3 min read
Welcome to this week’s edition of “the richest companies in history discover that electricity costs money”. It has been a genuinely mad seven days: a state told the data centres to sod off, a chip firm sold out of the future, and a Nobel laureate aimed a quantum computer at some chimpanzees. Here is everything that actually mattered, filtered so you do not have to wade through the LinkedIn thought-leadership sludge yourself.
The power grab, literally
The theme of the week was electricity, and who pays for it. New York became the first US state to slap a one-year moratorium on new hyperscale data centres, with Governor Hochul naming the thing nobody in the industry will: your bills are climbing to keep the AI barns humming. Over on the other side of the ledger, Elon Musk’s xAI got caught bolting 59 gas turbines onto a Tennessee data centre apparently without the clean-air permits, pumping the fumes out next to communities who were never once asked. One state hit the brakes; one billionaire kept his foot flat on the accelerator with the window down.
The money, because there is always more money
DeepSeek, the Chinese lab, is reportedly raising at a $71 billion valuation, up from around $50 billion just six weeks ago, having put out nothing new to earn the jump. AI upstart Reflection signed a $1 billion-plus compute deal with Nebius, proving yet again that in this particular gold rush the only guaranteed winner is whoever rents out the shovels. And in Taiwan, TSMC posted the biggest month in its history, up 67.9% year on year, with its best manufacturing booked solid through Christmas. When the arms dealer cannot restock fast enough, the war is nowhere near over.
The reckoning, slowly and then all at once
The single most important number of the week came not from a valuation but from a poll: 69, the percentage of Americans who told researchers they would back forcing big AI firms to hand half their stock to a public wealth fund. Set that beside the news that Amazon is closing Mechanical Turk, the platform that paid humans pennies to train the very AI now replacing them, and you have the entire macro story in two data points. The gains flow up, the pink slips flow down, and the public is starting to notice out loud.
And the one that made us smile
Finally, because it cannot all be dystopia and utility bills, the Jane Goodall Institute is using an IonQ quantum computer to work out why chimps go to war while bonobos keep the peace. The likely answer, tucked into the press release, is resource scarcity, which is either a profound insight into primate behaviour or an accidental subtweet of every other story in this roundup. Probably both.
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Did you know: every single story above, the sold-out fabs, the $71 billion valuations, the seized-stock poll, the unpermitted gas turbines and the chimpanzees, traces back to the same three resources: power, silicon and money. The AI revolution is, underneath all the marketing, a thoroughly old-fashioned scramble over who controls the physical stuff. The robots are almost incidental.
This week on Top Tool Stack
- New York told the data centres to wait, and your power bill is the reason
- Musk’s xAI bolted 59 gas turbines to a data centre without the permits
- TSMC just had its best month ever, because the robots need feeding
- DeepSeek went from $50B to $71B in six weeks without shipping a thing
- To fight OpenAI, an American AI startup is renting from Russia and paying Elon by the month
- 69% of Americans want to seize half of big AI. The layoffs explain why
- Amazon spent two decades paying humans pennies to train its AI, now the AI has replaced them
- Scientists are using a quantum computer to ask why chimps go to war and bonobos don’t