This week’s movers and shakers: New York froze new data centres, xAI bolted on 59 unpermitted gas turbines, TSMC sold out the future, DeepSeek hit $71B, and 69% of Americans said seize half of big AI. It all comes back to power, silicon and money.
Reflection AI signed a $1B+ compute deal with Nebius through 2029, weeks after a reported $150M-a-month SpaceX deal. In modern AI, the moat is not the model. It is a confirmed delivery date for chips.
Amazon is closing Mechanical Turk to new customers on 30 July. The platform that paid humans pennies to label the data that trained modern AI is being retired because the AI no longer needs them.
xAI installed 59 gas turbines to power its Colossus project in Tennessee, reportedly without federal clean-air permits, next to predominantly Black neighbourhoods near Memphis. The AI race is now an air-quality story.
A Verasight survey found 69% of Americans back forcing big AI firms to hand half their stock to a public wealth fund. With tech behind a third of 2026’s layoffs, the real surprise is that it isn’t higher.
The Jane Goodall Institute and FormationQ are running an agent-based model on IonQ’s quantum hardware to explain why chimps wage war and bonobos keep the peace. The uncomfortable answer may be about scarcity.
DeepSeek is reportedly raising $1.5B at a $71B valuation, up from ~$50B six weeks ago, and prepping a China IPO. The fundraising quietly kills the ‘China does AI on a shoestring’ story.
Governor Hochul signed the first statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centres. Underneath the environmental language, it is a fight about who pays for the AI buildout: the trillion-dollar tenant, or the household.
TSMC posted its biggest month in history, up 67.9% year on year. The catch: the only factory that matters is sold out through year-end, and only four companies are at the front of the queue.
China just outlawed humanlike AI “companions”. Awkwardly, it is the right call, the one the West has completely failed to make while its own companies quietly farm human loneliness for profit.