Browsed by
Category: Technology

Trump administration is repurposing federal land for AI data centers

Trump administration is repurposing federal land for AI data centers

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration is repurposing large chunks of federal land to host enormous data centers and the power plants needed to run them as officials seek to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence and overcome growing local opposition to the facilities. The Energy Department announced on Wednesday that it would redevelop parts of a retired Cold War-era uranium enrichment facility in Paducah, Ky., to host a large new A.I. data center campus. The site is…

Read More Read More

AI companies polluted the internet with slop. Now they are harvesting and destroying millions of rare books

AI companies polluted the internet with slop. Now they are harvesting and destroying millions of rare books

In January, the Washington Post reported: In early 2024, executives at artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic ramped up an ambitious project they sought to keep quiet. “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” an internal planning document unsealed in legal filings last week said. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.” Within about a year, according to the filings, the company had spent tens of millions of dollars…

Read More Read More

Residents furious at plan to seize and destroy their homes for AI data centers

Residents furious at plan to seize and destroy their homes for AI data centers

Futurism reports: As dozens of cities across the US are forced to scrap their plans to build power-hungry data centers, some civic leaders are no longer asking. According to new reporting by Fortune, the state of Georgia’s for-profit utility company, Georgia Power, is looking to demolish and pave over some 30 homes — and 330 parcels of land — that currently block the route of a 1,000 mile transmission line. When it goes live, the line will distribute nearly 10,000…

Read More Read More

Musk plans a second campaign to poison U.S. democracy

Musk plans a second campaign to poison U.S. democracy

Axios reports: Tech billionaire Elon Musk is jumping into the midterms with a huge investment in a plan to boost Republican voter turnout, Axios has learned. Driving the news: Musk is resuscitating his dormant super PAC, America PAC, which spent more than $260 million to help get President Trump elected in 2024. America PAC will focus on door-knocking, digital advertising and direct mail aimed at turning out the conservative base, including voters who typically are less inclined to cast ballots in a non-presidential election year,…

Read More Read More

Data centers become the new frontlines of global power

Data centers become the new frontlines of global power

Henrique Schneider writes: Data centers have emerged as a crucial element in the realms of geopolitics, energy security and industrial strategy. On the morning of March 1, 2026, three coordinated Iranian drone strikes hit Amazon Web Services facilities in the Gulf, disrupting regional cloud services for days to weeks. The episode crystallized a transition that had been building for years: The quiet warehouses of the digital economy are now contested strategic assets. The scale of what is being built is…

Read More Read More

Ireland is big tech’s lapdog – and that compromises its EU presidency

Ireland is big tech’s lapdog – and that compromises its EU presidency

Johnny Ryan writes: On the face of it, Ireland behaves like a good European by being a staunch advocate of human rights and a beacon of progressivism on the western edge of the continent. But there is one vital area in which its record is less than perfect – one that should cause concern when the Irish government takes over the rotating six-month presidency of the EU on 1 July. The EU’s tech and AI rulebook will be renegotiated during…

Read More Read More

A $154 billion CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights

A $154 billion CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights

At Fortune, Nick Lichtenberg writes: Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke, whose company commands a market capitalization near $154 billion, told his social media followers this week that a tax-tiered voting system—one that would strip voting rights from anyone who pays no income tax—would be a “good system.” That two-word endorsement, dropped into a viral thread, has reignited a debate over wealth, power, and democracy that most Americans thought was settled more than a century ago. The proposal would invert the founding…

Read More Read More

Is the wizard of AI ever going to pull back the curtain?

Is the wizard of AI ever going to pull back the curtain?

Science reports: Today’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) startups make no shortage of bold promises. Their technologies, some boast, will revolutionize software development, drug discovery, and scientific research. Yet a new preprint posted on 16 July on bioRxiv suggests many of these firms barely participate in one of science’s most fundamental practices: publicly documenting discoveries in scientific literature so other researchers can evaluate and build on them. More than half of AI unicorns—private companies valued at more than $1 billion—have never…

Read More Read More

How the AI data center blitzkrieg advances through secrecy and backroom deals

How the AI data center blitzkrieg advances through secrecy and backroom deals

The New York Times reports: A Louisiana state legislative committee was about to consider a bill in April 2024 when Richard Nelson, then the state’s revenue secretary, received an urgent message from Gov. Jeff Landry. Get the bill passed, the newly elected Republican governor told him, because they needed it for something else. Mr. Nelson walked across a room in Baton Rouge’s towering State Capitol to the bill’s author, Chris Turner, a Republican state representative. “‘Hey, we need to hijack…

Read More Read More

AI industry struggles with the real stupidity of tech overlords who fail to take public opposition seriously

AI industry struggles with the real stupidity of tech overlords who fail to take public opposition seriously

Futurism reports: The tech overlords pushing the AI boom are quickly wearing out what little welcome they had. You may have noticed big-name AI labs pushing new commercials lately. Meta’s new 60-second ad spot insists that the “future is for everyone,” even as CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s personal net worth eclipses the GDP of Hungary. Anthropic’s new commercial for Claude assures viewers that there’s “hope in hard questions,” seemingly embracing the discomfort that comes when your software is used to bomb…

Read More Read More

How the Iran war is highlighting data center vulnerabilities

How the Iran war is highlighting data center vulnerabilities

  DW News: A new chapter of warfare is opening. The US-Israel war against Iran has included strikes from both sides against an increasingly important target: commercial data centers. Facilities in the UAE, Bahrain and Iran were hit across the Persian Gulf As military operations increasingly rely on AI, how long will it take adversaries to target them? What kind of attack, including in the US, is likely? They’re already central to many people’s everyday digital lives and their online…

Read More Read More

Space datacenters proposed by Musk and Bezos will be ‘catastrophic’ for planet, experts warn

Space datacenters proposed by Musk and Bezos will be ‘catastrophic’ for planet, experts warn

The Guardian reports: Space datacenters proposed by SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and others would release staggering levels of pollution that would probably alter the Earth’s atmosphere and be “catastrophic” for the planet, space industry experts and environmental groups warn in a new petition demanding a review of their impacts. Tech companies have collectively proposed millions of “orbital datacenters” and are pressing forward with plans, which require Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approval. Among other issues, pollution from satellites and rockets…

Read More Read More

Trump’s ‘Golden Age’ of American science starts with dismantling it, while funneling billions into AI

Trump’s ‘Golden Age’ of American science starts with dismantling it, while funneling billions into AI

The Verge reports: The Trump administration unveiled the first “Genesis Mission” grants on Thursday, directing $5 billion toward hundreds of AI-driven science projects in an effort the White House has described as “comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project.” At roughly the same time, Trump’s science adviser Michael Kratsios was on Capitol Hill selling lawmakers on an equally grandiose promise: “A New Golden Age” of American science, one that would prioritize artificial intelligence, robotics, and nuclear energy and…

Read More Read More

An era of ‘abundance’ will never be delivered by billionaires. Their true belief is in scarcity

An era of ‘abundance’ will never be delivered by billionaires. Their true belief is in scarcity

Gizmodo reports: Elon Musk sat down with the editor-in-chief of the Economist for a taped interview that went live Thursday. The Tesla CEO has been avoiding normal journalists recently, even cancelling a planned interview with CNBC earlier this month. And it now seems pretty obvious why. Musk has a hard time answering normal questions about his often fascist and sometimes incoherent worldview. The interview started cordially enough, with Economist editor Zanny Minton Beddoes asking Musk about his thoughts on the…

Read More Read More

Its AI agent spent days hacking a company, but sources say OpenAI did not notice for a week

Its AI agent spent days hacking a company, but sources say OpenAI did not notice for a week

Reuters reports: The OpenAI agent that broke into tech firm Hugging Face went on a dayslong hacking spree that OpenAI didn’t notice until well after the threat was contained and the FBI was alerted, according ​to people familiar with the investigation. The agent – a program capable of making decisions and executing complex tasks with little or no human oversight – attempted to break out of its isolated testing environment ‌at OpenAI around July 9, according to two of the…

Read More Read More

EU fines Google $1 billion for stifling competition

EU fines Google $1 billion for stifling competition

Wired reports: The European Commission has levied a $1 billion penalty against Google over alleged competition law violations. An EC investigation found that Google had abused its dominance in the European Union’s search and app store markets to funnel people toward its own apps and services, in violation of the EU’s Digital Markets Act. The body has ordered Google to refrain from giving preferential treatment to its own services—such as shopping, accommodations, transport, and flights—in search rankings. Google must also…

Read More Read More