washington Mayor Ted Neitzke boasted that his city did not sign a nondisclosure agreement that would have concealed plans for a $15 billion facility that is now under construction.

“If you’ve got the courage and you push back and say, ‘Listen, we’re just not going to do it,’ (the data center developers) will find a way to operate without having to sign an NDA,” Neitzke said. “So, we did not and we will not.”

On the same day Neitzke was touting his community’s openness, Port Washington was in court over its refusal to provide communications about its data center. The city had turned over emails, but not documents attached to the emails.

It’s one example, beyond NDAs, of local governments hiding details of proposed large-scale AI data centers, which are projected to span hundreds of acres, cost billions of dollars and transform communities.

Microsoft used its Build conference to unveil seven in-house AI models, including a reasoning model it says draws even with Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.6 — part of a push to depend less on the AI partners it has invested billions in.

Last year I wrote one of my favourite pieces ever — The Hater’s Guide To The AI Bubble — and followed it up with The Hater’s Guide To The AI Bubble Volume 2 several months later. Sadly, I’ve realized “volume” is a terrible way to structure something like this,

because each volume is more of an update, which is why today’s newsletter will move to a versioning system.

The AI bubble is a psyop, a melodrama, a financial crisis, and a mask-off moment for the Business Idiots that run the vast majority of our economy. It is the largest-scale exploitation of ignorance in history, gnawing at the intellectual weaknesses of society by presenting just enough information or just enough proof to substantiate a trillion-plus dollars of investment and manufactured consent for a technology that, based on how many discuss it, doesn’t actually exist.

And it’s revealed how many rich and powerful people are either (or both) credulous and woefully ignorant.

To be clear, LLMs are real and do some things, but they don’t do any of the things that Dario Amodei is talking about when he says that AI will wipe out 50% of white collar jobs.

We’re four years into this joyless slog and people are still talking about AI’s “potential” and what it “will” do and that we’re in the early innings of a technology that, for the most part, is still doing exactly what it was doing at the beginning with refinements that never come close to reaching the vacuous heights of boosters’ promises. 

Anthropic’s high-profile spat with the Pentagon gave it a killer marketing advantage, burnishing its public image as a principled AI company that puts values over profits — unlike more mercenary rivals such as OpenAI or Google. But Anthropic’s double standard on authoritarianism suggests the nearly trillion-dollar firm is as calculating and ethically flexible as any of its competitors.

In a recently published policy paper arguing a full-throated embrace of data center nationalism, Anthropic said that “it’s essential that the US and its allies stay ahead of authoritarian governments like the Chinese Communist Party,” lest the world fall into the grips of tech-powered tyranny. Anthropic and its peers, the company claims, will form a bulwark of democratic values, protecting societies at home and abroad from repression.

Left unmentioned in the document — and seldom publicly acknowledged — is the fact a slice of Anthropic is owned by the Emirati dictatorship of Abu Dhabi, a repressive and authoritarian monarchy.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — The Nashville Zoo is pushing back against a proposal to build a nearly 70,000-square-foot data center on the edge of its property in South Nashville, warning the project could harm thousands of animals — including some of the rarest in the world.

DC Blox, the company behind the proposal, wants to build the facility in the Grassmere Business Park, directly adjacent to zoo property. An online petition against the project has gathered more than 180,000 signatures.

The Nashville Zoo says a proposed DC Blox data center next door threatens its 3,000 animals, including some of the rarest in the world.

The road is dusty and trash-strewn. My friend and collaborator Colby Groves is hanging out the car window as I drive, gazing at a patchwork of solar panels lined up behind a chain-link fence.

“This has to be it,” declares Colby, balancing a large camera on his lap, hoping it doesn’t bounce off as we traverse a series of bumps and divots.

We are in this land of scorching sun and heat, searching for a large Amazon solar installation in San Bernardino County, California. This is the home of the desert tortoise and Joshua trees, but more recently, it’s become a plaything for greedy Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

As demand for electricity continues to rise in the United States, policymakers and utilities are increasingly concerned about how to meet consumers’ needs cost-effectively, especially because it takes an average of five years for new energy projects to connect to the grid after they are proposed.

But one underused approach, called Surplus Interconnection Service (SIS), can shortcut that wait by allowing new power generation or storage to be added in months instead of years. That’s because SIS resources are colocated with existing power plants and share their access to the grid.

In New York, legislators have passed a one-year moratorium on new data center construction, reports The Verge, marking the first statewide ban on a critical component of the infrastructure needed for artificial intelligence. 

Governor Kathy Hochul has yet to sign the bill into law, however, so at this stage it is better understood as a proposed framework than actual policy, but the lawmakers behind the bill say it is designed less as an outright ban than as a means of buying time to assess the many impacts of new data center construction — on the environment, on energy prices, and on local jobs.

If passed into law, the bill would require any company planning to build a "large" data center, defined as having at least 20 megawatts of capacity, to also fund a public hearing into the desirability of the project among local residents. 

Four big data-center and crypto projects failed Texas grid voltage tests, exposing how fast AI demand is outrunning ERCOT's stability safeguards. The loss was big enough to rival a city the size of Boston.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas said in a report dated May 21 that unnamed large electricity users abruptly disconnected during a test of how they would handle routine voltage disturbances. When a facility trips offline during a grid fault, it doesn't just go dark—it destabilizes the entire system. When large customers abruptly cut their power use, it can knock the grid off balance and trigger wider outages.

The failures arrive at an awkward moment. Global electricity consumption for data centers is projected to double to reach around 945 TWh by 2030 in the IEA's Base Case, representing just under 3% of total global electricity consumption.

• Ahead of a planned IPO, SpaceX has inked a deal to rent compute capacity to Google at $920 million per month for 32 months.
• SpaceX announced a similar arrangement with Anthropic in May.
• Google parent Alphabet has made a windfall from backing SpaceX, which was worth $12 billion at the time of its 2015 investment, and is looking to go public at a valuation of over $1.75 trillion.

Days before a planned IPO that’s expected to raise record sums of cash, SpaceX has inked a deal with Google that will bring in $920 million a month by providing AI compute capacity to the search giant.

According to a regulatory filing on Friday, Google will use about 110,000 Nvidia graphics processing units, as well as central processors, memory and other components housed in SpaceX’s data centers. The agreement spans from October of this year through June 2029 at the $920 million rate, and with “capacity ramping up through September at a reduced fee.”