DCN, Range, and WIN Technology, three regional backbone fiber providers, announced a joint investment, known as the Heartland Fiber Project, to expand high‑capacity fiber infrastructure across the America’s heartland. The initiative, known as the Heartland Fiber Project, will create a new long‑haul fiber route designed to increase network capacity, resiliency, and flexibility to support the rapidly growing connectivity requirements across the industry and meet demand from AI hyperscale data center development in the region.

The Heartland Fiber Project will span seven states – Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois – establishing a route containing high fiber count and future path conduit to support future growth between Denver and Chicago. The $700 million investment represents a 2,000-mile expansion of regional network infrastructure that is designed to deliver the scale, resiliency, and performance demanded by next‑generation AI workloads and hyperscale computing environments.

Explore global Wi-Fi adoption trends, including where Wi-Fi 7 is gaining traction and how Wi-Fi connectivity is evolving worldwide.

Wi-Fi 7 represents just a small portion of the global Wi-Fi base, but in certain countries —U.S., Canada and Singapore —it’s gaining ground.

Wi-Fi is the last-mile workhorse that carries the vast majority of indoor internet traffic, supporting an increasingly dense network environment of smart home systems, enterprise IoT endpoints, and security infrastructure. While the demands of all these applications on Wi-Fi continue to diversify, the active end-user experience is ultimately governed by the device used most frequently – the smartphone.

Four hours of testimony, broken into answer length, topic splits, and contradictions — a data walk-through of the June 30, 2026 NTIA broadband oversight hearing.

The Assistant Secretary answered questions from both parties on NTIA activity for four hours. This walks through what she said, variance in answers, and a breakdown of topics. Scroll through, or click to explore.

Elon Musk's business decisions routinely leave minority populations lodged squarely under his white supremacist bootheel.

So I just got done writing about how Elon Musk's xAI data centers outside of Memphis feature 57 largely-unregulated gas turbines pumping pollutants and toxic chemicals into black neighborhoods that already see disproportionate levels of pollution-triggered illnesses among local minority children.

This synopsis was from a recent lawsuit by civil rights groups pointing out Musk's Colossus 2 AI data center is openly violating the Clean Air Act:

xAI’s power plant in Southaven has the potential to emit more than 1,700 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides (NOx) each year. The staggering emissions numbers likely make the facility the largest industrial source of NOx in the greater Memphis area, an area already failing to meet national smog standards. The illegal turbines also have the potential to release up to 180 tons of fine particulate matter, 500 tons of carbon monoxide, and 19 tons of formaldehyde—a toxic, cancer-causing chemical—each year. 

The data center is also having a negative impact on the local water supply, something Musk said he'd address by building a next-gen water recycling system that he just...never bothered to follow through on. And because U.S. regulators have been gutted by corruption, there's no accountability anywhere in sight.

Very innovative stuff!

It looks like the chip shortage is going to last longer than expected. At the beginning of this year, it looked like the chip shortage might be over by early to mid-2027.

That no longer seems to be the expectation. As a reminder of the issue, the chip shortage has come about due to chip manufacturers migrating to produce the more profitable chips used by AI data centers. Recent predictions are that 70% of all memory chips manufactured worldwide will go to data centers for the rest of 2026 into 2027. To put that number into perspective, the first public AI model was introduced to the world in November 2022, and the demand for AI chips has grown since then. At that time, about 32% of chips went to the more traditional data centers used for cloud computing.

BEAD was meant to expand access to high-quality broadband, but under Trump, it’s been diverted to tech moguls like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

With BEAD awards moving into the contract execution phase, a small but growing number of proposed subgrantees are deciding not to proceed. In some cases, companies are walking away voluntarily. In another, questions remain about what happened behind the scenes.

Nebraska. It’s Not for Everyone

In Nebraska, The Nebraska Examiner reported that three ISPs backed out “due to changes in their business plans.”

The three BEAD participants in the state that didn’t sign contracts appeared to be Amazon, Northeast Nebraska Telephone Company, and Pinpoint Communications.

Analysts Don Kellogg and Roger Entner discuss Roger's report, "The Half-Connected America," exploring why some people choose not to use broadband and what companies and policymakers can do to address the issue.

The Spanish government has blacklisted U.S. data analytics giant Palantir Technologies from public and private state-controlled companies due to growing concerns over the potential misuse of classified national security information.

On Sunday, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) put out its annual report and said, well, a bunch of things that I’ve been saying:

In the near term, the ongoing AI investment boom raises questions about the sustainability of the current economic expansion. The five largest hyperscalers are set to spend over a trillion US dollars on AI-related capital expenditure from 2025 through 2026. These commitments are outpacing earnings and the free cash flow of these firms, leading some to issue debt to raise additional financing.

As edifying as it is to see the bank for central banks say exactly what I’ve been saying for the last few years, this part is the one that both rocks as far as being right goes and sucks for the world at large:

Disappointment in returns could trigger a sudden pullback in financing and turn the capex boom into a protracted investment bust, with potential knock-on effects on financial conditions…should hyperscalers slow or halt the aggressive pace of capex deployment, many borrowers across the supply chain could struggle to replace lost revenue and service their debt.

No shit. In April of last year, I wrote a piece called “AI is a systemic risk to the tech industry,” where I outlined how the failure of one model lab, OpenAI, would have seismic effects down its supply chain, delivering body blow after body blow to NVIDIA, Oracle, Microsoft, and the various Neoclouds that serve its compute, the most notable of which being CoreWeave. 

Since then, OpenAI’s slimy tendrils have sunk into even more facets of the tech industry, and it has signed deals with the likes of Google, Amazon, Cerebras, and Broadcom, while also taking on more investments, including mammoth commitments from Softbank, which is only able to meet them by selling off prized stock in companies like ARM and NVIDIA, and by raising debt. 

Stakeholders are in active talks about a possible 800,000 square foot data center in Callaway County, MO.

Western District Commissioner Christopher Scott told ABC 17 News that Crusoe, a Denver-based AI company, would build the 14-acre center somewhere in the north Callaway area. It would be a private land transaction, and he said it is not his information to share the exact location of the proposed site.

The non-partisan group Missouri Protest Organization, Inc. held a meeting at the Callaway County Co-Op Monday night to discuss the data center. Scott said the focus of the forum was water usage.

Microsoft follows Amazon, OpenAI, and Anthropic with its new AI deployment group.

On Thursday, Microsoft announced a new operating business called Microsoft Frontier Company, focused on delivering successful enterprise AI deployments with Microsoft’s existing AI tools. The project will be backed by a $2.5 billion investment from Microsoft, as well as 6,000 industry and engineering experts.

In a statement announcing the venture, Microsoft’s Commercial Business CEO Judson Althoff resisted the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) label that is often applied to these ventures. “This goes beyond what has been labeled as Forward-Deployed Engineering,” Althoff wrote, “and will be the largest, most capable, outcome-driven engineering organization in the industry.”

Could it be used to fund an American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund?

It looks like we are one step closer to U.S. government owning an equity stake in OpenAI.

Financial Times is reporting that negotiations between OpenAI and the Trump Administration have floated OpenAI would donate a 5% equity stake to the U.S. government.

WASHINGTON, July 1, 2026 – Federal auditors said the National Telecommunications and Information Administration has implemented just one of 11 priority recommendations the Government Accountability Office identified last July.

In a June 22 letter addressed to NTIA Administrator Arielle Roth, the GAO urged NTIA to give “high priority” to recommendations that remain unfulfilled, which include: improving how it coordinates federal spectrum use, modernizing aging IT systems, and tightening oversight of multibillion-dollar broadband funding programs.

The Supreme Court on Monday gave President Donald Trump sweeping new authority over approximately two dozen multi-member agencies that Congress intended to be independent.

By a vote of 6-3, the justices struck down a federal law that bars the president from firing members of the Federal Trade Commission except in cases of “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” That law, a majority of the justices ruled, violates the constitutional separation of powers between the three branches of government. And in reaching that decision, the court overruled its 91-year-old decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which had upheld the law at the center of the dispute.

More broadly, Monday’s decision was a major victory for proponents of the “unitary executive” theory – the idea that the president should have complete control over the executive branch. Under this theory, the president should be able to fire any member of the executive branch, and laws – like the one that the court struck down – that restrict his ability to do so violate the separation of powers.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), as expected, has published its auction plan for the satellite ‘Upper C-band’ release of 160 MHz of spectrum to be used by terrestrial operators for 5G and 6G services. (The Upper C-band is 3.98-4.14 GHz).

FCC chairman Brendan Carr announced that “the FCC will vote July 22nd to auction a large swath of prime, mid-band spectrum next summer—putting America back ahead on 5G, 6G, and next-gen connectivity.

The Federal Communications Commission wants to require telecommunications providers to collect vast amounts of personal information from every person who wants a phone number in the name of combatting scam and spam calls. This plan will fail to combat the deluge of unwanted calls people in the United States receive every day while giving untrustworthy companies a gold mine of information that would harm everyday consumer’s privacy, access to communications, and ability to speak freely. 

The requirement to provide ID and an address would completely cut off the ability to have an anonymous phone line, which would mean many people in the most precarious situations imaginable: domestic violence and human trafficking survivors, unhoused people, and children without stable homes, would not be able to gain access to a crucial lifeline. EFF, along with ACLU, has submitted comments advising the FCC to abandon this proposal entirely. 

There’s a lot to unpack from NTIA Administrator Arielle Roth’s testimony yesterday before the Energy & Commerce, Communications & Technology subcommittee. In fact, I took much of yesterday to listen to the hearing again. Which is either quite a feat or a sign of self-loathing as the hearing ran more than three hours. Covered topics in the Q&A ranged from when non-deployment guidance will be released, whether these monies are savings or state allocations, to what the “gold standard” is for BEAD coverage. 

Non-Deployment Timing

Unsurprisingly, when guidelines for non-deployment dollars was a hot topic, especially on the Democrat side of the aisle. More than once, it was noted by Representatives that both promised delivery dates (March 11 and last week) came and went.

Once again, we didn’t get a specific date as to when expect guidance, but rather another vague timeline. Specifically, Roth told the committee that “We expect to release the guidance this summer.”

Program Support Digital Navigator Model Bridging the digital divide, with holistic, individualized support.

Who are Digital Navigators?

Digital navigators are trusted guides who assist community members with ongoing, individualized support for accessing affordable and appropriate connectivity, devices, and digital skills.

Navigators can be volunteers, cross-trained existing staff, or dedicated new hires who offer guidance on connectivity, devices, and digital skills. Typically at trusted community-based organizations, digital navigators are familiar with their community’s resources that relate to digital equity, and they help residents learn to use critical online services. They recommend resources and check back with the client over time to ensure they are able to reach their goals.

There's never been an infrastructure boom like AI.

Amazon (AMZN+2.43%), Alphabet (GOOG+0.96%) (GOOGL+0.69%), Microsoft (MSFT+3.99%), and Meta Platforms (META+10.42%) are set to spend around $700 billion this year in capital expenditures this year to build out data centers to support demand for AI applications.

That's a number that significantly exceeds annual profit for the group, and Wall Street is starting to get nervous. The latest news from Micron, confirming that memory prices have soared, hasn't helped the cause.

Why the hyperscalers are spending so much

All of these companies, except for Meta Platforms, have large cloud computing businesses that can justify this kind of spending. Amazon, for example, has gone through similar cycles of capex spending across both its cloud infrastructure business, Amazon Web Services, and its e-commerce business.

Industry lobbyists have swarmed the Golden State to block new anti-monopoly reforms ahead of a vote this week.

ilicon Valley and other powerful industries have spent millions of dollars to defeat a landmark bill in California that would expand state regulations against monopolies and threaten common business practices of numerous tech giants. The Lever has uncovered that lawmakers who may cast the deciding votes on the legislation in committee have taken thousands in campaign donations from deep-pocketed corporate interests. 

From social media giants Facebook and Google to ridesharing apps like Uber, Big Tech has grown its businesses by resorting to a variety of tactics that skirt antitrust laws, such as anti-competitive mergers and acquisitions, price gouging, and pricing discrimination. Only in recent years have these firms' practices started to face legal scrutiny from federal and state regulators, including a spate of lawsuits to break up Big Tech.

Under current law, California regulators can prosecute antitrust cases only when at least two companies collude to restrain fair competition. The new legislation, now facing a crucial June 30 vote in the Judiciary Committee, would allow the state, for the first time, to begin cracking down on single firm monopolies — when one company dominates a certain industry or uses its large status to unfairly drive out competition.